INTRODUCTION 11When top Soviet Communist A. A. Zhdanov announced in
1947 that the world had split into “two camps”—one imperial-
ist, the other anti-imperialist—he included Yugoslavia alongside
the Soviet Union in the anti-imperialist camp.27 Nonetheless, the
infamous Tito-Stalin split one year later launched Tito’s efforts
to pioneer a geopolitical “third way” between these two camps.
American and Western European states not only maintained
trade relations with Yugoslavia, but in fact provided it with sub-
stantial material aid. Yet even an influx of tourists from all over
the world did not diminish the repressive nature of Tito’s Com-
munist regime.28 For this reason, even though Cold War Yugo-
slavia was not, strictly speaking, part of the Soviet Bloc, this vol-
ume gives Yugoslavia a place of prominence in order to paint a
more complete picture of Catholicism’s fate behind the emerging
Iron Curtain.29
The Roman Catholic Church had already identified social-
ism in its various forms as a danger to the Catholic faith in the
mid-nineteenth century. When the Russian revolutions of 1917
led to the creation, among others, of both the Comintern and
the Soviet Union, the Holy See chose a radical anti-Communist
course.30 It was one thing, however, for Pius XI to condemn in
- Zhdanov’s speech announcing the doctrine is reprinted at A. A. Zhdanov,
“Comrade Zhdanov’s Report: On the International Situation,” September 25, 1947,
in The Cominform: Minutes of the Three Conferences 1947/1948/1949, ed. Giuliano
Procacci et al. (Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1994), 216–50. - On the split: Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yu-
goslav Communism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). On tourism: Igor
Tchoukarine, “The Yugoslav Road to International Tourism: Opening, Decentral-
ization, and Propaganda in the Early 1950s,” in Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History
of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–1980s), ed. Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor (Buda-
pest: Central European University Press, 2010), 107–40. - Hutten, Iron Curtain Christians; John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice
There Was a Country, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 233–85. - Piotr H. Kosicki, “The Roman Catholic Church and the Cold War,” in The
Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (New
York: Routledge, 2014), 259–71. On the Catholic Church’s response to the Industrial