Author Description

Letters to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and Other Documents brings together, in a single edition, the most decisive texts of the 1948 split that shook the socialist world. Issued by J.V. Stalin, V.M. Molotov, the Cominform and fraternal comrades, these letters, resolutions and speeches reveal the inner workings of the crisis that exposed Tito’s Yugoslavia as a renegade force within the international communist movement. From Stalin’s first sharp rebukes over unauthorized treaties and military manoeuvres in Albania, through Molotov’s telegrams detailing Yugoslavia’s growing hostility toward Soviet specialists, to Stalin's famous three letters, to the Cominform’s historic resolutions branding the Tito clique “a gang of fascists, murderers and spies,” this volume traces the escalation of warnings, criticism and open rupture. It includes Stalin’s famous Pravda article on the nationalism of the Tito group, the official recall of Soviet advisers, and the reports of Gh. Gheorghiu-Dej and P.A. Yudin at the November 1949 Cominform meeting. Together, these documents completely cover split: initial attempts at correction and comradely consultation; the exposure of Yugoslavia’s secretive, opportunist and anti-Soviet practices; the defence of Marxist-Leninist principles; and the final unmasking of Titoism before world public opinion. More than anything, this book is a documentary indictment. It shows how Stalin's vigilance preserved the independence of the people’s democracies at a turning point in the Cold War.