The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

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The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 25 in 1946. Edvard Kardelj did not formally open the debate concerning the Macedonian issue but Mo_a Pijade initiated the discussion by opposing Greek demands for the annexation of Pyrenean Macedonia. The decision made at the Tenth Plenum of the BRP/k/ (Bulgarian Labor Party) was in favor of allowing greater cultural autonomy to members of the Macedonian nation, mainly as a result of Stalin’s view that Pyrenean Macedonia should be given cultural autonomy within Bulgaria. The Lake Bled Agreement represented a culmination in the positive relations between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Later, however, Bulgaria took advantage of Yugoslavia’s unfavorable situation to favourise its own interests, causing a rapid deterioration of the two countries’ diplomatic relations and an increasing number of border incidents. The process of normalization in Yugoslav − Bulgarian relations began after Stalin’s death in 1953. The Cominform in Slovenia and Subsequent Political Liberalization (Bo_o Repe) Despite the fact that only a small number of Communist Party members in Slovenia were favourable to the Cominform, many of those criticizing the official policy were branded as »Cominformists«, the number of people who were arrested on such charges was far less than in other Yugoslav republics. When the process of liberalization began in Yugoslavia in the fiftties, Boris Kidri_ was one of the Slovenians most actively involved in the ensuing programs of reform. Likewise the Djilas case was felt in Slovenia but (it) also passed without a large number of political trials. The first steps in the political liberalization in Slovenia involved the rehabilitation of the »Osvobodilna fronta« (Liberation Front). The number of political prisoners in the period from 1952 to 1953 decreased ten times in comparison to the period between 1948 and 1950. At the peak of the process of collectivisation only 5% of the rural population formed part of agricultural cooperatives, but only until 1951 when members began withdrawing from the cooperatives in large numbers. The Videm (Udine) Agreement concerning the border traffic between Yugoslavia and Italy signed in 1955 was particularly important as the first agreement of this sort since the beginning of the cold war. Comparisons with Western standards of living, made possible by the open border to the West, placed greater pressure on the Slovenian leaders than on those in other parts of Yugoslavia, to improve the living standards of their own population. This soon became evident in the progress of the Slovenian consumer industry in the fifties. Consequently, the difference between Slovenia and the other Yugoslav republics was not manifested in the political life in Slovenia, which basically evolved along the same single-party ideological and political principles characteristic of other East European socialist countries, but rather in a different approach to property rights, higher living standards, the introduction, to a certain extent, of a market economy, the development of a consumer mentality, and the rising national awareness. The Moscow−Belgrade Rupture in Relation to Franco’s Regime and the Communist Opposition 1948-1951 (Havier Gari & Alessandro Gori)
The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 26 One of the most confusing and disturbing developments which joined the starting of Cold War was undoubtedly the rupture between Moscow and Belgrade in 1948. This event, which was little understood in its broad dimension even by the Western powers with more experience in the region, generated some rare consequences, as it had to be expected. As an example we have illustrated the indirect relationship (and reticence) between Yugoslavia and Spain at that time. They were two countries that never met themselves in the game of European geopolitics before. But then, in the framework of the emergent Cold War, the rupture of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union and the willingness of Spain to overcome its isolation put both countries in the centre of the intense and tense international geopolitics of this period. Nobody could have expected the situation that followed. Franco’s government used to entitle itself as »Custodian of the West« and ideologically it was very close with the most conservative trends in the United States’ administration. However, Franco’s government entered in competition with a communist state for a favourable geopolitical position in the new order generated by the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. Although that situation neither caused acute tensions nor lasted for a longer period, the agreements between Spain and the United States for the installation of military bases did not close until 1953, despite high pressures of militarisation of every corner in Europe. Yugoslavia’s geopolitical situation was analogical. The Yugoslavian government was proud of its relationships with the Spanish communists in the exile, especially based on sentimental-like reasons after the Yugoslavian participation in the Spanish Civil War. However, these comrades themselves rejected Tito’s government of 1948. In order to preserve the revolutionary image existing before the rupture with Moscow, Belgrade stopped supporting the Spanish Republican government in exile which had no diplomatic recognition and excluded carefully all communists. According to the Slovenian researcher J. Pirjevec, there seemed to be signs that Yugoslavia, in 1959, even established some modest diplomatic relations with Franco’s Spain. If that proves true, it would mean that the Tito government arrived to its pragmatic relationship with the Spanish in a surprisingly short time. It seems that these relations consisted in just commercial contacts which may have existed from the times of Castiella as Foreign Affair’s Minister, who opened the Spanish regime to contracts with Eastern Europe. In fact, Madrid had some contracts at that time with most of the Eastern countries. In any case, these commercial contacts represented a paradoxical counterpoint. Less than one decade before, the Yugoslavian delegate Vlahovi_ strongly opposed Spain’s readmission to the United Nations and Yugoslavian-Spanish reticence was at its peak. Both countries had rejected each other as either Fascist or Communist, both had struggled for Western support and aid, and both played against each other through diplomatic activity and contacts with the other’s opposition movements. Yugoslavia’s and Spain’s national and international political relations in the emergence of the Cold War illustrate a world that was becoming highly polarised, where the attachment to one of the extremes seemed vital for escaping isolation and thus surviving in a world that nobody knew where it was going to. Agrarian Policy after the Conflict with the Cominform (Mom_ilo Pavlovi_)
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