Istorija 20. Veka (Feb 2023)
JUGOSLOVENSKI KOMUNISTI I ŠPANSKA REVOLUCIONARNA EMIGRACIJA 1945–1975.
Abstract
The authorities of communist Yugoslavia resolutely refused to recognize Franco’s regime in Spain. Since 1946, they maintained diplomatic relations with the government of the Spanish Republic in exile and provided it with regular financial assistance. Furthermore, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (later the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – SKJ) maintained relations with Spanish revolutionary parties and political groups in emigration. The attention paid by the leading Yugoslav communists to those ties had doctrinal reasons, but also sentimental ones, since many of them had participated in the Spanish Civil War. In the period 1945–1948, the Yugoslav communists fostered tight relations with the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). However, after the Cominform Resolution against Yugoslavia in 1948, they were abruptly interrupted. The Yugoslav communists consequently approached other groups of Spanish emigration. In the early fifties, the closest relations were established with former communists grouped in the ephemeral pro-Yugoslav organization Acción socialista, especially with its leaders José del Barrio and Jesús Hernández, whose nearly anti-communist book on the Spanish Civil War was published in Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs tried to forge close ties with the much more important Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) in 1953 and 1954, but without much success. After the reconciliation of the USSR and Yugoslavia, the relations between SKJ and PCE were gradually restored. The meeting of Santiago Carrillo and Dolores Ibárruri with Josip Broz Tito in 1965 represented a symbolic turning point. In the following decade, the relations between SKJ and the Eurocommunist PCE were as cordial as in their Stalinist past.
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