Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

In Yugoslavia, wrote C. L. Sulzberger, “Tito’s partisans had created history’s
most effective guerilla army.” 35 This antifascist “popular front” became a
base for nation-formation and the communist revolution. Yet, prior to 1945,
the Partisan movement’s appeal was not excessively Marxist and communist.
As Tito’s top commissar Djilas testifies, Partisan leaders promised to each of
the major Yugoslav ethnic nations, and even to those previously unrecognized
as nations, a state of its own. 36
In the Moscow Declaration of 1955, the Soviet Union officially admitted
that the Yugoslavs had defeated fascism largely through their own efforts.
In a similar vein, some post–Cold War accounts acknowledged that the Yugoslav
Partisan war was not a communist myth but one of the most massive
and successful World War II resistance movements. 37 The Balkan forests and
mountains provided a setting favorable of guerilla warfare, but this alone
would not have sufficed for both the successful military resistance and the
Pan-Yugoslav nationalist-later-turned-communist revolution. The Allies recognized
the qualities of Tito’s movement as early as 1943, and, after the
Cold War, Western military literature as well as college history textbooks
acknowledged Tito’s resistance as one of the most successful local movements
in World War II. 38
The struggle of the Partisans was a pan-Yugoslav popular nationalist
liberation movement. The anti-Fascist People’s Liberation Struggle was successful
militarily and politically. As military force it started with 40,000 in
1941, of these most were members of the Communist Party and Communist
Youth. In the summer of 1944, the former guerilla Partisans had 39 divisions,
a navy, and an air force, with a total of 350,000 combatants, and in
May 1945 there were 800,000 troops organized in four armies and 52 divisions.
39 In the People’s Liberation Struggle, 305,000 fighters lost their lives
and 425,000 were wounded. 40 The Communist Party of Yugoslavia lost
50,000 members in combat. Three-fourths of the prewar cadres were killed,
as were over half of those admitted to the Party during the war. 41 The
communists led charges and were expected to sacrifice their lives. In a bizarre
note from his memoirs, Tito’s one-time close aide Milovan Djilas wrote
that the communists believed that God was one their side—Djilas allegedly
experienced a religious vision of Jesus Christ, whom Djilas considered a
protocommunist. 42
The movement’s political success was exemplified in the building of a
broad antifascist coalition, or “Popular Front.” From 1942 to 1944, the
country was covered with a web of “People’s Liberation Committees,” the
organs of government of the emerging Yugoslav federation, founded at Jajce
in central Bosnia on 29 November 1943. These committees included a number
of noncommunists and relatively large numbers of women. In 1944 in
Dalmatia alone, 965 women were active in military and civilian service with
the People’s Liberation Committees. 43 Finally, ethnic minorities (e.g., Jews,
Slovaks, Czechs, Ukrainians, Poles, Italians, Magyars, Roma, Turks, Albanians,
and others) were also represented in Partisan ranks. More than 2,000
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