Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The other exception, of course, was Yugoslavia. Until the Stalin-Tito split, Yugoslavia was, as we have seen, the most ‘advanced’ of all the east European states along the path to socialism. Tito’s first Five Year Plan outdid Stalin by aiming at a higher rate of industrial investment than anywhere else in the Soviet bloc. Seven thousand collective farms had been set up before collectivization had even begun in the other satellite states; and post-war Yugoslavia was well on the way to outdoing Moscow itself in the efficiency and ubiquity of its apparatus of repression. The partisans’ wartime security services were expanded into a full-scale police network whose task, in Tito’s words, was ‘to strike terror into the hearts of those who do not like this sort of Yugoslavia.’