ABSTRACT
The communist state that would rule Yugoslavia after 1944 grew out of the anti-Axis Partisan movement headed by Josip Broz Tito, since 1937 head of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY); the Partisans had been formed to fight against German Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation of the country. By the beginning of October 1944, the Partisans, benefitting from steady supplies of arms from Great Britain and the United States, which had begun in 1943 and from the Soviet Union beginning in late 1944, had cleared most of Yugoslavia of foreign occupation forces and their domestic collaborators. For Britain, France, and Germany, the Second World War ended on 8 May 1945. From Tito’s perspective, the positive value of the Hungarian Revolution in potentially weakening Soviet power was more than offset by the encouragement it might give to Yugoslav discontents.
