World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 107
too had received favorable information regarding Tito from an agent of the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American intelligence service. Indeed,
this agency had begun contacting Tito in the autumn of 1943 and sending him
arms and supplies from Bari.^304
Further Developments of the National Liberation
Struggle and the First National TensionsThe tumultuous events during the spring and summer of 1943 also had signifi-
cant consequences for Yugoslavia’s domestic policy. It was evident that, in the
interim, the foundations of the new state needed to be clearly stated, much
more so than previously, at the First AVNOJ. The Communist Party lead-
ers had no doubts that the new state should be completely different from the
old one. In a moment of sincerity one of them, Svetozar Vukmanović, called
Tempo, Tito’s envoy to Madedonia and adjacent regions, confessed to his Greek
comrades: “In Yugoslavia we will not allow the return of the old regime and
‘free’ elections. We have had too many victims to allow anything of the kind!
We will not allow the Allied troops to enter our country. Only the forces that
have triumphed over the occupiers have the right to convene elections, [and it
is from them that] the new power should arise.”^305 For his part, in 1942 Tito had
published an article entitled “The Yugoslav National Question in the Light of
the Liberation Struggle,” in which he tried to reconcile the different historical
traditions of the Southern Slav peoples and their diverging territorial interests
with the promise of a federal system.^306 In this context, he proposed that the
Politburo of the CPY deny the government in exile the right to speak on behalf
of Yugoslavia, and to definitively take power. “Tito and all of us present at that
session,” wrote Kardelj, “were well aware that this decision would have pro-
voked dissatisfaction and negative reactions from the governments of the great
powers and that it could, in particular, have led to political complications
between the Soviet Union and the West.... But at the time, the interests of the
National Liberation Struggle and of the future of our peoples were more
important to us than their possible reaction.”^307
In preparing the groundwork, the first thing to do was forge the instruments
best suited to represent the people who would constitute the new federal body.
Slovenia already had a Liberation Front. In Croatia, a special committee
charged with convoking an Antifascist Assembly of National Liberation had
been constituted on 17 March 1943. It met in the lake area of Plitvice on the
thirteenth and fourteenth of June and proclaimed itself the highest political
representative of the country. The ZAVNOH (Zemaljsko antifašističko veće
narodnog oslobođenja Hrvatske; State Anti-fascist Council for the National
Liberation of Croatia), the acronym by which it came to be known, presented