Since the break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia had sometimes been called an “American Communist Ally.” The West tried to support Yugoslavianstyle communism and to widen the wedge between countries in the Socialist world. If possible, the aim was to develop trends in Eastern Europe detected in the National Intelligence Estimate on Yugoslavia in 1967. However, by the time that things started to change in Czechoslovakia, the overall political environment had already been changed. “[D]espite setbacks to our expectations for détente, the search for secure and peaceful East-West relations leading in time to a European security settlement is the only political goal consistent with Western values,” the British were reporting.89 That goal could have been achieved only with cooperation from Moscow. No one in the West was willing to start an even bigger quarrel with the Soviets, let alone serious fighting.90 The strategy of driving a wedge between the satellites and Moscow and establishing regimes like Tito’s was an old and unsuccessful plan.91
In February 1948, Czechoslovakia was the last country in Europe to become Communist and a member of the Soviet Bloc. In June 1948, Yugoslavia was the first Socialist country to change sides, keeping the Socialist regime, but leaving Moscow. In 1956, Hungary was the first Bloc country to try to emulate the Yugoslav example. In 1968, Dubček seemed to be doing the same in Czechoslovakia. The Yugoslavs were helpful to both countries, although far less directly in 1968. Western propaganda was very outspoken during the Hungarian Revolution. One decade later, there was almost a silence. Although the “reawakening of political life” in Czechoslovakia was “obviously” in U.S. interests, as Western observers reported, a policy of nonaction carried the day.92 The West Germans, who were in charge of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, chose to seem disinterested in the liberal developments in Czechoslovakia, in a move intended to avoid provoking the Soviets93: “There is absolutely no evidence that either the State Department or the CIA took any measures to use the Prague Spring as a means of destabilizing or subverting the Soviet Bloc, in spite of constant Soviet propaganda about the sinister efforts of Western imperialism to do so.”94
Enver Hoxha, the Albanian dictator and one of Tito’s archenemies, softened his position. Tirana had described the intervention in Prague as the “aggression of the Soviet revisionists.”95 The anti-Yugoslav campaign was stopped. Semiofficial signals from Tirana aimed at the improvement of relations between the two countries became numerous. Hoxha was afraid of the Soviets, especially since Bulgarians were printing maps of Greater Bulgaria with the San Stephan borders from 1878.96 Although the positive trend in Yugoslav-Albanian relations did not last for long, there were some lasting positive improvements. For example, ambassadors were exchanged in February 1971.97
Once the Prague Spring was crushed, the Bulgarians, the most bellicose of all neighbors, refused to return the Yugoslav Army missiles they were supposed to mend. The Soviet Army was still on the very edge of the Pannonian Plain. Huge ferries, allegedly for the Soviet tourists, were being built in Odessa.98 Some of the most pessimistic analysts were thinking how the Soviets were aiming at creating a Greater Bulgaria at the Albanian and Yugoslavs’ expense.99
The answer to the diplomatic problems was to start with an ambitious diplomatic game. The initiative from Addis Abeba to convene a conference of “peace-loving” countries in Belgrade and to condemn the Soviets was politely refused, though. Serious splits among the nonaligned countries had to be ironed out first.100 The Arabs were pro-Soviet because the Soviets were helping them in the Middle East.101 To revive the nonaligned countries’ unity and to avoid alienating them in the process became a new major task of the Yugoslav diplomacy. The Soviets were aware of the Yugoslavs’ attempts. Therefore, Soviet diplomats were informed of the “active antiSocialist and anti-Soviet” Yugoslav politics in Asia and Africa. The Soviets were to confront the “antisocialist” Yugoslav diplomats because advocating nonalignment, especially among the Socialist countries, was in their opinion nothing but an imperialist strategy aimed at harming the unity of the Socialist world.102 Only one year before the Prague Spring was crushed, Tito was in Moscow attending an advisory meeting of the Eastern European countries (minus Romania) which was coordinating the Yugoslav assistance to the militarily defeated Egypt in the Six Days War.103 After August 1968, Tito was, for a while, traveling only to the West, including an important trip to the Vatican.104 The (re)imposition of the rigid Communist regime in Prague showed the continuing importance of Yugoslavia for the West.
Dubček was probably inspired by Belgrade’s independence, but he was not directly influenced or led by Tito. Tito and Ceaus¸escu were eager to help the Czechoslovaks achieve not greater liberalism, but their independence form Moscow. While in Bulgaria the reforms of the 1960s were stopped, in Yugoslavia, they were sped up.105 After the end of the Prague Spring, Tito continued with a program of reforms in order to satisfy different nationalities. The Yugoslav People’s Army went though the most elaborate change. Ivan Gošnjak, ideologically rigid and fully devoted to Tito as commander in chief, was replaced.106 Territorial units were introduced, and each Socialist republic of Yugoslavia became partially responsible for its own protection.107 Some of the Marxist dissidents in Yugoslavia saw in the Czechoslovak events “the hope that the evolution they had argued for was now within their grasp…. Tito’s support for Dubček… permitted some of them to predict a second Yugoslav revolution.”108 Federalization and decentralization of the country led to the so-called Croatian Spring of 1970–1971. When Tito and his number two in the nomenclature, Edward Kardelj, were talking about the reformers they considered too liberal in the second-largest republic (and among some other politicians in all parts of SFRY), they would often call them “Dubček-ites” adding how they would rather see Russian tanks in Zagreb than tolerate their “Dubček-ism.”109 Yugoslav leadership was quick to forget how pro-Dubček they had been only a few years earlier and even more eager to adopt the Soviet language. With the crash of the Yugoslav “Dubček-ites,” it was all over. That’s when Yugoslavia actually died.
NOTES
1. U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (hereafter NIE) 15–67, “The Yugoslav Experiment,” 13 April 1967.
2. NIE 15–67, “The Yugoslav Experiment,” 13 April 1967. Commercial exchange with the Lager countries was 33 percent, with Western Europe 38 percent, and 10 percent with the United States. A respectable 19 percent was foreign trade with the nonaligned countries. In 1966, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a move which emphasized Yugoslav dependence on Western markets.
3. NIE 15–67, “The Yugoslav Experiment,” 13 April 1967.
4. NIE Memo, “The Yugoslav Succession Problem,” 10 March 1969.