World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 137
thousand trucks for his army and provisions for the hungry cities. All Tito got
back was a rude reply, in which Stalin maintained that there had been no agree-
ment about “trophies,” expressing surprise “that a few incidents and offences
committed by individual officers and soldiers of the Red Army in Yugoslavia
are generalized and extended to the whole of the Red Army.”^452 From then on,
his attitude toward Yugoslavia and the Partisan movement cooled markedly,
as the offensive remarks he often repeated during subsequent meetings with its
leaders showed: “Your combatants fight badly. They do not smell of gunpow-
der. Look at the Bulgarians, this is really an army in formation!”^453 In spite of
the efforts of the Soviet commanders to hold their men at bay, the acts of vio-
lence toward the civilian population continued, as seen in a report sent from
Belgrade by an American officer, a member of the OSS, at the end of Decem-
ber 1944, which reached President Roosevelt himself.^454
But these quarrels could not dampen an alliance that had allowed the Par-
tisans to be victorious over the Germans, their Serb collaborators, and the
Chetniks, the most dangerous of all enemies. When the Russians entered Ser-
bia, Mihailović had hoped to cooperate with them, sending appropriate orders
to his units. In fact, during the war he was in constant contact with Moscow,
which was also interested in engaging with his movement. According to his
own testimony, this lasted until April 1945. The Russians were ready to accept
his help during the fighting but as soon as it stopped they had no qualms about
arresting the Chetniks and handing them over to Tito or deporting them to the
Soviet Union. Given the situation, Mihailović could do nothing but withdraw
with his remaining troops to Bosnia and the Sandžak, abandoning Serbia to
the Partisans.^455 They lost no time in organizing and strengthening their power,
with Soviet assistance, not only in Serbia but in the whole of the country. Local
groups that had expressed their resistance autonomously during the struggle—
particularly the Slovenes and Croats—had a heavy cloak of conformity thrown
over them in order to connect them even more closely to the central power.
Soviet “instructors” were sent, to quote a letter by Tito to Ranković, from “up
there” tasked with coordinating the work of OZNA. It is difficult to escape the
impression that Stalin was preaching a policy his men were not following in
practice. He kept repeating to Kardelj, for instance, that “the Yugoslavs should
absolutely not try revolutionary experiments and ape the Soviet regime” yet, in
the meantime, his agents were teaching the Yugoslav comrades precisely that.^456
How useful this advice was is attested to by the success of the secret police in
those areas where the new “people’s” regime succeeded in installing itself. The
first notable results were visible in Banat, the historic region between Serbia,
Hungary, and Romania, where the local German ethnic minority was punished
because of its mass adherence to Nazism during the war. Those among the