League of Communists of Yugoslavia - Crisis and Dissolution

Crisis and Dissolution

In the 1960s, the centralized command structure of the League of Communists began to be dismantled with the fall of the hardline OZNA and UDBA chief Aleksandar Ranković in 1966, culminating in the social and political movements that would lead to the de-centralized and regionalized Federal Yugoslavia of the Constitution of 1974.

After Tito's death in 1980 the party adopted a collective leadership model with the occupant of the top position rotating annually. The party's influence declined and the party moved to a federal structure giving more power to party branches in Yugoslavia's constituent republics. Party membership continued to grow reaching two million in the mid-1980s but membership was considered less prestigious than in the past.

Slobodan Milošević became president of the Communist League of Serbia in 1987 and combined certain Serbian nationalist ideologies with opposition to liberal reforms. The growing rift among the branches of the Communist Party and their respective republics led to the effective dissolution of the Communist League of Yugoslavia at its 14th Congress held in January 1990 with rifts between Serbian and Slovenian Communists leading to the breakup of the party into different parties for each republic. The Communist associations in each republic shortly changed their names to Socialist or Social-Democratic parties, transmuting into movements which were left-oriented, but no longer strictly communist.

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