With Stalin Against Tito

In 1948, in a series of moves that culminated in the famous Cominform Resolution, Stalin struck at the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, provoking the first split in the Communist state system. Commentators have long acknowledged that this event had a decisive impact on the Soviet Union's relations with the Communist movement throughout the world, but little attention has been paid to its significance for the political history of Yugoslavia. With this long-awaited book, Ivo Banac becomes the first scholar to assess the domestic consequences of Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform, and his findings will radically revise some of our most basic assumptions about Tito's revolution. Banac's subject is the nature and fate of those elements in the Yugoslav Communist party who were said to have sided with Moscow against their own country's leadership.^ Sifting through a huge fund of hitherto unexploited sources, Banac demonstrates that the so-called Cominformists, long considered an inconsequential fifth column, in fact represented as much as 20 percent of the party membership. He shows that this fifth column included a variety of oppositional groups within Yugoslav communism who wanted