Word: yugoslavs
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Dedijer also remains a dedicated Yugoslav. He was prompted to write The Battle Stalin Lost at the time Russia invaded Czechoslovakia. Among other things, he hoped it would serve as a warning to keep hands off his country. After all, look what happened to Stalin...
...invincible in the Communist world. The Yugoslavian assertion of independence showed that there could be more than one path for Communists: it also set an example that led to the whole concept of a neutral Third World. Today all that is taken for granted. But at the time the Yugoslav struggle was a very close thing. Just how close is dramatically described by Historian Vladimir Dedijer, who lived through the ordeal as one of Marshal Tito's right-hand...
Agonized Awakening. Until the revolt occurred, Yugoslavia seemed the Iron Curtain country least likely to give Stalin ideological trouble. Its tightly knit, fiercely dogmatic Communist Party worshiped Stalin as the father of Communism and the leader of the resistance to fascism. At first, after World War II, few Yugoslav Communists could bring themselves to believe that Stalin's aim was simply to take over their nation. Much of Dedijer's book deals with the agonized awakening to the Russian threat. He describes, for example, his own change of heart at a Russian-Yugoslav soccer match...
...Serious Yugoslav resistance came to a head in 1948 over Stalin's proposed federation between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. When the Yugoslavs refused, the Soviet dictator first urged good Communists in Yugoslavia to depose Tito, then set about that task himself. A virtual civil war ensued between Soviet agents and Yugoslav security forces. The latter won out, but only after some 10,000 Soviet agents, sympathizers and suspects had been put in jail. Throughout the period, the Yugoslavs tried to avoid fighting Stalinism with Stalinism. But, as Dedijer concedes, they did not always succeed...
Plainly, the road toward East-West detente is not exactly a high-speed expressway. It is vulnerable, moreover, to the sort of old-fashioned petty nationalism that is still able to poison relations between states. Last week, after a needless spasm of local hatreds had spoiled the atmosphere, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito canceled what would have been his first official visit to Rome. The flare-up involved Trieste, the Adriatic port city that has been disputed territory for many years and that nearly became a casus belli between East and West after World...