ABSTRACT
Tito lived for 32 years after his rift with Stalin in 1948. After Stalin’s deathKhrushchev paid two conciliatory visits to Yugoslavia. The first, in 1955, was tantamount to a confession of error and an apology for the Russian stand in 1948. The second, in June 1956, followed the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the USSR at which, earlier in the year, Khrushchev had indicated that relations with the satellites needed to be put on a new basis; it followed also the dissolution in April of the Comintern, the body which had pronounced Tito’s excommunication. But RussoYugoslav relations remained distrustful, if less bitter. Internally, Tito, having won the right to tackle his problems in his own way, did so only tentatively, although the introduction of workers’ management in industry in 1950 and the abandonment of collectivization in the countryside in 1953 attested a willingness to moderate doctrinal rigidity. The constitution of 1945 had nationalized all industrial, commercial and financial enterprises, limited individual landholdings to 60 acres, and organized the surplus agricultural land into collective farms. The first five-year plan was an immensely detailed, voluminous and bureaucratic blueprint for a Russian-style command economy. It was gradually dismantled in the 1950s, mainly because it was hopelessly cumbersome. In 1950 and again in 1961 industrial control was devolved on to workers’ councils with wide powers of management, including the right to allocate investment funds and to decide what to do with profits. In the early 1960s new lines of credit were made available through local banks (as opposed to the central bank) and the system of fixing prices centrally was relaxed. A new constitution in 1963 introduced real but limited decentralization without, however, removing ultimate power from the party or Tito himself. These half-measures failed to give industry the expected stimulus, the economy remained stagnant, inflation rose and so did Yugoslavia’s dependence on aid from the IMF and the United States. There was a brief reaction in economic policy but the liberalizing and decentralizing strands were – also briefly – resumed. So in fits and starts the economic sector was fragmented into tens of thousands of autonomous units. Whether the psychological stimuli of decontrol and self-management outweighed losses in efficiency and productivity was inconclusively debated. More
7.1 Yugoslavia and its republics, 1991
7.2 The Vance-Owen plan (April 1993) 7.3 The Contact Group proposal (July 1994)
certainly, these industrial changes created a new base for political power by opening careers for talents in industry besides the traditional ladders of the Communist Party and the armed forces.
