What the Yugoslav resistance was already locked into

The personality cult constructed around the figure of Josip Broz Tito, a Croatian locksmith drawn to
Marxism and then swiftly into the Comintern – the Communist Third International – during his time in
Moscow, itself testifies to the Stalinist cast of the Tito regime in Yugoslavia. Tito worked as a Comintern
agent with responsibility for the Balkans, and became secretary of the Communist Party in Yugoslavia in
1937. Tito was even groomed at one point to be the leader of the Comintern to succeed Stalin, and it is
worth recalling that there was a good deal of grotesque adoration of this single individual from before the
break with Stalin in 1948 through to his death in 1980. The bizarre doubling of the image of the leader –
modelled on Stalin yet with the pretence that he was in some sense the more progressive reverse image
– already introduces into the symbolic texture of Yugoslav politics a particular kind of duplicity.

Up to the point of the expulsion of the Yugoslav Party from the Cominform, Tito was quite explicitly a good
Stalinist. The Cominform, or ‘Communist Information Bureau’, was set up in 1947 as replacement and
successor to the Comintern, which had been dissolved in 1943. That dissolution was partly as a goodwill
gesture to the capitalist world, and a message to the West that the Soviet Union was willing to embark on
a period of ‘peaceful coexistence’ during which it could get on with the task of building ‘socialism in one
country’, and thus demanding that the local communist parties subordinate their activities to the needs
and diplomatic manoeuvres of the Soviet bureaucracy. For Tito, what being a good Stalinist meant until
1948 was to respect the compromises made with the imperialist powers, including agreement between
Stalin and Churchill as to how

14 SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Europe would be apportioned between the Western and the Soviet spheres of influence.5

Yugoslavia would then be neutralised as a threat to both sides, and function as part of the buffer zone.
The Communist Party in Italy, which was clearly assigned to the West, and bordering on Slovenia as a
component of the new Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, dutifully handed over its arms to its
government. In Greece, which was also assigned to the West, bordering on Tito’s southernmost republic
(now Macedonia), a bitter civil war broke out between the Western-backed government and partisans.
The Stalinists were then torn between instruc- tions from Moscow to stifle revolutionary activity and
communists on the ground who refused to hand over their weapons, particularly in the north of the
country (Greek Macedonia).

The West had already assumed that Yugoslavia would adhere to the diplomatic agreements made
between Moscow and London in 1944, which was when the Allies and the Yugoslav government in exile
stopped their military aid to the Chetniks – the Serb ‘Royal Army in the Homeland’ dedicated to the
elimination or expulsion of traitors and implicated in massacres of Croats and Muslims, as well as
Gypsies and Jews.6 Support from London then went to Tito’s Partisans in the Anti-Fascist Council for the
National Liberation of Yugoslavia, with collaboration continuing well after the war was over, to the extent
that captured Chetnik and Croatian fascist Ustashe7 would be handed over to Tito to be executed. What
we need to keep focused on here is the way that despite Tito’s refusal to close down the ‘proletarian
brigades’ in the Partisan forces, there was no intention of breaking from the Stalinist conception of
historical stages of development, in which there was the notion that proletarian revolution should be
delayed until there had been a sustained period of bourgeois rule.8

This is not to say that there was no conflict between Tito’s partisans and Stalin as early as 1941, when the
Soviet Union was still negotiating directly with the Royal Yugoslav Government in exile. Every local
Stalinist apparatchik at that time had to manage the extremely difficult task of balancing orders from Stalin
with what was actually possible, what activists on the ground would accept.9 The Tito–Subasich
Agreement for a coalition regime that would keep Yugoslavia on track for its capitalist stage of
development at the end of the war would conform to the cynical conceptual distortions of Marxism
emanating from Moscow, but this meant that any mention of ‘socialism’ by the partisans, and then by the
new government, had to be carefully guarded. The eventual re-designation of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia in 1963 was then designed to mark sym- bolically the ‘socialist’ character of the
regime as, we might say, drawing on a favourite phrase from Zizek, ‘precisely the reverse’ of what it
actually

YUGOSLAVIA – TO SLOVENIA 15

was. There had been no revolutionary overthrow of capitalist property relations, rather a neutralising of
the ‘proletarian brigades’ and stabilising of the economy, initially as capitalist and then as a
bureaucratically- regulated market system.