Tito and His Comrades

154 The Postwar Period

Yugoslavia’s international standing. The peace conference where important
decisions would be made about the Western borders and Trieste was imminent,
and most of Yugoslavia’s mines, factories, and large banks had been owned in
the prewar years by British, French, or American companies. Thanks to this
cautionary advice, Tito and his colleagues chose to delay nationalization until
the end of 1946. Only then, when the decisions of the major powers about the
borders with Italy had been made, did they promulgate a law nationalizing 90
percent of all enterprises, leaving just the smallest businesses in private hands.^21
This move provoked outrage in the West, as well as a wave of compensation
claims. At the same time the Politburo decided that nationalization would not
affect landowners unless they held large estates. Tito and his comrades were
determined that the collectivization of land would not have the same outcome
that it had after the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, when the gentry
as a class had been destroyed just so land could be handed over to the peasants.
In Yugoslavia the nationalization of land would in fact displace the peasantry,
as most plots of land were possessed by small land owners. This decision would
turn out to be economically unsound and politically dangerous, destabilizing
the alliance between the working masses and the peasants, and alienating from
the regime precisely those social classes that had participated most passionately
in the struggle for liberation.^22

The Trieste Question

At the end of February 1945, Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, commander
in chief of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean, came to Belgrade for talks
with Tito about the cooperation of Partisan and Anglo and American forces
in the western part of Venezia Giulia, as the Italians called the area around
Trieste, which they had annexed after the First World War. The Yugoslavs now
wanted it because it had been liberated by them and the rural population was
Slovenian or Croat. Interested in the control of the region in order to preserve it
for Italy, Alexander claimed that he needed it to assure communication between
his troops in the Apennine Peninsula and in Austria, and asked for permission to
have his forces occupy the entire strip of land along the former Italian and Yugo-
slav border. Marshal Tito accepted this request, on the condition that the civil
administration already established there by the Partisans who had been fight-
ing the Fascists and the Nazis from the start of the war and who enjoyed wide
support among the Slav but partially also the Italian population, should remain
under their control.^23 The final decision on Italy’s eastern borders would be
made by the peace conference. In 1951, Kardelj said that Alexander was “terribly
intransigent” in his discussions with Tito, boosting the suspicions of his Bel-
grade interlocutors that he wanted to bring about the division of Yugoslavia, as
Churchill and Stalin had agreed in October 1944: “Churchill wanted to come to