i
Square and crowded around the statue of the Ban to give this most Croatian of Partisan units a hearty welcome.We Communists did not want any opposition, none whatsoever.
Milovan Djilas1
As the remnants of the NDH’s army fled towards the Austrian frontier with an enormous number of civilians in tow, the first Partisan troops entered the deserted streets of Zagreb on 8 May 1945. The population stayed indoors. One reason was Partisan radio warnings about continued fighting in the streets with the rump of the Ustashe. Another was a certain wariness about the Partisan Second Army, which contained many Serbs and Montenegrins who had fought as Chetniks before taking advantage of an amnesty offered by Tito in 1943 to any Chetniks or Domobrani who wanted to join the Partisans. But a few days later, when the 10th Zagreb Corps marched triumphantly into the city, an enormous crowd of hundreds of thousands streamed into Jelai Square and crowded around the statue of the Ban to give this most Croatian of Partisan units a hearty welcome.
Many people, of course, remained fearful of the new regime. Throughout the war the population in the government-held towns had been subjected to a diet of anti-Communist propaganda, portraying all Partisans as killers and as sworn enemies of Croatian independence and of the Catholic Church. It was different in the Italian-occupied areas of Dalmatia and Istria. There almost all the Croats regarded the Partisans as liberators from Mussolini’s rule, Italianisation and the Chetniks. At Makarska, peasants greeted the Partisans with shouts of ‘Long live the Virgin Mary and the Communist Party.’2
The first task awaiting the Partisans after the entry into Zagreb was to eliminate the NDH army, then fleeing towards the Austrian frontier. The Ustashe and the Domobrani were desperate to get out of the country. Many were convinced that the West would not hand them back to the Communist allies of Stalin’s Russia. Between 14 and 16 May this column, several hundred thousand strong, was massing on the banks of the River Drava, demanding the right to enter Austria.
The Ustashe overestimated the anti-Communist feelings of the British and the Americans. They did not know that the Allies had decided to hand them back to Tito to do as he wished. Tito for his part wanted to annihilate as many of the Ustashe as possible. Now that control over the whole of Yugoslavia was within his grasp, he was determined not to allow the NDH to recoup its strength in exile, or filter back into the country as an anti-Communist fifth column. On 15 May he informed the Yugoslav First Army that:
a group of Ustashe and some Chetniks, a total of some 50,000 men, is reported by the Third Army in the Konjice–Šoštanj area, towards Dravograd. It includes Paveli, Maek, the Croatian government and a huge number of criminals. They are attempting to cross at Dravograd and give themselves up to the British … you must move your forces most urgently … to concentrate for an attack aimed at the annihilation of this group.3
On the other side of the River Drava, a small, lightly armed British force of about 150 was watching the arrival of the Croatian army with concern. The British were confused. They had only a small force on the Austrian border with which to confront the Ustashe army. They resolved on a policy of deception. The Croats were to be disarmed and put on trains, but not told of their destination.
On 15 May the confrontation came to a head when the Croats attempted to cross into Austria at Bleiburg. They were now in a dire state. From the rear they were being attacked by the advancing Partisans, who were trying to cut off the tail of the column of refugees and soldiers as it headed north. The Croats might have marched through the 150 British troops and moved into Austria, but they parleyed. The British commander at Bleiburg, Brigadier Scott, later recalled the lengths to which the Croats were prepared to go to avoid falling into Partisan hands: ‘They suggested that they might go to America or Africa and I told them that the ways and means for such a movement were completely non-existent and that if they moved anywhere they were bound to starve. Starving, they insisted, was an infinitely preferable course to surrendering to Tito.’ The Brigadier bluffed the Croats and told them that if they attempted to move into Austria, ‘they would not only be attacked by the Yugoslavs, but by all the weight of British and American air forces, land forces and anything else I could get my hands on, in which case they would unquestionably be annihilated’.
The NDH troops agreed to surrender to Allied forces on condition that they were interned outside Yugoslavia, and in a bewildered state they were packed on to overcrowded trains, which rolled straight back into Yugoslavia. The Partisans killed as many of the soldiers as they could, executing the Croats and Slovenes as they got off the train and throwing the bodies into the quarry at Koevje, a village on the Slovenian side of the frontier. The executions were carried out in such haste, however, that some of the soldiers survived and crawled out of the pits at night.
The question of how many Croats were killed at Bleiburg is difficult to estimate. Like the question of how many Serbs were killed in Jasenovac, it is hedged around with propaganda. Some Croat nationalists insisted that up to 200,000 were killed. Others have put the final death toll from Bleiburg at 30,000.
Not all the victims were Croats. Many were Slovenes associated with the Bela Garda, an anti-Communist militia in Slovenia which collaborated with the German and Italian occupying forces. After the war, Djilas said the Partisans had been surprised by the decision to return the Croats to Yugoslavia, as it was obvious that they would be massacred. Tito himself became disgusted by the orgy of killings that followed the Partisan victory. According to Djilas, he exploded with anger at a session of the Central Committee, declaring that as a result of the slaughter ‘no one is afraid of capital punishment any longer’.4
While the Partisans in Slovenia were killing off the remnants of the NDH army, the people of Zagreb awaited the arrival of Tito and the new Croat government under Nazor, Bakari and Franjo Gaži, one of the left-wing leaders in the Peasants Party. The new civilian government had replaced Zavnoh, and was established in liberated Split on 16 April.
Few people in Zagreb knew much about Tito at that time. Maek said that the first time he ever heard about him was at the begining of 1943, when the newspapers published a reward for his capture.5 That the leader of the Partisans was a Croat was certainly a reassuring sign, which ensured he was greatly preferable to Mihailovi’s Chetniks. He spoke with a strong accent that betrayed his origins in the region of Zagorje, the heartland of Croatia to the north of Zagreb. Yet to what degree Tito considered himself a Croat is debatable. He was born Josip Broz in 1893 in Kumrovec, a village on the border between Croatia and Slovenia, to a mixed marriage – his mother was Slovene and his father Croat. He had spent much of his youth far from home, fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army and later in Russia, caught up in the ferment of the Bolshevik Revolution. From 1928 to 1934 he had been imprisoned for Communist activities in Lepoglava, in Zagorje, and in Ogulin, in Lika, under the royal government. On his release, he spent three years in Moscow. After assuming leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1937 his duties had taken him all over the country. The beginning of the war found him in Zagreb. The latter part of 1941 he spent in Belgrade. For the remainder of the war he moved with his Partisan army between eastern Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Croatia, until the entry into Belgrade in November 1944. The only extended period he had remained in Croatia had been in the 1920s, as a trade union activist in Zagreb, Sisak and Kraljevica.
In the semi-autobiographical Tito Speaks, he spoke fondly but briefly of the land of his birth. He recalled with affection his mother baking štruklje, (cottage cheese pie) and the peasants of his village sitting around the hearth, recounting legends of the peasants’ revolt led by Matija Gubec in 1573 and the wicked ‘Black Queen’ who crushed the peasants with great cruelty, Countess Barbara Erdody. But the overwhelming impression is one of restlessness and a hatred of authority, whether it was the parish priest at St Rok’s in his childhood, the Austrian Emperor of his youth or the Yugoslav King when he was an adult.6
Time and time again he would set off on the back of a hayrick for Kamnik or Ljubljana in Slovenia, or for Trieste, in search of work. No matter how often he was dragged home by failure to find a job he would soon be off again, this time to the Czech factories of Bohemia, or to German-speaking Wiener Neustadt. The phenomenon of Croat nationalism passed him by, as he matured from rebellious Austro-Hungarian into Socialist internationalist. His favourite books as a young man were Sherlock Holmes and the writings of Jack London and the Russian radicals. His musical tastes were those of the Viennese coffee houses. He was not indifferent to his Croat heritage; he insisted he took the nom de guerre Tito from the eighteenth-century Croat writer, Tito Brezovaki. But he placed little stress on it.
None of his wives was a Croat. His first, Pelagia Belousova, was Russian. His second common-law wife, Herta Hass, was an ethnic German from Maribor, in Slovenia. His wartime companion, Davorjanka Paunovi, was a Serb from Belgrade and his post-war consort, Jovanka Budisavljevi, was also a Serb, from the Lika region of Croatia. He rarely referred to himself as a Croat in public, and after the war ended he resided in Belgrade. In his conduct of Communist Party business there was nothing that betrayed any special sympathy with Croat interests. He endorsed the creation of separate Communist Parties in Slovenia and Croatia in 1937, but he did so as the faithful executor of the Comintern’s policy towards suppressed nationalities, not as a supporter of regional rights. He had denounced the creation of the Croatian Banovina in 1939 as a ploy to co-opt the Croat bourgeoisie into government, just as he had denounced the ‘second imperialist war’ in 1939 – until Germany attacked the Soviet Union two years later.
He inherited from his Croat background a profound dislike for the old Serb-dominated ‘Versailles Yugoslavia’, although the six republics organised in 1945 enjoyed only limited decision-making powers in the first two post-war decades. He stamped on Moše Pijade’s plan to create a separate Serb province in Croatia in 1942.7 He was also determined to acquire for Yugoslavia as much Croat- and Slovene-inhabited land in Austria and Italy as he could lay claim to, although whether this was evidence of his territorial greed or a genuine interest in ‘liberating’ Croats and Slovenes is, again, debatable. Success in this venture was mixed. The Partisans occupied Trieste and part of southern Austria around Klagenfurt in 1945. In Trieste they presided over a brief reign of terror, not only against the Italians but also against Slovenes suspected of right-wing sympathies. But the attempt to gain these territories for Yugoslavia collapsed in the face of fierce Allied opposition – to the enormous relief of Trieste’s Italian majority and the Austrian majority in Klagenfurt.
The Zagrebians’ curiosity about their new master was soon to be satisfied. Tito arrived in the city on 21 May and delivered a speech to an enormous crowd in St Mark’s Square, outside the old palace of the bans in the Upper Town. His speech was the first opportunity the Zagrebians had to find out what kind of a state was going to replace the NDH.
If they expected a harangue, they were mistaken. Tito was at his most conciliatory and flattering. He spoke of his joy at being back in ‘our beloved Zagreb’ and said he was speaking ‘as a Croat’. He tried to dispel any fears that the end of the NDH meant the return of the old, hated Yugoslavia.
‘We have done away with the form of government created in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, when a clique of the Great Serbian bourgeoisie imposed the centralised system on us, a system in which other nations were entirely deprived of their rights,’ he said. ‘Today no one will be able to object that this or that nation is being oppressed.’ The period from 1918 to 1941 had been ‘a bitter and terrible lesson, and not only for the Serbs’, he added.8
Tito went on to explain that although the new Yugoslavia would resemble ‘a conglomerate of small states’ there would be no place for reactionary nationalism or petty disputes between Serbia, Croatia and the other republics. The arrival of Socialism rendered such disputes not only unnecessary but unthinkable. In fact, the borders between the new republics would scarcely be noticed. They would be like ‘white lines in a marble column’.9
In spite of Tito’s advice, the exact position of the ‘white lines in a marble column’ generated a fair amount of controversy. The debate was heated up by an announcement in the spring of 1945 from the provisional government of Vojvodina that the province would be attached to Serbia.
Changes to Croatia’s borders 1939–45
This was controversial, as it reopened a dispute over Srijem, which had belonged the Croat Banovina of 1939 and which Hebrang had insisted ought to remain in Croatia. The majority of the population in Srijem was Serbian, but the western districts of Vukovar, Ilok, Vinkovci and Županja were mostly Croat, and historically the region had been part of Slavonia. Another question mark hung over Dalmatia, where supporters of autonomy inside Croatia had clashed with Hebrang the year before. South of Dalmatia, the Montenegrins laid claim to the bay of Kotor, which had formerly belonged to the city-state of Dubrovnik, and where the population was a mixture of Catholic and Orthodox.10 The last area of dispute was Istria, although this was a dispute of a different kind, pitting Yugoslavia against the West rather than Croatia against Slovenia.
With Tito’s support, Bakari fended off the more unfavourable claims made against Croatia, in particular a Bosnian suggestion to swap Dubrovnik for Biha. On the eastern frontier with Vojvodina, a border commission under Djilas got to work, applying economic and ethnic criteria. The eastern tip of the old Croatian Banovina around Šid and Ruma was awarded to Serbia on ethnic grounds, while western Srijem stayed in Croatia. Baranja was awarded to Croatia on the ground that it formed a natural hinterland to Osijek. The result of the dispute over Istria favoured Croatia. Although Yugoslavia was forced to give up the city of Trieste after a brief period of occupation, the rest of the peninsula, including the mainly Italian town of Pula (Pola in Italian), went to Croatia, apart from the small strip of land awarded to Slovenia. The Croat portions of Bosnia, including the old Ustashe heartland of western Herzegovina, however, were lost to the new republic of Bosnia–Herzegovina, and the bay of Kotor went to Montenegro.
During the six months that followed the Partisan entry into Zagreb, Tito suppressed non-Communist political organisations and created a one-party state throughout Yugoslavia. In Serbia there was little opposition. This disappointed many foreign governmental observers, especially in the US, who had confidently predicted a royalist uprising in Serbia against the Partisans. Seton-Watson, on his last visit to Yugoslavia in 1936, drew this comparison between the two peoples. ‘The fact is that in Serbia it has always been a tradition to vote for the government of the day,’ he wrote. ‘Very different is the situation in Croatia. There the peasant masses have a long tradition not of subservience to the government of the day, as in Serbia, but on the contrary, of opposition at all costs.’11 Although support for the Partisans was weak in Serbia and most of the rural population remained attached to the monarchy, the rising against the Partisans in Serbia that many foreign observers had predicted never took place.
In Croatia non-Communist political activity was more difficult to suppress, although Maek’s flight abroad a few days before the Partisans reached Zagreb rid the regime of a potentially troublesome foe.12 The Peasants Party had been accustomed to persecution. The Church was stronger and more disciplined in Croatia than in Serbia, and was stiffened in its opposition to Communism by the strong support of the Vatican.
The Communists’ first task was to ease out of office the non-Communist ministers who were included in the Yugoslav cabinet following the Tito–Šubaši accord. This at first might have appeared problematic, as there were several non-Communists in the new Yugoslav government formed in March 1945, as well as three regents, who under the terms of the Tito–Šubaši agreement exercised the prerogatives of the King pending a final constitutional settlement. Apart from Šubaši, who was made foreign minister, there was another Croat in the cabinet from the ranks of the HSS, Juraj Šutej, and Miroslav Grol, leader of the Serbian Democratic Party, who was appointed deputy prime minister. Two other ‘non-Communists’, Sava Kosanovi, a Serb, and Drago Maruši, a Slovene, were really fellow travellers. The ace held by the Communists was that they acted in unison against their rivals throughout Yugoslavia, whereas the non-Communist parties in Serbia and Croatia were too divided by their experience in the war to form a united front.
Alongside a sharp divide between the Serbian and Croatian parties, there were deep splits in the parties themselves. In Croatia the Peasants Party was split into three factions, which greatly undermined its chances of revival. In the centre, Šubaši attempted to steer a course between the Communist-led Popular Front and the opposition. On the left, Gaži advocated working inside the Popular Front. At the other end of the spectrum, Stjepan Radi’s widow, Marija, tried to uphold the party’s independence and its traditional anti-Communist stance.
Šubaši’s tactics weakened the ability of the Peasants Party to present a united front; they did not, however, endear him to the Communists, who got rid of him – and all the other non-Communists – as soon as they were no longer useful. On 19 August Grol gave up the struggle and resigned. In October Šutej and Šubaši also were forced out of the cabinet, shortly after the provisional government set a timetable for elections to be held for a constituent assembly in November. The Foreign Minister had attempted to leave the country in September for talks with Maek, who was then in Paris giving interviews to the newspapers accusing the Communists of aiming for a dictatorship. The Communists at first gave Šubaši permission to depart, then withdrew it. Unable to leave the country, Šubaši saw that his position as foreign minister had become absurd. He resigned, and withdrew from politics, a disappointed man. Before his death he apparently wrote a letter to Maek, asking to be forgiven for the mess which his intrigues had partly helped to bring about.13
Once Šubaši and Grol were out of the cabinet, the Communists had a free hand to deal with their less important opponents. The three regents were simply ignored from the start, and King Petar relieved them of their responsibilities in August 1945. As the election grew closer, non-Communist candidates encountered more obstacles and intimidation. ‘We Communists did not want any opposition, none whatsoever,’ Djilas recalled. ‘In the summer of 1945 when the draft of the elections was discussed, we deliberately included provisions that rendered it impossible for the opposition to participate.’14
Supporters of Mrs Radi, the most significant opponent of the Communist-run Popular Front, were intimidated by the new Communist-run secret police, OZNa, which was later known by the acronym UDBa. When Mrs Radi’s newspaper, Narodni Glas, was suppressed at the end of September she decided to boycott the election in protest. The left wing of the Peasants Party under Gaži, meanwhile, surrendered its separate identity by agreeing to merge with the newly formed Popular Front, a Communist umbrella organisation which purported to harness a broad spectrum of progressive interests.
As a result the voters on 11 November were presented with a single list of candidates. The election was a farce. Voters were given rubber ballots, which they were told to drop in one of two urns, one representing the Popular Front and the other the non-existent opposition. The balloting was supervised by Popular Front officials, who could see, and hear, if the ballot was being dropped in the opposition urn. Not surprisingly the Popular Front won over 95 per cent of the votes in Croatia, as in the other republics. The Constituent Assembly quickly scrapped what was left of the Tito–Šubaši agreement. On 29 November the monarchy was abolished and Yugoslavia proclaimed a people’s republic.
Some non-Communists tried to save their parties’ independent existence by joining the Popular Front. But most were weeded out within a few years. The fate of Dragoljub Jovanovi was illustrative. The leader of the Serbian Agrarian Party was a convinced left-winger who had supported the Partisans in the war. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1945 on the Popular Front ticket. He was highly popular in his Pirot constituency and the Communists recognised him as a man of integrity. Nevertheless, in 1947 he was arrested on trumped-up charges and sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment.
Tito’s only concession to the pre-war regime was to place a few harmless and respectable relics of the old literary and political establishment in symbolic posts; in Zagreb, Nazor was rewarded for his services to Zavnoh with the post of president of the new Croatian People’s Republic; in Belgrade, Ivan Ribar, father of the Communist youth hero, Ivo Lola Ribar, became spokesman of the federal parliament.
Nazor was incomparably the greatest Croat poet of his time. His ode to Croatian independence. Hrvatski Kraljevi (Croatian kings), written between 1904 and 1912, had moved an entire generation. He was a convinced Christian. For a short time, while the Partisan government of Croatia was based at Otoac, he tried to act like a real president and make decisions. The Communists, who wanted only a figurehead, did not like that, and Djilas was sent to explain to him that he must not interfere in politics. After that he gave up.15 He never appeared to regret entering Tito’s service. He was old, surrounded by officials who kept him in the dark, and either he did not know, or he did not want to know, about the terrible purges that were going on around him.16
By the early 1950s the only political arena in which Communist control was less than 100 per cent complete was local government, where it seems that a few hostile elements clung on to menial positions in some of the more far-flung village councils. After the elections of 1952, the Party-controlled press launched a fierce campaign against the way the vote had been conducted in some areas, claiming that ‘reactionaries’ in several local councils had been elected to office.
Tito’s political radicalism was matched in the economic sphere. In August 1945 a vast amount of land was expropriated by a law confiscating the holdings of ‘collaborators’ and all those larger than 35 hectares (about 86 acres), with a few exemptions for the Churches.17 In Vojvodina the property of several hundred thousand ethnic Germans, who had been expelled for collaboration, was confiscated in its entirety. So was the land of about 200,000 Hungarians, although unlike the Germans the Hungarians were not expelled en masse. The property was handed over to a land fund, which then distributed much of it to landless Serb and Montenegrin families from Lika, Montenegro and Bosnia. But at the same time part of the confiscated land was set aside for the first agricultural collectives and enormous pressure was soon applied on the peasants to join them, especially in Vojvodina and Macedonia.
In both his economic policy and his suppression of the non-Communist opposition, Tito was far more headstrong than his East European comrades, who struggled on with coalition governments and mixed economies until 1947, or in some cases until 1948.
He was equally brutal in his handling of the Churches, the Catholic Church in particular. According to a report submitted to Anthony Eden by the writer Evelyn Waugh, who was attached to Partisan headquarters in Croatia in Topusko for several months from July 1944, the OZNa executed a large number of clergy after liberation on flimsy grounds:
Trials by OZNa take place in secret, the names of judges, accusers and witnesses are not disclosed: a prisoner is never acquitted in a judicial sense; he is sometimes set free … and finally shot after the third or fourth period of liberty. When executions have taken place a notice is posted giving the names of the victims and some general charges, such as ‘Ustasha’, ‘enemy collaborator’, or ‘denouncer’.
Waugh was convinced that the active pro-Ustashe sentiments of a minority of clergy, concentrated in Bosnia, were being used by the Partisans to stigmatise the entire clergy and eliminate potentially troublesome clerics whose real crime was anti-Communism, or even excessive local popularity:
Any priest prominent as an opponent of Communism is condemned as a traitor … even priests who lacked all interest in politics incur condemnation, simply by their prestige. Fr Petar Perica, a Jesuit of Dubrovnik, shot by the OZNa in November 1944 devoted himself entirely to the spiritual life [yet] an influential partisan spokesman told the writer of this report that he had been the instigator of Ustashe massacres. …
Of the fourteen priests killed to date in Dubrovnik, only three concerned themselves with politics, the others were singled out for their popularity, for example Fr Marjan-Blaži, a blind preacher. Fr Bernadin Sokol, a musician. … to have influence with the younger generation is especially culpable. The Croatian clergy has already been depleted by killings by Chetniks, Germans and Italians. It is steadily being depleted by partisan killings.
Waugh was a devout Catholic. The first British Ambassador to post-war Yugoslavia, Ralph Skrine Stevenson, was keen to keep the wartime alliance of the British and the Partisans alive. As a result, Waugh’s account was simply dismissed as propaganda. Stevenson wrote to Eden on 2 May 1945: ‘I cannot accept the general conclusions which he draws in the report.’18
In Zagreb, Archbishop Stepinac had remained at his post. Several other bishops had fled, breaking their canonical oaths, among them the Archbishop of Sarajevo and the Bishop of Banja Luka. Stepinac was taken into ‘protective custody’ as soon as the Partisans reached Zagreb.
On 2 June 1945 one of his suffragans, Bishop Salis-Seewis, called on Tito in his stead and assured him of the Church’s willingness to work alongside whatever civil authority was established. Tito spoke soothingly on this occasion, downplaying fears of organised retribution against the clergy. ‘Speaking as a Catholic and a Croat,’19 he told Salis-Seewis that he hoped the clergy would return to the ideology of Strossmayer and the ideas of southern Slav unity. He said that he blamed the Catholic Church for being inclined more to the Italians than to the Slavs and compared it unfavourably with the Orthodox Church in this respect.
The next day, Stepinac was released from detention and on 4 June visited Tito himself. The meeting did not go well, and the Archbishop came away convinced that Tito wanted the Church in Croatia to loosen its ties with Rome. He may have misunderstood Tito’s words, though there was no mistaking the fundamentally hostile position of the new authorities towards organised religion.
The Yugoslav Communists opposed the Church not only on dogmatic grounds but because they looked on the Catholic and Orthodox Churches as the main props to the kind of Croat and Serb nationalism that was irreconcilable with a wider Yugoslav nationalism. In the long term the Communist ideology and punitive land reforms undermined and impoverished the Orthodox Church, and some Orthodox bishops would also suffer persecution.20 But in 1945 the Serbian Church was still in a mood of euphoria over Serbia’s liberation from German occupation by fellow Orthodox Slavs from Russia, and its position seemed relatively secure. The Serbian Patriarch, Gavrilo, had been imprisoned in German concentration camps and his patriotic stock was high. The position of Archbishop Stepinac was quite different. He headed a Church which had lent considerable support to a defeated and utterly discredited Fascist regime, and, although he was not accused of personally advocating or encouraging war crimes, he was compromised by association.
The Archbishop, for his part, was shocked by the wave of trials and judicial executions that began in earnest in June. Some of the victims had little cause to expect clemency. They included several NDH government ministers who had been apprehended in Croatia, or repatriated to the Yugoslav authorities while attempting to escape through Austria, and notorious war criminals such as Fr Filipovi, a Franciscan friar from Herzegovina, who had become a concentration camp attendant at Jasenovac. But the war guilt of other victims was more questionable. The Muslim Mufti of Zagreb was shot soon after the Partisan victory and the Bishop of Dubrovnik ‘disappeared’, and was certainly killed. Germogen, the Metropolitan of the quisling Croatian Orthodox Church, and Spiridon, the Croatian Orthodox Bishop of Sarajevo, were also executed almost immediately. The Partisans took rapid and brutal revenge on Catholic parish clergy who were thought or known to have supported the wartime regime, especially in Bosnia, which had borne the brunt of Ustashe persecution and where the new republic’s regime was made up mostly of Serbs and Muslims.
There was savage retribution in May in Široki Brijeg, the village in western Herzegovina that had produced several Ustashe leaders and where the local Franciscan community was seen as an Ustashe seminary. Shortly after Partisan troops arrived, fourteen friars were doused in petrol and set on fire. Several others were taken away and shot.
In this tense atmosphere, Stepinac received permission in July to go ahead with the annual procession to the Marian shrine of Marija Bistrica, north of Zagreb. But Church-state relations were already tense and the authorities appeared angry that 40,000 pilgrims dared to go, complaining afterwards that the crowd included the families of Ustashe fighters. Stepinac defended the participants, saying many were distraught wives and children of soldiers who had gone ‘missing’ at Bleiburg. Already it appears that Stepinac had resolved on confronting Tito’s regime. It was not only the killing of clergy that aroused his indignation. He was also implacably opposed to the introduction of civil marriage, the confiscation of Church property, the abolition of religious education, the promotion of atheism in schools, the suppression of religious houses, and most other items on the Partisan agenda.
On 20 October the simmering quarrel burst into the open when the Archbishop published a strongly worded pastoral letter. In it he declared that 273 clergy had been killed since the Partisan take-over. 169 had been imprisoned and another 89 were ‘missing’, presumed dead. The letter was so controversial and daring that many Catholic clergy would not read it out from the pulpits. Tito was furious and – for the first time – publicly attacked the Archbishop for failing to speak out against the Ustashe massacres of Serbs in the war. On 25 October he wrote a signed editorial in the Party newspaper Borba accusing Stepinac of ‘declaring war’ on the new Yugoslavia.21 The rest of the media took their cue from Tito and launched a vociferous campaign against the Archbishop as a Fascist sympathiser. There is no doubt that it was the Archbishop’s opposition to Tito, not his record during the NDH, that condemned him. Djilas, then in the inner circle of the Party leadership, recalled: ‘He would certainly not have been brought to trial for his conduct in the war … had he not continued to oppose the new Communist regime.’22 On 4 November the Archbishop was attacked by a stone-throwing crowd of Partisans in the village of Zapreši. Shaken by the display of violence he withdrew to his palace and did not appear in public again.
The authorities did not arrest the Archbishop, however, until they had caught the Chetnik leader Mihailovi in a cottage near Višegrad in eastern Bosnia at the beginning of March. They executed Mihailovi in June. Once the regime had dealt with its principal opponent among the Serbs, it returned to settle its accounts with its principal enemy among the Croats. In September 1946 Stepinac was indicted to appear at the trial that was already under way of the former NDH police chief Erih Lisak, the Archbishop’s secretary Ivan Šali, and about sixteen other clerics and former NDH officials.
There was a long list of accusations against the Archbishop. The principal ones were that he had called on ‘the criminal Paveli’ on 16 April 1941 before the Yugoslav army had surrendered, and had then issued a circular to his clergy two days later urging them to support the NDH. He was accused of celebrating Mass at the opening of the NDH’s toy Sabor and of presiding over the forced conversion to Catholicism of thousands of Serbs ‘who had knives at their throats’. He was also accused of secretly meeting Lisak after the Partisan entry into Zagreb.
The Archbishop was reluctant to answer specific charges, claiming repeatedly in the courtroom (and for the rest of his life): ‘My conscience is clear.’ A respected defence lawyer was appointed by the state, Ivo Politeo, who answered many of the accusations Stepinac himself would not deign to rebut, such as the oft-heard charge that the Archbishop had allowed the Church to be used for the glorification of the Ustashe state.
‘Why is it never mentioned that, as soon as Paveli took power, Stepinac never sang the Te Deum, let alone in the cathedral?’ Politeo asked.
Why is it not recalled that only once in four years of occupation did the Archbishop serve Mass in the cathedral, and that only in 1943, when the Italians organised a ceremony in memory of the Duke of D’Aosta?
And on that occasion it was not the Archbishop nor any one of the clergy who received Paveli at the church door but the sacristan. Is that the behaviour of an Archbishop towards a self-styled head of state whom he had recognised, supported, and with whom he had collaborated?23
Politeo also cited Stepinac’s numerous sermons in which he had condemned racial and religious intolerance, in particular the Archbishop’s address at the feast of Christ the King on 25 October 1942, when he had declared that:
all men and all races are the children of God. … all without distinction, whether they are Gypsies, Blacks, civilised Europeans, Jews or proud Aryans, have the same right to say ‘Our father who art in heaven’. For this reason, the Catholic Church has always condemned and does condemn, all injustice and violence committed in the name of theories of class, race or nationality. One cannot exterminate Gypsies or Jews because one considers them of an inferior race. …24
Politeo reminded the court that the Archbishop had no automatic influence over the Church press during the war, many of whose publications had come under the authority of other bishops of the religious orders. He did not deny that Stepinac had received Lisak in his palace after the Partisan victory, but insisted that Lisak had gained the interview under a false identity.
It was a respectable case. But, although the trial was not quite a Stalinist show trial, the guilty verdict undoubtedly had been decided in advance. Stepinac was sentenced to sixteen years’ imprisonment and was taken to Lepoglava, where, only months before, the Ustashe had imprisoned and murdered many of their own opponents.
Once Tito had Stepinac under lock and key, he closed in on Hebrang, his most dangerous rival within the leadership of the Communist Party. The Croatian Party’s former leader had languished in the hostile atmosphere of Belgrade since 1944, where he fought an unsuccessful rearguard battle on behalf of Croatian interests. He opposed the new borders of Croatia that were drawn up by Djilas, especially the loss of Srijem, shouting that Croatia’s historic borders ran up to Zemun, just north of Belgrade;25 he opposed the unfavourable exchange rate forced on the Croats after the abolition of the kuna currency used in the NDH; he opposed the show trials of various so-called economic criminals that began in Croatia in 1946;26 and he appears to have opposed the suppression of non-Communist parties.27
Tito evidently feared and hated the man, and in 1946 made a ferocious attack on both Hebrang and Sreten Žujovi, a Serb Communist, at a Central Committee session from which the two men were absent. ‘What leaders of Yugoslavia they would make,’ he hooted. ‘One an Ustasha, the other a Chetnik.’28 In April Hebrang’s slide towards disgrace was confirmed when he was excluded from a government delegation to Moscow to discuss economic affairs, which, as the Minister for Industry and architect of Yugoslavia’s first five-year plan, he felt entitled to have led.
In January 1948, two months before Tito’s quarrel with Stalin burst into the open, Hebrang was abruptly demoted to the position of minister of light industry. That was the start of his final downfall. In April he was placed under house arrest. In May he was expelled from the Communist Party, which opened the way for his formal arrest. In the meantime, Rankovi got to work concocting a case that presented Hebrang as an Ustasha double-agent who had been recruited during his time in the NDH jail in Stara Gradiška in 1942. At the Fifth Party Congress in July, just after Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, Hebrang’s fate was sealed when Bakari announced that the Party was investigating his Ustashe ties.
Andrija Hebrang was never seen in public again. A veil of silence fell over his fate, which was lifted only partially with the release in 1952 of a book entitled Sluaj Andrije Hebranga (The Case of Andrija Hebrang), written by Mile Milatovi, the Serb head of the UDBa who had been in charge of investigating Hebrang after his arrest.
Written in the typically hectoring and denunciatory style of Communist literature in the 1950s, the book made an unconvincing case for Hebrang’s suicide after he was allegedly confronted with the proof of his wartime work as a double-agent. It is almost certain that Hebrang was killed in secret, and that the authorities feared to grant him a public platform in court, in the way that they had given one to Stepinac.
Because Stalin had cited the arrest of Hebrang as evidence of Tito’s anti-Soviet stance, Hebrang has been associated with the Stalinist cause in Yugoslavia, and with the fall of the ‘Cominformists’ who supported Stalin against Tito. And perhaps it is possible that Tito genuinely feared that Hebrang would be used by Stalin against him during the dispute in 1948. But it would be a mistake to assume that Hebrang fell from grace because he was a Stalinist. It is much more likely that Tito eliminated him because his political moderation and obdurate championship of Croatia’s special position within Yugoslavia both angered and embarrassed him. Hebrang most probably within a year or two would have been eliminated even had there been no quarrel between Tito and Stalin. There is little evidence that he advocated a conciliatory line towards the Peasants Party and the Church simply because that was then the Kremlin’s line, and more that he did so from conviction.29
The break with Stalin in 1948 did not lead to a relaxation of conditions inside Yugoslavia, least of all in Croatia. The fear that Yugoslavia could be penetrated by Stalin’s agents heightened the campaign to root out class enemies and nationalists, and the UDBa assumed an ever more pervasive role in the country’s life, at least until 1952. There was no let-up in the barrage of anti-Western rhetoric. Instead, Tito attempted to disprove Stalin’s charges of ideological deviation by accelerating the drive towards full-blooded Communism. In spite of the passive resistance of the peasants to a deeply unpopular policy, the authorities speeded up the collectivisation of agriculture after 1948 using more or less coercive methods, and the number of state farms grew from 1,318 in 1948 to 6,797 in 1950, by which time one-quarter of the farmland in Vojvodina had been taken into state ownership.30
Most Yugoslav businesses had been taken over in December 1946, but in April 1948 the job was completed when the government nationalised all the smaller businesses which had slipped through the loop, including all the immovable property of foreigners. The persecution of the Church continued, especially in Croatia and Bosnia, and the parish clergy did not have Archbishop Stepinac’s international reputation to shield them from the worst consequences. In 1948 Bishop Petar Cule of Mostar, successor to Bishop Alojzije Misic, who had complained so strongly to Stepinac about the Ustashe persecution of the Serbs, was arrested on charges of wartime collaboration. He was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment, and in far worse conditions than Stepinac.31 By the early 1950s some dioceses had been decimated by arrests and killings. In Senj diocese, of 151 priests before the war, only 88 survived in 1951, and half the parishes had no clergy.
