68 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
openly declaring that their final destination was the Soviet capital.^93 From a
telegram Tito sent to the Comintern on 31 May 1941, it is clear that he was
planning an uprising to coincide with the attack on the Soviet Union. “We
are organizing military units, instructing military cadres, preparing an armed
revolt.”^94 A leaflet distributed at the end of May by the communists among the
German and Italian troops, warning them that the Führer was going to propel
them into war with Russia, is also evidence of the inevitable clash.^95 Consider-
ing Stalin’s hostile attitude toward all those who dared inform him about the
imminent attack, it would have been strange if Tito’s admonitions had been
favorably accepted in Moscow. As Vladimir Bakarić wrote many years later:
“In the apparatus of the Comintern (at least in its majority) there was a strong
distrust against Comrade Tito.” For them he was not “obedient” and “humble”
enough, he was too “independent” and “full of his own ideas.”^96
However, a document in the archives of the Comintern shows that not
everyone in Moscow was critical of him. Dated 29 May 1941, it mentions secret
meetings in Zagreb and Belgrade between Broz and a Soviet agent, who re-
ported as follows: the CPY had eight thousand members and thirty thousand
adherents of the SKOJ, the youth branch of the party. Its organization was
intact and ready to fight; the CC had a military committee and a committee for
diversion activities. The party had arms and they were well hidden, but it
needed about ten thousand dollars to complete its reserves of weapons. “Pray,
transmit my greetings to the comrades and inform them that the tasks given to
the Yugoslav Communist Party will be accomplished.”^97 It must be said, how-
ever, that the urge to fight was not only nurtured by revolutionary ideals or by
faith in the Soviet Union. As Koča Popović remembers, interpreting the thoughts
of the masses: “There were also a lot of young people wishing to rebel.”^98
Uprising and RevolutionThe persecutions of the Serbs unleashed by the Ustaša, as well as by the Hun-
garians in Vojvodina, the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the Albanians
in Kosovo, resulted in a wave of refugees who tried to reach what remained of
Serbia, or took to the woods, where they organized armed groups to defend
themselves. In addition, groups of soldiers who decided not to accept defeat
passively gathered around Royal Army officers who had escaped capture and
continued the fight. The “Chetniks”—as the Serb rebels against the Turks had
been called in past centuries—started to appear as early as April 1941 in some
areas. In the mountains of Ravna Gora in western Serbia, a forty-nine-year-
old colonel, Draža Mihailović, led a handful of men who intended to keep the
embers of the country’s independence alive and to recall King Petar II to his