ABSTRACT
On 13 Feburary 1942 the Comintern executive suggested to Tito that the Partisan supreme command issue a short proclamation to the peoples of occupied Europe, and especially to those of France and Czechoslovakia, calling upon them to emulate the heroic example of the Yugoslavs’ fight for freedom and independence. In fact, the contretemps over the proclamation came in the midst of what would later be recognized as a crisis in the partisan movement. The partisans’ 1942 crisis and their difficulties with their mentors in Moscow are worth stressing at the outset in order to show that the Yugoslav revolution was neither inevitable in its success nor predetermined in its form. The Serbian uprising, meanwhile, had smouldered before taking flame in August, affording partisans and cetniks ample opportunity to take each other’s measure. More than their antithetical ends, the two movements’ incompatible strategies were to make their co-operation and, eventually, their coexistence impossible.
