Thesis - Stefan Gužvica

Learning Leninism:
Factional Struggles in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia

during the Great Purge (1936–1940)
By
Stefan Guţvica
Submitted to
Central European University
Department of History
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in Comparative History
Supervisor: Professor Alfred J. Rieber

Second Reader: Professor Ondřej Vojtěchovský
Budapest, Hungary
2018
Copyright Notice
Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full
or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged
in the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must
form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such
instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author.
i
Abstract
This thesis is an examination of factional struggles in the Communist Party of
Yugoslavia (KPJ) during the Great Purge, from 1936 until 1940. An understanding of this
conflict is crucial for completing the picture of the evolution of the KPJ in the interwar period,
and its relationship to the Communist International, as well as for reevaluating the roots of the
Tito-Stalin Split. The research sheds new light on the process of appointing a general
secretary in the midst of the Great Purge, whilst also offering an alternative understanding of
the relations between the Comintern and its constituent parties. In spite of the frequently
repeated assumption that the KPJ was an insignificant satellite of the Comintern, completely
subjected to the decisions of its Executive Committee, the argument of this work is that the
Yugoslav communists still enjoyed a large degree of autonomy. Their Moscow superiors were
far from detached, but they encouraged and expected independent actions. Tito was the
candidate who understood this expectation the best, which gave him a crucial advantage in the
factional struggle. Moreover, the struggle involved communists from many other communist
parties, showing how political networks of the Comintern often transcended national ties, and
reminding us that the history of national sections of the Third International can never be
observed in a vacuum.
The research begins by tracing the rise and fall of Milan Gorkić, the de facto leader of
the KPJ from 1932 until 1937. The clash between him and his opponents, who accused him of
“rightist deviation” at the April Plenum in 1936, drew the attention of the Comintern, which
saw the conflict as a revival of factionalism. The following year saw the purging of the former
oppositionists within the KPJ, mostly Trotskyists. Gorkić soon became a victim of the Great
Purge as well, sparking an all-out struggle for leadership over the party. The main contenders
for the vacant position of the general secretary were Josip Broz Tito, whose group was
dubbed the Temporary Leadership; Ivo Marić and Labud Kusovac, who led the so-called
ii
Parallel Center; Petko Miletić, the leader of an ultra-left group called the Wahhabis; and
Kamilo Horvatin, the KPJ representative to the Comintern. After over two and a half years of
conflict, Tito emerged as the new general secretary.
The KPJ was, by and large, a party on the left of the international communist
movement. All of the main leadership candidates were leftists, which was not ideal in the
period of the popular front, when the Communist International required moderation and
cooperation. Tito prevailed over other candidates primarily because of a proper understanding
of Leninism as defined by the Comintern at the time, and the practical achievements in
reviving the party organization in the country. As a consequence of the purge, the factional
struggle, and the practical political experiences of the newly-formed leadership, the period
between 1936 and 1940 became the key formative period, playing a crucial role in the making
of the KPJ as we know it from the 1940s on. Thus, the story of the KPJ leadership struggle in
the late 1930s is, in a lot of ways, a prehistory of 1948.
iii
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my professors and colleagues at the Central European University,
in particular Vladimir Petrović and Balázs Trencsényi, whose guidance eventually led me to
this topic; István Rév, Alex Voronovich, and Lovro Kralj, who greatly helped me by pointing
me to useful literature in the early stages of my work; and finally, my friends and colleagues,
Renny Hahamovitch, Cody Inglis, Steve Westlake, Štěpán Denk, Mike Morris, and Yana
Kitaeva, who greatly impacted my research through their constructive comments and
criticisms.
Many other friends and colleagues outside of CEU helped guide my research through
conversations and source recommendations, including Bogdan Ţivković, Bartul Ĉović,
Professor Ljubodrag Dimić, Milan Radanović, Vladan Vukliš, Professor Vladimir Unkovski-
Korica, Professor Tonći Šitin, and Vladimir Marković. I would like to thank them, as they
played a crucial role in making this thesis complete. I would also like to thank Goran
Despotović, Domagoj Mihaljević, Jure Ramšak, and Maja Ţilić for helping me access rare
published primary and secondary sources on the topic. Additionally, I am extremely grateful
to the very kind and helpful people at the Archive of Yugoslavia and the University Library
Svetozar Marković in Belgrade, and the Open Society Archive in Budapest, in particular
Jelena Kovaĉević, Slaven Ĉolović, and Robert Parnica. Friedrich Asschenfeldt and Arina
Zaytseva helped me translate crucial German-language sources, and some of my most
significant insights would not have been possible without them.
Finally, I would like to thank my supervisor, Alfred J. Rieber, and my second reader,
Ondřej Vojtěchovský, who provided me with guidance throughout the making of this thesis.
Most of all, I am grateful to my parents, without whose love and support this work would not
have been possible.
iv
Abbreviations and Glossary
AVNOJ – Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, the umbrella
organization of Yugoslav antifascist groups during the Second World War
CC – Central Committee
Cominform – The Communist Information Bureau, a group of leading European communist
parties formed in 1947 as a quasi-successor to the Communist International
ECCI – Executive Committee of the Communist International, the governing body of the
Comintern
Gorkićevci – Supporters of Milan Gorkić, the purged general secretary of the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia
GPU – State Political Directorate, the formal name of the Soviet secret police, 1922-1923
GUGB - Main Directorate of State Security, the formal name of the Soviet secret police,
1934-1941
HSS – Croatian Peasant Party
KIM – Young Communist International
KPH – Communist Party of Croatia, founded in 1937 as a subsection of the KPJ
KPJ – Communist Party of Yugoslavia
KPS – Communist Party of Slovenia, founded in 1937 as a subsection of the KPJ
KUNMZ – Communist University of the National Minorities of the West
NRPJ – Independent Workers‟ Party of Yugoslavia
PCE – Communist Party of Spain
PCF – French Communist Party
Profintern – The Red International of Labor Unions, a communist trade union organization
created to unite the communist trade unions and coordinate communist activity
among the reformist ones
v
SIM – Servicio de Información Militar (Military Information Service), the intelligence
department of the International Brigades
SRN – The Party of the Working People, a legal and broad left-wing party led by communists
in Yugoslavia from 1938 to 1940
SRPJ(k) – Socialist Workers‟ Party of Yugoslavia (communists), renamed to Communist
Party of Yugoslavia in 1920
SKJ – League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the name of the KPJ from 1952
SKOJ – League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia
Ultra-left – An individual communist attitude or a communist party line characterized by
perceived adventurism and sectarianism, such as individual acts of terror or refusal to
engage in any cooperation with the non-communist left
VKP(b) – All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)
Yezhovshchina – The colloquial name for the Great Purge in the Soviet Union
vi
Table of Contents
Copyright Notice ....................................................................................................................... i
Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................... iv
Abbreviations and Glossary .................................................................................................... v
Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... vii
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1
Historiography ........................................................................................................................ 4
Sources ................................................................................................................................... 7
Theory and Methodology ....................................................................................................... 8
Outline .................................................................................................................................. 14
On Party Unity: Factional Struggles in the KPJ, 1919-1936.............................................. 17
Between the Left and the Right ............................................................................................ 18
Thwarted Bolshevization ...................................................................................................... 22
Consolidation under Gorkić ................................................................................................. 24
The First Repressions ........................................................................................................... 28
Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 33
The Peak and Fall of Milan Gorkić ...................................................................................... 36
The April Plenum of 1936 .................................................................................................... 37
The Purge of the Oppositionists ........................................................................................... 44
The Arrest of the General Secretary ..................................................................................... 49
Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 58
The Factions ............................................................................................................................ 60
The Temporary Leadership .................................................................................................. 64
The Parallel Center ............................................................................................................... 73
vii
The Moscow Challenger ...................................................................................................... 81
The Wahhabis ....................................................................................................................... 89
Conclusions .......................................................................................................................... 96
The Struggle ............................................................................................................................ 98
Comrades in Paris................................................................................................................. 99
The Spanish Inquisition ...................................................................................................... 105
Liquidationism and the Croat Question.............................................................................. 110
Tito in Moscow .................................................................................................................. 119
Miletić in Moscow.............................................................................................................. 127
Conclusions ........................................................................................................................ 135
Conclusion: Tito Triumphant ............................................................................................. 137
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 145
viii
Introduction
On July 3, 1937, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ),
Milan Gorkić, informed his comrades in the Politburo that he had been summoned to Moscow
by the Comintern. According to the subsequent recollections of those close to him, he was
calm and optimistic about the journey; he expected to be back in Paris, where most of the
Yugoslav communist leadership was exiled to, within ten days. 1 His close friend, the
Austrian-French communist writer Manès Sperber, asked him in private whether he was
worried about the trip, given their shared knowledge of mass arrests in Moscow. Caring little
for his own security, Gorkić merely reminded him that disobeying Comintern orders would
amount to an act of treason and that it could be detrimental for his party.2 This was the last
time Sperber saw his friend alive. Following Gorkić‟s arrival in Moscow, the KPJ Politburo
ceased receiving letters from him or the Third International. Soon after, Comintern financial
aid was halted, without any explanation or prior notice.
The arrest and execution of Gorkić marked a turning point in the history of the KPJ.
While hitherto the main targets of the Great Purge were members of the Yugoslav party who
had opposed Stalin (a campaign that Gorkić wholeheartedly supported), from the summer of
1937, the NKVD turned against the KPJ leadership and other Yugoslav political émigrés.
Communists, sympathizers and the non-affiliated were targeted with equal intensity.
Furthermore, the Great Purge revived the factional struggles and created new ones. Due to the
mass repression by the NKVD, this renewed struggle was more volatile than any previous
one. Some of the contenders for the party leadership would also fall prey to the Purge. On
April 19, 1939, eleven top Yugoslav communists, including two former general secretaries,
two secretaries of the Communist Youth (SKOJ), and three Spanish Civil War veterans, were
1
Ivan Oĉak, Gorkić: ţivot, rad i pogibija (Zagreb: Globus, 1988), 319-320. As a consequence of state
repression, the party leadership was scattered throughout the continent, operating in several countries, with Paris
as its primary headquarters.
2
Oĉak, Gorkić, 321.
1
executed together, most probably as a result of direct orders from Lavrentiy Beria, Andrey
Vyshinsky, and the Politburo presided by Stalin.3 This mass execution of some of the most
prominent party figures has never before been a subject of historical research. The causes of
their execution at a time when NKVD repression was subsiding, remain a mystery. The
surviving Yugoslav communists who aspired to the position of general secretary were
expelled from the party that same year, following the establishment of a new leadership
headed by Josip Broz Tito.
Before Tito received a mandate from the Comintern, however, the power grab affected
all levels of the party and all areas of its activity, lasting for more than three years and taking
place across four different countries. The international character of the conflict was not
limited merely to KPJ activists abroad; other foreign communists also became heavily
implicated in the Yugoslav intraparty struggles. The influence these parties had on the
outcome of the KPJ‟s leadership competition raises the issue of transnational connections‟
impact on power dynamics within the Comintern. The factional struggle was never just an
internal KPJ affair, even though it has always been presented as such.
The period of the Great Purge remains one of the most controversial and under-
researched points in the history of the KPJ. Although it marks the time of Tito‟s ascension to
power, very few authors have examined the causes of his success, and fewer still have
attempted to understand the alternative paths that the party could have taken. This research
will help shed a new light on the general history of the KPJ by uncovering new facts on one of
the most chaotic and controversial moments in the party‟s existence. In my work, I intend to
go beyond the “teleology of Tito,” since all the currently existing works on the topic center
around the character of Josip Broz and his rise to the position of general secretary of the KPJ.
Such a perspective, wittingly or unwittingly, leads to a presumption that Tito was in some
3
S.A. Melchin, A.S. Stepanov, V.N. Yakushev et al., “Сталинские списки - введение,” Memorial,
http://stalin.memo.ru/images/intro.htm (accessed March 27, 2017).
2
way predestined to become party leader, or, in the more orthodox accounts from the socialist
period, that his rise to power presents the end goal and the culmination of the Yugoslav
communist movement‟s development. My research will argue for a move away from this
teleological approach, presenting Tito as just one of the actors who fought for power, rather
than the central figure in the Yugoslav communist movement. Even though he undoubtedly
became that by 1940, his position between 1936 and 1939 was no less precarious than that of
his rivals.
Taking all this into consideration, my thesis will try to ascertain the origins of the
KPJ‟s factional struggles which, as I will argue, first resurfaced in 1936, after being allegedly
ended through Comintern intervention in the late 1920s. I will offer an answer to the question
of how and why different factions emerged or dispersed in the period of the Great Purge,
taking into account their respective strategies, ideological views, and the reasons for their
success or failure. In part, I will touch upon the impact of external institutions and
organizations – such as the Comintern, the Soviet government, the NKVD, and other foreign
communist parties – on the factional struggles within the KPJ. Finally, I will assess the long-
term impact of the Great Purge on the KPJ itself, the formation of its policy, and the
consequences it had for the subsequent split with Stalin in 1948.
I will argue that the victory of Tito‟s party line, which was firmly on the left of the
Yugoslav communist movement, over its competitors, was a consequence of his proactive
policy prescriptions and understanding of the expectations that the Comintern had of the KPJ.
Although his rise was foreseeable in light of Comintern policy, it was by no means inevitable.
However, the appointment of a new general secretary retrospectively became a key formative
moment in the history of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. At this time, the “Titoist” party
line was formulated, and it remained more or less unchanged until the first serious attempts to
reform the Yugoslav system after 1948. As such, the roots of party policies in the 1940s,
3
including those that led to the Tito-Stalin Split, can be traced back to the ideological intra-
party struggles in the late 1930s.
Historiography
There are only a handful of quality historical works about the KPJ in the late 1930s,
and most of them do not treat the subject of the Great Purge in depth, in spite of its
extraordinary significance for the overall development of the party. The topic was relatively
taboo in Yugoslav academic circles until the 1980s, but the brief explosion of works on the
period in that decade stopped as the country‟s system began to collapse. These works,
although of high quality, have become dated and some of their findings require reassessment.
Such is the case with Ivo Banac's With Stalin against Tito,4 which provides a detailed
overview of the factional struggles in the 1930s, but which overemphasized the importance of
the national question in these struggles. Generally, the scholarship on the KPJ has tended to
overly focus on the issues of nationality, which is something I also intend to move away from.
The prolific Croatian historian Ivan Oĉak has written several biographies of famous Yugoslav
victims of the Great Purge,5 although at the time he was still unable to ascertain the exact
circumstances of their downfall and death. A journalist, Petar Poţar, has succeeded in
compiling a book on the more prominent Yugoslav victims of Stalinism,6 and his account is
very useful for gathering certain factual data on them, although it was written in the style of
popular history.
4
Ivo Banac, With Stalin against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988).
5
Aside from the already cited biography of Milan Gorkić in footnote 1, Oĉak published three more biographies
of Yugoslavs killed in the Great Purge. The first was the biography of Danilo Srdić, the most prominent
Yugoslav in the Red Army, a hero of the Russian Civil War who participated in the storming of the Winter
Palace: Ivan Oĉak and Mihailo Marić, Danilo Srdić, crveni general (Belgrade: Sedma sila, 1965). A decade and
a half later, he published a biography of Vladimir Ćopić, another participant in the Bolshevik Revolution, a
founder of the KPJ and the party‟s first organizational secretary, who was the commander of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War: Ivan Oĉak, Vojnik revolucije: Ţivot i rad Vladimira Ćopića (Zagreb:
Spektar, 1980). Finally, he published a biography of Đuro and Stjepan Cvijić in 1982: Ivan Oĉak, Braća Cvijići
(Zagreb: Spektar – Globus, 1982). Đuro was a one-time secretary of the KPJ between 1925 and 1926, while
Stjepan, his younger brother, was the organizational secretary of the Young Communist International in 1934.
6
Petar Poţar, Jugosloveni ţrtve staljinskih ĉistki (Belgrade: Nova knjiga, 1989).
4
More recently, there have been three works of great historiographical merit that have
dealt with the topic to some extent: by Nikita Bondarev,7 Geoffrey Swain,8 and Slavko and
Ivo Goldstein.9 Bondarev wrote a dissertation about Tito in Moscow in 1935 and 1936, which
helps shed light on the conditions within the KPJ at the very beginning of the Great Purge.
Geoffrey Swain‟s excellent 2010 biography of Tito goes even further and covers the entire
period of his rise to power, explaining his unique strategy in dealing with the Comintern. The
book by the Goldsteins draws on a large variety of secondary sources and makes for the most
comprehensive biography of Tito, and his activity during the Great Purge is extremely well-
covered. All three works, however, focus on the person of Tito and treat the KPJ as a mere
background to the story. Even when contemporary biographies, such as those of Swain and
Joţe Pirjevec,10 present Tito‟s rise as contingent and precarious, the story always revolves
around him. This creates an incomplete picture of the KPJ, as all those who lost the factional
struggle are brushed aside. The consequence of this is, at best, a misrepresentation of various
marginalized ideological traditions within the KPJ,11 and at worst, their complete oblivion.
Despite the opening of the archives in the 1990s, the Comintern as a whole remains
under-researched. The documents dealing with the KPJ are no exception, and thus much of
the party‟s interwar history remains unknown. The very first “wave” of research in the early
1990s focused precisely on the Cominternians who became victims of Stalinist repression.12
In the Yugoslav case, however, this “first wave” consisted only of a single article by Ubavka
7
Nikita Bondarev, Misterija Tito: moskovske godine (Belgrade: Ĉigoja štampa, 2013).
8
Geoffrey Swain, Tito: A Biography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).
9
Slavko Goldstein and Ivo Goldstein, Tito (Zagreb: Profil, 2015).
10
Joţe Pirjevec, Tito i drugovi, vol. 1 (Belgrade: Laguna, 2013).
11
The works that do address Tito‟s marginalized rivals in the KPJ usually present them through the lens of the
official party line, describing them as having undermined party unity and weakened the revolutionary cause. For
examples, see Ivan Jelić, Komunistiĉka partija Hrvatske 1937–1945, vol. 1 (Zagreb: Globus, 1981), 115-116,
223-238, and Sibe Kvesić, Dalmacija u Narodnooslobodilaĉkoj borbi (Zagreb: Lykos, 1960), 8-9, 21-23. The
post-Yugoslav historiography has been markedly more sympathetic, although few works have actually presented
Tito‟s rivals as central figures that they were. An excellent biographical account that goes against this tendency
is Jelena Kovaĉević, “Petko Miletić (1897–1943) – od revolucionara do “frakcionaša,” Tokovi istorije 1/2017:
47-73.
12
Brigitte Studer and Berthold Unfried, “At the Beginning of a History: Visions of the Comintern After the
Opening of the Archives,” International Review of Social History 42 (1997): 425-426.
5
Vujošević and Vera Mujbegović, listing the executed Yugoslavs that they managed to
identify.13 No comprehensive account exists on the fall of Milan Gorkić, although there have
been attempts to explain it.14 The most successful of these came from Ubavka Vujošević, who
published Gorkić‟s last autobiographical account, written just days before his arrest.15
Vujošević is the only Yugoslav historian who relied extensively on the newly-available
documents from the Comintern, although her own research into the KPJ in this period was cut
short by her death. As such, even a thorough examination of the last year of Gorkić‟s life is
currently lacking.
When considering the KPJ during the Great Purge, the most fundamental oversight in
existing research is the exclusion of foreign communists from the story. Although a vast body
of literature touches upon the issue of foreign – particularly Bulgarian – involvement in
Yugoslav intra-party struggles after the arrest of Gorkić,16 they all fail to engage in a deeper
analysis of the impact this might have had on the outcome of the Yugoslav leadership
struggle, or the broader implications of such ties for understanding the functioning of the
Comintern. The KPJ is observed in a vacuum, and the non-Yugoslav figures constitute mere
footnotes, whose role in either the Comintern or their own national parties is unimportant. The
collected works of Tito, for example, mention several times the obstruction of his work by the
French Communist Party (PCF),17 but never inquire about how or why this occurred. This
same lack of inquiry is evident when it comes to German communists, in particular Wilhelm
13
Ubavka Vujošević and Vera Mujbegović, “Die jugoslawischen Kommunisten in den stalinistischen
'Säuberungen' 1929 bis 1949,” in Richard Lorenz and Siegfried Bahne (eds.), Kommunisten Verfolgen
Kommunisten: Stalinistischer Terror und "Säuberungen" in Den Kommunistischen Parteien Europas Seit Den
30er Jahren (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1993): 157-173.
14
For a pioneering work on the topic, see Swain, Tito, 17-20.
15
Ubavka Vujošević, “Poslednja autobiografija Milana Gorkića, sekretara CK KPJ,” Istorija 20. veka 1/1997:
107-128. Writing autobiographies to the Cadres Department of the Comintern was a regular practice among the
communists.
16
See, for example, Vjenceslav Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1 (Belgrade: Rad, 1983), 84-86; 94-96, Goldstein,
Tito, 158, 162-163, or Pirjevec, Tito i drugovi, vol. 1, 102-103. Enigma Kopiniĉ remains a controversial book
due to Kopiniĉ‟s self-serving narrative about his role in World War II, but is extremely useful for his insights
into the period from 1937 to 1940, as his testimonies on events from that time match the findings of historians.
17
Josip Broz Tito, Sabrana djela, ed. Pero Damjanović, vol. 4 (Belgrade: Komunist, 1981), 60-61, 230, 233.
6
Pieck and Wilhelm Florin, who were among the most influential individuals in the Comintern,
and were directly involved in Yugoslav affairs.18 I will argue that the power struggle in the
Yugoslav party cannot be understood without a deeper examination of the involvement of
foreign communists, and will attempt to reconstruct it.
Sources
The primary source research will be based mainly on archival materials from the
Archives of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, the Open Society Archives in Budapest, and the
published memoirs of participants in the communist movement. The Archives of Yugoslavia
hold the fonds of the KPJ and the Comintern section for Yugoslavia, as well as the
unpublished memoirs of labor movement organizers from the interwar period. Many of these
memoirs and documents have not really been thoroughly researched despite the fact that some
of them have been in the archive since the late 1960s. The Open Society Archives in Budapest
contain the digitized Comintern Archives, originally held in the Russian State Archive of
Socio-Political History (RGASPI). Its documents have only been made available in the past
three decades, and have largely remained unexamined by historians of Yugoslavia. I will use
these digitized documents, in particular those from the Secretariat of Wilhelm Pieck,19 in
order to gain a better understanding of the KPJ‟s position within the Comintern and to gain
new insight into the course of the factional struggle. Finally, the newly available lists of
people arrested and deported by the Soviet regime, compiled by the Moscow-based NGO
Memorial and published online, will help me discover more about the individual destinies of
18
Josip Broz Tito, Sabrana djela, ed. Pero Damjanović, vol. 3 (Belgrade: Komunist, 1981), 90-91; 93-95; 102;
124-125; and Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1, 105-106.
19
The communist parties of the Balkan countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey) were
organized under the Balkan Länder-secretariat of the Comintern starting from 1926. From the late 1920s, the
secretariat became increasingly irrelevant, as the Comintern moved away from world revolution and towards
defending “the first country of socialism.” The Balkan Länder-secretariat was officially abolished during the
Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935. However, it de facto continued to exist under the Secretariat of
Wilhelm Pieck, which endured until the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943. In this text I will occasionally
refer to Pieck‟s Secretariat as “the Balkan Secretariat,” as this is what it really was in practice.
7
prominent communists, and to reassess the impact that the Great Purge had on the KPJ and
the Yugoslav émigré community in the Soviet Union.
Regarding printed primary sources, the thesis will rely on the collected works of Josip
Broz Tito,20 as well as documents gathered by the journalist Pero Simić.21 I will also rely
upon published memoirs and diaries, such as those of Rodoljub Ĉolaković,22 Milovan Đilas,23
and Georgi Dimitrov,24 to examine the variety of individual views on the factional struggle.
Articles from communist newspapers and magazines, such as Proleter, the organ of the
Central Committee of the KPJ, will help me understand the changing party line and the
ideological confrontations between factions.
Theory and Methodology
For a broader contextualization of the Great Purge, I intend to draw primarily on the
insights from the revisionist school, as explained by authors such as J. Arch Getty, Oleg
Naumov,25 and Sheila Fitzpatrick.26 For understanding the specific situation in the Comintern
during the Purge, I will greatly rely on William J. Chase‟s Enemies within the Gates?27 I see
the process of purging party and the Comintern as being simultaneously a part of Stalin‟s
“revolution from above,”28 and an expression of bottom-up popular grievances against abuses
20
Josip Broz Tito, Sabrana djela, ed. Pero Damjanović, vols. 3 to 5 (Belgrade: Komunist, 1981).
21
Although his methodological approach was highly questionable and his interpretation of documents
tendentious, misinformed and misleading, Simić gathered and published an impressive amount of extremely
useful primary source documents from the RGASPI. Pero Simić, Tito: svetac i magle (Belgrade: Sluţbeni list
SCG, 2005) and Pero Simić and Zvonimir Despot, Tito – strogo poverljivo: arhivski dokumenti (Belgrade:
Sluţbeni glasnik, 2010). All of the citations of Simić and Despot in this work refer to printed primary sources
published by them, unless otherwise stated.
22
Rodoljub Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju, vol. 2 (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1968) and Rodoljub
Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju, vol. 3 (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1972).
23
Milovan Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
24
Ivo Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
25
J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–
1939 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
26
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Sheila
Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
27
William J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939 (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).
28
Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 151, 163-170.
8
of power by the rank and file of the All-Union Communist Party. However, this violence from
below was always kept in check by Stalin and his inner circle, as there was always a danger
that the situation could get out of hand if the masses turned against the very top of the party.29
Furthermore, the perception of an impending foreign threat was a key constitutive element of
Stalinist repression. This led to the rise of xenophobia and suspicion of all foreigners within
the country, which facilitated the intensification of repression within the Comintern
apparatus.30
Based on the findings of the revisionist school, I acknowledge the agency of both
individuals and the communist parties as a whole during the Great Purge; they were neither
mere passive recipients of directives nor helpless victims of repression.31 Using this starting
point, I would like to emphasize that there has been a general tendency to reduce the KPJ to a
mere puppet of the Comintern in the interwar period.32 By contrast, this research should not
only be a step towards a greater understanding of foreign parties during the Great Purge but
also to a completely new perception of the KPJ and its agency in relation to the Comintern.
Far from wanting to control and micromanage all aspects of the Balkan parties‟ affairs, the
Comintern expected that the members themselves, in particular those untainted by the stigma
of factionalism, would take the initiative and resolve the problems of their party on their own.
The Comintern, naturally, had the final word, but the interaction between the two was
constantly present and very much required.
This approach and my focus on ideological disagreements within the KPJ necessarily
raise the issue of individual belief of the communists involved. Were the ideological
disagreements between Yugoslav communists genuine or should they be observed as merely
29
Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 14.
30
Chase, Enemies Within the Gates?, 102-104.
31
32
See, for example, Hilde Katrine Haug, Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia: Tito, the Communist Leadership and
the National Question (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016).
9
the tools of cynics pressed on winning political power? Chase has succinctly summarized both
the dilemma and the answer to it:
[R]hetorical homogeneity was a feature of party discourse under Stalin. Different historians
might interpret this rhetoric in different ways. Some might view it as evidence that
whatever doubts party members harbored, they were too afraid to express them and hence
adhered to party discipline and used the rhetoric as a means of self-defense. Others might
view the homogeneous rhetoric as evidence that party members believed entirely what they
said, that the rhetoric faithfully reflects their understanding of reality. Without evidence of a
person‟s private thoughts, either interpretation tells us more about the historians than it does
about historical reality.33
Therefore, I will accept and examine the theoretical arguments presented by various
groups involved in the factional struggle as genuine, without assuming them to be the
products of nefarious motives or fear. Even though I intend to use a vast body of memoirs
reflecting on this period, the impressions written down several decades later should not be
interpreted as accurate descriptions of the individuals‟ thoughts and feelings in 1937 and
1938. This is particularly true for the many who came to question their Stalinism after the
Tito-Stalin Split in 1948. Even if they disagreed in private during the 1930s (an assumption
which is nearly impossible to prove), doing so in public would have certainly cost them party
membership at a time when even expressing minor reservations was seen as an act of
treason.34
The most fundamental theoretical issue that I will have to contend with is factionalism
within communist parties. Factionalism referred to real or alleged formation of groups within
the party or a movement which hold views different than those officially presented by the
organization at a given moment. The origins of the term and its evolution are important for
understanding the KPJ during the Great Purge, since “factionalism” was the most common
accusation emerging from all sides involved in the struggle. As such, it is obvious that the role
of the term was primarily functional, not merely theoretical, and factional struggles did
33
Chase, Enemies Within the Gates?, 43.
34
10
undoubtedly have a negative effect on the unity of the KPJ.35 Factionalism has been a
persistent feature of leftist political organizations since the nineteenth century, and
Bolshevism itself developed out of a factional split in 1903. After the October Revolution,
several factions were formed within the Bolshevik party, most notably the Workers‟
Opposition and the Democratic Centralists, with varying degrees of success. Up until that
point, factions were considered a normal feature of party life, and would often disperse after
fulfilling their goals, or decisively failing to do so. However, at the Tenth Party Congress in
March 1921, a resolution banning factions was passed. Although no one was aware of the
ramifications of this decision at the time, the ban on factions effectively made the entire party
subject to the will of the Central Committee, and any kind of dissent from its decisions could
be interpreted as factionalism, and therefore an attack on the party itself.36 Throughout the
1920s, however, factions persisted both within the Soviet party and other constituent sections
of the Comintern. They arose primarily as a consequence of disenchantment caused by the
failure of revolutions in the West and, in relation to this failure, on the issue of how to
construct socialism in the Soviet Union. Factions were marginalized and politically
incapacitated with the rise of Stalin, and former factionalists were either expelled from the
party or given insignificant posts. Broadly speaking, the left faction argued for intensified
revolutionary radicalism and export of the revolution abroad, whereas the right faction argued
for a more gradualist approach to building socialism and a less aggressive policy towards the
capitalist countries. It is important to note, however, that the left-right distinction was always
relational. One was always more to the left or to the right in regards to the party “center” or to
other factions.
35
For further elaboration of this view, see Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 45-116; Haug, Creating a Socialist
Yugoslavia, 17-58; and Slavoljub Cvetković, Idejne borbe u KPJ 1919–1928 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu
istoriju, 1985).
36
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1998),
765.
11
The success of the Stalinist faction laid, among other things, in Stalin‟s ability to
fashion his group as a non-faction, a party center which was neither left nor right, and was
thus the only form of Bolshevism which did not present a deviation.37 Equally significant was
Stalin‟s own position as general secretary, which enabled him to appoint party cadres and
thereby creating a network of loyalists within the organization and the state apparatus.
Leaders of the constituent communist parties of the Comintern would try to mimic this tactic.
Indeed, all the major pretenders to the leadership of the KPJ adopted this approach to some
degree after Gorkić was arrested. Usually, this meant fashioning oneself as a compromise
candidate and accentuating both the positive and negative aspects of the political opponents‟
work.
However, the perception of intra-party opposition was becoming increasingly negative
in the 1930s. In the wake of the Kirov assassination, a fundamental shift occurred. Former
oppositionists were no longer seen as mere political rivals but were dehumanized as terrorists
and foreign elements who consciously worked to undermine Soviet socialism.38 The KPJ and
other parties of the Comintern largely uncritically accepted this change of attitude, facilitating
the coming repression of their own cadres. The KPJ‟s own bitter factional struggles,
combined with the double isolation of émigré life and the illegal status of the party, provided
further justification for the belief that one‟s opponents might be concealing nefarious counter-
revolutionary motives. As Ondřej Vojtěchovský observed in his case study of Yugoslav
postwar Stalinist émigrés in Czechoslovakia, delusions, loss of contact with current affairs in
the home country, collective frustrations, personal feuds, and ideological disagreements all
feature prominently in the life of political émigré communities in nineteenth and twentieth
37
Robert Wesson, Lenin’s Legacy: The Story of the CPSU (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2017), 125.
38
12
century Europe.39 The increased sense of internal threat in 1935 and 1936 could have only
served to confirm the doubts that the émigrés already harbored about each other. It created a
mindset which, according to Chase, was characterized by conformity and obedience,
reinforced through a sense of community, a rigidity of standards of judgment, and a
conspiratorial mentality.40 I will examine the factional struggles with these crucial factors in
mind.
Aside from the development of factionalism, other political practices also played a
significant role in determining the relations between party members. The KPJ was organized
as a secret underground party, very much along the lines of Lenin‟s program outlined in What
Is To Be Done?, which emphasized the necessity of the creation of a conspiratorial party in
conditions of illegality.41 Yugoslavia‟s own authoritarian monarchy gave the communists
plenty of reasons to project the Russia of 1902 onto their own country, particularly in the
wake of the 1929 dictatorship. This created a distinct process of ad hoc decision making, and
left little room for true intra-party democracy, which only served to exacerbate the existing
conflicts between members of the KPJ.
Finally, when examining the inner workings of the Communist International, I will
employ Brigitte Studer‟s distinction between three levels of the Comintern (the international,
the transnational, and the national) as a framework for interpreting the various relations
between members of the KPJ and other constituent parties. In this model, the international
refers to the ultimate goal of the communists, the world revolution; the national, to the
domestic political arenas in which their activities were carried out; and the transnational, to a
connection between the other two, a space of entangled exchanges of individuals and ideas.42
I will show the entanglement of these three levels and will devote particular attention to the
39
Ondřej Vojtěchovský, Iz Praga protiv Tita! Jugoslovenska informbiroovska emigracija u Ĉehoslovaĉkoj
(Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2016), 1.
40
41
Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 86-91.
42
Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the Cominternians (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4.
13
transnational aspect, using it to understand the networks of power and influence that the
Yugoslav communists were involved in, and which transcended national lines. Further
drawing on Studer‟s work, my thesis will avoid the perpetrator-victim dichotomy, which is
untenable in studies of the Comintern during the Great Purge, and replace it with an approach
that acknowledges the deep entanglement of individual accusation and self-accusation that
took place at the time.43
Outline
The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the overarching
issue of factionalism, particularly in the context of the KPJ, between 1919 and 1936. In it, I
will examine the early ideological development of the party, and the emergence of factional
struggles after the KPJ was banned by the Yugoslav government in 1921. After that, I will
briefly outline the course of the disputes between 1921 and 1928, presenting the main
arguments of the party left and right. As the factional disputes almost tore the party apart and
isolated it from broader political life of the Kingdom, the Comintern intervened in 1928,
supposedly bringing an end to factionalism. However, as I will argue, the divisions remained
under the surface, which was reflected in the Comintern‟s own interventions in the party
leadership between 1928 and 1935. I will devote a subchapter to the consolidation of the party
under Milan Gorkić, who I will argue played an instrumental role in reviving the KPJ in the
1930s. A final subchapter will deal with the first repressions of Yugoslav communists in the
USSR, beginning in 1929, which set a dangerous precedent for the future.
The second chapter concerns the high point of Milan Gorkić in 1936 and his rapid
downfall in 1937. I will present an answer to the question of why Milan Gorkić – who just a
year before had his authority cemented by a Comintern decision from above – fell out of favor
so quickly by the summer of 1937. To do this, I will examine his critics on the party‟s left,
43
Studer and Unfried, “At the Beginning of a History,” 426.
14
and their attack at the April Plenum of 1936. The Comintern interpreted this as a revival of
factionalism, which prompted it to formally name Gorkić general secretary. From here, I will
examine the purge of the Yugoslav oppositionists in the Soviet Union after the Kirov
assassination, as well as the actions of Yugoslavs who were charged with reviewing and
expelling fellow party members. I will conclude the chapter with an overview of Gorkić‟s
personal relations and political miscalculations that led to his arrest.
The third chapter is an overview of the main factions that developed after Gorkić‟s
arrest in Moscow, outlining their membership, views, and strategy. It will be divided into four
subchapters, each presenting one of the main competitors for the leadership of the party. The
competitors were Josip Broz Tito, whose group came to be known as “The Temporary
Leadership”; Ivo Marić, who led the so-called “Parallel Center” together with Labud
Kusovac; Petko Miletić, the head of the “Prison Committee” of the KPJ in the Sremska
Mitrovica prison; and Kamilo Horvatin, the KPJ representative to the Comintern who does
not seem to have gathered an organized group around himself, but was most likely Wilhelm
Pieck‟s main candidate for the position of party leader. The Marić and Miletić groups worked
together but will be examined individually as they largely acted so, with Marić being the first
to present a leadership challenge, and Miletić doing so much later, upon his release from
prison.
In the fourth chapter, I will present the course of the dispute itself and the response
from the Comintern. I will look at the bitter struggle waged in the early months of 1938
between the newly established groups. While most of the conflict took place in Paris, where
the leadership remained after Gorkić‟s arrest, I will also examine the events behind the
frontlines of the Spanish Civil War, and within the Communist Party of Croatia, which posed
the most serious challenge to the legitimacy of Tito‟s so-called Temporary Leadership in the
country. After that, I will examine the deliberations of the Comintern and the trips that Tito
and Miletić took to Moscow. A part of the subchapters on these two individuals will be
15
dedicated to analyzing the mass arrests of leading Yugoslav communists in the Soviet Union,
most of whom were executed between 1937 and 1939. By January 1939, Tito was confirmed
as the de facto leader of the KPJ, although it took another year before Miletić, his final major
competitor, was ultimately defeated.
The conclusion will present the victory of Josip Broz Tito and examine the reasons
that prompted the Comintern to give him the mandate. I will argue that Tito‟s taking of
initiative appealed to the Comintern and that he was the one figure who best understood the
importance of maintaining a proper party line throughout the period. However, this is not to
imply that he played a well-calculated game which made him destined to take over from the
start: a certain amount of luck was involved, especially in escaping the NKVD interrogators.
In the end, I will outline Tito‟s final moves at “cleansing” and centralizing the party
organization, which in turn made him the uncontested ruler of the KPJ. The ghosts of the
factional struggles lived on, and they affected the patterns of repression of intraparty
opposition in 1948 after the Tito-Stalin Split. Most importantly, I will demonstrate that the
victory of Tito‟s party line already set the stage for the future conflict. His tendency to act
independently of Moscow was seen as a desirable course of action during the popular front
period, and was thus supported by the Comintern Executive. However, even by the time the
war with Nazi Germany broke out, Tito‟s leadership style had become a liability.
16
On Party Unity: Factional Struggles in the KPJ, 1919-1936
“Many had then left the party out of fear, especially when the gossip started, not only gossip
but arguments about who is this and who is that, who is a leftist and who is a rightist. For the
workers, these arguments were pretty unclear and inadequate. Saying that somebody was a
leftist or a rightist meant practically nothing. I came to understand it only later, in Moscow,
when I entered the higher party forums.”
Milan Radovanović, metal worker and
participant at the Seventh Congress of the
Comintern44
The history of all hitherto existing Marxist organizations is the history of factional
struggles. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia was no exception. Like other communist
parties, its very foundation was the consequence of a split, namely the one revolving around
the issue of socialists‟ support for the Great War and participation in their respective
countries‟ bourgeois governments. The party‟s founding congress in Belgrade in April 1919
marked a final break with the right of the socialist movement, parts of which even entered the
first royal Yugoslav government after unification.45 However, this was not the last
disagreement within the Yugoslav communist movement. As was the case with communists
elsewhere, the Yugoslavs‟ factionalism was the consequence of an attempt to come to terms
with the failure of revolutions outside of the Soviet Union and the need to decide upon a
revolutionary strategy under the new conditions.
In this chapter, I will argue that the roots of both Stalinist repression and factional
struggle in the period between 1936 and 1940 cannot be understood without examining the
battles within the KPJ in the preceding period. The KPJ‟s poor standing within the Comintern
largely stemmed from the belief that the Yugoslavs were unable to establish and enforce a
coherent party line, which in turn facilitated and even legitimized repression.46 Furthermore, it
44
Archive of Yugoslavia (Arhiv Jugoslavije, AJ), Memoirs‟ Collection (516 MG), 2919, “Razgovor sa drugom
Milanom Radovanovićem,” 11.
45
Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 46-47.
46
This was true even within the party. Milovan Đilas would later claim in his memoir that “we were delighted
that the Soviet Union had dealt a final blow to the immigrants” and that “this was particularly true of Tito and
17
created a need for a party leadership that would, in the eyes of the Comintern, be able to both
unite the party and keep it disciplined, a process that was termed “bolshevization.” I will start
by briefly presenting the factional struggles from 1919 to 1928, first between the
revolutionaries and “the centrists,” and then between the left and the right. I will then examine
the first wave of bolshevization, which was attempted in the mid-1920s and seemingly
enforced following the Comintern‟s “Open Letter” in 1928. From there, I will provide an
overview of the party‟s meanderings through the so-called “Third Period.”47 Following
Geoffrey Swain, I will argue that the success and consolidation of the KPJ from 1932 to 1935
were achieved thanks to the work of the interim leader Milan Gorkić, who effectively already
began pushing a popular front line. I will also briefly examine the overlooked expulsions –
and even executions – of former factionalists in the USSR in this period, which set a
precedent for the events that unfolded after the arrest of Gorkić.
Between the Left and the Right
The Second Congress of the party took place in June 1920 in the Croatian town of
Vukovar. At this congress, the Socialist Worker‟s Party of Yugoslavia (communists) was
renamed the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, a name under which it would be known for the
next thirty-two years.48 The name change was not purely cosmetic: it was a sign of a major
split between the delegates present. At the Second Congress, the so-called “centrists” were
Kardelj, who were more familiar with the situation in Moscow,” although he adds that Tito had complained
about the excesses of the Purges very early on. Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 303-304.
47
The “Third Period” of the Comintern began with a victory of the ultra-left line in 1928. The organization, as
well as its constituent parties, adopted the view that the collapse of capitalism is near and that the communists
should therefore radicalize their actions, preparing for armed uprisings and other revolutionary measures. As a
consequence, they renounced all cooperation with the other forces on the left, seeing the social democrats and
socialists as “social fascists.” This was a period of extreme sectarianism which weakened the already poor
position of the KPJ. Following the establishment of the royal dictatorship in January 1929, the communists
responded with preparations for an armed uprising, which never took off. However, it gave the government a
pretext to decimate the ranks of the KPJ, killing, among others, the newly-elected party secretary Đuro Đaković.
48
At the Sixth Congress, in 1952, the KPJ was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ). The
change was meant to reflect an ideological shift away from Stalinism. The name “League of Communists” was
chosen after the name of the revolutionary socialist party founded by Karl Marx in 1847, and thus symbolized a
return to Marxist roots.
18
defeated and expelled from the nascent KPJ. The centrists were socialists who adopted an
anti-war stance, but were either undecided on, or hostile to, the revolutionary position. The
KPJ thus foreshadowed a broader split within the Communist International, which took place
along the same lines a month later, at the Second Congress of the Comintern. The communists
insisted on the expulsion of centrists from the movement because of their insistence on
continuing the practices of the Second International, which the communists considered to be
discredited due to its support for the war.49 In the case of Yugoslavia, the centrists deliberated
on whether to attempt a takeover of the SRPJ(k) or to engage in joint political action with the
social democrats.50 This deterioration of relations between the centrists and the communists
could help explain why the split occurred within the KPJ even before the centrists were
expelled from the Comintern itself.
Although no major splits of the party occurred after 1920, the KPJ remained deeply
divided throughout the 1920s. This was a consequence of disagreements on how to continue
communist activity after the wave of revolutions had obviously passed and European states
began stabilizing and reasserting control. Unlike the Soviet communists, the Yugoslavs were
by and large not divided on the issue of how to construct socialism in the USSR, although
some who immigrated to the USSR became involved in those disputes as well. The main
division within the KPJ was between the left and the right wings of the party. The left still
considered that the revolution in Yugoslavia was imminent, while the right was skeptical of
this idea. These starting positions determined their views on the course of revolutionary
action.
In 1921, the KPJ was banned by the royal Yugoslav government and its leadership
was either imprisoned or forced underground. By this point it had become evident that the
national question, which the communists originally thought would be resolved by the
49
Duncan Hallas, The Comintern (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2008), 29.
50
Cvetković, Idejne borbe u KPJ, 79.
19
formation of a centralized Yugoslavia,51 remained a point of contention, as many ethnic
groups were dissatisfied with their position in the new state. The left and the right primarily
quarreled over two issues: how to continue communist activity in conditions of illegality and
how to resolve the national question in Yugoslavia. The left argued that the way forward was
the creation of a Bolshevik-style underground party, operating on the principle of illegal party
cells subjected to the central leadership.52 Regarding the national question, they came to
consider national and class oppression as intertwined, eventually adopting the position that the
Serbian bourgeoisie oppressed both the Croat and the Slovene bourgeoisie,53 laying the basis
for their federalism. This view was in line with the general tendency for the leftists to “come
from the nationally discontented sections of the population.”54 Accordingly, the group was
dominated by the Zagreb-based communists Đuro Cvijić, Vladimir Ćopić, and Kamilo
Horvatin, although Belgrade party intellectuals such as Kosta Novaković, Triša Kaclerović,
and Rajko Jovanović were also prominent on the left.
The right wing, on the other hand, believed the banning of the KPJ would be
temporary, and argued that operations should continue through the still-legal communist-run
Independent Trade Unions, which would serve as a cover for the illegal party structure.55
They believed that the state should not be organized on an ethnic-federal basis, but on an
autonomist basis, which was not too far from the original support for a centralized Yugoslav
state espoused by the KPJ at its foundation in 1919. The right felt that if the revolution in
Yugoslavia was still far away, autonomism would be the best course of action for minimizing
51
Ben Fowkes, “To Make the Nation or Break It? Communist Dilemmas in Two Interwar Multinational States,”
in Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern: Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917–53, eds. Norman LaPorte,
Kevin Morgan and Matthew Worley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 209. It is noteworthy that the party
was named the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, while the state itself was named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats,
and Slovenes and only renamed to Yugoslavia in 1929.
52
Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 52.
53
Haug, Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia, 25-30.
54
Fowkes, “To Make the Nation or Break It?,” 214.
55
Swain, Tito, 10-11.
20
ethnic divisions within the country.56 The right was led by Sima Marković, Lazar Stefanović,
and Ljuba Radovanović, all members of the pre-war Serbian Social-Democratic Party with
strong links to the trade unions. It is important to note, however, that both the left and the
right saw the national question primarily as a means to an end: the leftists thought federalism
would accelerate the revolutionary process, while the rightists expected autonomism to do the
same.57
The historical background of the two groups confirms Ben Fowkes‟ thesis that the
Eastern European communist parties were, broadly speaking, divided into former social
democrats radicalized by the war and the Bolshevik Revolution, and the former ultra-leftists58
and anarchists who believed Bolshevism to be the first step in bringing the long-awaited
revolution to their own countries.59 The former became the KPJ‟s right wing, while the latter
formed the party‟s left. The two groups engaged in a drawn-out doctrinal struggle, which
officially lasted until 1928, and which led to over-intellectualization of the contemporary
political issues at the cost of actual active engagement with the working class. The ideological
solipsism further cemented the isolation of the KPJ, which already lost the status of a mass
organization as a consequence of state repression from 1921. The Independent Workers‟ Party
of Yugoslavia (NRPJ), founded as a legal communist front in 1923, merely served to
showcase the KPJ‟s internal struggles to the public, and thus failed to garner significant
support.60 The success or failure of the two factions depended largely on the Comintern: when
the left was dominant in the Comintern, it also dominated the KPJ; when the right prevailed, a
rightist leadership would take control of the Yugoslav party. Although this illustrates the
depth of the divisions within the Comintern itself, the organization did not approve of such
56
57
58
Much like the historical communist movement itself, I use the term “ultra-left” to describe adventurist
tendencies in the movement, such as individual acts of terror or untimely attempts at fomenting revolutionary
upheaval.
59
Fowkes, “To Make the Nation or Break It?,” 207.
60
21
behavior within its constituent parties. In May 1926, the Executive Committee of the
Communist International (ECCI) characterized the KPJ as “paralyzed and transformed into a
permanent debating club.”61 The KPJ developed the reputation of a troublesome and
disobedient party, which would haunt it throughout the period of the Great Purge.
Thwarted Bolshevization
The Comintern first called for bolshevization at the Fifth Congress in the summer of
1924. The process of bolshevization meant not only the creation of a unified and centralized
organizational structure among all individual communist parties, but also their “Russification
in an embryonic Stalinist form.”62 While calls for bolshevization persisted for several years,
the Comintern only truly managed to enforce it at the time of the Sixth Congress in 1928.
Although certainly an act of Russification, bolshevization was not merely a consequence of
interference by the Soviet party. Young communist radicals, dissatisfied with the older
generation and alarmed by the deteriorating global situation which they thought would
accelerate the advent of revolution, played a major role in pushing their respective parties
towards greater discipline and centralization.63 The bolshevization of the KPJ happened along
the same lines.
In February 1928, two young communist workers from Zagreb, Josip Broz and
Andrija Hebrang, persuaded the city‟s party organization, which was the largest in the
country, to adopt a resolution against factionalism and appeal directly to the Comintern to end
the factional struggles within the Party.64 This appeal resulted in an Open Letter from the
Balkan Secretariat of the Comintern in April that same year, which endorsed the “Zagreb
61
Geoffrey Swain, “Wreckage or Recovery: A Tale of Two Parties,” in In Search of Revolution: International
Communist Parties in the Third Period, ed. Matthew Worley (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 130.
62
Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to
Stalin (London: MacMillan, 1996), 45.
63
Notable examples include Klement Gottwald in the Czechoslovak party, Luigi Longo in the Italian party, and
Maurice Thorez in the French party. McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, 72.
64
Swain, Tito, 12.
22
Line” and called upon the party to act. In the following year and a half, the party managed to
seemingly put an end to factionalism. In reality, as within the Communist International itself,
the ultra-leftist faction prevailed under the guise of anti-factionalism. Therefore, the leading
leftists of the younger generation, including Broz and Hebrang, successfully fashioned
themselves as anti-factionalists and fighters for party unity.65
At the Fourth Congress of the KPJ in Dresden in November 1928, the Comintern line
was fully adopted. Broz and Hebrang were not considered for party leadership because they
had both been arrested in the months leading up to the Congress. Instead, Đuro Đaković
became the organizational secretary, while Jovan Martinović-Mališić became the political
secretary. Both were Moscow-trained organizers and both were on the party‟s left. The older
prominent leftists, however, were marginalized: Đuro Cvijić lost the post of political secretary
and was not reelected to the Politburo. The rightists were treated even more harshly, with
Sima Marković being expelled from the party.66 The new leadership rejected all collaboration
with the non-communist left and began preparing for ill-fated revolutionary action. They
embraced the view that Yugoslavia should be forcibly dissolved in order for the revolution to
progress, and even attempted collaboration with militant nationalist movements to reach this
goal.67 The crisis of the Yugoslav state, which culminated in the institution of a royal
dictatorship in January 1929, seemed to confirm the righteousness of the confrontational
course, as the communists interpreted the dictatorship to be a sign of the regime‟s instability.
Confrontation with the still-strong state authorities, however, proved to be fatal. In April
1929, Đuro Đaković was killed by the Yugoslav police. By 1930, the surviving party
65
This view of leftists as “anti-factionalist” remained prevalent in Yugoslav historiography during socialism. See
Cvetković, Idejne borbe u KPJ, 202.
66
67
Haug, Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia, 32.
23
leadership had fled to Vienna; they would not return to the country until 1938. The decimated
national party organization would only start to recover in 1932.68
Blame could not be placed solely on the Yugoslav repressive apparatus, as it was
obvious that the policy adopted in 1928 played a significant role in facilitating the party‟s
repression by the state. In August 1930, Martinović-Mališić was attacked by the ECCI as a
“putschist,” accused of merely forming a “third group” as an alternative to the old party
factions, and promptly sacked.69 The Comintern appointed Antun Mavrak in his place and
Filip Filipović as a replacement for the deceased Đaković. Mavrak, a former leftist and a key
supporter of Broz and Hebrang, turned sharply to the right during his mandate as party
leader.70 His conflicts with other party members merely showed to the Comintern that the
factional struggles, although officially ended in 1928, were still ongoing. Stabilization only
came in 1932, with the appointment of Milan Gorkić as the interim party leader. Over the next
four years, Gorkić was extremely successful in consolidating the party and creating an illusion
of unity, although discord continued, particularly in the émigré community, whose numbers
rose dramatically after 1929.
Consolidation under Gorkić
Milan Gorkić was born Josip Ĉiţinský in Sarajevo in 1904, to a Czech family that had
moved there five years earlier. His adopted last name was an adapted “Yugoslav” version of
Gorky, and he ethnically identified as Bosnian.71 In his youth, Gorkić was one of the most
active young KPJ organizers. He was forced to immigrate to the USSR in 1923, aged only
nineteen, and from there followed a path typical for a foreign communist. After completing
his education in Moscow, he worked in the Comintern apparatus, and became secretary of the
68
Branko Petranović, Jugoslavija 1918–1988: knj. 1: Kraljevina Jugoslavija 1914–1941 (Belgrade: Nolit,
1988), 213.
69
Swain, “Wreckage or Recovery: A Tale of Two Parties,” 133.
70
71
Poţar, Jugosloveni ţrtve staljinskih ĉistki, 192.
24
Young Communist International (KIM) in 1928. A competent theoretician, he rose through
the ranks thanks to his friendship with Nikolai Bukharin, as well as the patronage of Dmitry
Manuilsky.72 As one of the attendees of the meeting at which the Open Letter was composed,
he came to be seen as a leading anti-factionalist in the KPJ; in reality, his views were close to
the earlier right faction, although he was never involved in it. This became evident in his
subsequent actions as interim leader. Largely because of Gorkić, throughout the latter part of
the Third Period, the KPJ already pursued a line similar to the popular front.
The Croatian historian Ivo Banac has called Milan Gorkić “by disposition a man of the
popular front.”73 From the very beginning, his work marked a clear break with the earlier
sectarian attitude towards the reformist left. He encouraged activity within existing non-
communist trade unions, rather than the formation of alternative revolutionary ones, and
changed the KPJ‟s policy towards the socialists. The communists were now expected to work
with the socialist rank and file, while still condemning their reformist leadership, in what was
already considered to be a “united front from below.”74 As a consequence, the KPJ became a
sort of cautious vanguard of the developments which would be sanctioned by the Seventh
Congress of the Comintern in August 1935.
Furthermore, Gorkić insisted on independence of the KPJ, going as far as to
(rightfully) criticize the Comintern as the main culprit for the prolonged party crisis that
began in 1929.75 Although a disciplined follower of the Comintern line, he did not hesitate to
criticize the International when he felt that his party was being treated in a patronizing
manner.76 His divergence from the Third Period line regarding the socialists and the trade
unions was perfectly complementary with the Comintern‟s flexibility on policy, and it
72
Oĉak, Gorkić, 82, 335.
73
74
Swain, Tito, 15.
75
76
Nadeţda Jovanović, “Milan Gorkić (prilog za biografiju)” Istorija 20. veka 1/1983, 39.
25
ultimately helped the recuperation of the party.77 While many accounts argue that the
recovery of the KPJ between 1932 and 1934 took place independently of party policy,78 it is
much more appropriate to attribute it to Gorkić successfully avoiding sectarianism.
These moves were not uncontroversial. Vladimir Ćopić, an old leftist who joined the
temporary leadership, criticized Gorkić‟s “right errors” as early as 1933.79 In the following
years, their disagreement would escalate to the point that the Comintern would interpret it as a
renewal of factionalism. Unfortunately for Ćopić, Gorkić‟s allegedly “deviationist” course
was legitimized by joint decisions of the Comintern and the Profintern regarding activity in
reformist trade unions, passed in 1931.80 Gorkić‟s overall attitude, however, was largely
reconciliatory. He attempted to bring Đuro Cvijić, another former leader of the party left, back
into the party leadership,81 and argued that earlier belonging to factions was not a
measurement of one‟s loyalty or ability.82 The most ardent ultra-left challenge to Gorkić and
the popular front line would come from a group in the Sremska Mitrovica prison, which
would cause serious headaches to the leadership later on.83 At the time, however, the
existence of these troublemakers was a secondary issue.
From 1932, Gorkić gradually assembled a leadership team in which he was the first
among equals. In the beginning, he led the party in a triumvirate with Blagoje Parović and
Vladimir Ćopić, then gradually expanding his inner circle. The team‟s full composition was
completed by December 1934, when, at the Fourth Land Conference of the KPJ in Ljubljana,
they came to form the new Politburo. Aside from Gorkić, the members of the Politburo were
77
Swain, “Wreckage or Recovery: A Tale of Two Parties,” 148-149.
78
For example, Avgust Lešnik, “The Development of the Communist Movement in Yugoslavia during the
Comintern Period,” The International Newsletter of Communist Studies XI/18 (2005), 53-54 and Petranović,
Jugoslavija 1918–1988: knj. 1: Kraljevina Jugoslavija 1914–1941, 214.
79
80
Furthermore, these decisions helped establish Gorkić‟s patron, Manuilsky, as a leading figure in the
Comintern. Swain, “Wreckage or Recovery: A Tale of Two Parties,” 140-141.
81
For a detailed overview of Gorkić‟s relationship with Cvijić and the efforts to restore him into the leadership,
see Oĉak, Gorkić, 174-179.
82
Jovanović, “Milan Gorkić (prilog za biografiju),” 38-39.
83
26
Blagoje Parović, Adolf Muk, Josip Broz, and Kamilo Horvatin.84 Vladimir Ćopić, whose
relationship with Gorkić by then was more hostile, occupied the very influential position of
party representative to the Comintern.85 Four years later, Broz was the only one of the six who
was both still alive and a party member.
At the time, the leadership was seemingly more or less harmonious, and it reflected
Gorkić‟s “big tent” approach. Muk was the only figure who could truly be described as one of
Gorkić‟s cronies, while Parović was the most consistent promoter of Gorkić‟s policy on the
trade unions and the united front.86 Broz had just come out of prison and was uninvolved in
doctrinal disputes; Gorkić clearly remembered him as one of the initiators of the 1928 anti-
factional line.87 Ćopić was becoming increasingly hostile to Gorkić, while Horvatin, another
old member of the party left, did not have any disagreements with the leader at the time.
Although Gorkić‟s practical policies seemed “rightist,” nothing about his choice of top party
cadres showed a preference for the party‟s former right wing.
The most important policy change at the Fourth Land Conference was a revision of the
party‟s attitude towards Yugoslavia. As the fascist threat became more acute following the
Nazi takeover in Germany, the KPJ began supporting the unity of the Yugoslav state, a stance
that had been abandoned almost a decade earlier. The Conference reiterated the need for an
armed uprising against the “fascist” Yugoslav dictatorship, without explicitly calling for the
dissolution of Yugoslavia.88 This was a first, albeit rather shy, expression of the need for an
antifascist front in the country. The same Conference decided to organize the communist
parties of Croatia and Slovenia within the KPJ, which was not finalized until 1937. This, too,
84
Petranović, Jugoslavija 1918–1988: knj. 1: Kraljevina Jugoslavija 1914–1941, 237.
85
Oĉak, Vojnik revolucije, 231. According to this source, it was actually Ćopić, and not Horvatin, who was the
fifth member of the Politburo. Oĉak, Vojnik revolucije, 237.
86
For a thorough examination of Parović‟s prolific activity, see ĐorĊe O. Piljević, Ĉovek ideja i akcije
(Belgrade: Zavod za udţbenike i nastavna sredstva, 2001), in particular pages 297-504.
87
Swain, Tito, 14, and Jovanović, “Milan Gorkić (prilog za biografiju),” 41.
88
Desanka Pešić, Jugoslovenski komunisti i nacionalno pitanje (Belgrade: Izdavaĉka radna organizacija “Rad,”
1983), 264-265.
27
presented the beginning of reorientation towards a line that the Comintern itself would adopt
half a year later at the Seventh Congress.
The First Repressions
While Gorkić was stabilizing the fragile and marginalized party organization, more
ominous parallel processes began to take place among the Yugoslav émigré community in the
Soviet Union. The first executions of Yugoslav communists in the Soviet Union took place as
early as 1930. This confirmed the belief of some of the émigrés that there might be police
spies in their ranks, but it also set a very dangerous precedent. The concerns about treason and
espionage would come to haunt the entire party by 1937. Furthermore, the Third Period was
the time of the first anti-factionalist campaigns and purges, which legitimized the complete
expulsion of the party opposition, something that had not been done since the early 1920s,
when the party was still ridding itself of the centrists.
In the fall of 1929, the Soviet police arrested two Yugoslav communists. The first was
the Croat Mate Brezović, who had been a member of the All-Union Communist Party
(bolsheviks) since 1920, and had spent seven years living in Yugoslavia as a professional
revolutionary after the end of the Russian Civil War. Upon his return to the Soviet Union, he
was arrested in Moscow in September 1929 and shot as a spy on April 13, 1930.89 According
to Yugoslav sources, he was first arrested in Zagreb in 1929, and uncovered the entire Zagreb
party organization to the police, after which he became their informant. He was then sent to
the Soviet Union to spy on the communists. Once this was discovered, the KPJ leadership
reported him to the Soviet police, which led to his arrest and execution.90 While the Yugoslav
historiography acknowledges his collaboration with the police, and this incident confirms that
89
“Брезович-Егер Матвей Матвеевич,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 8, 2018,
http://lists.memo.ru/d5/f268.htm.
90
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 303.
28
“watchfulness” regarding the émigrés was not a matter of mere paranoia, the other case is
much more controversial.
The other arrested and executed individual was the Macedonian revolutionary Stefan
Popivanov, and his case is far more intriguing. He had been active in the socialist movement
from the first decade of the twentieth century, a founding member of the KPJ, and one of the
most prominent leaders of its left faction. Yet, he allegedly became an agent provocateur in
1928, after almost a quarter of a century of activity on the radical left. He was also arrested as
a spy, just a week after Brezović, and shot on March 6, 1930.91 Interestingly enough, he was
rehabilitated in 1963,92 during the Khrushchev Thaw, which further casts doubts on his guilt.
It is highly unlikely that Popivanov was in fact a police agent, which makes him the first
Yugoslav communist to have been wrongfully accused and executed in the USSR. The true
reasons for his arrest and execution, at a time when persecution of oppositionists was not as
extreme, remain unknown. Either way, the cases of these two individuals, one most likely
guilty and one most likely innocent, confirmed the belief that there might be spies among
émigrés. With the onset of the Great Purge, these cases were explicitly referenced to justify
the need for watchfulness and to confirm that there were provocateurs among communists.93
A far more common form of political punishment in the period was expulsion of the
opposition, from both the left and the right. Although certain individuals on the party left, in
particular Vojislav Vujović94 and Ante Ciliga,95 have been frequent subjects of academic
research, there are no academic works on the Yugoslav Left Opposition as a politically
91
“Поп-Иванов Стефан Македонович,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 8, 2018,
92
93
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 207 and Russian State Archives of Socio-Political History (Российский
государственный архив социально-политической истории, RGASPI), 495-11-357, Б.Н.Петровский, “О
задачах борьбы с троцкизмом в Югославии,” October 17, 1937, 6-7.
94
Branislav Gligorijević, IzmeĊu revolucije i dogme: Voja (Vojislav) Vujović u Kominterni (Zagreb: Spektar,
1983), and Milisav Milenković (ed.), Revolucionarna misao i delo braće Vujović (Poţarevac: Braniĉevo, 1981).
95
Ivan Oĉak, “Ante Ciliga – otpadnik komunizma i staljinske ĉistke,” Radovi 22 (1989): 267-296, and Stephen
Schwartz, “Ante Ciliga (1898–1992): A Life at History‟s Crossroads,” Journal of Croatian Studies 34/35
(1993/1994): 181-206.
29
organized group in the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, as I am primarily focusing on a later
period, this subchapter will not be an original contribution to the latter. Instead, I intend to
focus on certain prominent individuals as case studies of pre-1936 factionalism and political
repression of Yugoslavs in the Soviet Union. I will examine the two most infamous
“renegades” at the turn of the decade, the aforementioned leftist Ante Ciliga and the leader of
the right, Sima Marković.
Ante Ciliga, a founding member of the KPJ, was among the most vocal leftists of the
1920s. The main focus of his polemics was the national question,96 which is significant in
light of his subsequent reorientation towards radical Croatian nationalism. After immigrating
to the USSR in 1926, he became a professor at the Yugoslav section of the Communist
University of the National Minorities of the West (KUNMZ). By 1929, Ciliga openly
endorsed Trotsky and formed a Trotskyist group at KUNMZ.97 Moreover, he and the other
Trotskyists were members of a group of Yugoslav leftists dubbed “Group Forty-One,” named
after the number of signatories of their open letter to the ECCI, in which they criticized both
the leadership of the KPJ and the KUNMZ for alleged rightist deviations. Other leftists,
however, subsequently distanced themselves from their openly Trotskyist co-signatories.98
Ciliga and his group were subsequently expelled from the KUNMZ, the KPJ and the VKP(b),
and were forced to move to Leningrad. In 1930, they were arrested after forming a Trotskyist
group there. Five of them were sentenced to three years in prison, and the remaining twenty
were exiled to the Soviet provinces.99 At the time, this pattern of imprisonment and exile was
much more common than execution.
When the letter of the forty-one reached the ECCI, they responded by condemning not
only the left, but also the right. The letter was seemingly used as an excuse for a broader
96
97
Oĉak, “Ante Ciliga,” 276.
98
For the most comprehensive existing overview of the controversy, see Oĉak, Gorkić, 109-111.
99
Oĉak, “Ante Ciliga,” 279.
30
showdown with all Yugoslav factionalists. Mirko Marković, one of the punished leftists in
1929, noted that none of the leftists were expelled at the time, whereas “siminovci” (the
supporters of Sima Marković) were.100 Marković had already been targeted by the Comintern
several times, most notably in 1924, when he and Stalin disagreed on the national question.
While Stalin attempted to enforce the Comintern line of fomenting national conflict at all
costs, Marković‟s view was that national tensions should be ameliorated, and that trying to
connect them with proletarian internationalism could be detrimental to the communist
movement.101 Marković eventually fell into line, but at the Fourth Congress of the KPJ in
Dresden in 1928, he was attacked by the Comintern delegate Palmiro Togliatti,102 and
promptly removed from the leadership. By 1929, the KPJ insisted that he leaves Yugoslavia
to avoid arrest. He refused, leading to his expulsion from the party.103 Marković would later
claim that he chose not to comply with the party‟s orders because he believed that there were
police informants in the leadership, a fact which was confirmed by the aforementioned arrest
of Brezović in the USSR.104 Marković was not informed of this decision by the KPJ, and only
found out upon his arrest in Belgrade in 1930. He would remain isolated from the party until
1934.105
The cases of Marković and Ciliga show that only the most vocal opponents of the
party line were punished with expulsion at the beginning of the Third Period. The right was
punished more harshly than the left, because the Comintern as a whole turned against the
“rightist” communists at the time. By 1936, the tables had turned, with the former leftists
100
101
Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 136-141.
102
Poţar, Jugosloveni ţrtve staljinskih ĉistki, 158-159.
103
Nikita V. Bondarev “Sima Marković – moskovske godine (1935–1938),” in Društveno-politiĉka i nauĉna
misao i delo Sime Markovića, ed. Aleksandar Kostić (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 2013), 47.
104
Poţar, Jugosloveni ţrtve staljinskih ĉistki, 160.
105
Bondarev “Sima Marković – moskovske godine (1935–1938),” 47.
31
being subjected to harsher repression.106 This was a consequence of fears regarding their
potential association with Trotskyism.
The purges of 1932–1933 set a new precedent for Comintern interference into
Yugoslav party affairs. They were not followed by mass political repression, but they were a
clear sign of the Comintern‟s ever-increasing control over its sections. The Comintern
expected the KPJ Control Commission, under the guidance of leadership member Blagoje
Parović,107 to expel 25 percent of party members.108 The imposition was not uncontroversial.
Đuro Cvijić, whom Gorkić was trying to reintroduce into the leadership, protested against
what he saw as unjustified interference by the Comintern in the KPJ‟s internal affairs, and
additionally attacked both the leadership and the Comintern for their refusal to take
responsibility for the mistakes committed in 1929 and 1930.109 Such an attitude eventually led
to Cvijić‟s expulsion.
Gorkić was more pragmatic than Cvijić. He accepted the purges, but was not uncritical
of them, successfully positioning himself as a moderate and a mediator.110 Gorkić eventually
managed to restore Cvijić‟s party membership, although his stubbornness made it impossible
for him to be considered for the party leadership again. Much like with Cvijić, Gorkić
succeeded in overturning the expulsions of prominent leftists Antun Mavrak and Kosta
Novaković,111 and ameliorating the punishments of Filip Filipović and Kamilo Horvatin.112
All of these individuals, aside from Filipović, were on the party left. The only individuals that
Gorkić never made an effort to save were those who were already stigmatized as Trotskyists
106
This could help explain why Lazar Stefanović, one of the closest associates of Marković, who was expelled
from the party and KUNMZ in 1929, survived the Great Purge and lived in the Soviet Union until 1944, when he
returned to Yugoslavia and became a leading trade union organizer.
107
Piljević, Ĉovek ideja i akcije, 209.
108
109
Ivan Oĉak, Braća Cvijići, 367-372.
110
Jovanović, “Milan Gorkić (prilog za biografiju),” 39-40.
111
Piljević, Ĉovek ideja i akcije, 211-212.
112
32
and exiled, such as Ciliga or the former head of the Communist Youth International Vojislav
Vujović, who had already been banished to Central Asia due to his support for Trotsky.
Gorkić‟s moderation, however, did not stop attacks on him from all sides. He was
accused either of being a rightist or, at times, of forming a “third group” after the Open Letter
of 1928. The accusations of a “third group” appeared immediately after the victory of the
“anti-factionalist” line, and they most likely originated from Đuro Cvijić. This new “faction”
allegedly overestimated the danger from the left, ignored the fight against the right, and
engaged in excessive “intellectualism.”113 Gorkić himself was either accused of committing
“right errors” or of simply being a rightist.114 Most notably, such an accusation came from
Ćopić himself, a member of Gorkić‟s inner circle. As a consequence, during the 1932 purge,
Gorkić conducted self-criticism, and completely accepted the accusations that his work
amounted to the formation of a third group.115 This was most likely done to minimize the
potential damage that a renewal of factional struggles, caused by an open clash with his
opponents, could have inflicted on the party. Parović still supported him, and Ćopić decided
to do so too, in spite of his reservations, 116 presumably because he too was worried about
party unity.
Conclusions
Factionalism has been a prominent feature of Marxist parties from their very
inception. In this regard, the story of the KPJ was quite typical. A successful mass party at
first, it became a minor underground sect riven with internal tensions after it was banned in
1921. It was torn between the more radical “left” wing and the more moderate ”right” wing,
and the open animosity between members of the two groups became the rule. The sorry state
of affairs prompted the Comintern to intervene in 1928, allegedly abolishing the factions.
113
114
Piljević, Ĉovek ideja i akcije, 206-207.
115
116
33
However, the ultra-left sectarianism of the Comintern‟s Third Period only pushed the party
deeper into isolation. It also gave the Yugoslav government an excuse to decimate the KPJ
after the establishment of a royal dictatorship in January 1929. For the following three years,
the party was in a state of disarray, which was only stopped with the appointment of Milan
Gorkić as the interim leader in 1932.
By the time of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in August 1935, the KPJ was in
a much better state than Gorkić had found it in when he took over three years earlier. As the
rising star of the party, he played an instrumental role in transforming it from an ultra-left sect
riddled with factional struggles to a growing mass organization. Furthermore, it was
becoming the vanguard of the popular front within the Comintern and its influence in the
Yugoslav trade unions was growing. The abandonment of adventurism and anti-Yugoslavism
made non-communists more sympathetic to the party. The factional struggles which had
harmed it so much in the 1920s seemed to have finally been ended. At the same time, there
were plenty of signs of internal dissent, showing that not everything was perfect. Specters of
prior factional struggles were still haunting the KPJ. Despite grandiloquent proclamations of
“bolshevization,” the party was far from unified. Most former leftists and rightists still largely
held to the same views as before 1928, including Gorkić. Some members of his own inner
circle, most notably Vladimir Ćopić, opposed him, influenced by their own earlier leftism.
The most worrying trends, however, pertained to the Comintern‟s increasing control
over the party, which was most vocally opposed by Đuro Cvijić. These trends included not
only the first expulsions of intra-party oppositionists, but even their executions, as was the
case with Stefan Popivanov. The executions of spies, real or alleged, set a dangerous
precedent, serving to confirm the fear that political disagreement might in fact be a sign of
treason. By 1937, this example would haunt the party as much as the earlier factional
struggles themselves, and would lead to the arrest and execution of almost an entire
generation of leading Yugoslav communists, including the general secretary. For the time
34
being, however, the KPJ seemed fairly stable under Gorkić‟s leadership. His domination of
the party was only seriously threatened for the first time after he had lost the support of Ćopić.
35
The Peak and Fall of Milan Gorkić
“I must still say that recently I have had thoughts about whether Gorkić himself might not be
a provocateur. After careful consideration, I came to a conclusion that all these affairs on
which I have written are characteristic of the style of Gorkić’s work. In itself they do not point
to provocation.”
Kamilo Horvatin, Report to Wilhelm Pieck
dated August 5, 1937117
“In a period of revolutionary tension or external threat there is no clear-cut boundary
between political divergences and objective treason.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror118
On August 5, 1937, Kamilo Horvatin, one of the KPJ representatives to the
Comintern, arrived at the Secretariat of Wilhelm Pieck the ECCI member in charge of Balkan
affairs. Horvatin submitted two documents to Pieck: a shorter one, concerning the arrest of
Betty Glan, the general director of Gorky Park; and a longer one, regarding the internal
situation of the KPJ. The two reports had a common denominator: Milan Gorkić, the husband
of Betty Glan and general secretary of the KPJ. Nine days later, Gorkić was arrested by the
NKVD, together with Ivan Grţetić-Fleischer, the main KPJ representative to the Comintern.
Fleischer was shot on October 3, and Gorkić on November 1. At the time of Gorkić‟s
execution, Horvatin was still submitting reports to Pieck on the misdeeds of the now-sacked
party leadership. The purge of the KPJ was now in full swing. Just one year earlier, Gorkić
was at the height of his career: with the help of his allies in the Comintern, virtually all of his
opponents had been sacked from the party leadership and he was officially named general
secretary of the Central Committee. In this chapter, I will explain the circumstances that led to
Gorkić‟s success and his sudden – but not unexpected – downfall. I will begin by examining
the course and the consequences of the April Plenum of 1936, which the Comintern
interpreted as the re-emergence of factional struggles. From there, I will continue with an
account of the purges of Yugoslavs who openly supported the opposition to Stalin, most of
117
RGASPI, 495-11-335, Petrowski‟s [Kamilo Horvatin] Report to Wilhelm Pieck Dated August 5, 1937, 14.
118
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969), 34.
36
whom were imprisoned or executed by the spring of 1937, when Gorkić was still in power,
often with the knowledge and approval of party leadership. Finally, I will present the
multitude of reasons that led the Comintern to believe that Gorkić might be unreliable, and
which eventually led to his arrest in August 1937.
The April Plenum of 1936
The first serious challenge to Gorkić‟s leadership arose out of a conflict with his once-
close associate, Vladimir Ćopić. In April 1936, the Central Committee of the KPJ held a
plenary session in Vienna. Relations among the leadership were so strained that one of the
party members present at the plenum, Rodoljub Ĉolaković, noted that Gorkić did not even
greet fellow members of the CC upon his arrival.119 This session marked the culmination of
dissatisfaction with Gorkić, but the events that followed marked Gorkić‟s greatest triumph:
his official appointment to the post of general secretary of the KPJ. The plenum pitted Gorkić
and his closest associate at the time, Adolf Muk, now called “gorkićevci,” against the
“leftists” led by Ćopić. Ćopić was supported by Đuro Cvijić‟s brother Stjepan, and the leading
young Slovenian members of the Central Committee, Karlo Hudomalj and SKOJ secretary
Boris Kidriĉ. Notably, among those present at the plenum was Ivo Marić, a worker from Split
who had a long-standing dispute with Gorkić,120 but there is no evidence that he participated
in the attack, suggesting that his relations with the group around Ćopić and Cvijić were not
too close. The plenum took place without the presence of a Comintern representative, which
would later be used to attack both sides and question the legitimacy of the session
altogether.121
119
Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju, vol. 2, 516.
120
Marić, a trade unionist, was among the leading Dalmatian leftists from the party‟s foundation and had a
dispute with Gorkić since the late 1920s, when Gorkić‟s associates were attempting to establish the anti-factional
line in Dalmatia. Marić would later claim that he knew Gorkić was a “spy” since 1928. AJ, 516 MG, Box 58,
2231, Ivo Marić, Iz istorijata radniĉkog pokreta Dalmacije, 209.
121
37
The immediate pretext for the attack on Gorkić was the series of mass arrests that
shook the party organization in the fall of 1935. Even Gorkić loyalists, like Blagoje Parović,
began expressing concerns about the flaws in conspiratorial work of party members in the
country, a point which Gorkić was forced to concede.122 This probably encouraged his
opponents at the top of the party to launch a premediated attack. The true cause of
dissatisfaction was Gorkić‟s implementation of the popular front policy, which the party left
considered to be rightist. Gorkić had begun to “legalize” party members by moving the focus
away from illegal activity and pushing for an alliance not only with the non-communist left,
but also with all forces in the country opposed to the monarchical dictatorship. This was
denounced as liquidationism, a tendency of “abandoning, or „liquidating‟, the underground
committee structure of the Party in an attempt to legalise the Party and thus make easier an
alliance with the liberals by keeping the radical leadership in emigration at a distance.” 123 As
this was a Menshevik position which Lenin criticized in the early 1900s, Gorkić‟s policy
came to be seen by many in the party as essentially anti-Leninist. Moreover, the leftists
considered the attempts at legalizing the work of the communists to be the main reason for
mass arrests. The only change in policy that Gorkić brought about which remained largely
uncontroversial appears to have been the support for Yugoslav unity, which even the leftists,
like Stjepan Cvijić, had now come to actively embrace.124
The plenum followed a pattern typical of communist intraparty putsches. Ćopić spoke
first, presenting a critical report on the state of the party. He was followed by Stjepan Cvijić,
who supported him.125 The leftists argued that Gorkić was still pursuing the formation of a
122
Piljević, Ĉovek ideja i akcije, 539. Even worse for Gorkić, Parović was soon removed from all positions
because of a breach of rules of conspiracy, after having an affair with a Soviet Embassy worker in Budapest.
This left Gorkić without one of his most capable close associates. Piljević, Ĉovek ideja i akcije, 543.
123
Swain, Tito, 17.
124
Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju, vol. 2, 518-519, and Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 64.
125
38
“third group” within the party,126 continuing the trend of leadership pretenders accusing their
opponents of deviation while fashioning themselves as the center. While not explicitly stated
at the plenum, the leftists intended to replace Gorkić with Karlo Hudomalj.127 Hudomalj was
the logical choice. A true proletarian, he was a locksmith and was uninvolved in intraparty
struggles before 1928, although he was clearly on the left. Cvijić and Ćopić knew that
nominating themselves, or anyone else from their group, would have led to renewed
accusations of factionalism, as they were all intellectuals, and therefore illegitimate.
Furthermore, Hudomalj was a member of the temporary leadership in 1930, following the
sacking of Jovan Martinović-Mališić, who was close to Gorkić.128 Hudomalj was to assume
the role of a new Đuro Đaković, and the parallels between the two individuals were in fact
striking, even down to the fact that they were both locksmiths.
Figure 1. Factions in the KPJ from the April Plenum to the Moscow Consultation.
126
127
128
Poţar, Jugosloveni ţrtve staljinskih ĉistki, 148. Leftists constantly brought up the fact that Gorkić was closely
behind Martinović-Mališić, but opportunistically turned his back on him when the Comintern denounced him.
Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju, vol. 2, 524-525.
39
Gorkić was once again forced to cave in and engaged in self-criticism.129 The new
Politburo consisted of his opponents Mavrak, Ćopić, and Hudomalj, while Cvijić and Marić,
both also unfriendly to him, became candidate members. The only figures he could count on
in the new Politburo were Broz and Muk.130 This was supposed to be the beginning of the end
of Milan Gorkić. It would have likely turned out so were it not for the fact that, unlike the
leftists, Gorkić had his man on the Comintern Executive: Dmitry Manuilsky.131 The
Comintern reacted furiously to the decisions of the April Plenum, not least because they had
not been notified or consulted in any way. Gorkić‟s Comintern patrons were intent on
preserving his domination over the KPJ, as he enjoyed their utmost trust, unlike the majority
of Yugoslavs they had worked with. They therefore summoned a meeting of the ECCI in
Moscow in August and September at which the decisions of the April Plenum were to be
critically reassessed.
Although the official line was that both sides of the conflict were to blame, the
consultation in Moscow was heavily slanted in Gorkić‟s favor. Both Cvijić and Ćopić were
invited to the meetings of the ECCI, but neither of them ultimately showed up; they were
allegedly unable to receive their entry visas in time.132 This is unusual, given that they had an
official invitation from the Comintern. Equally suspicious was the fate of other opponents of
Gorkić – Marić, Hudomalj, and Kidriĉ were all arrested by the Viennese police in a raid in
July,133 and therefore none of them were able to attend the Moscow meeting. Although there
is no evidence that Gorkić or his allies had anything to do with the arrests, some leftists at the
time thought otherwise; Marić was now convinced that Gorkić did not even intentionally
betray them to the police in order to neutralize them politically, but rather that he betrayed
129
Oĉak, Gorkić, 243-244.
130
131
Bondarev, Misterija Tito, 174.
132
Oĉak, Vojnik revolucije, 294.
133
AJ, 516 MG, Box 58, 2231/2, “Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem u Splitu 27.XI 1963,“ 39.
40
them because he was actually a police agent himself.134 Those close to Gorkić, however,
attributed the arrests to Marić‟s own lack of vigilance.135
By the time the ECCI convened in Moscow, Gorkić was once again dominant in the
party. All of the prominent Yugoslavs at the meeting were his loyalists, such as Broz, Ivan
Grţetić-Fleischer, Blagoje Parović, Simo Miljuš, and Boţidar Maslarić.136 Also present were
former leftists who could have questioned Gorkić‟s political course, such as Vilim Horvaj,
one of the leaders of the SKOJ in the 1920s. They, however, had already been politically
marginalized at the time, and had no connections to Cvijić or Ćopić. As such, they served
more as tokenistic figures than actual representatives of the intra-party opposition.
The only criticism that Gorkić was faced with in Moscow concerned the convening of
the plenum itself without consultation with the Comintern, and his failure to confront the
criticism from Cvijić and Ćopić, choosing to compromise with them instead. 137 On the other
hand, the Comintern interpreted the moves of the left as a revival of factional struggles in the
party. The ECCI proposed that the KPJ return to its pre-April 1936 course, which included
pushing for a popular front “from below” rather than “from above,” returning the exiled
leadership to Yugoslavia, and arranging the foundation of the communist parties of Croatia
and Slovenia.138 Accusations that Gorkić‟s line was opportunistic were rejected. However, the
accusation that leftists were pushing for a popular front “from above” was unfounded. Rather,
the dispute revolved around whether or not the KPJ should act as a part of the liberal United
Opposition, with the left claiming that it should not.139 Gorkić disagreed, and was able to
134
135
136
Oĉak, Gorkić, 246. Boţidar Maslarić, an ethnically Serbian schoolteacher from Osijek in Croatia, had been a
supporter of Gorkić since 1928, when he sided with the anti-factionalists while studying at KUNMZ. He would
become one of Gorkić‟s close associates in Spain in the final months of Gorkić‟s life. Milan Radanović,
“Jugoslovenski interbrigadisti pred Kontrolnom komisijom CK KPJ 1945–1949.” (Bachelor‟s thesis, University
of Belgrade, 2016), 56.
137
138
139
41
continue this course for another year, veering dangerously close to liquidationism. The
distinction between the popular front from “above” and “below” would make a comeback
after July 1937, when Broz would fashion his approach to the popular front as a popular front
from below. Indeed, the popular front from above seems to have become anathema due to
perceived mistakes in its implementation.
Under the auspices of the Comintern, a new Politburo was elected, consisting of
Gorkić, Broz, Ĉolaković, the Serb veteran activist Sreten Ţujović and the Slovene worker
Franc Leskošek.140 Only the first two had been in the Politburo before, but the remaining three
were all seen as loyal to Gorkić. The Comintern, however, proposed that Gorkić permanently
remain abroad, with the others permanently in Yugoslavia, and that the two groups could veto
each other‟s decisions. Rather than ensuring the domination of Gorkić, this significantly
weakened the KPJ, putting it under the direct control of the ECCI.141 While Yugoslav
historiography had claimed that Broz was named organizational secretary at this time,142 no
such position appears to have existed by 1936, and he was equal to other members of the
Politburo. The Russian historian Nikita Bondarev considers that this new division of power
was detrimental to the KPJ, and that it was this, rather than Gorkić‟s incompetence, which led
to the KPJ‟s major failures in the following year, “as it fostered formalism, negligence, and
unhealthy competition within the party.”143
One thing that Gorkić could have affected, but did not, was the move away from the
view of the United Opposition as a kind of a popular front, a stance upon which he continued
to insist, persistently arguing against it being liquidationist. Manuilsky‟s support and victory
over his rivals seem to have only emboldened him. This eventually brought Gorkić into
conflict with Broz, who began distancing himself from Gorkić and criticizing liquidationism
140
141
Bondarev, Misterija Tito, 188-189.
142
This claim was then uncritically repeated by English-language historiography on Tito. See Phyllis Auty, Tito
(London: Penguin, 1974), 136.
143
42
from late 1936.144 Being the only other member of the Politburo present at the Moscow
meeting, Broz must have carefully noted the Comintern‟s expectations, as these essentially
became his policy prescriptions for saving the party after the fall of Gorkić. Although Broz
would also eventually engage with the liberal opposition, he would always attempt to do so on
the communists‟ terms and under communist leadership, unlike Gorkić, who was content with
the communists merely supporting the liberal opposition.145
The defeated faction was scattered around the globe. In October, Stjepan Cvijić was
ordered by the Comintern to move to the United States, where he was in charge of recruiting
volunteers for the International Brigades.146 Although he initially remained critical of
Gorkić,147 he soon fully complied with the new party line, going as far as to state, in 1938,
that “everybody knows that a popular front without bourgeois parties is pure nonsense.”148
Ćopić appears to have been less compliant, but he did not express this publicly, maintaining
his Bolshevik discipline.149 Instead, he opted to go to Spain and join the International
Brigades. He arrived in late January 1937 and became the first political commissar of the
newly-formed XV International Brigade, popularly known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade;
he became its commander two weeks later.150 Before his departure to Spain, his relationship
with Cvijić had also turned sour.151 This was the final nail in the coffin of the opposition to
Gorkić. At the time, however, Gorkić was undoubtedly far more worried about another
144
Swain, Tito, 19, and AJ, 516 MG, 2013/3, 88.
145
146
Oĉak, Braća Cvijići, 426.
147
RGASPI, 495-11-300, André (Stjepan Cvijić), “Bemerkungen zu dem Brief der Genossen Gorkic, Fleischer,
Petrowski, Schmidt und Walter an die Genossen Manuilski, Pieck und Waletzky,” November 10, 1937.
148
149
He made one last-ditch attempt at criticizing the party leadership by addressing the Pieck Secretariat
regarding the KPJ‟s mistakes on the national question. While the contents of his letter are unknown, the report
from the Secretariat dated March 20, 1937, which was apparently written in response to his letter, stated that he
was in fact wronged by not being able to appear at the ECCI session and that the matter should be investigated.
The unknown author also claimed that Ćopić‟s criticisms of the party‟s mistakes in Serbia were correct, and that
he rightly pointed out that the party organization in Croatia was weakened, something that the leadership was
unwilling to admit. At the same time, the author notes Ćopić‟s anti-Yugoslav stance, something that was not
expressed by his co-oppositionist Cvijić. RGASPI, 495-11-20, “Записка о Сенько,” March 20, 1937.
150
151
43
opposition, the one which was believed to have tried to murder Stalin and overthrow the
Soviet leadership in order to establish capitalism.
The Purge of the Oppositionists
When the NKVD uncovered the alleged involvement of Kamenev and Zinoviev in a
plot with Trotsky to assassinate Stalin, the oppositionists were transformed from political
opponents into two-faced vicious murderers. At the time, most of the Soviet citizens and
political émigrés had little reason to suspect that the charges against the oppositionists were
fabricated. This led to widespread fear and anxiety among communists worldwide, and the
Yugoslavs were no exception. They began looking for spies within their own community,
which, according to the Comintern, consisted of about five hundred individuals in the Soviet
Union, 180 of them in Moscow.152
From the KPJ‟s side, the purge was primarily conducted by Ivan Grţetić-Fleischer, the
party representative to the Comintern. A lumberjack from Karlovac near Zagreb, Grţetić was
an active trade unionist and joined the KPJ in 1920, soon after its foundation. He began his
rise to the party leadership in 1932, and was one of Gorkić‟s most trusted lieutenants. Grţetić
collaborated with Zigmas Angaretis, the Lithuanian Bolshevik who worked in the
International Control Commission (ICC) of the Comintern, and reported to Gorkić on the
expulsions that took place.153 The ICC was originally an appeals board to which those
expelled from constituent parties could lodge complaints about the decision, but it also
investigated foreign communists who were suspected to have committed personal or political
mistakes.154 As such, it became one of the main tools of repression within the Comintern after
152
RGASPI, 495-11-6, “О работе представителей партий,” January 20, 1936. This number could have been
even higher, as the Yugoslav historian Ubavka Vujošević collected biographies of six hundred Yugoslav victims
of the Great Purge before her death, in research that has yet to be published. Miroljub Vasić, “Dr Ubavka
Vujošević Cica (1930–2015),” Istorija 20. veka 1/2016, 223.
153
Branko Lazitch and Milorad M. Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford: The
Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 157-158.
154
44
the First Moscow Trial. The second most significant institution was the Cadres Department,
which carefully kept information on Comintern members for over a decade and a half. As the
persecution of potential “enemies of the people” intensified, the Cadres Department supplied
the NKVD with massive amounts of information, greatly facilitating repression of the
Comintern apparatus.155
The only direct involvement of Gorkić appears to have been his attendance at the
session of the ECCI Secretariat of September 5, 1936, at which Béla Kun was banned from
working in the Comintern and the Communist Party of Hungary, beginning his downfall.156
His fall from grace, however, lasted for almost two years,157 and Gorkić could not have
played a crucial role in it, as he was a mere candidate member of the ECCI. Aside from this,
he does not appear to have been directly involved in the Purge, although he was well aware of
it and publicly spoke in support of it. Responding to critics of the Purge and the trials, Gorkić
wrote that
Some naïve comrades are asking the following question: how is it possible for people who
have spent decades in the workers‟ movement to stoop so low? It is an inevitable
consequence of the factional struggles within the party. Whoever fights against the party
and its leadership cannot truly wish success to his party. On the contrary, he does
everything to prevent or slow down our successes, and while doing so, whether he wants it
or not, he ends up encountering the class enemy, and if he is blinded by his factional
interests, he connects with them, in fact becoming their mere tool. The case of Trotskyites
is not the first case in the history of the workers‟ movement. 158
Gorkić thus explicitly connected factionalism with treason. From this starting point, it
was not difficult to justify persecution of seemingly innocent people, considering them in fact
to be hidden enemies. In early September, Gorkić wrote a circular to the KPJ members, in
which he fully endorsed the decision of the First Moscow Trial to execute the accused, and
attacked the known Yugoslav oppositionists, Vojislav Vujović and Ante Ciliga, calling for the
155
156
RGASPI, 495-18-1112, “Protokoll (A) Nr. 70 der Sitzung des Sekretariats des EKKI am 5.Sept.1936.”
157
For an extremely interesting microhistorical account of Kun‟s downfall, see William J. Chase, “Microhistory
and Mass Repression: Politics, Personalities, and Revenge in the Fall of Béla Kun,” The Russian Review, 67/3
(2008): 454-483.
158
Ivan Oĉak, “Staljinski obraĉun s jugoslovenskim partijskim rukovodstvom u SSSR-u,” Radovi 21 (1988), 98.
45
death penalty for the former and the ostracism of the latter.159 Ciliga was released from prison
in 1935 and, having been an Italian citizen, left the USSR to settle in France, where he tried to
influence fellow Yugoslav émigrés. The communists thought that he used connections with
the Italian Embassy in Moscow to leave the country, which merely confirmed to them that the
most infamous Yugoslav Trotskyist must be a fascist spy. Vujović was in exile in Tashkent,
and was arrested there in July in connection to the First Moscow Trial. He was executed on
October 3, 1936.160 Despite the bombastic pronouncements in the party newspaper, the case
of Vujović was still a matter of the Soviet state, and not of the KPJ. Therefore, Gorkić
probably had little or nothing to do with his execution.
The period until the end of 1936 was a time of expulsions and arrests of former left
oppositionists, but by January 1937, the situation within the Comintern, and thus within the
KPJ, took a turn for the worse. After the trial of the so-called “Parallel anti-Soviet Trotskyist
Center” of Karl Radek, Georgy Pyatakov, and Grigori Sokolnikov implicated Nikolai
Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, the Central Committee of the VKP(b) held a Plenum from
February 23 to March 4, which heavily focused on cadres policy, calling for increased
vigilance and the rooting out of alleged enemies.161 By early April, a joint resolution of the
ECCI Presidium and the ICC Bureau stated that “The I.C.C. must bring to strict Party
accounting leading Party workers guilty of having recommended agents of the class enemy in
their parties to the ranks of the leading sections of the Communist International.”162 With
“agents of the class enemy” having been very loosely defined, virtually everyone became
suspicious, and the rise in arrests of foreign communists intensified almost immediately.
At this point, the KPJ itself became directly involved in the Great Purge. The
Yugoslav émigré community, already consisting largely of bitter factionalists with mutual
159
Oĉak, “Staljinski obraĉun s jugoslovenskim partijskim rukovodstvom u SSSR-u,” 87.
160
“Вуйович Войслав Дмитриевич,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 8, 2018,
161
For a summary of the Plenum, see Chase, Enemies within the Gates?, 217-221.
162
Chase, Enemies within the Gates?, 223.
46
disputes, quickly became engulfed in a wave of mutual accusations. Gorkić‟s
contemporaneous correspondence with Fleischer shows that he was closing ranks with his
supporters in the Soviet Union, who were coming under increasing criticism from fellow
émigrés.163 Gorkić explicitly identifies four individuals who were seen by opponents as
members of his “clique”: Fleischer, Horvatin, Simo Miljuš, and Grgur Vujović.164 Miljuš had
been the party‟s organizational secretary from 1923 to 1926, and was a leftist, while Grgur
Vujović was the brother of the arrested Trotskyist Vojislav. He was a former secretary of
SKOJ and Gorkić‟s representative to the Comintern before Fleischer. The investigations
surrounding these individuals would be a dark foreshadowing of the fate that awaited Gorkić
in Moscow.
Before the investigations of Gorkić and the “gorkićevci” began, the KPJ was
attempting to move as many political émigrés out of the Soviet Union as possible.165 This was
practiced by other Comintern parties as well, and it was not a conscious attempt to save
foreign communists from repression, but a necessity which arose out of fear that there might
be spies among their ranks.166 At the same time, the ICC was examining members of the pre-
1928 KPJ factions. Aside from Angaretis, a person under the pseudonym Crnogubec or
Gubĉek appears to have been frequently in contact with Fleischer. Gorkić was telling
Fleischer to either send this person information on particular individuals, or request
permission to publish the identities of Yugoslav volunteers to Spain from the Soviet Union.167
Therefore, the person in question is most likely Moisei Chernomordik, the deputy head of the
Cadres Department, although I have not been able to establish this with absolute certainty.168
163
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 34, April 29, 1937.
164
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 8, January 21, 1937.
165
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 22, April 5, 1937, 3.
166
Chase, Enemies within the Gates?, 105-107.
167
See RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 22, or RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from
Gorkić to Fleischer no. 8, February 5, 1937.
168
Oĉak alleged that “Crnogubec” refers to the Comintern itself, although this seems rather unconvincing. Oĉak,
Braća Cvijići, 464.
47
The most well-known individuals questioned by Angaretis in the spring of 1937 were
Đuro Cvijić, Kosta Novaković, and Radomir Vujović (the third of the Vujović brothers, and a
former party representative to the Comintern).169 According to Fleischer, Cvijić maintained
his belief that he had done nothing wrong, even using the investigation to attack Flesicher and
Gorkić.170 Cvijić and Novaković were investigated as members of the same leftist faction, and
Cvijić was expelled from the party in July 1937.171 Novaković, who had already been
expelled in 1932, was never reinstated,172 but was investigated nonetheless. Neither of them
had been arrested at that point, but they were completely ostracized from Soviet society.173
Although they apparently accused Gorkić and Fleischer of a variety of offenses, their
testimonies still did not mean much at the time. The first sign that the party leadership was
also deemed suspicious was when Fleischer himself came under investigation.
Fleischer was first interrogated by the ICC on March 26, 1937. He was criticized for
indulging in a series of love affairs which damaged his reputation as a party representative,
and of “rotten liberalism.”174 The latter meant that he was too lenient and insufficiently
vigilant to intra-party oppositionists. However, as Fleischer pointed out, this was not his fault,
but Gorkić‟s.175 As I have shown throughout the previous chapter, while Gorkić put all of his
efforts into enforcing party unity, he did not do this by expelling the former factionalists, but
by actively trying to bring them back into the fold. By 1937, this could have been interpreted
as outright enemy activity. Although Fleischer engaged in self-criticism, the pressure on him
did not cease, and he was becoming increasingly frustrated. He complained to Gorkić that the
émigré community hated him, and that he was faced with the unpleasant task of signing
169
170
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Fleischer to Gorkić no. 7, April 27, 1937, 2-3.
171
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Fleischer to Gorkić, July 17, 1937.
172
Vujošević, “Poslednja autobiografija Milana Gorkića, sekretara CK KPJ,” 122.
173
Both were left unemployed and without a roof over their heads. Oĉak, “Staljinski obraĉun s jugoslovenskim
partijskim rukovodstvom u SSSR-u,” 93-94.
174
RGASPI, 495-11-337, “Auszug aus dem Protokoll der Sitzung der IKK vom 26. III-37.”
175
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Fleischer to Gorkić no. 7, 2.
48
everyone‟s expulsions, pointing out that this was supposed to be Gorkić‟s job to begin with.176
He requested to be relieved of his duties and allowed to join the rest of the party leadership in
Paris. Already in early May, he notified Gorkić that the ICC, the Cadres Department, and the
Pieck Secretariat had all approved of his transfer,177 but the transfer never took place. After
several months of stalling, Fleischer was arrested before he obtained the permission to leave
the Soviet Union.
The Arrest of the General Secretary
On July 23, 1937, the ECCI Secretariat met to discuss the question of the KPJ general
secretary, Milan Gorkić. He had already been summoned to Moscow without much
information, as was customary at the time. His patron, Manuilsky, was out of town, as he had
been granted a month-long holiday.178 A special commission was set up to investigate
Gorkić‟s case, led by Wilhelm Pieck, and consisting of Georgi Damyanov (Belov), Mikhail
Trilisser (Moskvin) and Traicho Kostov (Spiridonov). The July 23 meeting already sheds light
on some of the main reasons for the arrest of Gorkić: namely, the earlier arrest of his wife,
and the failure of the transport of volunteers to Spain.179 However, as I will show in this
subchapter, there were many more reasons for his detention. In many ways, the KPJ general
secretary was a tragic victim of a series of unfortunate circumstances. In another era, they
would have led to his (somewhat justified) demotion, but during the Great Purge, they pointed
to treason, and thus led to his execution.
I identify three major factors that contributed to Gorkić‟s downfall: the general context
of intensified political repression within the Comintern; policy errors and lack of vigilance;
176
177
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 38, May 12, 1937.
178
RGASPI, 495-18-1213, Protokoll Nr. 172 (A) des Sekretariats des EKKI, zusammengestellt auf Grund
fliegenden Abstimmung unter den Mitgliedern des Sekretariats des EKKI, vom 1.8.37.” According to Vladimir
Dedijer, Gorkić stayed in Manuilsky‟s apartment in Hotel Lux, where he was arrested by the NKVD. Vladimir
Dedijer, Josip Broz Tito: Prilozi za biografiju (Zagreb: Kultura, 1953), 257.
179
RGASPI, 495-18-1211, “Protokoll (B) Nr. 167 zusammengestellt auf Grund fliegenden Abstimmung unter
den Mitgliedern des Sekretariats des EKKI am 23. Juli 1937.”
49
and Gorkić‟s connections to certain compromised and arrested figures. His mistakes in all
three fields could have led the NKVD to the conclusion that he was a Trotskyist, or at the very
least a sympathizer of Trotsky. The most commonly accepted explanation in the literature is
that Gorkić was arrested and executed for being a British spy.180 At the end of this chapter, I
will show that the accusations against him were far more extensive than that.
The first cause of Gorkić‟s downfall, however, was the intensification of
investigations and repression within the Communist International and the Soviet state as a
whole. Were it not for this, he would probably have faced a mere demotion, like many of his
predecessors. The fact that he was a foreigner probably aggravated his position as well, given
that xenophobia reached its peak from mid-1936.181 Furthermore, the members of the Cadres
Department in charge of foreign parties, Anton Krajewski and Chernomordik, were arrested
in May and June respectively.182 Their testimonies would also play a crucial role in the arrests
of foreign communists in the months that followed. Aside from that, Chernomordik and
Gorkić were close friends, a fact that was noted in a report on Gorkić from late July.183
Gorkić‟s more concrete errors pertained to party policy and a lack of vigilance; after
the arrest of Kirov, vigilance was the order of the day. It was considered the ultimate
Bolshevik virtue, and lacking it put the Bolshevik party, the Comintern, and the entire
communist movement in grave danger.184 Gorkić‟s main mistake was that he envisioned the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a broad church, incorporating various views on the party‟s
revolutionary course, and collaborating with a wide variety of political organizations in an
anti-fascist front. This belief was certainly reinforced by the policy prescriptions of the
Seventh Congress. Gorkić failed to realize the limits of this openness, in particular regarding
180
Geoffrey Swain, “Tito and the Twilight of the Comintern,” in International Communism and the Communist
International, 1919–43, ed. Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998),
210.
181
Chase, Enemies within the Gates?, 145, 176.
182
Chase, Enemies within the Gates?, 237.
183
184
Chase, Enemies within the Gates?, 5-7.
50
the attitude towards bourgeois parties and intraparty oppositionists. Some of the consequences
of this misunderstanding were insignificant, and were merely amplified by the anxiety that the
Great Purge triggered. Others, however, seriously threatened the KPJ.
The more benign ones pertained to Gorkić‟s policy towards real and alleged
factionalists. As already mentioned, Gorkić‟s idea of party unity was not the expulsion of
dissenters, but their return to the fold. He appears to have had a very democratic view of
relations within a communist party. This explains his persistent attempts to persuade Đuro
Cvijić of the correctness of his party line in 1932–1933, his compromise with Stjepan Cvijić
and Ćopić at the April Plenum, and his preference for leaving the expulsions of 1937 to
Fleischer. While his attitude to intra-party opposition is admirable, it was completely
incompatible with the contemporary Stalinist vision of the party. By the time he arrived in
Moscow, Gorkić was aware of his, now life-threatening, mistakes. In his last party
autobiography, written on August 3, 1937, he criticizes his lenient attitude to individuals like
Ćopić and Stjepan Cvijić, justifying it as an attempt “to save intra-party peace and save the
party from a renewal of factional struggles.”185
Another issue that stemmed from Gorkić‟s lenience towards factionalists and
oppositionists was his perceived meek attitude towards Trotskyism. At this point, Trotskyists
were no longer seen as a current in the international communist movement, but rather as a
group of traitors and criminals who worked for the capitalist powers. This is something that
Gorkić failed to understand: a report by Kamilo Horvatin written after Gorkić‟s arrest points
out that under Gorkić, the party newspaper engaged in intellectual polemics with the
Trotskyists, rather than simply uncovering them as traitors and murderers.186 This attitude was
enough to accuse Gorkić of having harbored Trotskyist sympathies. Additionally, Gorkić
185
186
RGASPI, 495-11-357, Петровский, “О задачах борьбы с троцкизмом в Югославии,” 2, October 17, 1937.
I will write more on Horvatin‟s radical change of attitude towards Gorkić at the end of the chapter.
51
defended the publication of Ĉolaković‟s ABC of Leninism,187 which was later denounced as a
Trotskyist theoretical piece.
Gorkić‟s more serious errors were related to his interpretation of the popular front. As
mentioned earlier, he was accused of various other “rightist errors” as early as 1933, and
specifically of liquidationism from 1935. His attitude towards the 1935 election in Yugoslavia
was that the communists should support the United Opposition regardless of the fact that they
were not granted any concessions. The leader of the opposition, Vladko Maĉek, correctly
calculated that they would receive communist votes anyway. 188 Gorkić‟s vision of the popular
front was one in which the communists merely support democratic parties against a
dictatorship, rendering them virtually indistinguishable from the bourgeois opposition. In
order to facilitate this cooperation, Gorkić focused on legalizing the work of party members.
He saw this as a way to halt the mass arrests in the country, whereas the Comintern saw it as
the cause of mass arrests.189 The Comintern was correct, and Gorkić‟s actions led to the
decimation of the party organization in the country. Paired with this was Gorkić‟s continued
inability to return the party leadership back to the country, where it was supposed to focus on
turning the KPJ into a mass organization once again.190 From here, it was not too difficult to
conclude that mass arrests were not a cause of individual failures, but of systemic problems
with the party, or even significant police infiltration in the highest party organs. 191 Although
this final conclusion was more the product of excessive fear, Gorkić‟s liquidationism did
undoubtedly damage the party and, ultimately, his own reputation.
The third major factor that led to Gorkić‟s downfall was his connection to individuals
who had already been denounced and arrested. This was rather typical for victims of the Great
187
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 20, March 26, 1937, 3.
188
189
Swain, Tito, 18-19.
190
RGASPI, 495-11-335, Petrowski‟s Report Dated August 5, 1937, 2.
191
This last charge was mounted by Kamilo Horvatin, who at this pointed had completely turned his back on
Gorkić. RGASPI, 495-11-335, Petrowski‟s Report Dated August 5, 1937, 3.
52
Purge, although Gorkić‟s inner circle at times made embarrassingly careless errors that only
cemented the belief that he is a provocateur. Long before this became obvious to the NKVD,
other arrests which shook Gorkić‟s position took place. Bukharin, his ally from the 1920s and
patron prior to Manuilsky, was arrested in February. Even more damningly, his wife, Betty
Glan, who was not directly involved in Yugoslav party politics, was arrested in June.192
However, the noose truly began to tighten with the arrests of his close KPJ associates, Sima
Miljuš193 and Grgur Vujović,194 in late July. Gorkić travelled to Moscow aware of their
arrests, and they certainly did not help relieve his fear for his own life.195 Their testimonies, as
well as those of Đuro Cvijić, Kosta Novaković, and Kamilo Horvatin, were all used to gather
a file on Gorkić‟s mistakes, both real and imagined.196
The biggest problems came from Gorkić‟s innermost circle; the party representative to
the Comintern, Fleischer, the head of the party press, Ţivojin Pavlović, and the Politburo
members, Ĉolaković and Muk. I have already explained the case of Fleischer, although it is
also worth noting both his and Gorkić‟s sheer recklessness at the time, as the two men were
found to have lovers. Given that another of their close associates, Blagoje Parović, had been
removed from all his posts just a year before for the exact same reason, they should have been
aware of the potential peril for their own careers (and, at this point, lives). As for Ţivojin
Pavlović, Gorkić‟s personal secretary and head of the party press, he was already under fire in
January 1937, when a special party commission reprimanded him and removed him from
most of his duties.197 Although it was not specified why exactly he was investigated, it is most
192
193
“Кубурич Илья Георгиевич,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 10, 2018,
194
“Вуйович-Митрович-Грегор Григорий Дмитриевич,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed April
10, 2018, http://lists.memo.ru/d7/f354.htm.
195
Vujošević shows that his last autobiography is written as a detailed attempt to exonerate himself while still
engaging in self-criticism, which suggests he knew the situation to be dire at this point. Vujošević, “Poslednja
autobiografija Milana Gorkića, sekretara CK KPJ,” 109.
196
Vujošević, “Poslednja autobiografija Milana Gorkića, sekretara CK KPJ,” 126-128.
197
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter from Gorkić to Fleischer no. 8, February 5, 1937.
53
likely related to the fact that Pavlović, a journalist, had met with Leon Trotsky in Turkey and
interviewed him.198 He was later expelled from the party and in 1940, he published a book
titled Bilans sovjetskog termidora (The Balance Sheet of the Soviet Thermidor),199 one of the
very first critical accounts of the Great Purge. This, combined with the fact that he began
working for the so-called Central Press Bureau of the Yugoslav Royal Government,200 which
was essentially an intelligence agency, confirmed to the communists that Pavlović, like
Gorkić, had been a police spy. In 1941, he was shot by the Yugoslav Partisans.
An even bigger problem for Gorkić was the new Politburo member Rodoljub
Ĉolaković. As fellow Bosnians, the two had known each other since 1919,201 virtually
throughout their entire time in the communist movement. A member of a communist terrorist
organization called Crvena pravda (Red Justice), Ĉolaković was arrested in 1921 and
sentenced to twelve years in prison as an accomplice in the assassination of the Yugoslav
Interior Minister, Milorad Drašković. This presumably did a lot to save him from being
involved in factional struggles. From 1933, he was an émigré in the Soviet Union and studied
at the International Lenin School. He worked as a CC representative in Yugoslavia and one of
the main writers for the party newspaper, until he was coopted into the Politburo in August
1936. By mid-1937, serious doubts were being raised about him. The source of these doubts
was unknown, but he was already branded as “a provocateur and a traitor since 1921.”202 The
cause was most likely the assassination itself, which was interpreted as an ultra-leftist terrorist
act which harmed the party. Furthermore, Horvatin explicitly accused him of being a
198
199
Ţivojin Pavlović, Bilans sovjetskog termidora (Uţice: Kadinjaĉa, 2001).
200
201
202
54
Trotskyist soon after.203 Had he been in the Soviet Union at the time, Ĉolaković undoubtedly
would not have made it out alive.204
Even this was not the most worrying of appointments conducted by Gorkić. Adolf
Muk was by far his greatest liability. Muk was a party organizer from the Montenegrin
Littoral and enjoyed extreme popularity in his native region, although he never showed
ambition to engage in the party at higher levels. Nevertheless, he rose through the ranks
rapidly from 1934 on, as one of Gorkić‟s closest protégés, and entered the Politburo at the end
of that year. Universally identified as a bland, gray apparatchik, Muk was later described by
Ĉolaković as “one of those people who, when they reached a high position by chance,
suddenly started believing themselves to be smarter, braver, and in every sense superior to
those hierarchically below them, and who insisted on showing that off at every opportunity
they got.”205
Muk‟s first major blunder came in the summer of 1936, when he openly disagreed
with the decision to execute Zinoviev and Kamenev, which he saw as harmful to the
reputation of the USSR, although he never questioned their guilt. He wrote a short statement
on it only four months later, essentially stating that he did not and would not engage in self-
criticism, as that would only benefit Ćopić‟s and Cvijić‟s factionalist work in the party.206 No
further measures were taken against him, and he remained in the Politburo. Moreover, Gorkić
even nominated him for the post of KPJ representative in the International Brigades,207
although that task was eventually given to Parović. Muk was then given an arguably even
more responsible Spain-related assignment, and botched it completely.
203
RGASPI, 495-11-343, Petrowski‟s Report to Wilhelm Pieck Dated October 2, 1937, 1-2.
204
His co-conspirator from 1921, Rudolf Hercigonja, was arrested on August 22, 1937 and shot four months
later. “Миронов Сергей Николаевич,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 16, 2018,
205
206
207
AJ, Fond Communist International – KPJ Section (790/1 KI), 1937/5, “Protokol sednice PBCK 12.I.1937.“
55
Muk was tasked with organizing the transport of over 500 Yugoslav volunteers to
Spain on the ship La Corse in March 1937. The culpability for the eventual failure of the ill-
conceived plan remains a subject of controversy, and is beyond the scope of my research.
What is certain is that the plan was discovered by the Yugoslav police, and Muk, as its main
organizer, was arrested. Under torture, he confessed everything, and gave the Yugoslav police
detailed information on every single individual member of the Central Committee, most of
whom had been known to them only under pseudonyms at that point. 208 This was the largest
single act of betrayal in the history of the KPJ, although Gorkić, having initally been given
incorrect information, insisted that an international campaign for Muk‟s release be organized.
From the Comintern‟s perspective, things looked alarming. Not only had Gorkić made his
closest associate a person who questioned the outcome of the First Moscow Trial, not only
had he given that person two extremely responsible tasks regarding Spanish volunteers, and
not only had that person failed and betrayed the party in the process, but that person had also
enjoyed Gorkić‟s unrelenting and unconditional support throughout.
The final nail in the coffin for Milan Gorkić was the loss of Kamilo Horvatin‟s
support. Identified as a member of Gorkić‟s “clique” in the final year of his leadership, he
became Gorkić‟s main accuser. From June, at the request of Wilhelm Pieck, he began
presenting regular reports on the misdeeds of Gorkić and the rest of the Politburo, most
notably Muk and Ĉolaković. In his report from August 5, he went as far as to suggest that
Gorkić should be removed from the post of general secretary.209 As I have shown in the case
of the April Plenum, just a year earlier, this had been an extremely bold and dangerous move.
By August 1937, however, the gravity of Gorkić‟s errors was too big to ignore, and even his
Comintern patrons were renouncing their support for him. Horvatin would go on to launch a
leadership bid of his own, which I will elaborate on in the following chapter.
208
209
56
Gorkić did not surrender without a fight. His final party autobiography submitted to
the Cadres Department was an extremely detailed personal exoneration, in which he
accentuated his anti-factionalist credentials,210 and attempted to present himself as vigilant,
noting his opposition to already expelled or purged individuals such as Osip Piatnitsky,
Henryk Walecki, Béla Kun, and Vojislav Vujović.211 By now, however, it was too late; his
mistakes indicated not only incompetence, but even potential treason. In 1937, that was all
that it took to draw the attention of the NKVD.
The files from Stalin‟s personal archive shed light on Gorkić‟s imagined crimes. His
alleged counterrevolutionary activity began in 1923. From 1927, “on behalf of Bukharin, he
created an anti-Soviet organization within the KIM, which he headed until 1930,” after which
he was the leader of the counter-revolutionary organization within the KPJ.212 Furthermore,
according to documents from the FSB Archive obtained by Ubavka Vujošević, his “counter-
revolutionary organization” within the KPJ was “proven” to have had ties with the anti-
Comintern group of Piatnitsky and Wilhelm Knorin,213 directly connecting Gorkić to the
purge of the Comintern apparatus. He was also found guilty of intentionally damaging the
KPJ by filling it with Trotskyists and police provocateurs.214 All of this information was
obtained through the confessions of Fleischer, who had been arrested on the same day, and his
Comintern associates Krajewski and Chernomordik.215 After a lengthy period of investigation
210
211
Vujošević, “Poslednja autobiografija Milana Gorkića, sekretara CK KPJ,” 123-125.
212
“ГОРКИЧ Милан Миланович,“ in “Сталинские списки,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 16, 2018,
http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/4-68.htm.
213
214
215
57
(which was used to implicate other Yugoslav communists),216 Gorkić was executed on
November 1, 1937.
Conclusions
The tragic downfall of Milan Gorkić was a consequence of both contingency and of
his personal mistakes and flaws. His vision of the KPJ as a broad church did not appeal to
everybody and his approach to the popular front seemed to his opponents to be a rightist
deviation. His rivals, led by Vladimir Ćopić and Stjepan Cvijić, led an unsuccessful attack in
April 1936, which merely served to cement Gorkić‟s power, with the Comintern officially
naming him the general secretary of the KPJ in the fall of that year. He was at the height of
his power, yet he had just over a year left to live. The Comintern interpreted attacks on him as
a renewal of factional struggles, and thus threw its support behind him, seeing Gorkić as the
only individual who could keep the party united. The situation within the Comintern itself,
however, was getting worse by the day. By the spring of 1937, the Great Purge was
decimating its ranks.
The KPJ was swept up in the process: anyone who had been involved in factional
struggles before 1928 became suspicious. This would still have kept Gorkić in the clear, were
it not for his own cardinal mistakes. While intensified repression within the Comintern
certainly did not help him, the state of the KPJ proved to be much more damning for his
position. His unchanging attitude to the popular front was not only liquidationist, but had also
led directly to mass arrests of many of Yugoslavia‟s prominent communists. The men in the
216
In an endless circle of mutual accusations, Fleischer was also “uncovered” as a spy through the (presumably
forced) confessions of Gorkić. “ФЛЕЙШЕР Стефан Петрович,“ in “Сталинские списки,” MEMORIAL,
accessed April 16, 2018, http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/3-135.htm. The second major wave of arrests of
prominent Yugoslavs, on February 7, 1938, was a direct consequence of the interrogations of Gorkić and
Fleischer. Đuro Cvijić, Filip Filipović, Kamilo Horvatin, and Antun Mavrak were arrested on that day. See
“КРЕШИЧ-ЦВЕЙЧ Георгий Георгиевич,“ in “Сталинские списки,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 16, 2018,
http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/8-35.htm; “БОШКОВИЧ-ФИЛИППОВИЧ Филипп Васильевич,“ in
“Сталинские списки,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 16, 2018, http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/7-199.htm;
“ПЕТРОВСКИЙ Борис Николаевич, он же ХОРВАТИН Камило,“ in “Сталинские списки,” MEMORIAL,
accessed April 23, 2018, http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/7-7.htm; and “КЕРБЕР Карл Яковлевич,“ in
“Сталинские списки,” MEMORIAL, accessed April 16, 2018, http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/7-201.htm;
58
party‟s top were widely considered to be there due to personal loyalty to Gorkić rather than
any actual competence for the job. Their major mistakes were overlooked, until they became
so massive that the Comintern and the NKVD both took notice. The failure to transport five
hundred Yugoslav volunteers to Spain, organized by his closest-associate-turned-police-
informant, had finally sealed his fate. While Gorkić was most certainly not a traitor, he
definitely appeared to be one in the febrile atmosphere of 1937. His arrest and death brought
about what he feared the most, and what the Comintern had accurately predicted: a renewal of
factional struggles, much fiercer than that of April 1936.
59
The Factions
“Sometimes it looked as if a factionalist hated the factionalists from the competing factions
more than he hated the class enemy.”
Rodoljub Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju217
The political landscape of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia between 1937 and 1939
was shaped by two main factors. One was the attitude to Gorkić‟s real or alleged supporters
(gorkićevci), and the other was the direction in which the party should be heading during a
worsening international situation. The émigré community lived in uncertainty, while most of
the members within the country (aside from those connected with the émigrés) were unaware
of the magnitude of the emerging struggle. In this chapter, I will present what I consider to be
the four major factions that vied for power within the KPJ from August 1937. I will argue that
all of them, in their own way, attempted to present themselves as occupying “the center,”
while everybody confronting them was presented as a deviationist of the left or the right. At
the same time, they tried to create (or at least leave the impression of creating) a wide-
ranging, non-sectarian political organization. This was a typical Stalinist tactic, which was
based on simultaneously presenting one‟s own political line as the only correct one and
persuading as many adherents as possible to support it. Before I investigate the four factions,
however, I will briefly examine the impact of foreign communists on the struggle. From there,
I will present the policies and tactics of the major groups.
The groups‟ names stem from established historiography and are not intended to give
value judgments on their political positions: they did not come up with the names themselves,
as that would have implied that they recognize themselves as factions, which was something
nobody was willing to admit. Each of the four factions that I will be presenting also had its
own candidate for the vacant post of general secretary, although the groups‟ precise
membership, due to their unofficial nature, was not always clear. With the rise of Stalin, the
217
60
post of general secretary became (and remained) the “apex” of power,218 and factional
struggles within groups were, in essence, a struggle among individuals for a single post, with
hand-picked candidates (usually close supporters of the individual in question) becoming the
new Politburo once the leader had been appointed. It is quite telling in this regard that even
the Comintern explicitly identified the factions according to the names of the individuals who
led them.219
The first one was the Temporary Leadership, led by Josip Broz, who during this period
increasingly began using the pseudonym Tito. Though his group was not confirmed as the
temporary leadership until January 1939,220 the name stuck in Yugoslav historiography, as yet
another reminder of the cliché that history is written by the winners. The second was the so-
called Parallel Center, led by Ivo Marić and Labud Kusovac. The name was pejorative and it
was given to them by their opponents, invoking the “Trotskyist Parallel Center” of Radek,
Pyatakov and Sokolnikov, who were tried in January 1937. The third competitor was Kamilo
Horvatin, the only Moscow émigré involved, whose leadership bid was hitherto unknown. I
argue that he did try to win the post of general secretary, although proof that he was forming a
faction similar to those of Tito and Marić is still lacking. The final group was the so-called
Wahhabis, supporters of Yugoslavia‟s legendary political prisoner Petko Miletić. Named after
the Islamic extremist movement, they were devout ultra-left followers of their leader. Marić
and Kusovac were well connected to Miletić and eventually began considering him as the
potential future leader of the KPJ; nevertheless, I will treat the Parallel Center and the
Wahhabis as two separate groups. This is because, on the one hand, they had very different
political ideas, and on the other, they operated at different times. While Marić and Kusovac
were politically neutralized by early 1939, Miletić only left prison in June 1939, going on to
218
Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (London: Vintage Books, 2010), 107.
219
The Temporary Leadership was called “The group of Walter” and the Parallel Center “The group of
Zhelezar,” after Tito and Marić‟s respective pseudonyms. RGASPI, 495-20-647, “тов. Димитрову (сводка по
югославским материалам),” March 29, 1938, 1.
220
Simić, Tito: svetac i magle, 97.
61
pose the last serious challenge to Tito‟s leadership. I will argue that Marić and Kusovac did
not consider him a potential leadership candidate until they themselves were defeated.
The struggle between these groups was not purely an internal Yugoslav party affair.
Many members of the Comintern and foreign communists were directly involved in it,
forming transnational networks that not only transcended the alleged unity of national parties,
but sometimes pitted members of the same party against each other. The most famous case of
this is certainly Georgi Dimitrov‟s support for Tito,221 although this support, as I will show,
was far more precarious than previously thought. As I already noted, Kamilo Horvatin
enjoyed the confidence of Wilhelm Pieck, the head of the Secretariat in charge of Balkan
affairs, who was continuously commissioning reports from Horvatin during the half year
when Tito‟s telegrams were being left unanswered.222 This shows disagreement and divergent
preferences even at the highest levels of the Comintern. Furthermore, one of the crucial actors
in the Yugoslav factional struggle appears to have been Georgi Damyanov, Bulgaria‟s post-
World War II Minister of Defense and Chairman of the National Assembly. From June 1937,
under his Soviet name Alexander Belov, Damyanov headed the Cadres Department.223 As
already mentioned, he was part of the special commission set up a month later to investigate
the case of Gorkić, and was later the main supporter of Petko Miletić‟s leadership bid. 224 He
was probably also connected to Marić and Kusovac, although their main international contacts
appear to have been in Spain and France, namely the International Brigades‟ Comintern
representative, Bulgarian communist Anton Ivanov – Bogdanov,225 and Maurice Tréand
221
Marietta Stankova, Georgi Dimitrov: A Biography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 141.
222
After several letters, Pieck finally replied to Tito on December 17, 1937, although Tito only received the
letter on January 7, 1938. Swain, Tito, 21.
223
RGASPI, 495-18-1204, “Protokoll (A) Nr. 153 zusammengestellt auf Grund fliegenden Abstimmung unter
den Mitgliedern des Sekretariats des EKKI am 23. Juni 1937,” 2.
224
Goldstein, Tito, 162-163.
225
AJ, Fond CK KPJ – KPJ émigrés in France (507 CK KPJ – France), I/30, Kristina Kusovac, “Kratka
biografija,” 1.
62
(Legros),226 head of the cadre commission of the French Communist Party. Finally, the role of
Ivan Karaivanov, although widely acknowledged,227 remains unclear. Karaivanov was a
Bulgarian communist who worked in the Cadres Department of the Comintern from 1934,
and was most likely also an operative of the NKVD. He was particularly close to Tito and
supported him throughout the period. In return, he received high posts in the postwar
Yugoslav state, where he immigrated already in May 1945. As a loyal supporter of Tito, he
was later one of his leading propagandists following the split with Stalin. Although he always
spoke of Tito in superlatives, he shed little light on how much exactly he had helped him
during the Great Purge.
Overall, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia did not fare well in the eyes of the ECCI,
and this made the impact of foreigners crucial in the factional struggle. Looking at the
primary sources, it appears that an informal hierarchy existed within the Comintern, with
Bulgarian communists essentially charged with resolving the internal party affairs of the KPJ,
and the Yugoslavs, in turn, being responsible for one of the few organizations that ranked
even lower than the KPJ, the Communist Party of Albania (which effectively existed only on
paper). For example, in the same way that Bulgarians were heavily involved in special
commissions pertaining to Yugoslav affairs, Gorkić was made responsible for investigating
Albanian Trotskyists.228 This informal division appears to have replaced the earlier structure
of the Balkan Communist Federation, an umbrella organization founded in the 1920s which,
by this point, existed in name only. I will interpret all the processes within the KPJ with this
power hierarchy in mind.
226
AJ, 516 MG, Box 58, 2231/2, “Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem,“ 46-47.
227
Bondarev, Misterija Tito, 196; Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1, 95-96; Goldstein, Tito, 163-166; Jasper
Godwin Ridley, Tito (London: Constable, 1994), 140.
228
RGASPI, 495-18-1195, “Protokoll (B) Nr. 134 zusammengestellt auf Grund fliegenden Abstimmung unter
den Mitgliedern des Sekretariats des EKKI am 15.IV.1937.”
63
Figure 2. Factions in the KPJ from the fall of Gorkić until the end of 1940. The names of
faction leaders are bolded. The names of those not involved in any factions are in black. The
group around Ljuba Radovanović was composed of former disciples of Sima Marković, but
none of them attempted to take over the KPJ.
The Temporary Leadership
Following Gorkić‟s departure to Moscow, the Politburo members in Paris stopped
receiving letters from him, which was unusual. Fleischer also stopped writing. Furthermore,
the Comintern inexplicably ceased sending funds which the Politburo badly needed for
propaganda activity.229 Unsure of what to do, both Tito and Ĉolaković kept writing letters to
Fleischer and Gorkić, the last one having been sent as late as September 21, 1937.230 The
Politburo was aware that something was wrong, and certainly suspected the worst, although
they were not receiving any specific information from anyone. Already at the end of August,
229
230
64
Tito wrote a letter directly to Wilhelm Pieck. The letter shows an attempt to continue with
business as usual, briefly inquiring about the situation with Gorkić and Fleischer, but
primarily focusing on party affairs and seeking the Comintern‟s guidance.231 This was Tito‟s
first display of initiative, and the beginning of his rise to the leading position in the party.
As he began to take action, Tito had a very clear advantage in Paris, simply due to the
fact that he enjoyed support from the majority of the party‟s most prominent members there.
According to Ĉolaković, the rump Politburo had accepted Tito as the de facto leader on its
own volition in August 1937. Apparently, he and Ţujović decided to invite Tito to Paris once
they realized Gorkić was not replying to their letters.232 Why he was chosen by his fellow
communists as the first among equals remains unclear. As mentioned earlier, the theory about
Tito having been the party‟s second-in-command after the April Plenum has been discredited
by Bondarev‟s recent research.233 For lack of a better explanation, I will posit that he was
simply the most experienced member of the Politburo, with Ĉolaković and Ţujović having
been part of the leadership for less than a year.
Ĉolaković further claims that the Comintern was notified of Tito taking over the duties
of party secretary in a letter to Pieck in late August 1937.234 This, however, is untrue: Tito‟s
letter to Pieck does not contain any information on him becoming general secretary.235 In
reality, he did not dare put such a motion forward until later in 1938. If he or anybody else
had done it in August 1937, it would have been considered a major breach of party discipline
and a challenge against the democratic centralist nature of the party, as Gorkić was still
231
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 3, 90-91.
232
233
It is interesting to note that Tito does seem to have already enjoyed high standing in the KPJ for some time: in
August 1935, the Yugoslav delegation at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern unanimously supported his
candidacy for membership in the ECCI. The Comintern interpreted this as an attack on Gorkić (who supported
Tito‟s candidacy), and punished the KPJ by refusing to give it seats on the ECCI. Gorkić was eventually elected,
but merely as a candidate member, and not a full member, meaning he did not have voting rights at ECCI
meetings. This incident is even more remarkable given Tito‟s relative obscurity at the time. Bondarev, Misterija
Tito, 112-118.
234
235
65
formally the leader. It remains possible that Ĉolaković merely wrote this to establish a
retroactive legitimization of Tito‟s leadership. Given the informal nature of most day-to-day
operations of the illegal party, the arbitrary decision of putting Tito in charge, although
certainly illegitimate, would not have been too out of the ordinary. Horvatin‟s direct proposal
to remove Gorkić, written almost at the same time, was a far more formal breach of party
discipline. Both, however, tell us a lot more about Gorkić‟s poor standing at the time of his
demise than of particularly vile scheming on behalf of his fellow party comrades.
For all practical purposes, Tito did increasingly behave as a general secretary in the
making from the late summer of 1937. He was the first individual to take initiative and start
writing directly to the Comintern, although his letters initially went unanswered. Originally
dealing only with questions of cadres,236 he soon began accelerating work on the issues on
which Gorkić had been procrastinating, such as moving the party leadership back into the
country. These were not yet early signs of independent decision-making, as he was merely
continuing what Gorkić had already begun.237 As such, they did not cause too much
controversy.
Tito‟s first steps were very cautious. The issue of moving the party leadership back
into the country, under the slogan of reconnecting it with the masses, would have been
particularly appealing to the Comintern. As most high ranking members were scattered
between Moscow, Vienna, and Paris, returning them to Yugoslavia would have made
communication easier and ameliorated the negative effects of political emigration, such as
236
Tito, Ĉolaković, and Lovro Kuhar were members of a special commission which, in September 1937,
investigated Hudomalj‟s lack of party discipline due to his behavior at the April Plenum. Tito, Sabrana djela,
vol. 3, 190. Interestingly, the original members of the commission were supposed to be Ĉolaković, Marić and
Drago Marušić, who ran the party press in France at the time. The new commission consisted of people
markedly more sympathetic to Gorkić. AJ, 790/1 KI, 1937/164, “Zapisnik sjednice 28.VI.1937.”
237
One of Gorkić‟s last acts as party leader was to prepare a letter to the Prison Committee in Sremska Mitrovica
with Edvard Kardelj. However, the contents of this letter are unknown. AJ, 790/1 KI, 1937/164, “Zapisnik
sjednice 328.VI.1937.”
66
factionalism.238 This was a development welcomed by both the Comintern and the rank and
file, and Tito would not be the only leadership candidate who would emphasize this proposal.
Notably, this policy echoed the old Bolshevik slogan “A single party center – and in Russia,”
which Lenin fought for in the early 1900s.239
The policies proposed by Tito represented, in essence, a close following of the
Comintern‟s instructions from the Moscow meeting of August 1936. From the end of 1937,
his Temporary Leadership would more or less consistently push for them. The most
significant proposals, aside from returning the party leadership back into the country, were
pushing for a popular front “from below,” working on the creation of a united workers‟ party,
preserving the territorial integrity and social order of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, calling for
an antifascist foreign policy based on collective security, 240 renewing the focus on work
among women‟s and students‟ organizations, and reorganizing the party structure in order to
avoid both liquidationism and mass arrests. As I will later show, it was only the policy
towards the Yugoslav state that would undergo more radical alteration in the latter half of the
factional struggle, but this would more or less coincide with the new leftward turn in the
Comintern following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.241
The most important policy shift was Tito‟s political struggle against the menace of
liquidationism. This was the issue over which he had already criticized Gorkić in late 1936,
and he was determined to show the Comintern that the party would be changing its course. As
previously discussed, the attempts of legalization at all costs were seen by the Comintern and
the party opposition as the cause of the mass arrests which plagued the country in 1935 and
238
In addition, the push to get as many émigrés out of the USSR as possible was certainly also a factor that made
the Comintern view this proposal favorably.
239
Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky, Revolutionary Silhouettes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 37.
240
Collective security refers to the Soviet foreign policy in the 1930s, which was focused on pursuing a grand
antifascist alliance with France and the United Kingdom against Germany. For a detailed account of it, see
Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39 (London:
Macmillan, 1984).
241
Swain, Tito, 25.
67
1936, while the unconditional political alliance with the opposition almost made the party
indistinguishable from the bourgeois parties. Like Gorkić, Tito reported on the working of the
United Opposition, and saluted their efforts, but consciously decided not to propose
continuing attempts to form an electoral alliance.242 As he kept sending letters to Pieck
without reply, he always emphasized the need for unity of the working class and collaboration
with the socialists, but refused to associate the party with the liberal opposition parties.243 In
terms of party structure, he focused on forming secret party cells within legal organizations in
the country, such as trade unions, opposition parties, or student associations. According to
Swain, this was the most significant discontinuity between Tito and Gorkić:
Tito would not have contradicted Gorkic‟s view that the underground was discredited, but
rather than abandoning it he concentrated on reforming the underground, making it more
secure and more in tune with workers‟ needs. He concentrated on trying to break down the
old „super-conspiratorial‟ three-man cell structure – in which student revolutionaries had
debated the pros and cons of the dictatorship of the proletariat – and establish Party cells in
the legal workers‟ movement.244
In Tito‟s view, the popular front essentially meant communist infiltration in legal
organizations, the creation of party cells subjected to the Central Committee within these
organizations, and ensuring the party‟s guiding role in them. It was not so much a “popular
front” as it was a transformation of major legal organizations in the country into communist
fronts. It was a huge success, with the party gaining ground in the majority of prominent
organizations in the country, and increasing its membership from 1,500 in 1937 to 8,000 in
1941.245
The major argument against Tito, in the eyes of the Comintern, was his cadre policy,
particularly regarding his relationship with individuals close to Gorkić. Overall, Tito
proceeded with relative caution in this area as well, but a number of his choices seem rather
reckless in retrospect. While his calls for moving the leadership to the country, along with a
242
243
244
Swain, Tito, 22.
245
Swain, Tito, 27.
68
more Leninist approach to party organization and the popular front, were in line with what the
Comintern wanted, his cadre policy was consciously or (more likely) unconsciously
rebellious. This might have seriously undermined his leadership bid in the first months after
Gorkić‟s arrest. Aside from keeping Ĉolaković and Ţujović as his closest associates, he also
remained close to CC member Ivan Krndelj, who was soon singled out in Moscow both as a
leading gorkićevac and as an alleged Croatian nationalist.246 Undoubtedly his bravest act in
these months was his call for the release of Fleischer, who, as Tito certainly knew, had
already been arrested by the NKVD;247 needless to say, the effort to save him was not
successful. Even more mysteriously, Tito appears to have actively collaborated with Ţivojin
Pavlović in the fall of 1937, even though Pavlović was already obviously falling out of favor
as a “Trotskyist” even before the arrest of Gorkić. Tito had attempted to assign him to a high
responsibility post, coordinating the work of Yugoslav émigrés in Canada, before an
intervention by Stjepan Cvijić led to an investigation by the Cadres Department that
eventually resulted in Pavlović‟s expulsion.248
Cvijić was in touch with Tito and had good relations with him, unlike with Gorkić.249
In late 1937, he was back in Moscow and, considering his earlier oppositional work to have
been vindicated, wrote a report to Pieck, outlining his proposals to restore order in the party.
Cvijić gave a measured overall assessment of all the major leadership candidates (Tito, Marić,
Horvatin), proposed the restoration of several others to the party leadership (his brother Đuro,
Filip Filipović, and the already arrested Simo Miljuš), and engaged in self-criticism, admitting
that his actions from 1936 were reckless, although his opposition to Gorkić was justified.250
246
RGASPI, 495-11-343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated October 2, 1937, 2.
247
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “тов. Димитрову,” March 29, 1938, 2.
248
Vujošević, “Poslednja autobiografija Milana Gorkića,” 127.
249
Tito‟s later letters to Pieck were sent through Cvijić. Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 3, 124.
250
RGASPI, 495-11-336, Stjepan Cvijić (André), “An den Genossen W. Pieck und an die Kader-Abteilung des
EKKI,” December 14, 1937.
69
His moderation did not help him. He was arrested on July 19, 1938 and died in the Lefortovo
prison hospital two weeks later, officially of tuberculosis.251
Why did Tito keep all the gorkićevci so close? The most likely explanation is that he
worked with those cadres who were already in an established position of authority, and that he
was simply unaware of the severity of the charges that were being prepared against these
individuals in Moscow. In fact, many similar charges were being brought against him, too.
This explanation shows Tito more as a regular individual caught up in a chaotic process,
rather than a mastermind who understood the rules of the game and used them to rapidly rise
to the top. An equally likely explanation for his behavior is that he was attempting to reach a
compromise, or at least present himself as a compromise candidate. As I have already pointed
out, this was a common tactic among individuals trying to gain the Comintern‟s mandate.
This, too, would not reflect the moves of a tactical genius as much as those of somebody with
a clear understanding of the most elementary rules of conduct in the communist movement.
In November, Tito wrote to Pieck that he did not co-opt anyone into the leadership,
but that he was actively working with Marić, Kusovac, Krndelj and the Slovene communist
writer Lovro Kuhar.252 They formed his ad hoc informal Politburo. The former two were
notable for their opposition to Gorkić, while Krndelj was his close associate, and Kuhar was
in good standing with both groups. Although Marić‟s subsequent reports – critical of both
Tito and Politburo proceedings – clearly show that there was a preference for gorkićevci in
these early months,253 Tito might have been trying to paint a different picture of the newly
emerging leadership. Whatever might have been the case, Tito gradually did distance himself
from all the gorkićevci, while simultaneously marginalizing the critics of Gorkić.
251
Simić, Svetac i magle, 88.
252
253
According to Marić, he was invited to Politburo meetings a total of four times in six months. AJ, 790/1 KI,
1938/8, “Izjava Ţeljezara broj 2,” 4-5. Although not all Politburo proceedings have been preserved, those that
have been testify that his attendance was indeed rare.
70
At this time, the situation was showing no clear signs of improvement. Although the
émigrés were frequently writing to Moscow through Tito, they still received no reply.
According to Tito‟s collected works, he had sent at least five telegrams and messages to
Pieck. The only reply had been a telegram ordering him to come to Moscow, with a follow-up
message instructing him instead to wait in Paris;254 the latter probably saved his life. He also
wrote directly to the ECCI at least twice. When the ECCI ignored his inquiry about sending a
Politburo representative to the country in early December, he decided to act unilaterally and
send Ĉolaković.255 This was a bold and independent move, considering he had no formal
position that would allow him to send a fellow Politburo member to another country without
prior approval from the general secretary. His subsequent justification for such independent
action was that he had received unanimous support from all key party members in Paris.256
This was even corroborated by Marić, his bitter opponent, who stated that he had originally
accepted Tito‟s primacy.257
The end of the year saw the arrival of two young communists to Paris, both of whom
would become Tito‟s personal friends and members of his inner circle. The first was Boris
Kidriĉ, the former secretary of SKOJ and Gorkić‟s opponent at the April Plenum. Kidriĉ had
harangued the party leadership ever since his release from prison in mid-1937, and was
among those who felt absolved by Gorkić‟s arrest. Tito, however, successfully swayed him to
the side of the Temporary Leadership, making an important political ally in the process.258
The second was Ivo Lola Ribar, the son of Democratic Party politician Ivan Ribar, who, with
historical irony, had presided over the Royal Parliamentary Assembly which banned the KPJ
in 1921. Handpicked by Tito during his trip to Yugoslavia at the beginning of 1937, Lola
254
255
256
257
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/8, “Izjava Ţeljezara broj 2,” 3.
258
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 240. Kidriĉ would go on to become the architect of Yugoslav self-management
before dying of leukemia in 1953, just one day after his forty-first birthday.
71
Ribar was named the new secretary of SKOJ. An incredibly skilled organizer and a master of
conspiratorial work with excellent personal networks, Lola Ribar collected information on the
actions of Petko Miletić in the Sremska Mitrovica prison, which was used to condemn Miletić
upon Ribar‟s arrival in Paris.259 Unlike sending Ĉolaković abroad, this was the kind of bold
and independent move that some members of the party leadership considered illegitimate,
leading to the first open clashes after the fall of Gorkić.
At the very end of the year, Tito must have felt relatively at peace. In spite of certain
disagreements in the leadership and silence from the Comintern, the majority of Yugoslavs in
Paris accepted him as the de facto party leader. He left Paris for several weeks, in order to
“liquidate” the party headquarters in Prague as part of his push to move the KPJ back to
Yugoslavia. On this trip, he visited Vienna where he met with Ivan Kralj, a miner from
Bosnia who worked for the NKVD.260 He returned to Paris on January 7, 1938. There, he
found a letter from Pieck, the details of which remain unknown. The letter was dated
December 17, and it stated that Ĉolaković and Ţujović should be immediately suspended, as
they might be traitors.261
Tito took heed, but his independence of action did not falter. He immediately recalled
Ĉolaković and Ţujović from their assignments, but kept them in responsible positions for
quite some time after the letter, suggesting that he might have been testing how far he could
go in disobeying the Comintern. According to Ĉolaković‟s memoirs, at the meeting at which
he was informed of the Comintern‟s decision, Tito went so far as to say that “until we
received an explanation for these measures from the Comintern, he considers that this
leadership should continue its work in its current lineup.”262 In the proceedings from the
meeting, which were sent to the Comintern, they merely wrote “We consider that this
259
Jozo Petriĉević, Lolo (Zagreb: Globus, 1986), 110.
260
261
Swain, Tito, 21.
262
72
leadership runs the business of the house [the KPJ] until a resolution is reached, and that the
main responsibility for work lies with comrade Otto [Tito].”263 The phrase “in its current
lineup,” which would have suggested that Ĉolaković and Ţujović remained within the
leadership, was conveniently omitted. From this point on, the Comintern was aware that Tito
considered himself the de facto leader of the party.
The situation, however, was far from clear. At the time, the primacy of the Temporary
Leadership was being directly challenged by Ivo Marić and Labud Kusovac, the figureheads
of the Parallel Center group. To make matters worse, they were supported by key members of
the French Communist Party, the PCF. Ţujović recalled that he went to complain to the PCF
Central Committee about the preferential treatment given to Kusovac and Marić at the
expense of the Temporary Leadership. The PCF representative he spoke to asked Ţujović if
he could produce a document from the Comintern proving that Tito and his comrades had the
mandate to lead the party. Ţujović did not have one, and had to leave the building.264
The Parallel Center
At first glance, there was little that separated Josip Broz and Ivo Marić. Both were
proletarians, both were ethnic Croats, both were only coopted into the party leadership under
Gorkić, and both were largely untainted by the earlier factional struggles in the party, even
though they had both been members since the first half of the 1920s. While Broz had built up
his reputation as an anti-factionalist, Marić had become one of the most popular and well-
known Dalmatian party organizers, and gathered a mass following in what was one of the
strongest regional sections of the KPJ. Both of them were in fact on the left of the party in the
1920s,265 but managed to avoid prominence in the factional struggles of the time, leaving the
impression of disciplined members who always followed the party line. This certainly helped
263
264
AJ, MG 516, 2013, Sreten Ţujović, Sećanja iz predratnog partijskog rada, 32.
265
73
propel their near-simultaneous ascent to power in the second half of the 1930s. The only thing
that set them apart was their attitude toward Gorkić.
Marić was supported by Labud Kusovac, a Montenegrin lawyer and journalist who
was a founding member of the KPJ. He had returned to Paris earlier in 1937, after having
worked in the Profintern for four years. He lived in Moscow with his wife Kristina (née
Nikolić) who worked for the Comintern. While Marić was the one who usually directly
addressed the Comintern, the Kusovac family was in charge of maintaining a complex
network of contacts intended to secure the takeover of the KPJ by the Parallel Center. This
network was transnational and vast. Aside from the PCF, it included some leading Bulgarian
and Spanish communists, Comintern workers in Moscow, the Prison Committee of Sremska
Mitrovica, and even the Soviet military intelligence. According to Kristina Kusovac, she
worked for the Balkan section of the GPU and, along with her husband, played a crucial role
gathering evidence of Milan Gorkić‟s alleged espionage.266 Marić, on the other hand,
maintained ties only with the Dalmatian party leadership, whose informal head was Vicko
Jelaska.267 It is unclear who had primacy in this group. Milovan Đilas, a young student who
enjoyed the trust of Kusovac, reported to the Central Committee in early 1938 that both he
and Marić were expecting the Comintern to invite them to Moscow and take over the party.268
Marić was probably charged with directly addressing the Comintern because of his proletarian
origin, and the Comintern certainly considered him to be the leader of the Parallel Center.269
Either way, there is no indication that they considered Miletić as a general secretary candidate
yet, although this was the impression of the Temporary Leadership.
266
The GPU (State Political Directorate) was actually at the time called the Main Directorate of State Security
(GUGB). Kusovac disclosed this information to the Cadres‟ Commission of the KPJ in the immediate postwar
period, mistakenly providing them with the earlier name. AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/29, Kristina Kusovac,
“Centralnom komitetu KP Jugoslavije, preko druga Veljka Milutinovića,” 1.
267
At the Sevent Congress, Marić had tried to nominate Jelaska for KPJ member of the ECCI as an alternative to
both Tito and Gorkić. Bondarev, Misterija Tito, 118.
268
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/16, “Izveštaj Veljka CK KPJ iz kaznione,” March 23, 1938, 1.
269
74
The conflict openly began during the party meeting of December 3, 1937, at which
Lola Ribar presented his report on Petko Miletić and the events in Mitrovica prison. Marić
dissented against the decision to accuse the Prison Committee of being an “anti-party”
group.270 Marić later admitted that he might have “acted rashly”271 at the meeting that
essentially brought him into open conflict with the rest of the party leadership. The main
disputes regarded the Prison Committee and the party in Dalmatia, both of which were viewed
positively by Marić, and negatively by the Temporary Leadership. Marić was also worried
that the top of the party was infested with gorkićevci, meaning there were still potential
traitors in its highest ranks.
These grievances are laid out in Marić‟s letter of December 8, 1937, which was
addressed to Tito, but which he also requested be forwarded to the Comintern. It dealt only
with the issue of cadres, protesting against the attack on Miletić at the Politburo meeting and
stating that he would not attend any more meetings in which Krndelj, Ĉolaković, and Ţujović
were present. He did, however, express willingness to continue working with Kuhar and
Tito,272 as well as Miletić‟s opponents in Mitrovica.273 Even later, when his rhetoric
sharpened, Marić continued insisting that he could cooperate with Tito. Before the escalation
of the conflict at the beginning of 1938, both sides seemingly showed willingness to
compromise, at least in the documents they directed at the Comintern and each other.
However, the two groups were already actively plotting against one another. In late 1937,
Marić and Labud Kusovac got in touch with Petko Miletić in Mitrovica prison through Dušan
Kusovac, Labud‟s brother, advising Miletić to ignore the Temporary Leadership‟s
condemnation of his policy.274 Therefore, his appeal for continued cooperation sounded less
than convincing, and the Temporary Leadership immediately informed the Comintern of
270
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1937/109, “Zapisnik sednice 3/XII/1937.”
271
AJ, 516 MG, Box 58, 2231/2, “Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem,” 44.
272
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1937/112, “Izjava Eisnera,” December 8, 1937.
273
274
75
this.275 Moreover, Dušan Kusovac was not a party member, but was given confidential
information by his brother, which was a serious breach of party discipline and rules of
confidentiality.
Simultaneously, Tito‟s own claims of openness to collaboration with his rivals were
somewhat farcical. As noted earlier, he generally avoided inviting Marić to Politburo
meetings, and tacitly excluded him from many aspects of party work even before relations
between the two groups deteriorated. Although the open dispute began in December, tensions
were obviously bubbling beneath the surface for quite some time. Personal correspondence of
Kusovac, retrieved after the war, reveals that around October 1937, he had been informed by
Soviet intelligence that Gorkić had been arrested, that the current leadership was illegitimate,
and that all issues were to be resolved at a KPJ congress in the country. 276 This seems to be
much more than the Temporary Leadership knew at the time. Tito, on the other hand, tried to
keep potential supporters of the Parallel Center at bay. Hudomalj was punished for breaching
party discipline at the April Plenum and sent to work outside of Paris, and an unsuccessful
attempt was made to send Marić to the United States.277 Other potential allies of Marić and
Kusovac, such as Kidriĉ and Đilas, were swayed by Tito, and became some of the crucial
supporters of – and informants for – the Temporary Leadership.
What united the Parallel Center was not so much a clear set of ideas as opposition to
Gorkić and his real or perceived supporters. They therefore formed broad and unlikely
alliances, from the ultra-leftists gathered around Miletić to the regional party organization in
Dalmatia, which was moving increasingly to the right. As a consequence, Marić‟s policy
prescriptions were far less coherent than Tito‟s, and they might have been detrimental to his
275
276
AJ, 507 CK KPJ (France), I/9, Letter from Labud Kusovac to Hudomalj, May 29, 1939, 1. Marić and Kristina
Kusovac both later claimed that they were not informed of Gorkić‟s arrest until January 1938. AJ, 516 MG, Box
58, 2231/2, “Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem,“ 44, and AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/29, Kristina Kusovac,
“Centralnom komitetu KP Jugoslavije,” 1.
277
76
attempted takeover of the party. Miletić essentially repudiated popular front policy and
continued supporting the line of the Third Period throughout the 1930s.278 The position of the
Dalmatian allies was the polar opposite of Miletić. Accused of rightist deviations and
liquidationism by Ribar, they were defended by Marić for their tactical cooperation with the
Croatian Peasant Party. The Dalmatian communists prescribed united action in areas where
the danger of pro-government parties winning persisted, but competing independently in areas
where they were stronger than the Croatian Peasant Party.279 Eventually, they would be
accused of completely abandoning the KPJ, instead acting through the legal Party of the
Working People (Stranka radnog naroda, SRN).280 This unlikely coalition of the party‟s
leftmost and rightmost wings was unlikely to last, even if Marić had succeeded in receiving
the Comintern mandate.
Marić‟s proposed leadership, much like Tito‟s, was made to seem like a compromise
solution, albeit one that excluded gorkićevci. It was to be composed of Tito, Kuhar, Dragutin
Marušić (an obligatory “neutral” individual), Kusovac, and himself.281 It is important to note
that he expected to sway Kuhar to his side, as Kuhar also expressed sympathy towards
Miletić‟s Prison Committee.282 All other responsible posts in the party outside of the Politburo
were to be filled by people who he considered personally close to him, including Hudomalj,
the former prominent leftist Rajko Jovanović,283 and Kristina Kusovac.284 The Comintern
could not have missed a clear bias towards certain party cadres from the left. The Parallel
Center, therefore, was composed largely of former left factionalists, while the Temporary
Leadership comprised a group of people formerly close to Gorkić. Neither looked good in the
278
279
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “тов. Димитрову,” March 29, 1938, 2-4.
280
Kvesić, Dalmacija u Narodnooslobodilaĉkoj borbi, 8.
281
282
283
Jovanović, however, remained unimpressed by Marić in spite of his efforts, and became a supporter of the
Temporary Leadership. Ĉolaković, Kazivanje o jednom pokoljenju, vol. 3, 431.
284
77
atmosphere of watchfulness against spies and traitors. Furthermore, for both groups, the
commitment to moving the leadership back into Yugoslavia was, at the time, still verbal.
Marić, however, was much more focused on vigilance than Tito. His obsession with
finding Gorkić‟s alleged partners in crime attests to this, and the theme of vigilance persists
throughout his writings. One particularly negative consequence of this was that Marić
interpreted Tito‟s efforts to infiltrate Yugoslav government organizations as a sign that people
in the Temporary Leadership were police informants,285 further widening the gap between the
two. Tito, for his part, widened the gap by increasingly cutting off communication with the
Parallel Center, and playing up their paranoia by keeping gorkićevci close to him. Marić‟s
biggest mistake was overly focusing on vigilance rather than policy. While he was hunting for
enemies, both real and imagined, Tito was taking concrete steps to implement the policies
which he considered necessary for the transformation of the KPJ.
What Marić lacked in ideas, he made up for in connections. He was impressively
proactive in his syncretistic alliance-building. For somebody who had less access to official
channels than Tito, and also had less experience with the Comintern apparatus,286 he was
surprisingly good at utilizing connections among the rank and file from all sides. Aside from
the party ultra-left of Mitrovica and the right from Dalmatia, he managed to bring into his fold
such diverse individuals as Gorkić‟s former associate Alfred Bergman,287 and the Dalmatian
Ivo Baljkas, who was under investigation for Trotskyism in 1936.288
Far more significant was the support Marić enjoyed in the PCF. This was most likely
the work of Kusovac, who headed the Yugoslav Committee for Aid to Republican Spain.
Kusovac had ties to two key figures in the PCF: one was André Heussler, a CC member who
285
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “тов. Димитрову,” March 29, 1938, 6-7.
286
Marić‟s time in Moscow was limited to several months around the Seventh Congress, whereas Tito had spent
two years there, working in the Balkan Secretariat and in the KPJ representative office, closely collaborating
with Dimitrov, among others.
287
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/6, Letter from Kristina Kusovac to Hudomalj, May 3, 1939, 4.
288
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1936/474, “Izjava Ţivka 29.VI.1936.”
78
was working in the International Committee for the Coordination of Aid to the Spanish
Republic; the other was René Arrachart, a PCF Politburo member and a leading French trade
unionist.289 The latter could have worked very closely with the Parallel Center, as he knew
Kusovac through his earlier work in the Profintern,290 and Marić through his work in the trade
unions of the Yugoslav émigrés in France. The full extent of these connections, however,
remains unknown, as none of the correspondence between the PCF and Kusovac is currently
available. Given that the PCF had replaced the decimated Communist Party of Germany as
the model party of the international communist movement, such support was very significant.
The PCF considered the Parallel Center to be the legitimate leadership of the KPJ, which
probably means that they supported them in the Comintern, and that they encouraged all
Yugoslav émigrés to accept Marić and Kusovac as party leaders.291
To top it all off, the duo had ties to an individual who greatly outshone Heussler and
Arrachart in importance. This was Maurice Tréand, who was a CC member, head of the PCF
cadre commission, head of the party‟s underground operations, and an ECCI operative in
Western Europe.292 In a meeting in January 1938, Tréand explicitly told Marić, Kusovac, and
Tito that the PCF considered the KPJ leadership non-existent until the Comintern clarified the
situation.293 He would remain in touch with the Parallel Center, providing them with aid and
support until at least the end of 1939. A similar role was played by Bulgarian communists in
Moscow, whose support for the Parallel Center in the ECCI is much better documented than
that of the French. As mentioned earlier, the main proponents of an alternative party
leadership in the ECCI and the Cadres‟ Department were Georgi Damyanov and his associate
289
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/29, Kristina Kusovac, “Centralnom komitetu KP Jugoslavije,” 1.
290
Marić goes as far as to state that Arrachart and Kusovac were close friends. AJ, 516 MG, Box 58, 2231/2,
“Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem,” 56.
291
AJ, 507 CK KPJ, 1944/583, “Izjava dr. Radivoja Uvalića Centralnom komitetu Komunistiĉke partije
Jugoslavije,” 2.
292
Banac (ed.), The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 109.
293
79
Anton Ivanov, both of whom actively worked against the Temporary Leadership: the former
in Moscow, the latter in France and Spain.
In addition to the PCF, more crucial support came from Mustafa Golubić, who worked
in the Red Army Intelligence Directorate, the Soviet military intelligence service. A friend of
Kusovac since the late 1920s, Golubić is one of the most intriguing figures in the Yugoslav
communist movement. Prior to World War I, he was a national revolutionary from Bosnia
who joined the secret Serbian army organization Crna ruka (Black Hand), which was involved
in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914. He fought in the Serbian army during World
War I, and was imprisoned following the king‟s crackdown on Crna ruka. After the war, he
became a communist, and was soon involved with Soviet intelligence structures. There are
abundant theories regarding his intelligence work, most of them bordering on conspiracy, and
I do not intend to engage with them here.294 What is certain is that Golubić was deeply
involved in Yugoslav party affairs, and that he supported the Parallel Center over the
Temporary Leadership. Golubić had been in touch with Kusovac since at least October 1937,
and it was Golubić who kept him informed about the perceived illegitimacy of the Temporary
Leadership in the Comintern.295 He was providing both intelligence information, and advice
on how to proceed further in order to win the leadership contest. According to Marić‟s
memoirs, there was an ongoing dispute between Golubić and Kralj, the NKVD operative
whom Tito was meeting at the same time, which deepened the suspicions they had about the
Temporary Leadership.296 Aside from his own network of Soviet intelligence operatives,
Golubić established a connection with Yugoslav student émigrés in Paris, whom he recruited
294
Two dated but unusually sober sources on the topic are Borivoje Nešković, Mustafa Golubić (Belgrade: self-
published, 1985) and Ubavka Vuјošević, “Prilozi za biografiju Mustafe Golubića: (nepoznati dokumenti iz
arhiva Kominterne),” Istorija 20. veka, 1–2/1993: 217–230.
295
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/9, Letter from Labud Kusovac to Hudomalj, May 29, 1939, 1.
296
AJ, 516 MG, Box 58, 2231/2, “Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem,” 45-46.
80
to work for him.297 Kusovac was also close to the Croat Ivan Srebrenjak – Antonov, a Soviet
military intelligence operative who led the Red Army intelligence center in Zagreb during
World War II before he was murdered by the Ustasha in 1942.298 It was he who prepared
intelligence reports against Tito for the Cadres‟ Department.299 All of these individuals
undoubtedly worked for the Parallel Center, although the exact extent of their activity remains
unknown.
At the same time, an equally significant gatherer of information about the KPJ rank
and file was sitting in Moscow. Unlike the Temporary Leadership and the Parallel Center,
whose various pleas and grievances were still being ignored by the Balkan Secretariat, he
enjoyed Wilhelm Pieck‟s undivided attention and utmost trust between July 1937 and
February 1938. This was Kamilo Horvatin, the final remaining KPJ representative to the
Comintern, who turned from being one of Gorkić‟s key supporters to his harshest critic.
According to the available sources, Horvatin never formed a faction in the proper sense, but
he was the one party member that the Comintern listened to after the fall of Gorkić, and was
notably singled out as the only former factionalist in Moscow who was seen as a potential
member of the new leadership. His case, therefore, warrants particular attention.
The Moscow Challenger
Kamilo Horvatin was a veteran revolutionary. In his high school years, he became
involved in a secret revolutionary South Slavic organization, which he later described as “half
national revolutionary and half anarchist in character.”300 Through this group, Horvatin
became friends with the future great Croatian writers Miroslav Krleţa and August Cesarec, as
297
AJ, 507 CK KPJ, 1944/583, “Izjava dr. Radivoja Uvalića,” 2-3. They were all later deemed suspicious by the
party, and one of them, Ĉeda Kruševac, was even shot in 1942 as a “Trotskyist.”
298
299
Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1, 86.
300
AJ, 790/13 Yugoslavs working and studying in the USSR, H/10, “Autobiografija Petrovskog Borisa
Nikolajeviĉa, 7. februar 1936,” 1.
81
well as the young journalist Đuro Cvijić.301 All four would become communists in the
aftermath of World War I. Horvatin was imprisoned for two years in 1912, following a failed
assassination attempt against the viceroy of Croatia-Slavonia, Slavko Cuvaj. He spent most of
the war either in prison or trying to avoid the draft. According to his own account, it was the
war that radicalized him and turned him into a Marxist.302 He became one of the founding
members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1919, and in 1920, he was elected to the
Zagreb City Council.
After the KPJ was banned by the royal government in 1921, he devoted himself to
underground work. To former national revolutionaries turned communists, “the ideal of a
messianic South Slavic state was betrayed by the bourgeoisie,”303 which first turned them to
communism, and then specifically to the party‟s leftist faction. Horvatin, an ethnic Croat, was
no exception. However, by 1936, he felt it necessary to emphasize that he had ceased all
factional activity in 1928, and that even before then, he never publicly spoke out against the
decisions of the Comintern.304
Like many other Yugoslavs, Horvatin was forced to emigrate in 1929. He arrived in
the USSR in 1930, taking the name Boris Nikolayevich Petrovskij. He became a member of
the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks) that same year. Over the following six years, he
worked as an associate of the International Agrarian Institute, later becoming a member of the
Central Committee in 1934. After the Moscow meeting in 1936, he remained one of the party
representatives to the Comintern, and was considered close to Gorkić. He was still working
there in the late spring of 1937, when the purge of the Comintern began in earnest, and,
unbeknownst to Gorkić, had become his primary nemesis within the KPJ.
301
Ivan Oĉak, s.v. “Horvatin, Kamilo,” Krleţijana Online. (Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleţa,
1993). http://krlezijana.lzmk.hr/clanak.aspx?id=1598 (accessed December 7, 2017).
302
AJ, 790/13, H/10, Autobiografija, 1.
303
304
AJ, 790/13, H/10, Autobiografija, 2.
82
Horvatin‟s activity as the most prolific denouncer of his fellow comrades in the KPJ
had been largely absent from historiography until my discovery of documents from the
Comintern Fond in RGASPI. The only biography of Horvatin in existence, written by his
comrade Marko Zovko in 1980,305 makes no mention of the role he played in the purge of the
KPJ. The only author to notice the significant role played by Horvatin so far is the Russian
historian Nikita Bondarev.306 Looking at the available reports, Horvatin appears to have had
the habit of reinterpreting certain well-known events from the party‟s history and twisting
them in such a way as to prove certain individuals‟ alleged treason against the party. This
retroactive condemnation is akin to the retrospective legitimacy given to the Stalinist show
trials described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: once the “correct” party line prevailed (and, of
course, it is correct because it prevailed), those who were against it turned out to have been
traitors all along.307 Here, Horvatin set a dangerous precedent within the KPJ. He was the first
person to allege that mass arrests in the country were not merely a consequence of flaws in
conspiratorial work, but also of the fact that provocateurs were sought “only in the lowest
party organs.”308 This would open a Pandora‟s Box of accusations at a time when the
Comintern observed communist oppositionists as enemies in disguise.
Horvatin‟s Bolshevik vigilance far exceeded that of Marić, and of anyone else in the
KPJ. Pretty much every single prominent individual from the Yugoslav community in
Moscow became a target of his accusations. Any prior activity in the party opposition, either
to the left or to the right, effectively became anti-party treason, identical to Trotskyism. This
305
Marko Zovko, Kamilo Horvatin: nestao u staljinskim ĉistkama (Zagreb: Spektar, 1980). Ironically,
Horvatin‟s reports single out Zovko as one of the gorkićevci and a potential provocateur within the KPJ.
RGASPI, 495-11-335, Petrowski‟s Report Dated August 5, 1937, 11-12.
306
In a recent article on the Moscow years of the Yugoslav communist Sima Marković, who was also executed
during the Great Purge, Bondarev discovered that Horvatin‟s eight-page testimony, which called Marković “the
Trotsky of the KPJ,” formed the basis for Marković‟s arrest. Bondarev “Sima Marković – moskovske godine
(1935–1938),” 54-55.
307
Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 42-43. For example, the earlier support of (the already expelled) Kun
and Walecki for Gorkić gave rise to suggestions of Gorkić‟s own treason. RGASPI, 495-11- 335, Petrowski‟s
Report Dated August 5, 1937, 7.
308
83
was all the worse because Trotskyists were not seen as a current in the international
communist movement, but rather as a group of traitors and criminals who clandestinely
worked for the capitalist powers.309 Horvatin went on to say that, aside from Trotsky, the left
and the right opposition fully served the interests of Gorkić, as the factionalists enabled him to
present himself as the “center” and thus strengthen his own position.310 This view was
perfectly in line with the Stalinist assertion that the boundary between political disagreement
and objective treason is virtually nonexistent “in a period of revolutionary tension or external
threat.”311 Throughout his reports, Horvatin emphasized his watchfulness and allegiance to the
party line, while his own leftist past was conveniently ignored. He notes how his work was
obstructed by those purged, thereby confirming his own credentials.312 Even at times when he
accepts that he too committed errors, they were merely a consequence of the influence of
traitors.313 Therefore, while he fully internalized the Bolshevik ethos of vigilance, an equally
important part of the communist character, self-criticism, is strangely lacking.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of my work, his opinion on the émigrés in Paris is far
more important than his watchfulness in Moscow. As far the ECCI was concerned, Horvatin
was the primary, and, according to Pieck, most objective source of information, as he
personally requested Horvatin to report on Yugoslavia for a special commission of the
ECCI.314 It remains unclear what channels Horvatin used to gather the information, but he
viewed the post-Gorkić Temporary Leadership in a very negative light. Some of the
information he presented was patently incorrect, such as his claim that Ĉolaković was the new
309
This is something that Gorkić failed to understand, and which Horvatin explicitly criticized: he points out that
the party newspaper under Gorkić polemicized with the Trotskyists, rather than simply uncovering them as
traitors and murderers. RGASPI, 495-11-357, Б.Н.Петровский, “О задачах борьбы с троцкизмом в
Югославии,” October 17, 1937, 2.
310
RGASPI, 495-11-357, Б.Н.Петровский, “О задачах борьбы с троцкизмом в Югославии,” October 17,
1937, 8.
311
Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 34.
312
313
314
RGASPI, 495-20-647, Wilhelm Pieck, “An die Genossen Manuilski und Kolarow,” January 28, 1938.
84
“central figure” in the leadership.315 His description of Ĉolaković is by far the harshest, as he
explicitly accuses him of Trotskyism.316 The rest of the Temporary Leadership is not portrayed
in a much better light. Of particular interest, however, is his description of Tito. Horvatin was
unaware of Tito‟s position, and saw him merely as the third highest ranking person in the
Temporary Leadership. He pointed out that Tito has managed to mitigate several mistakes
committed by Gorkić, but simultaneously expressed significant doubts about him.317 Tito had,
according to him, actively covered up the errors committed by Gorkić, had been too close to
Walecki, and had failed to account for his whereabouts in Siberia during the Russian Civil
War, suggesting that he might have been connected to Alexander Kolchak‟s anticommunist
forces.318 Tito‟s past was completely reinterpreted through the lens of his potentially
traitorous present, and not only through his association with Gorkić. Horvatin‟s conclusion
was that “one cannot have any political trust in the remaining part of the current
leadership.”319
This negative view of the Paris émigrés would only intensify in his later reports, as he
received more information on the situation in France. However, it is important to note that he
did not distinguish between the Temporary Leadership and the Parallel Center.320 This works
in favor of my hypothesis that he acted alone: if he had been close to either of the groups, they
would have been informed of his work, and would therefore have asked for his support in the
Comintern. By January 1938, Horvatin reported that the negative liquidationist practices of
315
RGASPI, 495-11-343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated October 2, 1937, 1. This information was most likely based
on a report by Karlo Hudomalj, who claimed that Gorkić told him, before his departure to Moscow, that if he
was arrested, Ĉolaković was to act as leader and Ţujović as organizational secretary. RGASPI, 495-11-343,
“Erklärung Oskar fur PB über Gespräch Oskars mit Som (Gorkic).” It remains unclear whether this is indicative
of collaboration between Hudomalj and Horvatin, but it is unlikely, as this report would have been easily
available to a party representative in the Comintern.
316
RGASPI, 495-11- 343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated October 2, 1937, 1-2.
317
RGASPI, 495-11- 343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated October 2, 1937, 1.
318
319
320
RGASPI, 495-11- 343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated January 2, 1938, 2-3.
85
Gorkić were continuing.321 Several decisions of the Comintern, such as the order that Tito had
to suspend Ĉolaković and Ţujović from all party activity, suggest that Horvatin‟s reports may
have had a significant practical impact, although it remains unclear whether it was specifically
his information that played a crucial role. However, it is certain that he was, by then, a serious
contender for the post of general secretary. His highly prescriptive reports and advice on party
cadres, both submitted to the Balkan Secretariat, attest to this.
Horvatin‟s vigilance, unlike that of Marić and Kusovac, was accompanied by concrete
policy proposals. Measures against Trotskyism feature prominently,322 though they were not
his only focus. In October 1937, he made a report on individuals whom he considered fit to
take over the party leadership. Every single one of them, aside from Edvard Kardelj, was a
trade unionist of working class origin, they were all based in the country, and they were all,
broadly speaking, on the party‟s left.323 This already gives a clear sign of Horvatin‟s political
preferences. His unabashed favoritism toward the left is striking, as he was the only major
contender who did not attempt to present himself as a compromise figure who gathered
various party factions around himself. Furthermore, his intentional exclusion of the Paris-
based comrades further confirms his detachment from their own internal disagreements.
Horvatin never openly nominated himself for any position within the new leadership; it was
not common practice to do so, and he probably expected to receive a mandate from the
Comintern regardless. He recommended that the individuals he handpicked should travel to
Paris and hold a meeting at which they would ensure that the party takes the proper political
course. He further stated that it would be a good idea to send a Yugoslav and a Bulgarian
comrade “who [have] the trust of the Secretariat of the ECCI” from Moscow to this meeting
321
RGASPI, 495-11- 343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated January 2, 1938, 3.
322
RGASPI, 495-11-357, Б.Н.Петровский, “О задачах борьбы с троцкизмом в Югославии,” October 17,
1937, 25-26.
323
His leadership would have consisted of old Serbian leftists Pavle Pavlović and Nikola Grulović, experienced
Zagreb-based union leaders Josip Kraš and Miroslav Pintar, Gorkić‟s Politburo member Franc Leskošek, Kardelj
from Slovenia, and the Dalmatian party leader Jelaska. RGASPI, 495-11-343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated October
2, 1937, 3. None of these individuals ever appear to have been informed of Horvatin‟s plan.
86
as well.324 This was a tacit self-nomination, as he was the only Yugoslav in Moscow at the
time who kept in contact with the ECCI Secretariat. He was never sent to Paris, either due to a
lack of trust or to the Comintern‟s own confusion about the situation.
As his cadre preferences demonstrate, Horvatin was also on the party‟s left, and his
primary focus was on returning the party leadership back to the country. He saw the “line” of
the Paris-based émigrés as “constantly oscillating from sectarianism to the greatest of
opportunisms.”325 He considered the newly founded Communist Party of Croatia (KPH) to be
too nationalistic, as they still considered support for Yugoslav unity to be conditional on the
achievement of Croatian autonomy.326 Moreover, Horvatin explicitly criticized Tito for his
attempts to unify the communist and reformist trade unions and form a united workers‟ party,
which he saw as a failure because of resistance from the social democrats. 327 He also disliked
Tito‟s work on the legal SRN, as he saw signs of open discord between the legal and illegal
party structures.328 All three assertions were correct. In the end, however, Tito would resolve
all three of these issues on his own during 1938.
In January 1938, the ECCI finally met to discuss the Yugoslav question. They formed
a special commission consisting of Pieck, Manuilsky, and Dimitrov‟s close ally Vasil
Kolarov, which was to “examine the situation of the KPJ, examine the existing cadres, and
prepare concrete proposals for restoring the leadership and work of the party in the
country.”329 Yugoslav historiography and eyewitnesses usually claimed that the Comintern
was on the verge of dissolving the KPJ,330 which further cemented Tito‟s legitimacy as the
324
RGASPI, 495-11- 343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated October 2, 1937, 2-3.
325
326
RGASPI, 495-11- 343, Petrowski‟s Report Dated January 2, 1938, 1-2.
327
328
329
RGASPI, 495-18-1232, “Protokoll (A) Nr. 232 des Sekretariats des EKKI, zusammengestellt auf Grund
fliegenden Abstimmung unter den Mitgliedern des Sekretariats des EKKI vom 3.I.1937.”
330
See, for example, Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1, 94.
87
savior of the party. However, this document shows that, even if that had been the case earlier,
the Comintern‟s main concern by January 1938 was to establish a stable party leadership.
The commission, which met throughout January 1938, relied exclusively on
Horvatin‟s reports. These reports largely repeat his earlier policy proposals. According to one
of them, the immediate tasks of the KPJ were: restoring the party‟s political unity; increasing
vigilance; ridding the party of gorkićevci; and bringing older, experienced party members into
the leadership, provided that they did not partake in earlier factional struggles.331 He correctly
identified Gorkić‟s actions as liquidationist and condemned his procrastination in moving the
party leadership to Yugoslavia,332 and he saw Tito as Gorkić‟s direct political successor.
Furthermore, he expressed concern that the KPJ in Yugoslavia was deteriorating into national
sections, with each pursuing policies independently of the party center and one another.333
Overall, his identification of problems within the party was accurate, aside from his belief that
mass arrests were a consequence of high-level police infiltration. Even more interestingly, his
proposals for fixing the party were virtually identical to those of Tito. Any disagreements
Horvatin might have had with him were a consequence of excessive vigilance, a lack of
communication, and Tito‟s own (understandable) hesitation to act more rapidly at the end of
1937.
Horvatin would never live to see the constitution of a new party leadership. He was
arrested by the NKVD soon after the work of the ECCI commission ended, for reasons which
remain largely unclear. His position probably began to worsen in November 1937, when his
wife Jovanka was expelled from the party.334 However, unlike Gorkić, he became a victim
because of the purge of the KPJ, and not because of the perceived treason of his wife. He was
arrested on February 7, 1938, in the second major wave of arrests of prominent Yugoslavs.
331
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “Основные выводы,” January 15, 1938.
332
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “Состояние и работа партии и ее руководства,” January 28, 1938, 12.
333
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “Состояние и работа партии и ее руководства,” January 28, 1938, 8.
334
RGASPI, 495-11-343, С.А. Грабер [Jovanka Horvatin], “В секретариат ЕККИ, в президиум ИКК,”
December 25, 1937.
88
His arrest, as well as those of his fellow comrades, was a direct consequence of the
interrogations of Gorkić and Fleischer.335 It remains unknown whether Pieck, or somebody
else close to Horvatin, attempted to save him. His tragic case further demonstrates that proper
adherence to the party line and constant vigilance were not enough to ensure survival during
the Great Purge. Denunciations, personal rivalries, and simple contingency were often crucial.
He was executed on March 15, 1938 as a member of a “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist
organization,” with a simple conclusion: “exposed through the testimonies of GORKICH
M.I., and FLEISCHER.”336 As he was “exposed” by the same people he had himself
“exposed” half a year earlier, the first circle of accusations among the Moscow émigrés was
closed.
The Wahhabis
In some ways, the brutality of the struggle in Sremska Mitrovica prison exceeded that
of Moscow, as the communists in Mitrovica quite literally served as one another‟s judge and
jury (and almost executioners). The Prison Committee, dominated by the veteran communist
Petko Miletić, relied on a personality cult and a policy of ultra-leftism in equal measure. For
this, they were named “the Wahhabis,” after the adherents of an eighteenth-century Islamic
fundamentalist movement.337 If one was to look for similarities within the international
communist movement itself, it would be more appropriate to describe Miletić as the Béla Kun
of the Yugoslav communist movement. His political views, personality, and even downfall
were all similar to that of the Hungarian communist leader.
The only major difference between the two was their social origin. Miletić was born
into a peasant family in the mountains of Montenegro, and left the family home at the age of
335
See chapter “The Peak and Fall of Milan Gorkić,” note 216.
336
“ПЕТРОВСКИЙ Борис Николаевич, он же ХОРВАТИН Камило,” in “Сталинские списки,”
MEMORIAL, accessed December 25, 2017, http://stalin.memo.ru/spravki/7-7.htm.
337
The origin of the label “Wahhabis” came either from the ultra-leftist Ognjen Prica, who considered it
something to be proud of (Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 163), or from their opponent Moša Pijade, who
used it to mock them (Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 66).
89
sixteen to become a carpenter. He settled in the southern Hungarian city of Pécs, where he
soon became involved with the social democratic party. In November 1918, while in
Budapest, he joined the newly founded Communist Party of Hungary, and fought in the
Hungarian Revolution the following year.
After his return to Yugoslavia, he was arrested for communist activity and attempting
to incite an armed uprising. He spent several years in the mountains of Montenegro as part of
an armed insurrection against the Yugoslav government before an armistice was reached in
1924. He then moved to Belgrade in 1926, but soon left for Moscow, where he studied at
KUNMZ. His inevitable rise in the KPJ began after the Fourth Congress in 1928. By 1930,
the Comintern had made him a member of the Politburo, and he remained a member of the
party leadership until 1932. That year, he was arrested while trying to illegally cross the
Hungarian-Yugoslav border.338 His arrest coincided with the early signs of the KPJ‟s turn
away from the ultra-left; as such, his problems with the party leadership began after his
imprisonment. Milovan Đilas, his one-time supporter, later left a critical yet sympathetic
account of Miletić:
He was a rebellious peasant who had not thoroughly digested proletarian revolutionary
learning. His political education in Moscow, in which he had not distinguished himself in
any field, further reinforced his impatient, tough, and rebellious spirit by oversimplified
dogmatism. He had also learned the importance of intrigue in political struggle and thus
freed himself of any idealized notion of the Communist movement. But none of this
changed him fundamentally. He remained a Montenegrin who verged between adventurism
and heroism, a typical product of a culture rich in extremes. Below his gloomy brow was a
pair of dull green eyes. But when he spoke, one sensed a man of action, a man who had
seen the world. In spite of his oversimplified picture of it, he had a great knack for
maneuvering and plotting, particularly on the smallest issues of everyday party life. 339
This fiery temper made Miletić a hero among the communists. His proud attitude in
court and his refusal to confess anything to the police were vividly reported in the communist
press at the time.340 In fact, Miletić had initially confessed, and then recanted his testimony.341
338
For a detailed academic biography of Miletić, see Kovaĉević, “Petko Miletić.” A less professional, but still
well-written, biography is available in Poţar, Jugosloveni ţrtve staljinskih ĉistki, 275-282.
339
Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 182.
340
Kovaĉević, “Petko Miletić,” 53-54.
341
Kovaĉević, “Petko Miletić,” 53.
90
This would come to haunt him later, when he attempted to become general secretary of the
KPJ.
In the Mitrovica prison, Miletić encountered Moše Pijade, a Jewish journalist and
painter who was among the most famous Yugoslav political prisoners. In prison, Pijade was
close to Andrija Hebrang, the Croatian communist who – alongside Tito – played a key role in
inciting the Comintern to write the Open Letter of 1928 which condemned factionalism.
Pijade and Hebrang, who argued for a more measured attitude toward the prison authorities,
soon clashed with Miletić, who accused them of being “rightist.”342 The relations between the
two groups were never good, but they truly escalated after the Wahhabis attempted to murder
Hebrang in August 1937.343 Soon after, the Central Committee condemned Miletić and his
group. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Miletić, in spite of the trouble he was
making, enjoyed the trust of both Gorkić and Tito. After the August incident, Tito was at first
informed that Hebrang had been the one who tried to murder Miletić, and personally wrote to
his old friend, expressing disbelief that he could engage in acts as vile as physical assault of a
fellow party member.344 Tito‟s attitude to Miletić began to shift only following Hebrang‟s
reply and Ribar‟s report later that year, which confirmed that Hebrang, and not Miletić, was
the victim.
Miletić‟s dominance over the Prison Committee in Sremska Mitrovica was marked by
a confrontational approach to the authorities.345 While this was acceptable during the Third
Period, the popular front instigated a change in attitude: the communists were to be less
confrontational in prison, and were instead supposed to devote themselves to political
education and building alliances with the imprisoned members of the opposition. While the
342
Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 181.
343
Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 67. The Wahhabis persistently claimed the opposite: that supporters of
Hebrang attempted to take the life of Miletić. Jelena Kovaĉević, “Frakcijske borbe meĊu ĉlanovima KPJ u
Sremskomitrovaĉkoj kaznioni 1937–39,” Arhiv 1-2/2015, 109.
344
345
91
latter approach certainly appealed to older and more experienced communists like Hebrang
and Pijade, the former was the preference of younger leftists whose political leanings were
molded by the 1929 dictatorship.346 As a consequence, Miletić was first and foremost a
champion of the young communists. His groups fostered “self-sacrifice and anti-
intellectualism.”347 He was not opposed to education in prisons, but his vision of education
essentially came down to learning how to fight. His view of the national question was equally
anachronistic: one of his main allies in prison was the fascist Ustasha leader Juco Rukavina,
as Miletić still argued for the pre-1935 position on the necessity of breaking up Yugoslavia.348
Long before its collision with the Temporary Leadership, the Prison Committee was
establishing direct connections with several party organizations in Yugoslavia and sending
them instructions independently of the party leadership.349 Even with Gorkić‟s rapidly
declining legitimacy in mind, this presented a serious breach of party discipline. Miletić‟s
stronghold was his native Montenegro, where he enjoyed significant support,350 as well as
Kosovo, where his brother dominated the regional party organization.351 Aside from Milovan
Đilas,352 Miletić was supported by ultra-left radicals such as Ivan Milutinović, who would
later become one of Tito‟s finest and most trusted military commanders. His statement in
support of Miletić was used as the basis for Marić‟s report to the Comintern in early 1938;
Milutinović later denied that he wrote it, and claimed it to be a forgery.353 Miletić was also
close to Radonja Golubović, who would become the leader of Yugoslav Cominformist
346
Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 180-181.
347
348
Banac, With Stalin against Tito, 68. In the pre-1935 period, the only political allies were “national
revolutionaries” who were as militant as the communist ultra-left. As such, the communists briefly “flirted” with
the Ustasha, who were yet to become a fully-fledged fascist movement. See Haug, Creating a Socialist
Yugoslavia, 31-33.
349
350
351
Kovaĉević, “Petko Miletić,” 64-65.
352
Đilas later denied that he was involved in the struggle between the Wahhabis and the Rightists. Đilas, Memoir
of a Revolutionary, 193. However, the primary sources which I will discuss later in the text show that he was
certainly allied with Miletić before his release in 1936, and remained sympathetic to him at least until 1938.
353
92
émigrés after the Tito-Stalin Split.354 His most bizarre and damaging political liaison was with
Antun Franović, the Dalmatian who organized the failed attempt to transport five hundred
Yugoslav volunteers to Spain with Adolf Muk in March 1937.355 Like Muk, Franović
betrayed the entire party organization (in his case, the Dalmatian regional committee) and
caused further mass arrests. The most likely explanation for Miletić‟s collaboration with
Franović was that the two saw each other as natural allies once the Temporary Leadership
condemned them both.
Aside from Franović, who was among the people handpicked by Gorkić, Miletić held
a great disdain for gorkićevci, much like his comrades from the Parallel Center. Đilas‟ report
to the Temporary Leadership in early 1938 stated that Miletić disliked Gorkić, and therefore
supported the April Plenum.356 Gorkić, on the other hand, supported Miletić, and even
managed to persuade Pijade to accept the preeminence of the Prison Committee for the sake
of party discipline.357 Gorkić‟s attitude was a consequence of his respect for the immense
support that Miletić enjoyed in prison, rather than of his political stance. When Gorkić urged
the Prison Committee to respect the decisions of the Seventh Comintern Congress in a letter
in June 1936, the Prison Committee went so far as to call the new KPJ line “opportunist.”358
Both Gorkić and, initially, Tito, tolerated this extremely confrontational attitude. This
shows how respected and influential Miletić was, as the KPJ at the time failed to tolerate far
less severe violations of party discipline.359 The first noticeable changes in attitude came in
November 1937 when, following Hebrang‟s letter, Tito warned of “alarming news” about the
354
Swain, Tito, 96.
355
356
357
RGASPI, 495-11-334, Letter of Gorkić to Fleischer no. 10, February 9, 1937. According to Đilas, Pijade‟s
support for Miletić lasted right up to November 1937, whereas Hebrang was unrepentant and openly
confrontational. AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/16, “Izveštaj Veljka CK KPJ iz kaznione,” March 23, 1938, 2.
358
Kovaĉević, “Frakcijske borbe meĊu ĉlanovima KPJ u Sremskomitrovaĉkoj kaznioni,” 108-109.
359
An interesting note on the cult of Miletić is the fact that a Yugoslav anti-tank battery in the International
Brigades was named after him.
93
situation in the prison.360 The breaking points were Lola Ribar‟s aforementioned report and
the heated KPJ meeting at which it was presented. By the end of December, the prisoners
received a letter explicitly accusing Miletić and the Prison Committee of trying to take over
the KPJ, and engaging in factionalism, ultra-leftism, and sectarianism.361 The letter, signed as
“The Central Committee,” named Pijade the new head of the Prison Committee. Pijade was a
compromise choice, as opposed to the much more controversial Hebrang. Furthermore, Pijade
could always gain legitimacy by pointing out that he had repented and stopped engaging in
factionalism in the spring of 1937, despite his disagreements with Miletić. This presented him
as a prescient, but ultimately disciplined, member of the party.
Nevertheless, this did not make the work of the Temporary Leadership much easier.
The letter was met with disbelief and outright refusal to follow the orders from the self-
proclaimed Central Committee. About forty of the 120 imprisoned party members refused to
accept the December letter.362 Meanwhile, the Comintern was skeptical of both the
Temporary Leadership‟s actions and the opposition coming from the Parallel Center. The
Cadres Department informed Dimitrov that both Pijade and Miletić were former members of
the leftist faction,363 meaning that they should be treated with suspicion. The most outrageous
claim in the eyes of the rank and file in prison was that Miletić was trying to escape prison
and call a party congress, independently of the Temporary Leadership, in order to take over
the party. The existence of such a plan was later confirmed by Miletić‟s allies. 364 Đilas
allegedly ended his support for Miletić when he was informed of this plan;365 nevertheless, he
kept trying to broker a compromise between Tito and Miletić until at least March 1938.366
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
94
Any hope of compromise became virtually impossible once Miletić had received
information from Paris about the illegitimacy of the Temporary Leadership. Marić and
Kusovac told him to persist, and kept in touch with him throughout. Miletić therefore formed
an alternative Prison Committee with his allies Boris Vojniloviĉ and Ivan Korski.367 Like
other supporters of Miletić, they were young ultra-leftists. The self-sacrificing, romantic ethos
of the Wahhabis is perhaps best captured in the story of Vojniloviĉ‟s eventual execution. In
1941, he joined the partisans and fought in Central Serbia at the beginning of the uprising.
After being captured by the Chetniks, he was shot for his stubborn refusal to remove the five-
pointed red star from his cap.368 Ultimately, it was a group that valued meaningless,
melodramatic sacrifice over patient long-term struggle, and as such, it was bound to fail. By
the end of 1938, the imprisoned Miletić faction was reduced to half a dozen hardliners.
Miletić wrote to the Temporary Leadership through Đilas in March 1938, apologizing
for his sectarian mistakes and efforts to establish contact with other party organizations
outside of prison. However, he continued to protest the appointment of Pijade, and accused
those close to him of being spies.369 It appears, therefore, that his continued conflict with the
Temporary Leadership was a matter of vanity more than anything else. Miletić was
marginalized, but he was not out of the game yet. Instead, he was waiting for his release from
prison. However, his temper continued to be his biggest obstacle, as he got into a dispute with
his former lawyer, Bora Prodanović, whom he accused of being a police spy. 370 This was an
extremely clumsy move, given that Prodanović, unlike the other communists, knew of
Miletić‟s less than heroic actions in custody in 1932.
367
Kovaĉević, “Frakcijske borbe meĊu ĉlanovima KPJ u Sremskomitrovaĉkoj kaznioni,” 112.
368
Milenko Karan, Njima nije oprošteno (Subotica: Minerva, 1991), 164-165.
369
370
95
Conclusions
The period from August 1937 to February 1938 was a time of political realignment
within the KPJ. The main cleavage was the attitude to Gorkić and his real or perceived
collaborators. Nevertheless, the seemingly new standpoints were greatly influenced by old
factional struggles. Those who disliked Gorkić now considered their suspicions to have been
confirmed, while those who were close to him tried to persuade the Comintern that they
would correct earlier errors. The only member of the latter group who succeeded was Tito
himself, together with a few close associates like Kardelj and Ribar, who were latecomers to
the Gorkić-era leadership. One common trait that the four competing factions shared was that
they were all on the left; there was not a single group formed from the remnants of the former
rightist faction. Although they were leftists, the differences between them were
insurmountable due to their mutual mistrust and constant scheming. Among them, Tito and
Horvatin were the only two individuals with clear ideas on how to resolve the crisis in the
party. Their ideas were quite similar, although they were unaware of it, and Horvatin was
openly hostile to Tito. Horvatin‟s subsequent arrest, contrasted with Tito‟s success, amply
illustrates that proper adherence to the party line imposed by the Comintern was not enough to
ensure survival during the Great Purge. Marić, Kusovac, and even Miletić were primarily
motivated by their disagreement with Tito‟s proposals. Marić and Kusovac offered little, aside
from the suggestion that the Comintern should resolve the situation. They made up for their
lack of policy with an extraordinarily vast transnational network of contacts. Miletić, on the
other hand, would come to establish himself as the candidate of Marić and Kusovac, as he
was the only figure who showed any kind of willingness to make concrete proposals on party
policy. Unfortunately for all three, Miletić‟s proposals were anachronistic and unrealistic.
They were a mixture of ultra-leftism, revolutionary romanticism, and a personality cult. His
political career was doomed long before he left prison. Nevertheless, for almost two more
years, Marić, Kusovac, and Miletić would pose a major challenge to Tito‟s attempted
96
takeover of the party, primarily through their skilled usage of patronage networks within the
Comintern. Tito had connections too, but was also actively taking practical steps towards
reviving the work of the KPJ and enforcing a coherent party line.
97
The Struggle
“At the top of the KPJ everybody is a factionalist, and you, too, are a factionalist.”
Georgi Dimitrov to Josip Broz Tito,
December 30, 1938371
The ECCI first met to discuss the issue of the KPJ on January 3, 1938, almost five
months after Gorkić‟s arrest. This might initially seem like a blatant lack of regard for the
Yugoslav communists, which greatly facilitated the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and
accusation within the party. Silence from Moscow meant confusion, and confusion meant
individuals were free to jump to conclusions. With party democracy virtually extinguished,
and with the communists‟ status abroad being semi-legal at best, this situation could not result
in an open, critical discussion on the future of the KPJ. Instead, it bred mutual hostility and
very serious charges of espionage, treason and wrecking. On the other hand, it allowed the
Comintern, now more wary than ever, to carefully survey the Yugoslavs from the sidelines.
The Comintern was silent, but it was not unobservant or disinterested. By early 1938, various
political currents within the KPJ were laid bare. The next step was deciding which one was
correct, or at least which one was wrong, in its political proposals. With Horvatin arrested by
the NKVD and Miletić marginalized in prison, most of the disputes in 1938 and 1939 were
between the Temporary Leadership and the Parallel Center. By 1939, the Parallel Center was
all but defeated. However, Miletić, who had been released from prison in the late spring of
that year, was on his way to Moscow, ready to pose one final challenge to Tito, then already
the acting general secretary.
In this chapter, I will examine the course of the factional struggle from the beginning
of 1938 until the beginning of 1940. In these two years, the KPJ was transformed and turned
decisively to the left, with most of its World War II-era policies easily traceable to the late
1930s. Its leadership, too, was fully formed in this period. Tito successfully presented a
371
Simić, Tito: svetac i magle, 97.
98
political program that the Comintern eventually found acceptable, defeating all of his key
rivals and becoming the undisputed leader of the KPJ. All of these things, however, occurred
against a backdrop of major turmoil and confusion, with Tito‟s triumph being a consequence
not only of skill and intelligence, but also of chance.
I will begin this chapter by examining the factional conflict between the Temporary
Leadership and the Parallel Center until the summer of 1938, when Marić and Kusovac were
deported from France, and Tito was summoned to Moscow. I will present the struggle for the
support of both the party rank and file and the Comintern leadership, with a particular focus
on Tito‟s practical steps toward reorganizing the party in Yugoslavia, which earned him the
attention of the ECCI. From there, I will examine two particular issues which caused a
significant amount of friction within the party, reaching the rank and file itself, and fully
uncovering the crisis of authority which the KPJ was undergoing. The issues were the
ongoing attempts to enforce the party line among the International Brigadists in Spain, as well
as among the Croatian communists, who refused to run independently in the December 1938
election. These two incidents seriously undermined Tito‟s claim to party leadership, although
he eventually overcame both successfully. After that, I will focus on Tito‟s time in Moscow in
late 1938, when he finally received the Comintern‟s mandate. I will pay special attention to
the final purge of the Old Guard of the KPJ, which took place from November 1938 until
April 1939, and came close to claiming Tito‟s life as well. I will then move to Tito‟s
enforcement of party unity throughout 1939, before finally examining Miletić‟s last
leadership challenge, presented on his trip to Moscow in the second half of the year. The
chapter will end with an examination of Miletić‟s failure and his arrest.
Comrades in Paris
Tréand‟s claim that the KPJ Central Committee was considered effectively
nonexistent, and that the Yugoslavs in Paris were to put themselves under the control of the
99
PCF, was taken very seriously by the members of the Parallel Center. It could, to a large
degree, have contributed to their inertia regarding internal party affairs in 1938.372 Although
they were active on several fronts, they failed to take any practical steps regarding the
situation in Yugoslavia itself. On this matter, Tito would make crucial advances in the spring
of 1938. The Parallel Center, on the other hand, made only one major proposal regarding the
internal organization of the party at the time. This was Marić‟s suggestion that, due to a lack
of financial resources caused by the Comintern‟s refusal to send money, the funds previously
allocated as aid to the Spanish Republic should be used to cover the living expenses of
communist émigrés in Paris. This outrageous proposal, which the Comintern quickly
discovered,373 would not help his standing in the leadership struggle. Nevertheless, for the
time being, Marić and Kusovac were the only Yugoslavs in Paris with whom the PCF leaders
were willing to talk, giving them an apparent advantage. For his part, Tito gained a crucial
ally in these early months: Lovro Kuhar introduced him to Josip Kopiniĉ, a young Comintern
intelligence operative who had just returned from Spain.374 Kopiniĉ would become one of
Tito‟s crucial allies in Moscow over the next two years, submitting intelligence reports
supportive of Tito and hostile to his rivals.
The provisional, self-appointed Central Committee continued to meet, without Marić
and Kusovac. On February 15, Marić was sacked from his post as organizer of Yugoslav
émigrés in France.375 This prompted him to act, and he decided to take the issue to Dimitrov
himself. He wrote to Dimitrov in February 1938, a full month before Tito, who originally
addressed letters only to Pieck. This raises interesting questions about his choice to do so,
especially considering the well-established opinion among scholars that Dimitrov effectively
372
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/29, Kristina Kusovac, “Centralnom komitetu KP Jugoslavije,” 1, and AJ, MG
516, 2899, Vicko Jelaska, Autobiografija, 17-18.
373
374
Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1, 74-76.
375
Swain, Tito, 21.
100
acted as Tito‟s patron.376 In light of these letters, it appears highly likely that Tito only wrote
to Dimitrov in response to Marić‟s initiative towards the Comintern, hoping to defend
himself. Indeed, Tito‟s subsequent first letter to Dimitrov did contain two full paragraphs in
which he openly criticized Marić and Kusovac,377 although he was previously very hesitant to
do this, even with Pieck.
The letters which Marić sent to Dimitrov in February 1938 begin by pointing out the
shortcomings of the party‟s choice of cadres. He first talks about the April Plenum and its
consequences, stating that he abided by the decisions of the Comintern, although he
personally did not agree with them. More specifically, he was against the entry of Gorkić and
Adolf Muk into the Politburo, while arguing that he still accepted the appointment of Tito and
Ĉolaković at the time.378 Marić was portraying himself as prescient and watchful, somebody
whose political setbacks in the preceding period were a consequence of Gorkić‟s treason. He
continued to criticize the potential gorkićevci, allegedly unmasking their ties to the former
general secretary. He pointed out that from August 1937 to February 1938, the party was
completely in the hands of these people. Furthermore, he suggested Tito‟s attitude showed
that he was their patron and that he willingly continued the previous, flawed policies of the
party.379 Thus, Marić established the overarching theme of vigilance that would persist in his
letters to the Comintern. His entire second letter concerned the causes of the mass arrests in
1936 (including his own), and his belief that the primary responsibility for them lay with
Gorkić.380 He then continued to explain his support for Petko Miletić, and proposed a new
leadership with himself and Kusovac at the helm, as outlined in the previous chapter. Marić
reiterated his willingness to continue working with Tito.381 He also claimed that Tito, by his
376
See, for example, Swain, Tito, 19, and Haug, Creating a Socialist Yugoslavia, 47.
377
378
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/6, “Rozjenko, Bistri,” February 18, 1938, 3.
379
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/8, “Izjava Ţeljezara broj 2,” 2-4.
380
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/7, “Kako sam se upoznao sa Nikolom Ĉervenĉićem.”
381
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/8, “Izjava Ţeljezara broj 2,” 2-3.
101
own admission, had received orders from Pieck to continue acting as if Gorkić was still the
general secretary.382 Comparing this to Tréand‟s aforementioned instructions to the Parallel
Center helps illustrate the contradictory information coming from within the Comintern, and
the degree to which it fomented discord within the KPJ.
Although Tito was probably aware of Marić‟s letters to Dimitrov, they still did not
prompt him to write directly to the Comintern general secretary. Instead, he wrote to Pieck
again, reiterating his support for moving the KPJ leadership to Yugoslavia and informing him
of advances made in the country, in particular regarding the popular front and work in the
trade unions.383 He still received no response on whether he should return to Yugoslavia, as he
desired, or not. The most interesting section of the letter speaks of “middlemen” who
informed him of elements in the army plotting a coup against the ruling KaraĊorĊević
dynasty.384 These “middlemen” made numerous promises, including: democratization (which
could have meant abolition of the monarchy); recognition of, and alliance with, the USSR; an
alliance with France; and the legalization of the KPJ. This was Tito‟s first expression of
radical revolutionary plans, which were still too outrageously leftist at the time. However, this
would become the official attitude of the KPJ towards Yugoslavia by the time he was
appointed general secretary in 1939.
The following month, Anton Ivanov – Bogdanov, a Bulgarian communist personally
appointed by Dimitrov to go to Spain as a Comintern representative,385 found himself in Paris.
There, he met with Ivo Marić, along with Labud and Kristina Kusovac. He met separately
with Kuhar, but did not look for Tito or anyone more explicitly connected to his inner circle.
According to Marić, Ivanov merely confirmed the information that they originally received
382
383
384
385
Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, 195.
102
from Tréand, further instructing them to remain in Paris and not to go anywhere.386 This
meeting took place just as Tito was planning to leave Paris of his own accord, in order to
personally take care of party affairs in Yugoslavia. According to Ĉolaković, Tito was
prompted to act precisely because a Comintern representative met with leaders of the Parallel
Center, but ignored him.387
Tito‟s actions were simultaneously independent and cautious, as he began to largely
act on his own, while keeping the Comintern informed of everything he was doing. 388 Before
his departure to Yugoslavia, he finally wrote to Dimitrov. Notably, he addressed him as a
“friend,” and always wrote to him on a first name basis.389 In the letter, he reiterated the
successes of the KPJ in Yugoslavia, which he told Pieck about the month before. He also
explicitly emphasized that individuals in Paris do not represent the leadership of the KPJ, and
that he is going to form a new leadership team in Yugoslavia.390 Clearly, he did not want to
run the risk of being accused once again of harboring gorkićevci. Yet, in a much more
controversial act, he showed that he was no longer waiting for clearance to leave Paris.
Finally, he informed Dimitrov of the “anti-party” activities of the Parallel Center, and the
support they enjoyed from the PCF.391 Soon after, he departed to Yugoslavia.
April and May of 1938 were extremely successful months for the KPJ. In April, seven
communists were elected to the fifteen-member Central Committee of the United Workers‟
Trade Union Federation of Yugoslavia.392 The following month, Tito formally established the
new Temporary Leadership, which was composed of nine members: three Slovenes (Edvard
Kardelj, Miha Marinko, Franc Leskošek), three Croats (Josip Kraš, Andrija Ţaja, Drago
386
AJ, 516 MG, Box 58, 2231/2, “Razgovor sa drugom Ivom Marićem,” 53. There are no additional sources to
corroborate Marić‟s claim, and he might have only said this to discredit Tito.
387
388
Swain, Tito, 22.
389
390
391
392
Swain, Tito, 23.
103
Petrović), and three Serbs (Aleksandar Ranković, Milovan Đilas, and Ivo Lola Ribar; the
latter was an ethnic Croat based in Belgrade who was also the general secretary of SKOJ).393
Tito informed Dimitrov of his progress, saying that the party cadres had achieved unity in the
trade union movement, shedding their earlier sectarianism, and that the rank and file was well
connected with “democratic groups and parties.”394 The latter point was related to his vision
of a party whose members form cells within legal organizations, consequently moving these
organizations towards the left. Clearly distinguishing himself from his opponents, Tito
dismissed the danger of “Gorkić‟s ideas” infecting the rank and file in Yugoslavia, and
criticized the “perestrahovshchiki,” that is, the excessively vigilant party members who see
enemies everywhere.395 He expressed his willingness to work with both Marić and Hudomalj,
subjecting only Kusovac to harsh criticism.396
By June, Tito‟s letters and practical achievements had attracted the attention of
Dimitrov, who summoned him to Moscow.397 The following month, Marić and Kusovac were
arrested in Paris by the French police and deported to Spain,398 for reasons which remain
unclear. The process of granting a visa to Tito was prolonged until late August, mainly
because of the accusations levelled against him by the Parallel Center. Eventually, he
managed to receive the visa thanks to the efforts of Kopiniĉ. Tito finally arrived in Moscow
on August 24, 1938. This in itself was a bold move, given the very real possibility that he
might never return. Marić and Kusovac apparently did not attempt anything similar, although
they seem to have had a lot more faith in the infallibility of the Soviet security apparatus than
Tito. Over the next five months, after a series of long and excruciating meetings with the
393
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 259. This team remained more or less unchanged until the beginning of World
War II. Only Ţaja and Petrović were replaced, with Ivan Milutinović and Rade Konĉar taking their places.
394
395
396
397
398
AJ, 507 CK KPJ, 1944/583, “Izjava dr. Radivoja Uvalića,” 3.
104
Comintern Executive, and in an atmosphere in which some proposed leadership members
simply disappeared overnight, the Comintern eventually decided to confirm the Temporary
Leadership‟s status as the Central Committee-in-waiting.399 Marić and Miletić both continued
their oppositionist activities for at least another year, but the battle was already lost.
The Spanish Inquisition
The spillover of the factional struggle into Spain – where over 1700 Yugoslav
volunteers fought for the Republic – was virtually inevitable, considering that Paris was a city
through which an overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs had to pass in order to reach the
frontline. Although the situation within the party was very precarious in the late summer of
1937, Tito took his first cautious steps with regard to the Spanish volunteers less than a month
after the arrest of Gorkić. In September 1937, he sent Rodoljub Ĉolaković to Spain with a
clear and modest set of tasks: to accelerate the reassignment of Boţidar Maslarić; to meet
Yugoslav volunteers at the front to better grasp the situation; and to see how to help the
volunteers away from the frontlines, primarily the sick and wounded. Ĉolaković worked
closely with Maslarić in the two-month period that followed, overseeing his appointment as
the new CC representative in Spain. A schoolteacher from Osijek and a member of the KPJ
since 1920, Maslarić would go on to become Tito‟s right-hand man among the Yugoslav
volunteers, ultimately playing a crucial role in enforcing the line of the Temporary
Leadership. This would prove to be a daunting task. Maslarić and his superiors were accused
of being gorkićevci soon after the news of Gorkić‟s arrest began to spread.400
Maslarić‟s twenty-two-page long report written for the Comintern in August 1939
sheds light on both his personal conflicts with various commanders and fighters, and on his
399
400
Vladan Vukliš, Sjećanje na Španiju: Španski graĊanski rat u jugoslovenskoj istoriografiji i memoaristici
1945–1991 (Banja Luka: Arhiv Republike Srpske, 2013), 25.
105
struggle with a group led by Roman Filipĉev401 that questioned both his authority and the
authority of the Temporary Leadership. Filipĉev was an extremely powerful individual, as he
was the head of the International Brigades‟ intelligence department (SIM) in Albacete.402
Maslarić claims that his showdown with the Filipĉev-led group began in April 1938 when he
arrived in Barcelona, although he had heard that this group was forming behind the frontlines
even before September 1937.403 Although the arrest of Gorkić probably did contribute to the
worsening of relations among the Yugoslav volunteers, it was not the primary point of
contention. The problem is establishing what exactly was.
The political nature of this particular clique, which Maslarić termed the
“Counterrevolutionary Yugoslav Group” in his report,404 remains somewhat unclear. They
were a group of Yugoslav political émigrés from the Soviet Union fighting in Spain, who
questioned the authority of the party leadership and its representatives on the frontlines. They
seem to have been very vocal in their unwillingness to fight and their attempts to return to the
USSR, where they hoped to wait for the Comintern to resolve the issue of the new KPJ
leadership‟s appointment.405 As a result of this attitude, they were dubbed the “Returnees.”406
Eventually, they developed the same doubts about the Temporary Leadership that the Parallel
Center already had. The three preserved letters from Maslarić to Tito, sent in early 1938,
show this very clearly. Maslarić wrote to Tito that he was struggling to enforce the party line
because the new leadership was generally seen by the volunteers as illegitimate.407 Even
worse, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) was not convinced of
401
Roman Filipĉev (1895–1941), a craftsman from Vojvodina, was a participant in both the Russian and
Hungarian revolutions, and a founding member of the KPJ. He spent most of his career in the Soviet Union,
teaching history at KUNMZ. He was killed in the Battle of Moscow in 1941.
402
Ivan Oĉak, “Jugoslavenski sudionici Oktobarske revolucije u borbi protiv fašizma, 1936–1945,” Radovi 18
(1985), 218.
403
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/33, “Izveštaj o radu u Španiji,” 10.
404
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/33, “Izveštaj,” 10. Although Maslarić had deeply vested interests, and his report is laden
with typical Stalinist accusations, there is no reason to doubt that the main points which he makes – and which
the Comintern could have easily checked – are correct.
405
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/33, “Izveštaj,” 10-11.
406
Simić, Tito: svetac i magle, 104-105.
407
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/12, “Pismo br. 3 za Ota 5.III.1938.”
106
their legitimacy either, and worried that the Temporary Leadership was full of gorkićevci.
Maslarić was even accused of being a gorkićevac himself.408 He was therefore in the same
situation that the Temporary Leadership found itself in relation to the PCF, several hundred
kilometers north of the frontline.
The Returnees soon began actively working together with Ivo Marić‟s Parallel Center.
This cooperation came naturally, due to their shared doubts about the Temporary Leadership,
and mutual agreement on the need for Comintern intervention in the KPJ. The latter factor
might also explain their shared passivity with regard to enforcing party policies. The
correspondence of Hudomalj recovered after the war helped shed light on the relations
between the Returnees and the Parallel Center. The link between the two groups was the
commander of the Washington Battalion, Mirko Marković.409 A letter from Kristina Kusovac
to Hudomalj dated April 13, 1939, in which she complains of “maslarićevci” arriving in the
Soviet Union from Spain,410 shows that the Parallel Center was well-informed of their
disagreements, and kept in touch with the Returnees well into 1939.
There is no evidence that the Returnees ever tried to seriously agitate and gain more
followers. Maslarić mentions only eleven of them by name,411 and it seems that they did not
have more than a handful of sympathizers. Only one of them ever dared to raise the issue of
the party leadership while in Spain. In general, their behavior left the impression of vigilant
408
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/12, “Pismo br. 3 za Ota 5.III.1938.”
409
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/4, Letter of Marković to Hudomalj, February 18, 1939. Mirko Marković (1907–
1988) was one of the most colorful figures in the Yugoslav communist movement. A nephew of Lenin‟s
personal friend Vukašin Marković, he organized armed uprisings with his uncle in Montenegro in the early
1920s in the hopes of sparking a communist revolution. After their failure, he immigrated to the Soviet Union
and finished studying at KUNMZ. The Comintern sent him to the United States, where he worked as an
organizer of the Yugoslav diaspora. After returning to Moscow for a short time in 1936, he went to Spain, where
he became commander of the Washington Battalion, later befriending Ernest Hemingway, who hosted him in
Cuba after the fall of the Spanish Republic. After being allowed to reenter the United States, he returned to
organizing the Yugoslav diaspora and mobilizing them for the war effort. In 1945, he returned to Yugoslavia and
became the first dean of the School of Economics at the University of Belgrade. In 1948, he was arrested as a
Cominformist and sent to the Goli otok prison camp. After his release, he dedicated himself to scientific work
and became one of the pioneers of cybernetics in Yugoslavia.
410
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/5, Letter of Kristina Kusovac to Hudomalj, April 13, 1939, 2.
411
Ten are mentioned, with brief summaries of their “anti-party work,” in the August 1939 report. The eleventh,
Milovan Ćetković, is mentioned in a letter to Tito from February 1938. AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/12, Pismo br. 1 za
Ota.
107
Bolsheviks who were confident that the Comintern would eventually resolve the situation and
make the right decision, although they did knowingly side with Marić and Kusovac. Their
belief in the need to preserve party cadres for a future Yugoslav revolution was probably
genuine, although it is easy to see how it would lead their opponents to think of them as mere
cowards.
Like the Parallel Center, they posed a problem primarily because of their extensive
ties: in this case not only with the Comintern, but also with the Cadres Department of the
International Brigades. Maslarić names two members of the PCE Central Committee, under
the pseudonyms Edo and Yakov, and the head of the Cadres Department, Georgi Dobrev –
Zhelezov, as their main patrons.412 Edo was Edoardo D‟Onofrio, an Italian communist who
was a member of the PCE and served on the party‟s Foreigners Commission.413 Yakov was
most likely Palmiro Togliatti, who worked as a Comintern representative in the CC of the
PCE in Barcelona under that pseudonym.414 Additionally, Maslarić claims that the Returnees
had connections with the Soviet Embassy in Spain.415 All of this helped them gain a
significant victory against Maslarić and the party faction that he was representing in the
summer of 1938.
The main showdown between Maslarić and the Returnees occurred during the so-
called Barcelona Conference, which took place on August 3, 1938. The main discussant at the
conference was Vladimir Ćopić. According to the proceedings from the meeting, almost all of
the KPJ members gathered were against Maslarić, and the evaluation of his work was
extremely negative. Aside from being called a gorkićevac several times, he was also accused
412
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/33, “Izveštaj,” 15.
413
Francesco M. Biscione, s.v. “D'ONOFRIO, Edoardo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 41 (Rome:
Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana, 1992). http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/edoardo-d-onofrio_(Dizionario-
Biografico)/ (accessed September 3, 2017).
414
Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, 471.
415
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/33, “Izveštaj,” 11.
108
of harboring Trotskyists.416 Maslarić fought back, accusing the Returnees of cowardice and
pointing out their inability to perform tasks they had been ordered to undertake.417 His
response, however, was comparatively meek, given the weight of the accusations against him.
Ćopić, as the main speaker, took a more moderate stance, trying to reconcile the two groups.
He dismissed the dispute as a personal feud between Maslarić and Filipĉev, but claimed that
their personal disagreements were nevertheless leading to a formation of factions around
them.418 D‟Onofrio and Togliatti took a position similar to Ćopić,419 in spite of Maslarić‟s
claims that they were all against him and the Temporary Leadership. Overall, the three
authority figures present at the meeting seemed uninterested in taking sides. As such,
Maslarić‟s claim that Togliatti and D‟Onofrio worked against the Temporary Leadership is
unsubstantiated. Those who did undoubtedly work with the Returnees were, once again, the
Bulgarian communists. Aside from the aforementioned Zhelezov, Anton Ivanov was also
mentioned at the meeting, where one of the Returnees claimed it was Ivanov who informed
them that Maslarić was a gorkićevac.420
The situation was not fully resolved with the Barcelona Conference, but it did not
escalate either; the conflict remained confined to about a dozen individuals. Soon after the
meeting, Ćopić embarked on a trip to Moscow and Maslarić was arrested on an unrelated
issue, spending half a year in a Spanish prison before being cleared of all charges.421 This
meant that Tito‟s most trusted associate in Spain was sidelined for the entire second half of
1938. A more proactive group would have taken the opportunity to weaken the authority of
the Temporary Leadership among the Yugoslav volunteers. However, there are no sources
which would suggest that the Returnees did such a thing. If they had, they could have caused
416
RGASPI, 545-2-79. “Протокол собрания от 3.VIII. по вопросу взаимоотношений среди тов. из
Югославии членов И.К.П.,” 4.
417
RGASPI, 545-2-79. “Протокол собрания от 3.VIII.,” 3.
418
419
RGASPI, 545-2-79. “Протокол собрания от 3.VIII.,” 5-8.
420
421
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/33, “Izveštaj,” 19-21.
109
a great deal of trouble for Tito and his Temporary Leadership. The fact that they had not done
so probably accounts for their lenient treatment in the immediate aftermath of Tito‟s takeover
of the KPJ. He attempted to obstruct their careers in the Soviet Union due to their lack of
party discipline,422 but he did not accuse them of treason or expel them from the party. The
Spanish episode, therefore, was not a crucial moment in the factional struggle. However, it
shows similarities to the situation in Paris, laying bare the powerful transnational networks
that influenced intraparty relations at the time. Additionally, it illustrates Tito‟s relatively
conciliatory attitude towards defeated intraparty rivals, which was much milder than the
criticisms levelled by Horvatin, Marić, and Miletić.
Liquidationism and the Croat Question
The events in Croatia in 1938 and 1939 had a far greater significance than the disputes
in Spain. They represented a major blow for the Temporary Leadership, and, had they taken
advantage, could have led to the victory of the Parallel Center. They also illustrate well the
discord and lack of communication between various levels of the party leadership and the
mutually competing groups within the KPJ. The conflict was directly tied to questions of
liquidationism and nationalism. The former related to the proper application of popular front
policy, while the latter concerned the defense of Yugoslavia in the case of fascist threat. Both
were burning issues at the time. The disputes conducted in the language of Bolshevism were,
in this case, inextricably linked to nationalism, as they were justified by an alleged uniqueness
of the Croatian nation‟s position within Yugoslavia.
While Gorkić was writing his party autobiography in Moscow, hopelessly trying to
save his life, Croatian communists under Tito‟s leadership met clandestinely in the dead of
night, in a forest west of Zagreb, to form the Communist Party of Croatia (KPH). The
communist parties of Slovenia (KPS) and Croatia were founded as part of the popular front
422
Pero Simić, Tito: svetac i magle, 105.
110
strategy, in an attempt to better accommodate the local conditions and different political
alignments in these parts of the country.423 The KPH and KPS were intended to operate as
regional subsections of the KPJ, not as separate parties, and the leadership explicitly stated
that this move was not intended to federalize the party, which was to remain centralized.424
Within a year, the communists had also founded the Party of the Working People (SRN), a
communist front organization subordinate to the KPJ.425 It was supposed to operate in the
same way as all other fronts envisioned by the Temporary Leadership: thus, a high-ranking
member of the legal SRN would have to comply fully with the decisions of the underground
KPJ organization.426 However, this organizational hierarchy was not always respected, as a
consequence of both earlier liquidationist practices and a lack of faith in the new leadership,
which still lacked a mandate from the Comintern. This would lead to a major dispute between
the Temporary Leadership and the KPH over the course of 1938.
Following the KPJ‟s failure to form a popular front for the 1935 election, and its
change of course after the fall of Gorkić, the Temporary Leadership under Tito did not throw
its weight behind the United Opposition. Instead, the party planned to present a separate list of
candidates for the 1938 election, guided by the Leninist belief that the workers‟ opposition to
the dictatorship should not merge itself with the bourgeois opposition. Many in the KPH,
however, disagreed, calling for stronger cooperation with the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS).
This call was echoed by the Parallel Center, as Marić considered that an electoral
confrontation with the HSS would alienate the Croatian masses, and that tactical
accommodation was necessary.427 Tito‟s appeals for party unity were not always successful,
423
424
Jelić, Komunistiĉka partija Hrvatske, vol. 1, 66.
425
426
Swain, Tito, 22-23.
427
RGASPI, 495-20-647, “тов. Димитрову,” March 29, 1938, 2-4; For examples of this tactical accommodation
in Dalmatia, see AJ, MG 516, 2246, Josip Rosić, “Prilog za istoriju KPJ,” 80-81.
111
primarily because he was merely the acting leader of the party throughout the course of the
year.
The first disputes began in March 1938, after the Anschluss of Austria. This event
brought Nazi Germany‟s troops to Yugoslavia‟s doorstep, making the threat of war more
imminent than ever before. In response, the KPJ leadership issued a proclamation calling for
cooperation not only with the United Opposition, but also with the Yugoslav monarchist
centralists and nationalists who opposed the government, in order to defend the Yugoslav
state.428 This proclamation drew sharp criticism from the KPH, whose leadership stated that
such an alliance was out of the question. Some Croatian communists posited the solution of
the Croatian national question as a prerequisite for Croatian support for a united Yugoslavia.
Tito harshly criticized such a view as sectarian in his letters to Dimitrov.429 Although the
Croatian question would escalate in a different way later in the year, this particular incident is
notable for revealing an important feature of the Temporary Leadership‟s strategy. Although
liquidationism was the most frequent accusation employed by Tito against the opponents of
his party line, the KPJ did not really shy away from liquidationist tactics if the unity of
Yugoslavia was at stake. In this particular incident, therefore, the Temporary Leadership of
the KPJ was significantly further to the right than the KPH leadership. Moreover, it remains
unclear how this call for cooperation with forces of the right correlates with Tito‟s
contemporaneous suggestion to Pieck that the KPJ should support the overthrow of the
Yugoslav government and the establishment of a new, more democratic regime. In the
following years, the line of the KPJ would evolve into a consistent attitude that only the
proletarian left can preserve the unity of the nation, while the bourgeois forces would
inevitably betray it to fascism. This line clearly distinguished the KPJ from both the Croatian
and Serbian nationalists, while affirming their commitment to a federal Yugoslav state.
428
429
112
The Croatian national question took center stage in the run-up to the December 1938
election. The worsening international situation made it impossible to further postpone
resolving the issue which the Kingdom had avoided confronting for two decades. The
socialists started approaching the United Opposition again, sensing that the government‟s
position was significantly weakened, and that the time had come for some substantial changes
in the internal organization of the country. Many communists shared the sentiment, although
the Temporary Leadership remained unconvinced.430 The conflict was publicly played out
through the Party of the Working People, which was expected to contest the election outside
of the HSS-led United Opposition. It profoundly divided the KPJ and exposed intraparty
disagreements to the general public. The dispute was detrimental to the party‟s electoral
performance and reputation. Croatia was one of the communist strongholds in the only free
and fair election in Yugoslavia in 1920, and the party was hoping to repeat its earlier
success.431 The disagreement between the KPH and the KPJ leaderships, however, sabotaged
this effort.
As already mentioned, the entirety of the KPJ, including its subsection, the KPH, was
expected to present separate candidates for the election, unconnected to the United
Opposition, through the SRN. While this did indeed occur in all other parts of the country, the
KPH refused to comply. It did not propose any of its own candidates, instead fully supporting
the United Opposition in all regions.432 This angered the central party leadership, with Tito
once again bringing up accusations of liquidationism against his rivals.433 While the
accusation itself was not mere slander, Tito‟s particular brand of leftism was weak in Croatia,
and his opponents had strong counterarguments to present. The KPH leadership rightly saw
the mass support for the HSS as a sign of its popular perception as the only legitimate
430
Swain, Tito, 26.
431
432
433
Swain, Tito, 24.
113
defender of Croatian national interests.434 Therefore, the communists were afraid that open
confrontation would be detrimental, further weakening their support among the Croats. They
considered that the only proper application of the popular front was to understand these
circumstances and act in line with the main representative party of the Croatian nation, which
considered Croatia to be oppressed in Yugoslavia. The notion that Croatia was a special case
was constantly emphasized.435
To Tito and the Temporary Leadership, this sounded a lot like nationalism. While the
KPH began infiltrating the HSS and other legal organizations which operated within the
United Opposition,436 attempting to push them further to the left, the Temporary Leadership
accused them of pandering to reactionary elements within the Croatian national movement.437
Furthermore, the focus on legal organizations was presented as another deviation from the
proper party line, as work in non-communist trade unions and peasant organizations was
described as liquidationist.438 The question of whether it was truly so requires in-depth
microhistorical research of Croatian communist politics on the ground, which is beyond the
scope of my work.
Nonetheless, the accusations coming from the Temporary Leadership were not entirely
unfounded. The KPH did constantly shy away from criticizing the HSS, fearing that any and
all such criticism would weaken the communists‟ position.439 The same was the case with the
legal SRN, led by Boţidar Adţija and Mladen Iveković. In reality, such an attitude merely
served to make the SRN indistinguishable from the rest of the opposition. Moreover, the fact
that the communists mostly engaged in politics through the SRN and the trade unions further
434
435
Swain, Tito, 24.
436
437
438
Jelić, Komunistiĉka partija Hrvatske, vol. 1, 226-227.
439
114
vindicated the view that the KPH line was liquidationist. Like Gorkić before them,440 the KPH
leadership hoped that such activity would be the best bulwark against future mass arrests of
communists. Tito, on the other hand, saw the establishment of secret and independent party
cells within legal organizations as the way forward, rather than the full absorption of the
communist rank and file into non-communist organizations.
The profoundly entangled conflicts of interest escalated the most in Dalmatia. For
their part, the Dalmatian communists led by Jelaska and supported by the Parallel Center
always insisted that they worked hard to ensure the leading role of the KPH in legal
organizations, in line with the proposals of the Temporary Leadership.441 Moreover, the
Dalmatians, like the Temporary Leadership, eventually developed the view that the SRN
should contest elections independently, and not as part of the HSS.442 This was all the more
significant because Jelaska had been elected president of the SRN and thus enjoyed a high
degree of authority. Tito therefore found himself in a situation where those ostensibly
supported by the Temporary Leadership (the KPH leaders) were pursuing an incorrect line,
while those explicitly connected to the Parallel Center were enforcing correct policies, even
though the Parallel Center itself was a proponent of collaboration with the HSS. This
extremely convoluted situation was a serious challenge to Tito‟s newly established authority.
Ultimately, personal friendships and rivalries prevailed over policy considerations. Rather
than turning his back on the Central Committees of the KPH and the SRN in support for
Jelaska and the Dalmatians, Tito focused on bringing the KPH and SRN into line while
punishing the Dalmatian communists, whose views were much closer to his own.
440
Swain, Tito, 19.
441
442
AJ, MG 516, 2899, Vicko Jelaska, Autobiografija, 18.
115
Figure 3. Factions in Croatia from the Anschluss until the expulsion of Jelaska, Marić, and
Kusovac.
A special party committee was set up to investigate the case. Once again Lola Ribar,
as Tito‟s most trusted lieutenant, was given the task of investigating and reporting on the
situation in Dalmatia.443 The Temporary Leadership eventually decided to punish the highest-
ranking figures in the SRN (Adţija, Iveković and others), as well as three leading KPH
members, Josip Kraš, Đuro Špoljarić, and Andrija Ţaja.444 All were reprimanded, although
none were expelled. The expulsions were reserved for the party leadership in Dalmatia, which
was accused of “liquidating” party work to the point of dissolving several local communist
branches, and focusing on the SRN at the expense of the KPJ.445 Jelaska, an old party member
who had never been involved in any factional struggles before, would deny these allegations
443
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1938/34, Letter of Ilija [Lola Ribar] to Oto [Tito], mid-November 1938.
444
445
Jelić, Komunistiĉka partija Hrvatske, vol. 1, 235-236.
116
until the end of his life. He decided that he would not go down without a fight. In 1939,
Jelaska mobilized the popular support he enjoyed in Dalmatia. When the SRN expelled him
on the orders of the KPH, the SRN members in Split voted against the decision, thus directly
contradicting the supposed subordination of the SRN to the communist party. 446 This appears
to have been as far as Jelaska‟s alleged liquidationism went.447 Moreover, the rank and file in
Split completely rejected collaboration with Tito‟s newly appointed head of party
organization in Dalmatia, Vicko Krstulović, who was booed at all the mass meetings he
attended, as the members insisted on rejecting the CC‟s decision to expel Jelaska.448 Although
already formally expelled, Jelaska was defeated only after repeated interventions from the
Central Committee of the KPJ throughout 1939 and 1940.
Even though Tito‟s main rivals were all marginalized by mid-1939, the change in
political situation seemed to vindicate the views of the Croatian “liquidationists.” The
dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 raised concerns over whether Tito‟s leftist
attitude to the popular front could push segments of the Croatian people into the
collaborationist camp, as had happened in Slovakia. Even if the dispute was a matter of
Croatian national sentiment, and thus was problematic from a Marxist point of view, it was
now inextricably linked to the struggle against fascism. It seemed that the leftism of the KPJ
had subverted this struggle. As a consequence, Tito would soon face charges of Trotskyism in
Moscow, pressed by Marić‟s ally Petko Miletić and his supporters in the Comintern. Tito
cleverly procrastinated, only arriving in Moscow in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,
446
Kvesić, Dalmacija u Narodnooslobodilaĉkoj borbi, 22.
447
According to Ivan Jelić, the charges of liquidationism were also a consequence of the fact that Jelaska simply
used the SRN due to the lack of a formal party organization in Dalmatia, which was a consequence of frequent
mass arrests. Jelić, Komunistiĉka partija Hrvatske, vol. 1, 228-230. Tito‟s first attack on Jelaska, in a report to
the Comintern in September 1938, was not focused on liquidationism but on his “refusal to let young cadres take
up leading positions,” and his comrade Ivo Baljkas‟ alleged relations with Trotskyists. Tito, Sabrana djela, vol.
4, 92.
448
Vicko Krstulović, Memoari jugoslavenskog revolucionera, vol 1. (Belgrade: Mostart, 2012), 105.
117
when the Comintern once again took a leftward shift. The charges were eventually dismissed
and his error forgiven.449
Tito‟s thesis on the reactionary role of the bourgeoisie in underdeveloped countries
was, in fact, fundamentally Trotskyist, as this view was developed by Trotsky and the Left
Opposition in relation to the Chinese Revolution in 1925.450 It was certainly in contradiction
to the Comintern‟s vision of the popular front dominant until the tacit abandonment of the
policy in 1939. However, this does not mean that Tito was himself a Trotskyist. Rather, his
view on the revolution was partly in the Leninist tradition which Trotsky claimed to continue.
Geoffrey Swain claims that, writing in 1940, Tito merited Stalin for “constructing socialism,”
but added that “the revolutionary struggle in capitalist countries is mainly led by Lenin's
thought.”451 Therefore, Tito‟s policy was a hybrid of revolutionary Leninism and what
Fitzpatrick has called Stalin‟s “revolution from above.” His subsequent implementation of the
revolutionary struggle, which was consistently criticized by the Comintern for being too
leftist, and the establishment of the postwar regime, which was fundamentally Stalinist in
spite of some minor divergences, both attest to this. When the revolution came, it took the
form of a party-guided peasant revolt and an antifascist liberation war, not of mass worker
takeovers of factories and formation of the soviets.
The only major political casualties of the anti-liquidationist struggle from Tito‟s inner
circle were Croatian compromisers with the HSS. By 1940, Andrija Ţaja and Drago Petrović
were no longer in the party leadership, replaced by ardent leftists Rade Konĉar and Ivan
Milutinović. The only one of the three Croatian “rightists” who kept his position at the head
of the party was Josip Kraš. The Croatian case illustrates both Tito‟s flexible attitude to
449
Swain, Tito, 25.
450
Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990), 10.
451
Geoffrey Swain, “Tito: The Formation of a Disloyal Bolshevik,” International Review of Social History
XXXIV (1989), 262. Swain cites a single source – a note handwritten by Tito on the margins of Proleter and
kept in the Archive of Yugoslavia – to support his claim. However, this observation is consistent with Tito‟s
overall ideological outlook and practical policies, and is therefore not without merit.
118
intraparty dissenters with whom he enjoyed close personal ties, and his irreconcilable
harshness toward rivals with whom he might have shared political views while having
opposing political ambitions. Furthermore, Jelaska‟s expulsion in spite of his immense
popularity serves as an example of how democracy was extinguished in the Stalinized party,
with democratic centralism now meaning that the rank and file was to obey the decisions
already reached by the leadership. Finally, the KPH controversy showed a latent potential for
factionalism along national lines, which would persist in the party after 1940,452 as well as for
divergences from Stalinism which would intensify after the communist takeover of power.
Tito in Moscow
When Tito arrived in Moscow on August 25, 1938, the Yugoslav community of the
famous Hotel Lux, in which foreign communists resided, was reduced to four individuals,
himself included. The remaining three were primarily alive because they had spent most of
the Great Purge abroad, namely in Spain: Josip Kopiniĉ as a Comintern operative, Vladimir
Ćopić and Janko Jovanović as commanders in the International Brigades. By August, the
Yezhovshchina was gradually subsiding, although the situation was far from secure for
anybody. Two of these three Yugoslav comrades in the Hotel Lux would be dead by the
spring of 1939. Throughout his time in Moscow, Tito was close to Kopiniĉ and Ćopić,
frequently meeting them for coffee and political discussions.453 No information exists about
the relationship of this group to Jovanović, who returned to the USSR in May 1937, after
having lost his right arm in battle, to work for the International Control Commission. Tito also
enjoyed the support of Mita Despotović, a Yugoslav who worked for the Cadres Department
of the Comintern.454 However, Tito‟s most significant ally was the Bulgarian communist Ivan
452
A dated – yet still relevant – overview of factionalism along national lines, particularly in the KPH, is
available in Banac‟s With Stalin against Tito. A more recent summary of the topic is Hilde Haug‟s Creating a
Socialist Yugoslavia.
453
454
119
Karaivanov (Spinner), a close comrade of Dimitrov and Kolarov, who worked in the Cadres
Department. Most authors agree that Karaivanov was Tito‟s vital supporter in the Comintern
at the time, and allege that he had close ties to the NKVD;455 Kopiniĉ himself shared this
view.456 However, specific details of his relationship to Tito at the time are largely unknown,
and neither man ever spoke about it in much detail. The two were so close that Karaivanov
immigrated to Yugoslavia already in May 1945, eventually supporting Tito after the
Cominform Resolution in 1948, and remained in Belgrade until his death in 1960. He was
even an MP in the Yugoslav Federal Assembly and a member of the party Central Committee.
In spite of these connections, Tito‟s situation was far from secure. His contact in the
NKVD, Ivan Kralj, was arrested just three weeks before his arrival in Moscow.457 The biggest
problems came from accusations by the Red Army officer Ivan Srebrenjak, and the ECCI
member, and head of the Cadres Department, Georgy Damyanov – Belov. Both were
supportive of the Parallel Center. In March, Damyanov wrote that Tito had attempted to
desert the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, that he was unable to account for his
whereabouts for several months at the time (implying he might have worked with the Whites),
alleged that he might have had contacts with the Yugoslav police, exposing his close links to
Gorkić, and pointed out that his wife, Lucia Bauer, had been arrested by the NKVD.458
Srebrenjak was even harsher in his accusations. Kopiniĉ claims he found out about these
when meeting Manuilsky‟s deputy, Andrey Andreyev, in the summer of 1938. Srebrenjak was
trying to prove Tito‟s spy links by pointing out that his closest associates from SKOJ, Lola
Ribar and Boris Kidriĉ, were both the sons of wealthy Yugoslav capitalists, that his current
455
Pirjevec, Tito i drugovi, vol. 1, 91; Goldstein, Tito, 163; Bondarev does not examine the allegation that
Karaivanov worked for the NKVD, but focuses on his work in the Comintern and posits that he was the person
in charge of Balkan affairs in the Cadres Department. Bondarev, Misterija Tito, 102.
456
Kopiniĉ said that Karaivanov delivered his positive reports on Tito “to a special group within the NKVD.”
457
“Красль Иван Иванович,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed May 5, 2018,
458
Simić, Svetac i magle, 91.
120
lover Herta Haas was a Gestapo agent, and that the increase in party press circulation at a time
when the Comintern was not sending any money meant he must be receiving funding from the
police.459 Kopiniĉ refuted all the accusations. However, he had to personally speak and write
to Dimitrov several times before Tito, invited in June, was actually granted an entrance visa in
late August.
Soon after his arrival, Tito was obliged to write reports on arrested individuals with
whom he had connections to the Cadres Department. Among others, he wrote about Horvatin,
Đuro Cvijić, Fleischer, Gorkić, Filipović, and the recently deceased Stjepan Cvijić,460 as well
as his wife Lucia Bauer.461 Predictably, these reports contained a mixture of accusation and
criticism for his own lack of watchfulness, without a fundamental questioning of the decisions
of the NKVD. It is highly unlikely that Tito was aware that some individuals, like Sima
Marković and Sima Miljuš, were still alive, or that his reports contributed to their subsequent
execution, as alleged by Pero Simić.462 Tito was still not cleared of all suspicion, but he had
the attention of the Comintern. He first appeared before the ECCI Secretariat on September
17, 1938.
The only other Yugoslav attending the meeting was Vladimir Ćopić. Tito presented
his lengthy report on the conditions in Yugoslavia and within the KPJ. In the weeks prior to
that, he also wrote reports on his own activity since April 1936, the conditions in the trade
unions, the popular front, the SRN, and the communist party itself. 463 Presumably, the
members of the ECCI familiarized themselves with these reports in the weeks preceding the
meeting. The discussants were Ćopić, Manuilsky, Otto Kuusinen, and Mikhail Trilisser.
These discussants later constituted a special commission (with Tito instead of Ćopić), which
459
Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1, 85-87.
460
Simić and Despot, Tito – strogo poverljivo, 86-90.
461
Simić, Tito, 407-409.
462
Simić and Despot, Tito – strogo poverljivo, 89. A critique of Simić‟s claims already exists in Bondarev‟s
Misterija Tito, as well as in his article “Sima Marković – moskovske godine (1935–1938).”
463
The reports are available in Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 74-119.
121
was tasked with drafting a resolution based on the decisions from the meeting. 464 Tito‟s
political proposals were the same as those he had made earlier in 1938: returning the party
leadership to the country, ridding the KPJ of factionalists, and building up the popular front in
Yugoslavia without bourgeois parties.465 It appeared as if a new leadership, composed of Tito
and Ćopić as the only remaining reputable Yugoslavs in Moscow, was looming on the
horizon.
Ćopić and Tito were very close at the time, and all sources seem to suggest that he was
seriously considered for a leading post in the KPJ (although his earlier factionalism was
probably an obstacle to him being appointed general secretary). Even before Ćopić‟s arrival in
Moscow, in April 1938, Tito recommended him as the only one of two intellectuals who
should be considered for one of the leading positions in the KPJ (the other being Maslarić).466
Consolidation of the Yugoslav party was most likely one of the main reasons for his recall
from Spain. His demeanor in the summer of 1938 testifies that he was aware of his candidacy
for a leading position in the KPJ. At the Barcelona Conference of Yugoslav volunteers, he
took a “centrist” position, criticizing both sides of the conflict, in a manner typical of aspiring
party leaders during Stalinism. He took the same attitude during his brief stay in Paris, where
he met both Ĉolaković and Kusovac in an attempt to make sense of the dispute between the
Temporary Leadership and the Parallel Center.467 It does not seem that he was interested in
taking sides in Paris, but he clearly aligned with Tito as soon as he reached Moscow.
Just as it seemed that the issue of the KPJ leadership was nearing its resolution, Tito
and Ćopić were left to wait again. Instead of receiving a response on the fate of their party,
they were given the task of translating Stalin‟s book History of the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course into Serbo-Croatian. The third translator was most likely
464
RGASPI, 495-18-1112, “Protokoll (A) Nr. 339 der Sitzung des Sekretariats des EKKI vom 17.9.38.”
465
Goldstein, Tito, 162.
466
467
122
Janko Jovanović.468 Although highly significant, this new job left them with a continued sense
of both uncertainty and urgency. During this time, Tito wrote to Dimitrov twice, claiming that
the impending December elections in Yugoslavia meant they should meet as soon as possible,
and that he should leave the Soviet Union.469 He received no reply. According to Kopiniĉ, he
even tried to convince Dimitrov to take Ćopić under his protection in mid-October, after
hearing that Ćopić was facing accusations from the NKVD.470 If this plea existed, it also went
unanswered. Exactly two months after his return to Moscow, on November 3, 1938, Ćopić
was arrested by the NKVD in the Hotel Lux, together with Jovanović. A participant of the
October Revolution, a founder and one-time leader of the KPJ, and the former commander of
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Vladimir Ćopić was shot half a year later.471
It remains unclear why Tito was the only one of the three who was not taken away by
the NKVD. Kopiniĉ says that he only narrowly escaped arrest, but does not share anything
beyond that.472 A couple of weeks later, Trilisser – who was part of the special commission
for Yugoslavia and had links with the NKVD – was also arrested, just two days before
Yezhov himself.473 At this point, Tito‟s last remaining allies in Moscow were Kopiniĉ and
Karaivanov. Despite claims to the contrary by many historians, Dimitrov does not seem to
have been particularly sympathetic to Tito or the KPJ in general. He did, however, appoint
468
Ridley, Tito, 139. Several authors, including those who edited Tito‟s collected works, say that the third
translator was Horvatin, which is impossible because he had been dead for over half a year by this point. The
fact that it was actually Jovanović is corroborated by William J. Chase, since a report printed in his book
mentions Jovanović as an employee of the International Publishing House. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates?,
354. It is highly likely that they were all hired at the insistence of Karaivanov, who worked in the International
Publishing House at the time.
469
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 124, 130.
470
Venceslav Cenĉić, Enigma Kopiniĉ, vol. 1 (Belgrade: Rad, 1983), 97-98. Allegedly, after Ćopić was arrested,
Tito tearfully protested in the company of Kopiniĉ. Kopiniĉ is a deeply unreliable narrator who frequently
attempted to embellish his own role in events, and it is not too far-fetched that he did the same for his friend and
comrade. As such, this claim should be taken with a grain of salt, as the relationship between Tito and those
executed requires further research.
471
“Чопыч-Сенько Владимир Иванович,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
472
473
123
Kolarov to replace Trilisser,474 and Kolarov had a much more favorable view of Tito than the
rest of the commission. By the end of December, Kolarov was insisting that the Temporary
Leadership should be recognized as the new ruling body of the KPJ, granted the financial
funds they requested, and given full control over the party newspaper.475
Dimitrov was still unconvinced. On December 30, he met Tito in the presence of
Damyanov and Stela Blagoeva.476 Tito repeated the need to return the leadership to the
country, reported on the work of the SRN, and tried to discredit the Parallel Center. Dimitrov
called both him and Marić factionalists, proclaimed his work to be “worthless,” and stated
that his leadership was considered only temporary by the ECCI. He also accentuated the need
for communists to take a leading role in legal organizations as the basis of the popular
front.477 Tito was explicitly told that the ECCI did not trust him, and that he was not to present
himself as the secretary of the KPJ.478 A decision about the leadership was to be reached by a
party “consultation” in the country.479 However, the resolution on party work that Tito penned
with Kolarov was accepted by the ECCI on January 5, 1939.480 Two days later, Manuilsky
wrote to Dimitrov insisting on Tito‟s removal, due to his involvement in the failed mission of
sending Yugoslav volunteers to Spain in the spring of 1937.481 This once again slowed down
the procedure, and it took two more weeks for Tito to once again be granted a permit to leave
the Soviet Union and continue sorting out party affairs.
Before returning to Yugoslavia, Tito spent a couple of days in Paris. He informed
Marić and Kusovac that they did not have a mandate from the Comintern.482 He then met with
474
475
Pirjevec, Tito i drugovi, vol. 1, 94.
476
Simić, Tito: Svetac i magle, 95. Stela Blagoeva, a worker in the ECCI apparatus, was the daughter of the
founder of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Dimitar Blagoev.
477
Simić, Tito: Svetac i magle, 97-98.
478
Simić, Tito: Svetac i magle, 98.
479
480
481
Simić and Despot, Tito – strogo poverljivo, 93. Manuilsky, formerly close to Trotsky and a patron of Gorkić,
was probably excessively vigilant due to fears for his own life.
482
124
Srebrenjak, their intelligence contact, and Raymond Guyot, a member of the PCF central
committee,483 presumably to give them the same information. On March 15, the Temporary
Leadership met for the first time in the Slovene town of Bohinjska Bistrica. There, they heard
Tito‟s report on the crisis in the party and the instructions of the Comintern. They expelled all
the “factionalists” (including Kusovac, Marić, and Miletić), punished the Croatian party
leadership for liquidationism, and agreed on a detailed plan for the reorganization of the
national, provincial and local branches of the KPJ.484 Notably, the minutes from the meeting
explicitly refer to the group as the Temporary Leadership, and acknowledge that the Yugoslav
question in the Comintern had not been formally resolved. The promised “party consultation”
took place on June 9 and 10, in a village outside of Ljubljana, and the Temporary Leadership
was now formally confirmed as the Central Committee of the KPJ.485 The newly appointed
“overseer” of the KPJ, Vladimir Poptomov (Gromov), submitted a favorable report to the
ECCI, saying that Tito had revived the work of the party in Yugoslavia.486
Given that the first, and subsequently most controversial, decision of the Temporary
Leadership in March was to expel party members who had been arrested in the USSR, I
would like to briefly reflect on that issue as well. Some authors, most notably Pero Simić and
Zvonimir Despot, allege that those arrested communists who were still alive at the time of
their expulsion were shot on the orders of the Temporary Leadership.487 Eleven prominent
Yugoslav communists were shot in Moscow one month after the Temporary Leadership
expelled them from the KPJ, on April 19, 1939. Of those individuals already mentioned, the
483
484
485
486
Another Bulgarian communist working in the Cadres Department, Poptomov later became the Bulgarian
Minister of Foreign Affairs and a staunch opponent of Tito after 1948. RGASPI, 495-18-1306a, Громов,
“Информация о работе КП Югославии за последние месяцы по материалам полученым из страны,“ June
4, 1939, 1.
487
125
executed were Vladimir Ćopić,488 Janko Jovanović,489 Sima Marković,490 Kosta Novaković,491
Simo Miljuš,492 Jovan Martinović-Mališić,493 and Radomir Vujović.494 The additional four
murdered Yugoslavs were no less important: Vilim Horvaj495 was a prominent former leader
of the SKOJ and the Young Communist International, as well as the head of the Yugoslav
section of the International Lenin School; Akif Šeremet496 was another former leader of SKOJ
and a Comintern worker, who was exiled for Trotskyism in 1932; Robert Valdgoni 497 was a
prominent Yugoslav veteran of the Russian Civil War; and Ernest Ambruš – Richter498 was a
Slovene communist who organized Yugoslav political émigrés in France and Czechoslovakia.
It is absurd to presume that a temporary leadership of a communist party, which the
Comintern barely trusted enough to give a provisional mandate, enjoyed the necessary
authority to order the NKVD to execute somebody. The most likely explanation is that the
Temporary Leadership possessed no exact information about the fate of these individuals,499
although they could have presumed that they were, at best, sent to a gulag. The most likely
explanation is that these reputable Yugoslav communists were shot following a joint decision
488
“Чопыч-Сенько Владимир Иванович,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
489
“Дреновский Душан Павлович,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
490
“Маркович Сима Милашевич,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
491
“Драгачевац Петр Петрович,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
492
“Кубурич Илья Георгиевич,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
493
“Мартынович-Малишич Иван Павлович,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
494
“Лихт Франц Дмитриевич,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
495
“Белич Милан,“ in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
496
“Бергер Карл Иосифович,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
497
“Булыгин Алексей Михайлович,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
498
“Рихтер Амбруц-Эрнест,” in “Списки жертв,” MEMORIAL, accessed March 27, 2017,
499
A good example of the prevalent lack of information is the aforementioned report on Janko Jovanović
discovered by William J. Chase (see note 468). This report was drawn up at the request of Dimitrov in February
1941 in order to release Jovanović from the gulag. Even Dimitrov, as the general secretary of the Comintern, was
completely unaware of the fact that Jovanović had already been dead for two years when his request was made.
126
of the VKP(b) Politburo, the NKVD, and the state prosecutor to execute 198 members of a
“counterrevolutionary right-Trotskyist conspiratorial organization” on April 9, 1939.500
However, the exact reasons for their execution, as well as the question of why it was
ordered by the highest organs of the Soviet state – including individuals such as Stalin, Beria,
and Vyshinsky – remain a mystery. Even if the Temporary Leadership did not cause these
people‟s deaths, there is little reason to suspect that any of the leading communists ever
doubted that those arrested in the USSR were indeed guilty.501 Nevertheless, an interesting
incident involving Tito is worth mentioning. In June 1939, Miroslav Krleţa, a leading
communist writer who was at the time being denounced as a Trotskyist for his opposition to
the Purge, secretly met with Tito, as the two had been close friends for over a decade. He
inquired about “our Siberian graves,” as many of the executed were his close friends.
According to Krleţa, Tito admitted that these executions were indeed “a problem,” but added
that the threat of fascism was a much bigger problem, and therefore the executions should not
be critically discussed at this point.502
Miletić in Moscow
The Parallel Center was not lying idle during Tito‟s takeover of the party. During the
course of 1939, Kusovac and Marić returned to Paris, while Miletić was released from prison
and headed to Moscow. It appears that, during this time, Kusovac and Marić had become
aware of the fact that their own leadership bid would come to naught, so they threw their
weight behind Miletić as their long-time associate, and the most reputable opponent of Tito.
The expulsions did not discourage them or their supporters, who believed now more than ever
that a showdown with the usurpers from the Temporary Leadership was fundamental to the
survival of the party. Mirko Marković, one of the most prominent Returnees in Spain, who
500
S.A. Melchin, A.S. Stepanov, V.N. Yakushev, “Сталинские списки - введение,” MEMORIAL, accessed
March 27, 2017, http://stalin.memo.ru/images/intro.htm.
501
Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 271-272, 303.
502
127
was in Havana with his friend Ernest Hemingway at the time, wrote to Hudomalj in February
1939. He expressed his dismay that the party had been taken over by “Trotskyists” and “other
anti-party shitheads,” and explicitly told Hudomalj that he considered his letters to be official
party letters.503 Moreover, he informed Hudomalj that he was keeping in touch with Tito and
that he could effectively act as a double agent, as Tito had trust in him.504
Their main source of information remained Golubić. He appears to have realized that
the battle was lost and set about attempting to mitigate the damage. In May, he informed
Kristina Kusovac of the victory of the Temporary Leadership, adding that he tried to save at
least her and Labud from expulsion. In his view, the organizations in the country kept running
throughout the period, and Tito‟s connections at the local level ensured his victory in the
factional struggle.505 Most of them were not discouraged, although they were becoming
increasingly desperate. Kristina and Labud Kusovac insisted several times that all supporters
of the Parallel Center should personally petition Dimitrov, Thorez, and Guyot, informing
them of the situation in the Yugoslav party.506 While the contents of these letters remain
unknown, the very choice of figures they wrote to is quite telling. They addressed the leading
members of the ECCI, rather than the ICC, which was in charge of the issue of expelled party
cadres. This suggests that their goal was still not merely to overturn their expulsions, but to
generate a fundamental change of party leadership. Marić later claimed that he was still
treated as a “temporary representative” of the KPJ by the French comrades.507
The primary sources corroborate this claim, although it was becoming increasingly
obvious that the French comrades were turning away from the Parallel Center. The PCF was
forced to accept Kuhar as the party representative in Paris after the ECCI informed them that
503
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/4, Letter of Marković to Hudomalj, February 18, 1939.
504
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/4, Letter of Marković to Hudomalj, February 18, 1939.
505
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/8, Letter of Kristina Kusovac to Hudomalj, May 17, 1939, 2.
506
AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/8, Letter of Kristina Kusovac to Hudomalj, May 17, 1939, 1; AJ, 507 CK KPJ –
France, I/9, Letter of Labud Kusovac to Hudomalj, May 29, 1939, 2.
507
128
Tito had been given a mandate from the Comintern.508 The Temporary Leadership used the
opportunity to raise the issue of the Parallel Center‟s suspicious use of party funds, something
that the Comintern had been aware of for over a year. A special commission was set up,
concluding that Marić and Kusovac were unable to account for most of the money spent by
the Yugoslav Committee for Aid to Republican Spain between October 1937 and September
1938.509
Nevertheless, certain parts of the PCF still trusted the Parallel Center. As late as
August of 1939, Tréand refused to meet Tito.510 At the same time, Marić was still the de facto
representative of Yugoslavs in France. In order to put an end to this, the new Central
Committee applied the same strategy that was successfully implemented in the Mitrovica
prison a year and a half earlier: they tried to win over the key supporters of the Parallel
Center. The most serious and successful attempt at “conversion” concerned Hudomalj; as a
friend and close associate of Kuhar since the early 1930s, 511 he was the logical choice. By the
summer of 1939, Tito was openly courting him. In March, he had already made Hudomalj the
editor of the Slovenian émigrés‟ newspaper in France, and in July, he suggested that
Hudomalj replace Marić as the organizer of Yugoslavs in France. 512 The Central Committee
thus managed to kill two birds with one stone: a key supporter of the Parallel Center was won
over, while the PCF was swayed by the nomination of a candidate whom they trusted much
508
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 230. The Parallel Center soon found out, as their one-time supporter André
Heussler began sending all Yugoslavs in Paris to Kuhar. Kuhar was probably the most hated member of the
Temporary Leadership, as Marić had originally hoped to sway him to their side, but ultimately failed. In their
internal correspondence, Kuhar was referred to as “Korošec,” a nickname which referred to his native region of
Carinthia/Koruška. However, it could have also been intentionally pejorative, as the leader of the clerical-
conservative Slovene People‟s Party leader was named Anton Korošec. Kuhar‟s brother Alojzij was a Catholic
priest and a member of Korošec‟s party, which caused the Parallel Center to both ridicule and suspect Kuhar. AJ,
507 CK KPJ – France, I/5, Letter of Kristina Kusovac to Hudomalj, April 13, 1939, 1.
509
AJ, 790/1 KI, 1939/14, “Zapisnik o pregledu blagajne Nac. komiteta za pomoć Rep. Španiji,” March 10,
1939.
510
511
Ervin Dolenc, “Kuharjeva skupina v vodstvu Komunistiĉne partije Jugoslavije,” in Preţihov Voranc – Lovro
Kuhar: pisatelj, politik, patriot, ed. Aleš Gabriĉ (Ljubljana and Vienna: Inštitut za novejšo and Slovenski
znanstveni inštitut, 2010), 80.
512
129
more than anybody from Tito‟s circle. The Parallel Center was dismayed, but powerless, as
Hudomalj informed them of his conviction that the Temporary Leadership obviously had a
mandate from the Comintern, and that this must be respected.513
Things were not much better in Yugoslavia. Jelaska was still fighting, but Miletić was
defeated in Sremska Mitrovica. The new Prison Committee, elected in January 1939, was
composed entirely of Tito‟s prominent supporters.514 Upon his release in June 1939, Miletić
met with Lola Ribar, as he had demanded to meet someone from the newly formed
leadership.515 However, Ribar was the worst possible choice. A son of a bourgeois and an
intellectual, he had no chance of convincing Miletić that he was wrong about the new Central
Committee. Therefore, this last-ditch attempt to pacify him was either clumsily botched or
intentionally sabotaged. Miletić was now determined to do something which Marić and
Kusovac had both failed to do: get to Moscow. He succeeded. Traveling via Bulgaria and
Istanbul, he arrived on September 25, 1939. Again, the support of Bulgarians was
instrumental: according to Kopiniĉ, Damyanov personally arranged Miletić‟s arrival, still
hoping that he would replace Tito as general secretary.516 It is highly likely that he also
enjoyed the support of Anton Ivanov. Ivanov had already worked with the Parallel Center
against Tito in the spring of 1938, and he was a member of the Central Committee of the
International Red Aid, which gave him access to the funds necessary to ensure the emigration
of a former political prisoner like Miletić.
Tito had been in Moscow since September 2, and Miletić therefore began his offensive
as soon as he arrived. Luckily for Tito, his prior call for the overthrow of the royal
513
For the correspondence between Kusovac and Hudomalj, see AJ, 507 CK KPJ – France, I/9-I/13.
514
It was led by Stanko Paunović, Ivan Maĉek, Mihael Servo, Paško Romac, and Bane Andrejev. They were,
respectively, a Serb, a Slovene, a German, a Croat, and a Macedonian. This committee was an overt way to
affirm the pro-Yugoslav and popular frontist orientation, as opposed to the anti-Yugoslav ultra-leftism of the
Wahhabis. Pijade was not elected, as he had only three more months left in prison. AJ, 513 Moša Pijade, Box,
17, III-2/56, “Kaznioniĉki komitet izabran u Mitrovici posle likvidacije frakcije Petka Miletića,“ January 1939.
515
516
130
government was no longer seen as an act of ultra-leftism, given that the Comintern had once
again turned to the left after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. He seemed, therefore, to have
avoided the gravest accusation of all: that of Trotskyism. However, his troubles were not over
yet. Vladimir Poptomov was gathering information from both sides of the factional conflict,
and accusations against the Temporary Leadership and its supporters continued to pour in.517
The most controversial case concerns Tito‟s relationship with Dragan Miler-Ozren, a
Yugoslav of Czech origin who, from 1938, ran the German section of the International
Publishing House, a post to which he was appointed after almost all of his German colleagues
were arrested and shot.518 Several authors allege that he accused Tito of inserting “Trotskyist
formulations” into the Serbo-Croat translation of Stalin‟s Short Course.519 On the other hand,
Ozren‟s wife, Ida Radvolina, insisted that he did not attack Tito, but that Tito attacked Ozren,
falsely believing him to have been involved in the factional struggles of the 1920s.520 The
only documents thus far discovered in the Archive of the Comintern confirm that Ozren did
criticize grammatical errors in the translation, but mention nothing of allegations of
Trotskyism, or of Tito personally.521 Joţe Pirjevec claims that the accusations actually came
517
RGASPI, 495-11-360, Громов, “В Отдел кадров ИККИ,“ April 14, 1939.
518
Mary M. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 147. Dragan Ozren (1908–1951) was one of the most fascinating
forgotten figures in Yugoslav communism. Born Dragan Miler in Travnik to a mixed Czech-Croat family and
raised in Osijek, he became a Marxist while attending a Jesuit Lyceum. He studied architecture in Prague, where
he was involved with the Czechoslovak avantgarde and the communist youth. He had to leave Prague because of
his communist activity, moving first to Berlin and then to Moscow in 1931, where he took the name Dragan
Antonovich Ozren. Due to his extensive linguistic knowledge (he spoke eight languages by this time), he began
working for the Comintern‟s International Publishing House. During this period, he befriended many leading
leftist intellectuals, such as György Lukács, André Breton, Julius Fuĉík, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Sergey
Tretyakov. He worked as a propagandist during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1943, Ozren finally
joined the Red Army, becoming a part of the First Yugoslav Brigade. According to the account of his wife,
despite being a Soviet citizen, he was arrested by the Yugoslav secret police and interrogated for several months
after the liberation of Belgrade. However, other sources claim that Tito personally saved him from interrogations
for anti-party activity. After his release, he worked in publishing again, collaborating with leading Yugoslav
intellectuals such as Ivo Andrić, Desanka Maksimović, Oskar Daviĉo, and Moša Pijade. Arrested again in
August 1948, Ozren was sent to the Goli otok prison camp, where he died in 1951.
519
Pirjevec, Tito i drugovi, vol. 1, 93; Goldstein, Tito, 364.
520
Ida Markovna Radvoljina, Dugaĉko pismo koje nije stiglo do primaoca (Sremski Karlovci and Novi Sad:
Izdavaĉka knjiţarnica Zorana Stojanovića, 2011), 277-278.
521
RGASPI, 495-18-1311, “Генеральному секретарю ИККИ тов. Г.М.Димитрову. Секретарю ИККИ тов.
Д.З.Мануильскому,” December 22, 1939, 6.
131
from the German communists, who wanted to demonstrate their vigilance to the Cadres
Department.522 However, the most probable theory comes from Tito‟s collected works,
according to which the supporters of Miletić fabricated these charges.523 The most likely
explanation regarding Ozren is that his benign report was simply used for much more
menacing purposes than its author had intended. Radvolina‟s claim of Tito‟s unprovoked
attacks on her husband is not implausible, although it does not fit into the general pattern of
Tito‟s known actions at the time.
Either way, the charges against Tito were dismissed. The head of the ICC, Wilhelm
Florin, was allegedly sympathetic to Tito and decided to help him.524 Aside from Florin, Tito
enjoyed the continued support of Karaivanov, Kopiniĉ and Despotović, as well as
Dimitrov,525 who had finally become more sympathetic to him. In April 1939, Despotović
was employed as a “reserve” in the Pieck Secretariat,526 the first Yugoslav to work there since
the arrest of Horvatin in February 1938. Although the Bulgarians remained dominant in the
Balkan Section, this was a sign of a gradual improvement of the stature of the KPJ, and
particularly of Tito‟s allies, in the Comintern. Moreover, he was given room to defend his
more controversial policies, such as the choice of cadres, and he made a compelling case in
support of the appointment of Ribar as the secretary of SKOJ.527 Tito presented his report on
the party to the ECCI on October 23, 1939. It was received favorably,528 and Tito was by now
clearly treated as the de facto leader of the KPJ.
Encouraged by this development, Tito set out to discredit his final opponent. Given
Miletić‟s ultra-leftism and tendency to surround himself with suspicious characters, this task
was not too difficult. Aside from Antun Franović, who had betrayed the Dalmatian party
522
Pirjevec, Tito i drugovi, vol. 1, 93.
523
Josip Broz Tito, Sabrana djela, ed. Pero Damjanović, vol. 5 (Belgrade: Komunist, 1981), 264.
524
525
526
RGASPI, 495-18-1275, “Изменение в штатном расписании на 14-е апреля.”
527
Petriĉević, Lolo, 122.
528
132
organization to the police in 1937, Miletić also collaborated with Ljudevit Trilnik, a technical
university student from Prague, who became a police informant and might have been the main
culprit for the failed attempt to send volunteers to Spain in the spring of 1937.529 Moreover,
Tito pointed out that, upon his release, Miletić was allegedly allowed to travel freely through
Yugoslavia, something that was unthinkable for released communists.530 Before his arrival in
Moscow, he is said to have visited several party organizations in Montenegro, Kosovo, and
Macedonia, gathering support against the new Central Committee. Most damningly, however,
Tito got a hold of the interrogation documents from 1932, which proved that – despite claims
of heroism – Miletić had actually confessed to many of the accusations against him, revealing
a great deal about the inner workings of the party. The documents were provided through
Đilas by Miletić‟s lawyer Bora Prodanović, whom Miletić angered by accusing him of being a
police spy. Đilas would later claim that Miletić did not give away the real identity of any of
his comrades, and that much of what he confessed was merely what the police already had
proof of.531
Although Đilas‟ claim appears to have been correct, the interrogation file was only one
aspect of Miletić‟s work that aroused suspicion. Kopiniĉ translated Miletić‟s earlier resolution
of the Prison Committee, thus demonstrating a series of ultra-left errors, such as continued
cooperation with Croatian and Macedonian separatists in prison, calling the methods of the
Yugoslav regime “fascist,” and identifying all those willing to take a more conciliatory
attitude towards the prison authorities as Trotskyists.532 Miletić attempted to counter these
accusations. Two years prior, Béla Kun attempted to clear himself of the charges against him
in an equally stubborn way. Rather than accepting the new line of the Comintern and
529
Tito, Sabrana djela, vol. 4, 257, 374.
530
531
Đilas, Memoir of a Revolutionary, 179. Jelena Kovaĉević corroborated this claim by examining the court
records and concluding that every single one of over fifty communists implicated in the Miletić case was
subsequently cleared of all charges due to a lack of evidence. Kovaĉević, “Petko Miletić,” 67.
532
RGASPI, 495-11-343, Перевод с сербского Вокшин, “Из тюрмы Митровицы, Резолюция общего
собрания коллектива,” January 16, 1940, 3-4.
133
engaging in self-criticism, his defense was to stick to ultra-leftism and sabotaging of the party
line.533 Both before and during that process, he collided with many of his fellow comrades,
alienating them and strengthening their belief that he might be intentionally sabotaging the
Comintern in the service of a foreign power. Miletić essentially did the same. Even his forty-
page defense letter written to the ECCI represented an affirmation of the “class against class”
policy, painting any cooperation with the non-communist left as “anti-communist,” and
declaring that the Central Committee of the KPJ was full of traitors.534 Such recklessness
naturally appeared to be another act of sabotage, giving weight to the otherwise flimsy
allegations of treason presented by the Temporary Leadership and its supporters. Miletić was
arrested on January 5, 1940, before even getting a chance to personally present his grievances
to the ECCI. In September of that year, he was sentenced to eight years in the gulag, where he
died on January 27, 1943.535
At the time of Miletić‟s arrest, Tito had been gone from Moscow for over a month. He
was in Istanbul, where he was held up due to visa issues. He finally arrived in Yugoslavia on
March 15, 1940,536 and began preparations for a party congress which was intended to
formally confirm his primacy over the KPJ. Although he did not receive permission from the
Comintern to hold a party congress due to safety concerns, he organized the Fifth Land
Conference in October 1940, in a house on the outskirts of Zagreb, found for him by Kopiniĉ.
The 110-strong conference was a party congress in all but name. It was much bigger than the
Fourth Congress, organized in 1928, and it confirmed the appointment of Tito as general
secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
533
Chase, “Microhistory and Mass Repression,” 472.
534
535
536
134
Conclusions
There were two major reasons for Tito‟s success in the final stages of the struggle. The
first concerns his proper understanding of the Comintern line. Both the Parallel Center and
Miletić were fixated on their personal rivalries, and essentially engaged in a witch hunt
against everybody who they perceived as supporters of their rivals. Tito, on the other hand,
largely avoided the issue, proceeding with business as usual, and proposing a very clear set of
policies. In particular, his success at returning the party leadership to the country, and his
break with Gorkić‟s liquidationist policies, coincided with what the Comintern expected.
Even when he disobeyed the Comintern line by going too far in his leftism, he saved himself
through what Swain has called “the tried tactic of disingenuity and procrastination.”537
Miletić, on the other hand, was not able to understand when he was going too far. When
Tito‟s actions caused suspicion in the Comintern, he proceeded with caution; when Miletić‟s
work raised eyebrows, he persisted to his own detriment. Even if Tito had been snatched by
the NKVD during his stay in Moscow as Horvatin had (which almost happened in November
1938), somebody with views similar to Tito‟s would have been more likely to take over than
Miletić. The Comintern required “Bolshevization” as understood in the context of the Popular
Front period, not in the form of Miletić‟s outdated sectarianism.
The second major reason was Tito‟s proactive approach to internal party affairs. He
prevailed because he showed more initiative, demonstrating that the communist parties were
not expected to just blindly wait for orders. There has been a general tendency to reduce the
KPJ to a mere puppet of the Comintern in the interwar period. However, Tito‟s success shows
that agency was both required and helpful for an ambitious party cadre like himself. Marić,
and particularly Kusovac, proved to be much more skilled when it came to mobilizing the
transnational networks of power and influence within the Comintern: they had supporters on
537
Swain, Tito, 25.
135
the ECCI, in the ICC, in the Cadres Department, in Soviet military intelligence, in the NKVD,
and in the French, Spanish, and Bulgarian communist parties. However, they never presented
a viable vision of the post-Gorkić KPJ. They knew that Gorkić was a problem, but they lacked
a solution. The Comintern noticed this, and it effectively disarmed Tito‟s opponents.
The most obvious example of the crucial distinctions between Tito and his opponents
is the Croatian question. Largely caused by the crisis of legitimacy experienced by the
Temporary Leadership, this was the most serious spillover of the factional struggle into
Yugoslavia and among the party rank and file, as Tito‟s faithful supporters abandoned him to
pursue a different line. A more skilled politician would have used this to undermine Tito, but
it appears that Marić and Kusovac did not even try. They and Miletić were masterful at
obstructing Tito‟s attempts to enforce a unified party line, but they failed to take advantage of
disunity once it appeared. Instead of being the beginning of the end of Tito‟s leadership bid,
the Croatian question showcased two important traits of his leadership style. The first was the
affirmation of his leftism: giving any primacy to the Croatian question over the Yugoslav
question was seen as a concession to the bourgeoisie. This neutralized both Serbian
hegemonistic nationalism and Croatian separatist nationalism through the establishment of a
consistently pro-Yugoslav line and an insistence on the political independence of the working
class from the bourgeois opposition. The second trait was Tito‟s adaptability when dealing
with intraparty dissenters whose personal favor he enjoyed, in direct contrast to the severe
approach he took against ambitious rivals, even if he shared their political positions. Jelaska
was an ally on the party left, but his ties to Marić made it impossible to integrate him into the
new leadership. Kraš, on the other hand, was a moderate who would have worked better with
Gorkić than with Tito, but personal loyalty ensured his ascent to the Politburo. These traits
made him both a consistent internationalist and the logical candidate for a general secretary of
a Stalinist party.
136
Conclusion: Tito Triumphant
“You, who will emerge from the flood

In which we have perished
Remember also
When you speak of our weaknesses
The black times
You have escaped.”
Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”538
In his closing speech to the Fifth Land Conference, Tito vowed to hold the next one
“in a country free from both foreign invaders and capitalists.”539 While this might have
seemed overly optimistic to the outside observer, it was not at all so to the communists, who
saw in the future not only the final showdown but also, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, a
victory “already inscribed in the text of the history books of the future.”540 The next
“conference,” however, took place at a time that those present in the suburban house in
Zagreb in October 1940 could not even have dreamed of. It was July 1948, and it was the
Fifth Congress of the KPJ, the first in twenty years. At this point, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia
was no more, and the Federal People‟s Republic of Yugoslavia, ruled by the communists and
with a command economy, took its place. This was well within a 1930s communist‟s horizon
of expectations. What nobody could have predicted was that this Federal People‟s Republic of
Yugoslavia would be, at the time of its ruling party‟s Fifth Congress, completely cut off from
the rest of the socialist world. Less than a month before, the Communist Information Bureau,
the de facto successor to the dissolved Communist International, expelled the KPJ. The story
of the factional struggle in the KPJ during the Great Purge is the prehistory of the causes of
this expulsion.
The Communist Party of Yugoslavia was, by and large, a party on the left of the
international communist movement. Tito‟s closing sentence at the Fifth Land Conference is
538
Quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 139.
539
540
Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 73.
137
an excellent illustration of this, and it would have rang true for most of his comrades even
before the Comintern‟s change of policy in 1939. The Yugoslavs were not hoping merely to
fight fascism; they wanted to use the war to bring about a socialist revolution. Generally
speaking, leftism resonated well in Yugoslavia. Its vast socioeconomic and national
inequalities resulted in mass discontent, and a prevalent desire for systemic change. By the
late 1930s, the persistence of Yugoslavia‟s problems made the most radical solutions – those
of the communists – also seem to be the most viable. This leftism was one of the causes of the
Yugoslav communists‟ revolutionary radicalism in 1945, which put Yugoslavia on a collision
course with the Soviet Union.
In general, Stalin was more fearful of the left than of the right in the communist
movement, because of both their adventurist tendencies and their potential ideological
proximity to Trotskyism. This attitude was reflected in the Comintern of the popular front era.
Ironically, it was an act of adventurism, the failure of the Spanish expedition in the spring of
1937, which sealed the fate of the KPJ‟s quintessential rightist leader, Milan Gorkić. His
political views, so despised by his comrades on the left, were perfect for the era of the popular
front, and truly helped rejuvenate the party from 1932. However, he went too far, discrediting
the KPJ both in the country and in the Comintern with his fundamentally liquidationist
policies. Following his fall, there was no viable middle-of-the-road candidate for general
secretary. The only remaining rightism within the KPJ was the remnant of the moderate wing
of Serbian social democracy, represented by Sima Marković. However, he was already
completely politically marginalized by the time of his forced emigration to Moscow in 1935.
The other rightists surrounding him lacked both the reputation and the initiative required to
significantly influence the party in the late 1930s.
Of all the leftists, Josip Broz Tito eventually managed to persuade the Comintern that
he was the most viable candidate. Interestingly, he was still the least leftist of all the potential
leadership candidates. He carefully balanced moderation and radicalism, and survived the
138
various U-turns of popular front policy between 1936 and 1939. Geoffrey Swain goes so far
as to characterize him as a “disloyal Bolshevik,”541 arguing that his distinction between Lenin
and Stalin already indicated a critical distance from the latter.542 Although Swain‟s general
argument is very convincing, and he presents several instances of Tito disobeying the
Comintern to support his view, I argue that this assertion of Tito‟s alleged disloyalty is
somewhat exaggerated. His transgressions were, at the time, much more modest than Swain
claims. Nevertheless, they did represent a faithful following of Lenin‟s revolutionary thought,
as interpreted in the late 1930s. Before examining Tito in greater depth, I would like to look at
the broader relationship between the KPJ and the Comintern.
In my view, Tito‟s misbehavior always remained within the boundaries of what was
permissible in the eyes of the Comintern. To understand this, it is important to focus more on
the perspective of the ECCI, and less on the views of the KPJ members in Moscow and Paris.
Although they were certainly ultimately subject to the Comintern, the Yugoslav communists
had much more autonomy than Yugoslav historiography acknowledges. As I have argued, in
spite of the fact that historians since Vladimir Dedijer have presented the events of the late
1930s as Tito‟s ongoing struggle to save the KPJ from the fate of the Polish party, there is
nothing in the Comintern sources that would suggest Dimitrov and Pieck ever considered the
dissolution of the KPJ. Although the leading émigrés were massacred between 1937 and
1939, most of them were already politically marginalized long before the Great Purge began.
At the same time, the party organization in the country was largely intact, and the popular
front era was its most successful period since the early 1920s.
The KPJ enjoyed a relative degree of freedom throughout. Far from wanting to control
and micromanage all aspects of Yugoslav party affairs, the Comintern expected that the KPJ
members themselves, in particular those untainted by the stigma of factionalism, would take
541
Swain, “Tito: The Formation of a Disloyal Bolshevik,” 248-271.
542
Swain, “Tito,” 262.
139
the initiative and sort out the party‟s problems on their own. It was Tito‟s understanding of
this expectation that played a crucial role in his appointment as general secretary. The Parallel
Center left the resolution of the Yugoslav question to the Comintern, essentially disarming
themselves before the Temporary Leadership.
Moreover, the case of the Parallel Center and its vast intelligence network abundantly
illustrates that, even though the USSR was a police state, the ultimate decision-making power
did not always lie exclusively with the intelligence apparatus. The secret police was merely
one of several extremely powerful institutions, and its decisions could be ignored – or at times
even overridden – by organizations such as the Comintern. This insight also goes against the
journalistic and non-academic descriptions of Tito as a Machiavellian mastermind rising to
the top through intrigue and manipulation, as argued by individuals such as Simić and Despot.
Marić, Kusovac, Miletić, Horvatin, and Tito all acted with the intention of helping their party.
Although we should not always take their statements at face value, their confusion and
disorganization show that they were not individuals who fully understood the inner workings
of the system and tried to manipulate it to their advantage.
Despite the relative freedom from the Comintern, the factional struggle shows the
death of intraparty democracy. The case of Marić‟s ally Jelaska is the best illustration of this:
regardless of his mass support among Dalmatian communists, he was sacked from all posts
and expelled from the party just because he disagreed with the newly formed Central
Committee. Aside from Stalinization, this development was facilitated by the party‟s
illegality, which often necessitated rapid top-down decision making. The semblance of party
democracy was still maintained, but it was largely a sham. Ivo and Slavko Goldstein naively
praise the fact that, in 1940, Tito was the first party leader since 1921 to have been elected by
party members, rather than by the Comintern.543 This election, however, was purely formal,
543
140
and his position was confirmed by the Third International much earlier. Without it, he would
have never become general secretary.
The issue of the exact date of Tito‟s appointment as general secretary has also puzzled
Yugoslav historians. Based on my research, Tito had effectively started behaving as the acting
general secretary from August of 1937, although his actions were initially quite cautious
(Yugoslav historiography has generally taken this period as the moment of Tito‟s
appointment). He became the de facto general secretary following the ECCI meeting on
January 5, 1939, and this decision was formally confirmed by the KPJ at the Fifth Land
Conference. This brings me to the question of why exactly Tito won over all the other
candidates. I argue that there are several reasons for Tito‟s victory, the main one being a
proper understanding of Leninism as defined by the Comintern in the 1930s. In short, Tito
was the best at understanding the Comintern‟s demands and the ways to implement them.
Horvatin, Miletić, Marić, and Kusovac primarily focused on accusations. Their
writings betray an omnipresent fear of enemies, spies, and Trotskyists in the communist
ranks. In some cases, this led them to fully disregard party work. Marić and Kusovac were
particularly notable for this: they were masters of intrigue, but they were not good political
organizers. Miletić did have a semblance of policy, but it all came down to the aggressively
anti-intellectual ultra-leftism of 1928, alongside a personality cult. Horvatin, in spite of his
overzealous accusations, had a coherent popular front policy that was the closest to Tito‟s, but
he was arrested by the NKVD. His case, in particular, illustrates the importance of sheer luck
in the factional struggle. Committed adherence to the party line, and constant vigilance
against political enemies, remained insufficient to ensure survival during the Great Purge.
Equally important was Tito‟s readiness to take initiative. Among his opponents, Marić
and Kusovac were active in forging political alliances; Horvatin was active in Moscow,
temporarily gaining the attention of the Comintern; and Miletić was active in turning the
prison organization in Sremska Mitrovica into a sect revolving around his personality cult.
141
Tito, however, focused on practical changes to the internal organization of the party. Cautious
at first, he began to take concrete steps at improving the state of the party in late 1937. He
transformed the KPJ from an outdated leftist group based on conspiratorial cells into a
growing mass organization capable of exercising disproportionate influence on the political
affairs of the country. Moreover, he did so without endangering the party and exposing it to
mass arrests, as Gorkić had before him.
His flexibility in terms of party cadres was also significant. When the factional
struggle first broke out in Paris, both Marić and Tito were rather intolerant to one another,
despite claims to the contrary in their official correspondence with the Comintern. Eventually,
however, Tito would prove much more efficient at coaxing opponents to his side. His brand of
leftism successfully unified all strands of the party, bringing individuals such as Đilas, Kidriĉ,
and Hudomalj into his fold. Marić‟s and Miletić‟s leftism did not. The question of why this
was so requires further scrutiny. What is certain, however, is that Tito showed a willingness to
cooperate with opponents, but did not shy away from politically destroying them if, like
Miletić and Marić, they went too far. The aforementioned Dalmatian case also shows that he
did not always prefer ideological connections to personal connections. Jelaska was
ideologically much closer to him than the leaders of the KPH, but he was too personally close
to Marić to be trusted. Moreover, the choice of Krstulović over Jelaska as Dalmatian party
leader was consistent with Tito‟s broader tendency of choosing younger party cadres,
untainted by factionalism. People like Ćopić, Pijade, and Maslarić were rare exceptions to this
rule. The afterlife of factionalists, and the fact that most of those who survived the war ended
up in the Goli otok prison camp in 1948, show that these rivalries persisted.544 However,
while Ivo Banac argues that their persecution was a case of strengthening state power, new
544
142
archival sources, such as interrogations of the Kusovac couple in 1948, 545 show that Tito‟s
crackdown was not unprovoked. Rather, it was a reaction to renewed oppositional work by
these individuals, who had seen Tito as illegitimate since the late 1930s, and whose hopes for
change were given a new life with Yugoslavia‟s expulsion from the Cominform.
Finally, my thesis leaves open several questions which require further research in the
future. One is certainly the issue of the involvement of Soviet intelligence services and
Yugoslav émigrés in Moscow in the process of purging the KPJ. The role of “secondary”
individuals, such as Karaivanov and Golubić, although potentially crucial, is still largely
shrouded in mystery. The political repression of the rest of the Yugoslav community in the
USSR and those who were not involved in factional struggles (such as economic émigrés), is
still largely unexplored, as is the broader relationship of the Yugoslavs with the Soviet society
they inhabited and were a part of. Most interestingly, my work raises the issue of transnational
networks of power within the Comintern and their impact on politics and repression in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s. Individuals like Marić and Kusovac were extraordinarily well-
connected with French, Spanish, and Bulgarian communists. Tito and Horvatin, on the other
hand, had the attention of certain other Bulgarians, as well as Germans such as Pieck and
Florin. The perceived interests of the Comintern gave rise to a transnational solidarity which
transcended the confines of national communist parties, but also led to important political
disagreements at the highest echelons of the Third International. Directly related to this is the
informal hierarchy of communist parties in the Comintern, exposed by the subordinate
relationship of the KPJ to the Bulgarian Communist Party. Although this hierarchy has been
recognized in literature on the French and German communist parties, it leaves open another
545
I have used these interrogations in chapters four and five to recreate the actions of the Parallel Center in the
late 1930s. However, most of these documents focused not on the 1930s, but on their continued oppositional
work after 1945. A more thorough examination of this and similar cases exists in Milan Radanović‟s thesis
“Jugoslovenski interbrigadisti pred Kontrolnom komisijom CK KPJ 1945–1949.”
143
potential avenue for research, which would greatly broaden our understanding of international
communism in the interwar period.
The period between 1936 and 1940 was the key formative period of the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia as we know it from the 1940s. The old KPJ was, quite literally, dead. All
the leading figures of the party from the 1920s and 1930s were either expelled, or more
commonly, murdered, by 1939. In their place, Tito assembled a young team composed of
workers and a few intellectuals, most of whom had been relatively unknown in the movement,
but were untainted by factional struggles. Although Tito‟s appointments were to a large
degree based on personal ties and close friendships, the new leadership was by no means
comprised of incompetent characters distinguished only by their obedience to the general
secretary. In fact, Tito‟s Central Committee was composed of people who, despite their youth,
generally paralleled or exceeded in skill those who led the KPJ before 1937. Their ability and
practical success would give them the power and the legitimacy necessary for all their
political actions in the 1940s. In that decade, they led the party through a world war, a civil
war, and a revolution, culminating in a split that changed the international communist
movement in the twentieth century. And it all began with the arrest of a competent, yet
tragically unsuccessful party leader under false accusations of espionage in the summer of
1937.
144
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Archives
Archive of Yugoslavia (Arhiv Jugoslavije, AJ), Belgrade.
Fond 507 CK KPJ
Fond 507 CK KPJ – KPJ émigrés in France
Fond 513 – Moša Pijade
Fond 516 MG – Memoirs‟ Collection
Fond 790/1 KI – The Communist International
Fond 790/13 – Yugoslavs working and studying in the USSR
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Российский государственный архив
социально-политической истории, RGASPI), Moscow.
Fond 495, Subfond 11 – Secretariat of the ECCI Secretary Wilhelm Pieck
Fond 495, Subfond 18 – ECCI Secretariat
Fond 495, Subfond 20 – Bureau of the ECCI Secretariat
Fond 545 – The International Brigades of the Spanish Republican Army
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Thesis - Stefan Gužvica

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Learning Leninism:

Factional Struggles in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Supervisor: Professor Alfred J. Rieber

This thesis is an examination of factional struggles in the Communist Party of

conflict, Tito emerged as the new general secretary.

the late 1930s is, in a lot of ways, a prehistory of 1948.

conversations and source recommendations, including Bogdan Ţivković, Bartul Ĉović,

Zaytseva helped me translate crucial German-language sources, and some of my most

significant insights would not have been possible without them.

have been possible.

organization of Yugoslav antifascist groups during the Second World War

Cominform – The Communist Information Bureau, a group of leading European communist

parties formed in 1947 as a quasi-successor to the Communist International

HSS – Croatian Peasant Party

KIM – Young Communist International

KPH – Communist Party of Croatia, founded in 1937 as a subsection of the KPJ

KPJ – Communist Party of Yugoslavia

KPS – Communist Party of Slovenia, founded in 1937 as a subsection of the KPJ

KUNMZ – Communist University of the National Minorities of the West

NRPJ – Independent Workers‟ Party of Yugoslavia

PCE – Communist Party of Spain

PCF – French Communist Party

among the reformist ones

department of the International Brigades

in Yugoslavia from 1938 to 1940

SRPJ(k) – Socialist Workers‟ Party of Yugoslavia (communists), renamed to Communist

Party of Yugoslavia in 1920

SKOJ – League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia

Ultra-left – An individual communist attitude or a communist party line characterized by

perceived adventurism and sectarianism, such as individual acts of terror or refusal to

engage in any cooperation with the non-communist left

VKP(b) – All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)

Copyright Notice ....................................................................................................................... i

Abbreviations and Glossary .................................................................................................... v

Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... vii

Theory and Methodology ....................................................................................................... 8

On Party Unity: Factional Struggles in the KPJ, 1919-1936.............................................. 17

Between the Left and the Right ............................................................................................ 18

Thwarted Bolshevization ...................................................................................................... 22

Consolidation under Gorkić ................................................................................................. 24

The First Repressions ........................................................................................................... 28

The Peak and Fall of Milan Gorkić ...................................................................................... 36

The April Plenum of 1936 .................................................................................................... 37

The Purge of the Oppositionists ........................................................................................... 44

The Arrest of the General Secretary ..................................................................................... 49

The Factions ............................................................................................................................ 60

The Temporary Leadership .................................................................................................. 64

The Parallel Center ............................................................................................................... 73

The Wahhabis ....................................................................................................................... 89

The Struggle ............................................................................................................................ 98

The Spanish Inquisition ...................................................................................................... 105

Liquidationism and the Croat Question.............................................................................. 110

Tito in Moscow .................................................................................................................. 119

Miletić in Moscow.............................................................................................................. 127

Conclusions ........................................................................................................................ 135

Conclusion: Tito Triumphant ............................................................................................. 137

Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 145

aid was halted, without any explanation or prior notice.

headed by Josip Broz Tito.