[Editor's note: Although this piece was originally written as a letter responding to material appearing in SeeingRed, it contains so much information--and has such value--that it deserves publication as an article.]

I myself was inspired by the Yugoslav revolution from childhood in the late 1950s when I read biographies of Tito and stories of the partisan war. It is a glorious page in the history of the international working class and one of the things that inspired me to look at Communism as something different from the official Cold War line I got from television and school.

However, that revolution was led by a Stalinist party with a petit-bourgeois Stalinist program, not a revolutionary Communist party. While the objective thrust of the workers^Ò struggle broke through the nose of capitalism, the policies of the Stalinist leadership of that revolution should not be ignored or prettified. The Stalinist policies led directly to the disaster working people there face today. It doesn't help those workers--rather it insults them--to tell them what they need to do is to go back to those policies.

Sometimes, people who should know better try to call back to the history of the Yugoslav revolution and get so far afield that their version is unfamiliar to those of us who grew up with the story of that revolution fresh in our hearts. No Yugoslav revolutionist would say, as some have said, that Yugoslavia was entirely liberated by the partisans. The tens of thousands of Soviet troops who died before Belgrade and in Serbia would doubt that.

No Yugoslav revolutionist would claim, as some have, that the partisans received no aid from Western imperialists. (One of the most storied incidents in the history of the partisans is how when Tito was completely surrounded by the Germans [I believe in 1944], he was rescued by British forces who flew him out of Yugoslavia to reorganize his headquarters on a British-held island off the Italian coast.) Any standard history of Eastern Europe or the Second War, including those written by supporters of Tito, will recount the millions of dollars of British and US aid Tito received after 1942-43.

No one will deny of course that the US and Britain attempted to support the Chetniks [Serbian monarchists - editor] and not Tito, and continued to aid them even after the various different units of the Chetniks had all gone over the Germans.

The national policy of the Revolution in Yugoslavia in the 1940s was not a revolutionary proletarian internationalist policy like that practiced by Lenin in 1917, nor like that practiced by Castro, Che and the Communist leaders of Cuba's revolutionary Army in 1959, but was instead a Stalinist policy.

Any attempt to glorify it or to accept ignorant glorification of the Yugoslav Revolution without examining the facts of the matter, renders supporters of that revolution incapable of supporting the real gains of that revolution, or even discussing the Yugoslav revolution with people whose knowledge is drawn from reality.

Trying to glorify it and remove the facts only butchers history, and creates a fictionalized version contrary to what history even the Yugoslav Stalinists have admitted to. It renders Communists incapable of actually discussing realities with those who experience the Yugoslav revolution as a reality, not on web pages or in newspaper articles. Most importantly, it threatens to pollute our common understanding of the program and principles of Communism as developed by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and extended by Fidel and Che.

"Yugoslav Unity" versus Proletarian Internationalism The concept of Yugoslavia was a product of Serbian bourgeois and petit bourgeois consciousness, a cover for a greater Serbia. It clearly states the idea of Yugoslavia as an area for the "Southern Slavs," immediately consigning all other persons in the area to second-class citizenship. This is why the Serbia working class communists in World War I and immediately after opposed this concept (Serbia was the only other combatant country in 1914 besides Russia where the majority of the Social Democracy supported Revolutionary Defeatism [the stance of opposing their own government in the war --ed.]).

Yugoslavia was an imperialist country then, not a developing country like Cuba, Nicaragua or South Africa where steps toward national unity and the formation of a nation has some progressive aspects.

Tito's partisans did not campaign on a program of real working class unity. They campaigned on the same Stalinist policy that other Stalinists campaigned on. Instead of being for working-class unity aligned with oppressed nationalities whose national rights they supported, they were for "Yugoslav Unity," just as American Stalinists were for American unity, just as Canadian Stalinists were for Canadian unity. [The U.S. Communist Party called Malcolm X a "Black fascist" for supporting Black nationalism --ed.]

Kosova was explicitly prevented from joining Albania and was forced into Serbia by the Russian and other imperialists at the close of the Balkan wars in 1913. It is estimated that more than a half-million Kosovars went into exile in Turkey and Albania after this happened. This was ratified in the treaties ending World War I when Croatia, Slovenia and other areas were added to the Kingdom of Serbia which changed its name to Yugoslavia in the late 1920s.

Kosova and adjoining Albanian-populated areas of Macedonia were added to Albania during the Second World War in a move that was seen as popular by most Albanians and Kosovars, including the partisans in Albania, Macedonia, and Kosova who fought against the Italian occupiers and the Albanian puppet state. Kosova was not liberated by Tito's "Yugoslav" Partisans, but by the Albania liberation front.

At the close of the war Tito' forced the Albanians and Kosovars to allow Kosova to be reintegrated into Yugoslavia. This was not without opposition, including armed opposition that had to be surpressed within the armed partisan movement.

At this point, Tito explicitly promised that Kosova would be allowed to have the right to chose whether to become part of Albania. Of course Tito did absolutely nothing of the kind. Kosova was added to Serbia. The Yugoslav Stalinists launched a campaign which by their own admission was to lead to the forcible incorporation of Albania into the Yugoslav federation with the full cooperation of Joseph Stalin. They launched a series of exploitative and oppressive agreements with Albania similar to the ones that the Soviet Union launched with other Eastern European workers states. Only the breach between Tito and Stalin prevented the further "unity" of more Albanians into Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was a prison house of nations. The policies of Stalinist unity were not enough to unify the working class because it could never break out of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois framework of "Yugoslav" unity towards a policy of proletarian internationalism. Ideas touted about the glories of the Titoist national policy dote on how people claim "we were all Yugoslavs," or incidents of intermarriage, mainly between Serbs and Croats. None of this means anything to anyone who has been to the school of Lenin.

In Yugoslavia saying "we are all Yugoslavs," is the equivalent of people in the United States saying "we are all white." Albanians are not Yugoslavs. Germans, Italians, Hungarians, Turks, and Egyptians (there was considerable interchange between Egypt and the Balkan Muslim areas. King Farouk and his dynasty were actually of Albanian descent!) are not Yugoslavs. They are not "South Slavs."

Anyway the task of a real workers internationalist policy is not to unite people on a basis of the national unity of imperialist countries, but on a class basis. The real test would have been for people to have said, "We are all workers, peasants, struggling youth, we are united with oppressed nationalities on the basis of their right of self-determination."

In Kosova, almost no respect to the national rights, national culture, national self-determination of the people was recognized except when the struggles of the Kosovars erupted into riots, demonstrations, and other struggles against the Tito regime in the late 1950s, in the late 1960s, and finally in the 1970s. Kosova was administered as part of Serbia. Resettlement of Serbians into Kosova was carried out immediately after the war as well as more recently.

Only by the battle of their own struggles did the Kosovars achieve some level of autonomy, rights to use and to be educated in their own language, etc. We would add that "autonomy" within a bureaucratized workers state like Yugoslavia under Tito, the USSR after Lenin, or China does not mean anything like what that means in the Russia of Lenin or in Fidel's Cuba.

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Tony Thomas is a Miami transit worker and the editor of Black Liberation and Socialism.

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