Church and State

Abstract

Within four months of the expulsion of the Yugoslav Communist Party from the Cominform the last vestiges of comradeliness between it and the workers’ parties in other people’s democracies had vanished. In the immediate aftermath there had still been grudging acknowledgments of the Yugoslav people’s heroic struggle against fascist forces and of Tito’s efficient liquidation of internal reaction. A towering figure like Josip Broz Tito could not from one day to the next be reduced to the rank of a disgraced heretic as Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Bukharin had been in the Stalinist purges. Zoltán Szánto, in one of his reports from Belgrade, conceded that Yugoslavia had been the people’s democracy with the greatest prestige and “to gain her friendship and trust was a major foreign policy task.” He commented with seeming approval on Belgrade’s claim that the Cominform resolution amounted to a denial of the country’s fight against the German occupiers and that it “defames tens of thousands of fallen soldiers and flings mud into the heroic face of the nation.”¹ In another report Szánto noted that some communist parties were in no hurry to adopt the new line; the Central Committee of the Bulgarian party even stated that “the debate” could not influence the friendly relations between the two countries.²