BELGRADE (24 page)

Then the incendiary bombs began to fall, the National Library was burned down, as was a third of the city, all the bridges destroyed, the young King in flight. The German Wehrmacht arrived in town. Buildings were cut in half. Once they were opened up, you could see dining tables, chandeliers, pictures untouched on the wall, here a dentist’s surgery, there a bathroom with its tub. In the first days of the occupation there was neither water nor electricity. Various smells wafted through town. A temporary public toilet was hastily opened in the interests of order and hygiene, made by joining together bomb craters in the very centre of town behind a large fence with separate entrances for men and women.

This makeshift convenience was in Terazije. Makavejev remembers other events:

A couple of months later when they had cleaned Terazije up, five Communists were hanged from lamp-posts. A little to the left of them was an advert for the horse races, and under that, people from the town and refugees would drink beer.

Wartime Belgrade bore no relationship to the civilized pre-war city.

Elsewhere in Serbia remnants of the army continued to resist under the command of Colonel Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović (1893–1946). The government-in–exile made him chief of staff of what loyal forces were left, but it was difficult to impose overall strategic planning. His fighters were called Četniks, after the name given to the guerrillas who used to harass the Turks. They were a disparate army split into small units and their communications in occupied Serbia were sporadic. Leader of a Serbian rather than Yugoslav resistance group and loyal to the king, Mihailović was convinced of a future Allied victory. His policy was to wait, holding his soldiers in reserve to support the inevitable defeat of Italy and Germany in Europe. In some areas the Četniks disbanded altogether, in others they formed temporary alliances with the occupying forces in order to take revenge for Ustaše atrocities against Serbs, or to fight against their ideological opponents in the alternative resistance movement, the Partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and Josip Broz Tito.

The Partisans were eventual victors in the complex Yugoslav conflict—a mixture of resistance to outside invaders and internecine civil war—and have been awarded credit for most of the armed activity against Axis troops. Mihailović’s policy proved to be a mistake as he was unable to control those who ostensibly accepted his authority—for which he paid the price. Captured by the security service of the new communist state, he was executed in 1946 as a collaborator.

Tito (1892–1980), real name Josip Broz, was born in the border country between Croatia and Slovenia in 1892. He fought in the First World War for the Austrians on the Eastern Front where he was captured by the enemy and taken to a prison camp in Russia. The camp was liberated by the Red Army during the 1917 revolution, and the prisoners were given freedom in return for joining the Bolsheviks. Josip Broz accepted the offer and after the revolution was sent back to Yugoslavia as a trade union organizer. He served a term in prison from 1929 to 1934 for being a member of the Communist Party, an illegal organization, and returned to the Soviet Union. As an agent of the Moscow-run Comintern, he was appointed general secretary of the Yugoslav party in 1937. Tito was one of the code names which he adopted in order to hide his true identity from the authorities.

The Yugoslav communists arranged to meet in Belgrade on 4 July 1941 to discuss resistance to the occupation. Their destination was a modest house at 5 Botić Street in the exclusive residential area of Dedinje, belonging to Vladislav S. Ribnikar (1900–55), owner of the
Politika
newspaper and—in those desperate times—willing to help Broz against the invaders. His wife, Jara (1912–2007), a prominent writer after the war, recalled Tito’s visits to their house and in particular the meeting of 4 July, when seven men arrived at the house to plan the uprising. She describes in detail the bizarre ordinariness of the occasion:

First, they gathered in the garden, divided into small groups, sat on the grass and chatted. It was a beautiful, sunny day. The garden was empty as we had sent the children to friends for lunch, and they were to return only in the evening. We took a walk down the garden and explained the disposition of the house to those comrades who were not yet acquainted with it. It was agreed that in the event of danger they would leave via the neighbouring estate, make their way to Dedinje Boulevard and try to save themselves. We kept guard, but nothing happened. It was exceptionally quiet. There were no unexpected callers or neighbours popping round that day. Our guests withdrew from the garden into the dining room where they continued to work. Whiffs of cigarette smoke would float out the window from time to time. They asked for a snack for lunch, and drank a great deal of black coffee. They worked without a break, very intensively, until six o’clock in the evening. Then they began to come out, cross the terrace and into the garden. They breathed in the air, satisfied, in good spirits. Comrade Tito was the first to leave. The others walked a while more in the garden, joking and behaving as if they were having a picnic.

Although they took the decision to organize the resistance in Belgrade, the heart of the Partisan movement was in the countryside. The city was occupied and not a place to wage a guerrilla war. The communists also felt uneasy in the old capital. It was not their natural habitat and it exuded the atmosphere and values of the pre-war regime and society, which they were committed to transforming. Consequently, once in power, they said little about the Belgrade experience of the war. The city was not part of their narrative, and it was not theirs to commemorate. Refugees flooded into the city from Croatia and Bosnia with stories of atrocities against Serbs. Corpses would float down the rivers, some coming to shore, victims of the Ustaše on the other bank. From the point of view of the Allies, Belgrade was a resource used by the enemy, and as such a legitimate target. In April 1944 British and American planes systematically bombed the city in a series of attacks with much greater destructive effect than the Germans in 1941. The new government after 1945 did not record the full extent of all the damage inflicted on Belgrade nor all the names of those who perished.

Belgrade was liberated by the Partisans, with the help of the Soviet Red Army, in October 1944. Fitzroy Maclean, head of the British military mission to Tito’s headquarters, recorded his memories of the event in his book
Eastern Approaches
. The German army was in retreat and shelling Belgrade from Zemun as its troops tried to withdraw across the River Sava. Maclean noted the chaos in the streets, which were “crowded with civilians, some enthusiastic, some just standing and gaping. From time to time a shell would land full amongst them, killing several.” He was in the company of a senior Partisan officer who was taking his guest on a tour of the city centre with no regard for the obvious dangers. Maclean attributes his guide’s behaviour to his Partisan experience: “Accustomed to the hand-to-hand fighting of guerrilla warfare, long-range shelling meant little to him.” They reached Kalemegdan from where he could see the enemy withdrawing across the bridge over the Sava and racing on to Zemun. For a brief moment the bridge was empty, and then immediately filled with soldiers of the Red Army in full pursuit. Maclean recounts how German attempts to destroy the bridge failed due to the efforts of one old man who spied German sappers laying explosives under it on the night of 19 October 1944 and, realizing their intentions, disconnected the charges.

The arrival of the Partisans in Belgrade was not good news for many in the capital. Besides those who had collaborated during the occupation, others who had simply continued in their work or who did not wholeheartedly welcome the new ideology of their liberators discovered that they could easily be denounced as traitors. On Monday 27 November
Politika’s
front page contained the names of 105 citizens who had been shot the previous day. The charges against them were accompanied by an article justifying the executions in the name of the people; it was signed by the Surrealist poet, now politician, Marko Ristić. Many of the victims were leading members of the pre-war elite, figures who might act as focal points for opposition to the communists, and their elimination was part of the new regime’s drive for mastery over the city.

The communists took to government in order to build socialism based on the Soviet model. Land, industry, transport and banks were nationalized. Elections were conducted on the basis of one list of approved candidates, giving the communists a legal mandate for their aspirations. Yet they were also genuinely popular, promising stability and some degree of normality after the years of bloodshed.

The new constitution was rooted in the 1936 constitution of the USSR. Yugoslavia was divided into six republics based on the national structure of the country: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Slovenia. Serbia itself was further divided with two autonomous provinces in the north and south, Vojvodina and Kosovo. Each constituent part had its own government and capital city, but real power was tightly centralized in the hands of the Communist Party. Belgrade was the capital city of both the Republic of Serbia and of the federal government with responsibility for the whole country. Officials, military officers and bureaucrats came to live in the city from all parts of the country, making a significant impact on its demographic composition. The old Belgrade rapidly disappeared as the new elite brought with them a new ideology. The city stopped looking westward and there was no further discussion of cultural and artistic contact with London and Paris. Instead, the new regime sponsored links with the people’s democracies of Eastern Europe and in particular with the first land of socialism, the USSR.

Yugoslavia was regarded in the West as one of Stalin’s most loyal acolytes. But a rift soon opened between the leadership of the two countries over differences in defining their relationship. The Yugoslav communists liberated their country with little help from the Soviet Red Army and were quick to establish control over government. They were self-confident and naïve in equal measure, seeing their relationship with the Soviet Union as one of equals, as comrades in arms furthering the cause of international socialism. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, viewed its East European satellites as a buffer zone separating it from a hostile West and as markets to be exploited.

Stevan Pavlowitch in his book
The Improbable Survivor
has characterized the reason for the break as follows:

The difference between Yugoslavia and other East European states in these post-war years lay in the extent of Tito’s hold over his regime, and in his country’s position bordering on the Mediterranean and on non-Communist Europe. This combination would be the cause of difficulties both with neighbours and with the Soviet Union. Because of increasing tension in Europe, Stalin wanted to prevent the development of a situation likely to cause trouble in the Communist camp that he was setting up. His need to be able to control Yugoslavia more directly because of her geopolitical position led to the break.

The main areas of frictions revolved around economic, military and foreign policies. The Soviet Union wanted to dominate Yugoslav markets by selling finished goods from its factories in return for raw materials. The two sides established joint stock companies for air and river traffic in which decisions tended to be made to the benefit of the Soviet side. From the end of the war the Soviet Union had installed military advisers in the Yugoslav armed forces. Complaints began to arrive from Belgrade that these advisers behaved in an arrogant and domineering manner. In matters of foreign policy Yugoslavia supported Soviet demands against those of the western allies, but rarely received Soviet support in return for its claims over, for example, Trieste. It rapidly became apparent that Stalin was not going to treat Yugoslavia as an equal partner, and that Yugoslavia under Tito was reluctant to accept subordination to the state interests of the Soviet Union. Stalin considered it necessary to get rid of the upstarts in Yugoslavia before other leaders in Eastern Europe began emulating them.

Matters came to a head in 1948 with Soviet criticism of the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party. They responded by publishing all their correspondence with the Soviet leadership, calling on the nation to defend itself against outside interference. People suspected of supporting the Soviet line were dealt with severely. Some high-ranking party members were shot while ostensibly trying to leave the country. Many others were imprisoned on the notorious island of Goli Otok, which was nothing more than an outcrop of bare rocks in the Adriatic Sea. The prison regime was extremely harsh, intended to break the spirit of anyone with pro-Soviet sympathies, forcing them to admit their guilt and to recant. Many of the inmates came from Belgrade, returning home only after several years of incarceration and inhuman and degrading treatment. Stalin’s attempt to squash the Yugoslav leadership failed. The result of his action was to force the country to look westward for financial support and for reasons of state security.