The Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed on the 29th of November 1945. The new state's constitution, adopted in January 1946, was modelled directly on Stalin's 1936 Soviet constitution. It established six constituent republics — Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro — each nominally sovereign, with the right of secession formally enshrined. Within Serbia, two autonomous provinces were created: Vojvodina in the north (with substantial Hungarian, Slovak, and Romanian minorities) and Kosovo and Metohija in the south (with an Albanian majority). The structure looked federal. In practice, all real power was concentrated in the federal organs of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia — renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1952 — and in the Party's leader.
The new state had — alongside its centralised political structure — a genuinely innovative cultural policy. Each constituent republic had its own official language (Serbian and Croatian were treated as variants of a single Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian as separate languages), its own primary school system, its own university, its own state symbols, and its own folk culture programmes. The federal language was an artificial Serbo-Croatian that nobody actually spoke. Cyrillic and Latin alphabets were both official; bilingual signage in mixed regions was standard. The slogan was Bratstvo i jedinstvo — "Brotherhood and Unity" — and the official ideology held that the various Yugoslav peoples were equal constituent partners in a voluntary federation.
Reconstruction
The country in 1945 was in physical ruin. About 11% of pre-war housing had been destroyed; about a third of agricultural production had been lost; the railway network was at 60% of pre-war capacity; the principal bridges over the major rivers (Sava, Danube, Drava, Neretva) were down. The first task of the new government was reconstruction.
It conducted this with the standard Communist tools of nationalisation, central planning, and forced collectivisation, modified by the unique Partisan inheritance: an enormous reserve of trained, ideologically committed, militarily organised young people willing to work for sub-subsistence wages in the name of the new state. The Youth Work Brigades (Omladinske radne brigade) of the late 1940s built the great post-war infrastructure projects — the Brotherhood and Unity Highway from Slovenia to Macedonia, the railway from Brčko to Banovići, the steel mills at Zenica and Jesenice, the hydroelectric stations on the Sava and the Drina. The brigades drew young volunteers from across Yugoslavia, mixed them deliberately by ethnicity, and gave a generation of post-war youth their first contact with members of other Yugoslav peoples. The cultural impact of the Work Brigade experience was enormous; many Yugoslavs in the 1970s and 1980s still remembered their brigade summers as the most idealistic experience of their lives.
The break with the king
The political consolidation of the new state was conducted with the standard Communist toolkit. A controlled referendum in November 1945 abolished the monarchy. King Peter II, in exile in London, was deposed; he would die there in 1970 of cirrhosis. Royal property was confiscated. Old political parties were either banned (the Yugoslav National Party, the Croatian Peasant Party, the Slovene People's Party) or absorbed into the Communist-controlled Popular Front. By 1948, all opposition political life had been eliminated, the Party held perhaps 600,000 members, the state controlled all the main industrial enterprises and the entire banking sector, and Tito's personal authority was effectively unchallenged.
The Greek question
The new Yugoslav state's first major foreign-policy crisis was its support for the Communist insurgency in the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). The Greek Communists were sheltered on Yugoslav, Bulgarian, and Albanian territory and received substantial supplies through Yugoslavia. Tito's involvement put him on a collision course with Stalin, who had agreed with Churchill at the Yalta-era percentages agreement that Greece would remain in the Western sphere. Tito's view, in private correspondence with Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov, was that a Communist Greece could federate with Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to form a Balkan Communist union. This was an idea Stalin could not tolerate: a southern Balkan federation under Tito's influence, with its own diplomatic and military capacity, outside Soviet control.
The disagreement over Greece was one of several issues — Albania, the Italian border at Trieste, the structure of Communist-bloc economic cooperation — that produced an open break between Tito and Stalin in the spring of 1948. The break is the most consequential moment in Yugoslav post-war history and the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter IV