Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

What is striking about the non-Communist victims of these early public trials is that—with the exception of those who really had thrown in their lot with the Germans and whose activities were thus common knowledge—they conspicuously refused to plead guilty or confess to their alleged ‘anti-national’ crimes. In the palpably rigged Sofia show trial of Agrarian Party leader Nikola Petkov and his ‘co-conspirators’, in August 1947, four out of the five accused proclaimed their innocence in spite of torture and false testimony.7 With the Yugoslav crisis of 1948, Stalin’s attitude shifted. As an alternative to Moscow, Belgrade had a certain appeal to many. Unlike Stalin, Tito posed no imperial threat (except within the local Balkan context); and by liberating his country and leading it to Communism with no help from Moscow, the Yugoslav leader had set an attractive precedent for any Communist in eastern Europe still tempted to ground a local revolution in national sentiment. Stalin was notoriously paranoid about threats to his monopoly of power; but that does not mean that he was altogether mistaken to see in Tito and ‘Tito-ism’ a genuine danger. Henceforward, therefore, nationalism (‘small-state nationalism’, ‘bourgeois nationalism’) ceased to be a local asset and became instead the main enemy. The term ‘nationalist’ was first deployed pejoratively in Communist rhetoric at the June 1948 meeting of the Cominform to condemn the Yugoslav ‘deviation’. But with all domestic non-Commu...