communist status in the Greek Civil War the Balkans to clamp down even more on Eastern Europe. So, to keep both continuity and control over the Eastern Bloc, anything and everything that Stalin said about the split was ideologically based. Tito was not originally set on distancing Yugoslavia from the USSR as much as he did. In response to the resolutions and overall policy of the USSR of differentiating Yugoslavian and Soviet ideals, “the Yugoslavs insisted that they were not in any way deviating from the Marxist-Leninist line. Not until later, when Tito sought to bolster domestic support for his leadership and to give the Yugoslav model a new ideological justification, did he embrace the argument that the split occurred because of Yugoslavia’s own path toward socialism”(4). While this was going on, Stalin sent multiple threatening letters to Tito and the Yugoslav government about PAGE 11 VOL. 1, NO. 1 ZEITGEIST believed that this is the most Marxian way to go, stating, “Such decentralization is simply applied Marxism. We are giving factories to the workers, and this strengthens our state and makes the workers feel, more than ever, that they are the owners of the mean of production”(7). Tito was also different frommany different socialist thinkers at the time in that he did not think that his application of socialism was the way for every country. As has been expanded upon, Tito believed that each socialist movement should be allowed to determine their own interpretation of Marx. To Tito, Yugoslavia exemplified this attitude: he claims, “We have only applied the science of Marx and Lenin to our specific conditions. There is no new tendency that could be called Titoism. This must be explained to the masses. Otherwise, it would be harmful to the international working class movement, if it were thought that this is some new tendency”(7). He recognizes that each revolution is different, and so the organization of each socialist system will be different. Obviously, there are limits to this, as he has been shown to be a harsh critic of the vast bureaucratic systems of Stalin’s USSR. When Tito broke Yugoslavia off from the Eastern Bloc, Stalin took as many avenues possible to control the narrative surrounding it. The main reason that Stalin put forward into the public was that their conflict was a purely ideological one: “The Cominform resolution of 28 June 1948 accused the Yugoslavs of deviating from the Marxist-Leninist line. The published letters exchanged by Soviet and Yugoslav leaders from March through May 1948— letters that were merely a prelude to the Cominform resolution in June—were entirely ideological in tone”(4). Stalin did not want it to be known, especially to the other members of the Cominform, that he was essentially using the dispute over the Joseph Stalin, photographed 1920 its international policy and attitude towards the Balkans and the Greek Civil War (4). In response to Stalin’s aggression, Tito took Yugoslavia down a path that trapped the Eastern European country between the two superpowers of the time, the US and the
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