were allowed to organise and participate in
national politics.
The Catholic Church too played an important
role, acting as a bulwark against atheistic com-
munism. Stalin proceeded in Hungary with
caution, permitting free elections in November
- The communists lost badly. Stalin was not
going to repeat such an error.
Still, Rákosi, with Soviet backing, retained the
key to power through his control of the Interior
Ministry and the secret police. He skilfully
exploited differences between the government
coalition parties, cynically commenting later that
he had sliced them away like salami until only the
communists were left. First the Smallholders’
Party was eliminated, then the Social Democrats.
In the 1947 elections, communist victory was no
longer left to the whim of the voters. Within a
few months, Rákosi and his lieutenants had taken
over the country, and a new ‘constitution’ in
1949 turned Hungary into a Moscow-style
‘people’s democracy’.
There were few indications in 1945 that
Yugoslavia would differ in any significant way
from the other states in Eastern Europe liberated
from the Nazis with the help of the Soviet Union.
If anything, Yugoslavia was more obviously com-
munist, controlled from the start by Marshal Broz
Tito as undisputed leader organising a one-party
state, ideologically bound to Marxism–Leninism.
The military victory of the partisans who had been
fighting the Germans left little alternative but to
accept Tito’s terms for the post-war reconstruc-
tion of Yugoslavia. Only a military occupation,
Soviet or Allied, could have altered that. Inter-
estingly, in 1944 Stalin had encouraged the idea
of an Allied landing in Yugoslavia, evidently
already seeing in Tito’s Yugoslav communism a
dangerous national deviation. A closer study of
Yugoslavia shows both similarities with and
important differences from the general pattern
of the communist takeover of the central and
Eastern European states. None of the communist
resistance forces was strong enough to defeat the
Wehrmacht without the victories of the Red
Army. This was no less true of Yugoslavia,
although there the partisans actually liberated the
country from German occupation.
Tito was well aware that the partisan victory
would be dependent upon the victory of the
Soviet Union. He also followed Lenin’s precept
of a tightly disciplined party as indispensable for
maintaining communist power. During the war
the German and Italian occupation had destroyed
the pre-war social and political order. Yugoslav
communists and the royalists fought each other
for predominance at the same time as they
fought the Germans. This triangular struggle was
complex, the two Yugoslav sides accusing each
other of helping the Germans to eliminate the
internal enemy. Initially Tito drew his support
overwhelmingly from Serb peasants attracted by
promises of greater social justice and by appeals
to their patriotism. The Serbs were the largest
national group and Tito succeeded in winning
over far more to his side than the royalist
Chetniks did. But from the first he was also aware
that Yugoslav unity required the support of all the
major national groups – Croats, Macedonians,
Montenegrins and Slovenes. He created people’s
committees in villages, towns and provinces,
promising full national rights to the major nation-
alities in a post-war federal Yugoslavia.
Milovan Djilas, Tito’s friend and supporter
until 1954, has described Tito vividly as a man
born a rebel, who combined a distinctive zeal for
communism with a personal zest for power; like
some Eastern potentate Tito, once the hardened
partisan leader, built villas and palaces after the
war for his exclusive pleasure, even though he
could spend little time in any one of them. The
dictatorship of the proletariat became in practice
personal power wielded by an autocratic leader.
Tito created a new party hierarchy, himself at the
pinnacle and the secret police as the instrument
for securing compliance by dealing ruthlessly with
his opponents. In 1946 a constitution on the
Soviet model was established, which guaranteed
the cultural and administrative rights of all the
nationalities in a federal Yugoslav state; this went
some way towards solving the nationality conflicts
of pre-1945 Yugoslavia, at least for a time. Tito’s
second achievement was his resolute defence of
Yugoslavia’s own road to socialism in 1948 in
the face of Stalin’s onslaught, and the assertion
of Yugoslavia’s independence from Moscow’s
1
THE SOVIET UNION 325
