League of Communists of Yugoslavia - National Question and Factional Strife

National Question and Factional Strife

In 1923, the party also began to rethink its position on the national question and distanced itself from its former view, that 1918 had created a unified Yugoslav nation. Communists began to question the structure of the Yugoslav state and supported a Danubian-Balkan Federation. Debates were summed up by the 3rd state conference held at Belgrade in January 1924 which supported the concept of a federative republic with fully developed local self-management.

However, the Comintern denounced any federative organization and instead demanded the breaking up of the so-called "Versailles Yugoslavia", with Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia forming independent republics. The Comintern, perceiving that the unsolved national question could be used to foster a new revolution, focused on Yugoslavia as the least stable of Balkan states.

The 3rd state conference also decided to strengthen the illegal party organization by the creation of party cells among industrial workers (instead of skilled craftsmen), the schooling party cadres and a united front with the trade-unions. This led to the increase of membership from 1,000 to 2,500 at the end of 1924.

The 3rd conference's decisions were accepted in a party referendum but rejected by the local Belgrade organization, led by trade union functionaries and Sima Marković, who refused to recognize the leadership under Kaclerović. They especially opposed the Comintern's policy of dissolving Yugoslavia, seeing no chance for a revolution and hence no need to foster it by such a move. The conflict was heightened by Croatian Communists open support for nationalist groups like the Croatian Peasant Party or the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO), and their directing complaints against Serbian hegemony not against the Serbian bourgeoisie but against the Serbian people. The Belgrade opposition was defeated in a renewed debate in autumn 1924 and subsequently left the party. The conflict was reviewed by the Comintern, which condemned Marković's views as ″Social Democratic and opportunistic″.

The 3rd party congress held at Vienna in May 1926, convoked to overcome the internal conflict, agreed with Comintern's evaluation and confirmed the 3rd state conference's as "the foundations for its ideological and political Bolshevization″. The Comintern's program was made binding on any party member and the party's name supplemented by "Section of the Communist International". The Congress also defined Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Vojvodina as non-Serb territories that should secede from the remaining "area of the Serbian Nation". Members of both party wings practiced "self-criticism", expressed their desire for unity and were subsequently elected into the Central Committee, with Marković returning as political secretary.

But the conflict was not truly resolved and began to spread into the lower party organizations, to which the party responded by anti-factional campaigns among the cadres. In January 1928, Đuro Đaković appealed to the Comintern, denounced both wings as blocking party work and marginalizing the party in the political life of Yugoslavia. He received the support of the local Zagreb organization, led by Josip Broz Tito and Andrija Hebrang. In April, after conferring with Moscow, the Comintern replaced the Central Committee with a temporary leadership in and call on party members to liquidate factionalism. Convoked in this atmosphere, the 4th party congress, held at Dresden in November 1928, saw sharp criticism of the factions, and especially of Marković, who submitted to party discipline and called upon to the Belgrade party to return to party discipline. The congress reaffirmed the centralism principles and demanded that the leadership must be composed of industrial workers educated in the spirit of Leninism. Jovan Mališić was elected political secretary and Đuro Đaković organizational secretary. The congress also predicted an imminent bourgeois revolution, adopted the Comintern's theory of Social fascism, which regarded social democracy as a form of fascism, and reaffirmed the policy of breaking up Yugoslavia. Both the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Comintern would support these views until 1935.