With the Yugoslav Political Emigrants in Romania Against Tito

With the Yugoslav political emigrants in Romania against Tito The year of 1948 brought news within the Cominform (The Information Bureau), an organisation of International Communism created in September 1947. On 18 March, Moscow withdrew its military advisers from Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav-Soviet conflict came to open when the Soviet press published on 29 June a Resolution of the Information Bureau titled “The Situation in the Yugoslav Communist Party” (PCY). Tito and other top leaders of the PCY were accused of deviation from Marxism-Leninism, by still accepting the existence of the Popular Front “from below” that made, in Moscow’s view, the PCY to operate “semi-illegal”, by refusing to liquidate the “capitalist elements” in the party and society and by “the dictatorial style of governing that made the PCY to depart from the working class”. The expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform was followed by a fearful campaign aiming to determine the collapse of the Tito regime. It envisaged propaganda, diplomatic and trade boycott, terror and sabotage, and a war of nerves by creating incidents and organising military movements along Yugoslav borders and even a plan of military invasion. The campaign also envisaged undercover operations aiming to set up a parallel Yugoslav Communist Party, and to create economic chaos and social unrest in Yugoslavia, in which Yugoslav political emigrants would be assigned an important role. Most of them lived in Bulgaria (1705) and Albania (1340), but there were also 497 emigrants in Hungary and Romania. As some of them declared to the secret services during the interrogations, it was a lot easier to cross the border to Romania than to Bulgaria, due to the geographical location. Their social origins covered the entire strata: from former Yugoslav diplomats, military and Intelligence officers to students, workers and peasants. Drawing on newly archival research, this paper will show how the Romanian secret police – Securitate – succeeded in involving Yugoslav political emigrants in this campaign, by following their journey from the moment when they illegally crossed the border to Romania. It will also show how and what missions were assigned to them, and how they were permanently kept under surveillance through a network of informants in order to identify potential spies and provocateurs among them. Finally, it will present their fate after the Soviet-Yugoslav split came to an end.