Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Well-written, thorough
Comment: "With Stalin Against Tito" is an outstanding monograph on a crucial period in post-WW2 Yugoslav history by one of the field's preeminent historians. The Tito-Stalin split in 1948 was the first major rift to occur among the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and its repercussions were felt in Yugoslavia, the USSR and the Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. Banac convincingly shows that although the conflict between the Yugoslav and Soviet communists assumed an ideological veneer, it was primarily a power struggle between two willful autocrats. This partially explains why the Yugoslav "Cominformists," who ended up supporting Stalin's line, were such an ideologically diverse group - from national (populist) communists to dogmatic internationalist hardliners. The only thing that united them was opposition to Tito and unquestioning loyalty (in some cases) to Stalin and the much-revered Soviet Communist Party. Banac bases his study on extensive research into this area, and it's interesting that he made use of subsequent cultural production (i.e. novels, films, plays, poetry) that deals with the Cominform crisis and its consequences for Yugoslav society as valuable source material. Banac's analysis is top-notch and his writing style is very engaging and never dull.
|
|
