With Stalin against Tito

Book excerpt: In 1948 in a series of moves that culminated in the famous Cominform Resolution, Stalin struck at the Communist Party in Yugoslavia, provoking the first split in the Communist state system. With this long-awaited book, Ivo Banac becomes the first scholar to assess the domestic consequences of Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform, and his findings will radically revise some of our most basic assumptions about Tito's revolution. Banac's subject is the nature and fate of those elements in the Yugoslav Communist party who were said to have sided with Moscow against their own country's leadership. He demonstrates that the so-called Cominformists represented as much as twenty-percent of the party membership and had widely divergent aims. He then reconstructs the history of the labrynthine factional struggles that preceded and accompanied the 1948 split and shows that, as always, the national question played the dominant role in Yugoslav politics. After identifying the members of the opposition and mapping its course, Banac recounts the harsh repression of the movement. He provides massive documentation of startling irony: the conflict with Stalin played the same part in the shaping of Yugoslavia's political system as the collectivization and purges of the 1930's did in the history of Soviet communism.