The Penguin History of the World

Besides its demographic and communal diversity (the Yugoslav census of 1931 distinguished Serbo-Croats, Slovenes, Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Vlachs, Albanians, Turks, ‘Other Slavs’, Jews, Gypsies and Italians), Yugoslavia also displayed wide disparities of custom, wealth and economic development. In parts of it, the Middle Ages had barely faded away by 1950, while others were modern, urbanized and contained significant industry. Overall, what were mainly agricultural economies had been impoverished by fast-growing populations. Yet Yugoslav politics between the two wars had turned out to be in the main about a Croat–Serb antagonism and this was deepened by wartime atrocity and struggle in a three-sided civil war between Croatians, the mainly Serb Communists (themselves led by the Croatian, Tito) and Serb royalists after 1941. This struggle began with a campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing launched against the 2 million Serbs of the new Croatia (which included Bosnia and Herzegovina). It ended in Communist victory in 1945, and the effective containment of the different nationalities by Tito’s dictatorship within a federal structure; this seemed to solve the old Bosnian and Macedonian problems and was likely to be able to ward off the territorial ambitions of outsiders. Forty-five years later, and ten years after Tito’s death, however, the old issues suddenly revealed themselves to be still vigorously alive.

In 1990 the Yugoslav federal government’s attempts to deal with its economic troubles were accompanied by accelerating political fragmentation. Democratic self-determination finally undid the Tito achievement as Yugoslavs of different nationalities began to cast about to find ways of filling the political vacuum left by the collapse of Communism. Parties formed representing Serb, Croat, Macedonian and Slovene interests as well as one in favour of the Yugoslav idea and the federation itself. Soon, all the republican governments, except that of Macedonia, rested on elected majorities, and new national minority parties had even begun to make themselves heard inside the individual republics. Croatian Serbs declared their own autonomy and there was bloodshed in the Serbian province of Kosovo, four-fifths of whose inhabitants were Albanian. The proclamation of an independent republic there had been a major symbolic affront to the Serbians – as well as of concern to the Greek and Bulgarian governments, whose predecessors had not ceased to cherish Macedonian ambitions since the days of the Balkan wars. In August, sporadic fighting by air and ground forces had begun between Serbs and Croats. Precedents for intervention by outsiders did not ever seem promising – though different views were held by different EC countries – and prospects for it became even less attractive when the USSR in July uttered a warning about the dangers of spreading local conflict to the international level. By the end of the year Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia had all, like Croatia, declared themselves independent.

The Soviet warning was the last diplomatic démarche of the regime. It was soon eclipsed by a much more momentous event. On 19 August 1991 an attempt was made by an uneasy coalition of some Party and KGB figures to set aside Mikhail Gorbachev by coup d’état. It failed, and three days later he was again in occupation of the presidency. However, his position was not the same; continual changes of side in a search for compromise had ruined his political credibility. He had clung too long to the Party and the Union; Soviet politics had taken a further lurch forward, in the eyes of many, towards disintegration. The circumstances of the coup had given an opportunity, which he seized, to Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian republic, the largest in the Union. The army, the only conceivable threat to his supporters, did not move against him. He now appeared both as the strong man of the Soviet scene, without whose concurrence nothing could be done, and as a possible standard-bearer for a Russian chauvinism that might threaten other republics. While foreign observers waited to understand, the purging of those who had supported or acquiesced in the coup was developed into a determined replacement of Union officialdom at all levels, the redefinition of roles for the KGB and a redistribution of control over it between the Union and the republics. The most striking change of all was the demolition of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which began almost at once. Almost bloodlessly, at least to begin with, the huge creation which had grown out of the Bolshevik coup of 1917 was coming to an end. There seemed at first good grounds for rejoicing over that, although it was still unclear how much good would follow.