ABSTRACT
The primary goals of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) in the months following the October 1944 liberation of Belgrade were to maintain and secure its position in power. The most important of the new values conveyed by early CPY rhetoric was that the good of the whole is greater and more important than the good of the one. CPY public statements were even more cautious; several authors insisted that the working class was not acting on the basis of its own selfish class interests but saw its interests in those of the entire people. CPY leaders, male and female, generally believed that differences between the sexes were biologically preordained rather than socially constructed, and should be accepted and encouraged, not repressed. While CPY rhetoric often worked to stabilize postwar Yugoslav society and projected an atmosphere of tolerance and conciliation, it also reflected the prevailing unsettled and revolutionary atmosphere.
