(1) An old post of mine (see
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...soviet-invasion-of-yugoslavia-in-1950.464475/ for the thread in which it appears):
I was under the impression that Stalin was relying on Yugoslav "Cominformists" to overthrow Tito, and that the buildup of satellite troops on the Yugoslav border in 1950 was basically psychological warfare to encourage anti-Tito Yugoslavs to take action, and that only if they had achieved some measure of success would Soviet-bloc forces intervene. However, Sabrina P. Ramet,
The Three Yugoslavias: State-building and Legitimation, 1918-2005, pp. 179-182 argues that while at first Stalin was indeed relying on anti-Tito Yugoslavs, he really did seem to contemplate an invasion in 1950:
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"To Invade or Not to Invade
"In the period June 1948-mid-1949, the Kremllin hoped that Yugoslav Communists, trained for decades to assume Stalin's infallibility, would revolt against Tito. Hundreds of Yugoslav citizens were already in the USSR. and a large number of these were now recruited into armed units being formed and trained in the USSR. They were subsequently infiltrated back into Yugoslavia, where they attempted to stir up rebellion. In Bucharest, for example. about 200 defecors from Yugoslavia received training in espionage and sabotage beginning in 1949 and were subsequendy parachuted back into their country of ori-gin.. According to Krzavac and Markovic, "more than 700 emigces were infiltrated [into Yugoslavia] across the frontiers. with arms, mines, leaflets, [on] spying and terrorist assignments. Around 160 were captured, and forty were killed in direct conflict with [Yugoslav] security organs.". Anti-Tito emigres were also given funding to publish and distribute propaganda. In Moscow, for instance, they were allowed to broadcast programs on Radio Moscow, and in Prague, Cominformists published the newspaper Nova Borba and maintamed close contact with Bedrich Geminder, hced of the Foreign Section of the Czechoslovak CP.
"Yugoslav Cominforrmists also established three International Brigades, stationed in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. the last of which included 6,000 'volunteers' from the German Democratic Republic. Belgrade sources estimate that there were some 3,500 Cominformist emigres at the time. In addition, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of disaffected Yugoslavs who had remained in Yugoslavia. Cominformist insurgency began in summer and autumn 1948, and although most intense in Montenegro, it affected also Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where, in May 1950, army units rose up in Cominformist mutiny.
"Beginning in autumn 1949, the Soviets refused to have any official or even private contacts with the Yugoslavs: from 1949 to 1953, the only exception was the exchange of protest notes. The Soviets obviously hoped that the domestic insurgents could either overthrow Tito single-handedly or create enough political disorder to facilitate a Soviet intervention. As early as 7 November 1948. Foreign Minister Molotov, in a speech commemorating the October Revolution, called on the Yugoslav people to overthrow Tito, and a year and a half later (6 May 1950), Nikolai Bulganin declared in Prague, "We believe it will not be long before [the Yugoslav people] achieve victory over the Tito-Rankovic clique."
"In communications dated 6 July 1948 and 11 June 1949, the Yugoslav government sought to recall its citizens studying in civilian and military schools in the USSR and protested Soviet failure, even after repeated requests, to permit the repatriation of Yugoslav children in the USSR. The Yugoslav government also protested that the USSR was nurturing anti-Tito exiles. The Kremlin replied on 31 May 1949. asserting its right 'to receive and give shelter to the Yugoslav patriot-exiles, persecuted by the Yugoslav anti-democratic regime for their democratic and socialist convictions.' As a secret Cominformist directive of 1951 makes dear, the Kremlin looked to the domestic Cominformists to build up an alternate organizational apparatus and considered that the time-table for takeover would depend on the relative success in organization building. But by the end of summer 1949, Rankovic's secret police had by and large broken the back of the domestic Cominformist dissent. Hence. if Stalin was to stay in the game, he had to escalate.
"The escalation came in September 1949, when the Soviet government declared itself "released" from any obligation under its 1945 Treaty of Friendship with Yugoslavia, citing the "evidence' produced at the trial of Rajk in Hungary. Shortly before Molotov's ultimatum, intelligence sources had revealed the formation of special armed groups for the projected invasion of Yugoslavia, ascertaining that some seven motorized divisions were close to Yugoslav borders. Between 1945 and 1948. the Hungarian Army, for example, had been allowed to fall into a state of decrepitude. Within three months of the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, however, the Hungarian armed forces began to be rejuvenated, a political officer system was introduced along with party cells and anti-Titoist indoctrination, the army's strength was beefed up, and Hungarian production of war materiel was stepped up. In September 1948, the Hungarian Army consisted of a paltry two undermanned rifle divisions plus one engineering division. By summer of 1950, it counted nine infantry divisions, three engineering divisions, one chemical division, one horse cavalry division. one signal regiment, one communication brigade, and three heavy armored regime. Bela Kiraly, an eyewitness. recalls having seen the "feverish modernization" of airfields and the construction of new ones, whose immediate purpose was to provide air bases for assault against Yugoslavia. Arms industries were quickly developed, rail lines with strategic value were upgraded, and the highway system was developed with military needs foremost among the considerations. Throughout 1950 and early 1951, there were repeated war games and military maneuvers designed to practice for invasion. By then, armed strength levels in Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were two to three and a half times the levels permitted by the Paris Peace Treaty...
"In early June 1950. the highest echelons in the Hungarian Army were arrested and variously executed or imprisoned; military illiterates were named to replace them, with the effect that actual operational control passed clearly into the hands of Soviet "advisors." This was a clear signal that the Kremlin considered the preparations for invasion complete and that the assault would come shortly. Matyas Rakosi, the Hungarian party leader, expecting that Yugoslavia would be broken up, evidently hoped to annex Croatia to Hungary, thereby reclaiming the Habsburg patrimony. On 25 June 1950, news came that North Korea had launched an offensive against South Korea. Kiraly believes that this was timed to precede the invasion of Yugoslavia by a few months. But whether it was so timed or not is inessential to the argument. The point is that Yugoslavia had been in contact with the Americans since early 1948, had signed a foreign trade agreement with a U.S. company as early as April 1949, and, under the Yugoslav Emergency Act of 1950, had obtained 150 million from the U.S., in addition to 126.5 million in previously authorized agricultural goods. The Americans sent boatloads of sugar, wheat, and flour, agreed to send tanks, heavy artillery, and fighter aircraft, and offered equipment to outfit heavy armaments factories; these factories were now built in Bosnia and western Serbia. When Stalin considered the firm American response in Korea and saw the increasing favor with which the U.S. regarded Tito, he shelved the projected invasion. Yet even now, Yugoslavia's wor-ries were not over. In early August 1950. Bulgarian authorities started removing and interning many families from villages along the Yugoslav frontier in the northwestern tip of Bulgaria. evacuating the villages of Rakovica, Kakres, Aleksandrov, Kapetanovac, Sardev, Jesnjinac. Kobilje, Dragovac, and Lesikac.. It was hard to avoid interpreting these evacuations as anything but continued preparations for a possible invasion.
"Under the circumstances. Tito wanted to obtain as firm a guarantee of Western support as possible. U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson offered an unambiguous guarantee of protection in February 1951 when, in response to a question about U.S. willingness to defend Yugoslavia if it were subjected to a military assault, the secretary declared that the U.S. attitude could be inferred from its response to the military aggression on the Korean peninsula. But even several months after invasion had most likely ceased to be on the agenda, Tito told foreign journalists at a press conference in Brdo (Slovenia), August 1951, that the danger of a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia was greater than ever and declined to exclude the possibility that an American military mission might be invited to Yugoslavia, noting that U.S.-Yugoslav negotiations about military instruction were in progress. Tito was probably genuinely worried, given a series of border incidents along Yugoslavia's borders with Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania over the months April-September 1951 and the Czechoslovak government's noisy closure of its consulate in Zagreb in May of that year. On 14 November 1951, finally. the U.S. and Yugoslavia signed an agreement on military assistance to strengthen Yugoslav defense capability, and an American military assistance advisory group was established in Belgrade. Large-scale military maneuvers had been staged in Bulgaria in September-October 1950 (with the participation of Soviet generals and other officers), in Hungary in January 1951, and in Hungary again in September 1951. After the establishment of the American advisory group in Belgrade, the military maneuvers by bloc states came to an end, and the East bloc armies were once more reduced in size..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=FTw3lEqi2-oC&pg=PA179
https://books.google.com/books?id=FTw3lEqi2-oC&pg=PA180
https://books.google.com/books?id=FTw3lEqi2-oC&pg=PA181
https://books.google.com/books?id=FTw3lEqi2-oC&pg=PA182
***
FWIW, Khrushchev in his memoirs wrote:
"But when the split [with Tito] occurred everything changed all at once. Stalin was virtually ready to invade Yugoslavia. I remember on one occasion the Ukrainian minister of state security [Sergei Savchenko] reported to me that a large number of people were being sent secretly to the Balkans from Odessa. They were being sent by ship apparently to Bulgaria. People who were involved with organizing this operation reported to me that military units had been formed, and although they were traveling in civilian clothing, they had military uniforms and weapons in their luggage. It was reported to me that some sort of military blow against Yugoslavia was in preparation. Why it didn’t happen I just don’t know—especially since I never heard anything at all from Stalin himself about this operation. The people who reported it to me were carrying out his orders; they were the ones making the arrangements to get these people onto ships and send them off. These organizers were in an aggressive mood. They said: “Our guys are going to give it to them, but good! We’ve already sent them off, and soon they’ll be going into action.” They expressed no regrets about what was happening..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=nR0f25dmbn0C&pg=PT521&lpg=PT521
Khrushchev, though, seems to be speaking of his years in Ukraine, before he was called back to Moscow in December 1949. If Stalin had reached a decision to invade in 1950, evidently he didn't mention it to Khrushchev and the Politburo.
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(2) Another post of mine in that thread:
BTW, such an invasion was definitely on US policy makers' minds. Eric F. Goldman in
The Crucial Decade: America 1945-1955, p. 147, on the atmosphere in Washington, DC at the time of the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950:
"Yet whatever the tensions in Korea, Washington's attention was not concentrated on that area. If Central Intelligence indicated the possibility of an aggression in Korea, it also indicated an equal possibility at a number of other points in the world. As a matter of fact, when Connors's telephone call reached his superior, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary was at the house of the columnist Joseph Alsop, where the conversation centered on the threat to Yugoslavia resulting from the build-up of the Romanian and Bulgarian armies."
https://archive.org/details/crucialdecadeame006464mbp/page/n165
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(3) And one more post of mie from that thread:
For a skeptical view of one of Ramet's sources:
"...while no known plans against Yugoslavia exist, Bela Kiraly, a fomer Hungarian general before the 1956 Revolution, claimed that the Soviets had a plan in place to use Hungary as a staging point for an armed removal of Tito by the Red Army. Scholars have found, though, that his claim was false. See Mark Kramer, "The Expulsion of Yugoslavia and Stalin's Efforts to Reassert Control"
Yugoslavia's Explusion from the Cominform Sixty Yeare Later, AAASS National Convention, Philadelphia, PA 22 November 2008. Bela Kiraly's original work appeared in "The Aborted Soviet Military Plans Against Tito's Yugoslavia," in
At the Brink of War and Peace: The Tito-Stalin Split in a Historical Perspective, vol. 10 of
War and Society in East Central Europe, Wayne Vucinich, ed., (New York: Social Science Monographs, 1982.), pp. .273-288; also see, Sabina P. Ramet,
Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918-2005, (Bloomington, IN: Wilson Center Press, 2006), p. 4. Here Ramet reiterated the common notion that Stalin backed away from Yugoslavia, because if 'the U.S. would send in an expeditionary force to fight the North Koreans, it would surely do likewise in Yugoslavia.'"
https://books.google.com/books?id=asZKDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA64
Unfortunately, Kramer's article does not seem to be available online. In any event, we should remember that with all the sabre-rattling, there is no proof that Stalin was planning an all-out Korea-style invasion of Yugoslavia and was only dissuaded from doing so when the US sent troops to Korea. That such was the case is plausible speculation, but still speculation.
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(4) One final post of mine from that thread:
I rather doubt that even if such an invasion took place (and was not resisted by the West) Hungary would regain Croatia. Even under Austria-Hungary, Croatia, though part of the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, was distinguished from the Kingdom of Hungary proper, and had its own parliament, etc. If Hungary would regain any land, I would think it would be part or all of Vojvodina, where prior to World War II Hungarians were almost as numerous as Serbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Vojvodina
Other possibilities: Bulgaria gets the People's Republic of Macedonia, Albania gets Kosovo? But I am not sure there will be any international boundary changes at all--there would be no need to diminish Yugoslavia once the "healthy elements" of the Yugoslav Communist Party had been put in charge.
