ABSTRACT
The postwar history of Eastern Europe can be seen as a period of imperial subjugation, the result of a Soviet desire to build a belt of docile allies in Cold War confrontation with the West. Yugoslavia's Tito was actually expelled from the Cominform, although he successfully withstood its verbal onslaughts and the political and economic ostracism of the other countries in the Soviet orbit. When in 1956 Khrushchev advanced the doctrine that there were "different roads to socialism" and that all Communist states did not have to follow the Soviet pattern, he was recognizing that even under Stalin there had been considerable diversity among the countries of Eastern Europe despite an outward appearance of conformity. Just before the revolutions of 1989, the danger of tampering with the established order could be seen in the indirect impact of Gorbachev's reforms, even the idea of reform itself, on the Eastern European outcast, Yugoslavia.
