Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

In the initial months following the split with Stalin, Tito actually became more radical, more ‘Bolshevik’, as if to prove the legitimacy of his claim and the mendacity of his Soviet critics. But the posture could never have been sustained very long. Without external help, and faced with the very real prospect of Soviet invasion, he turned to the West for aid. In September 1949 the US Export-Import Bank loaned Belgrade $20 million. The following month Yugoslavia borrowed $3 million from the International Monetary Fund, and in December of that same year signed a trade agreement with Great Britain and received $8 million in credits. The Soviet threat forced Tito to increase his defense spending (as a share of Yugoslavia’s meager national income) from 9.4 percent in 1948 to 16.7 percent in 1950; the country’s munitions industries were moved for safety into the mountains of Bosnia (a matter of some consequence in the wars of the 1990s). In 1950 the US Congress, now convinced of Yugoslavia’s possible significance in the global Cold War, offered a further $50 million in aid under the Yugoslav Emergency Relief Act of 1950, and followed this in November 1951 with an accord that allowed Yugoslavia to receive military aid under the terms of the Mutual Security Act. By 1953 the Yugoslav national deficit on current account was fully covered by American aid; over the course of the years 1949–55 Tito’s aid from all Western sources amounted to $1.2 billion, of which just $55 million was ...