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Titoism and the Cominform
Book by Ulam, Adam B.
251 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1952
About the author
Adam B. Ulam
70 books6 followersAdam Bruno Ulam was a Polish-American historian and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union, and the author of twenty books and many articles.
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April 1, 2026
I imagine this is probably quite a rare book these days - this 1951 publication offers a very insightful contemporary account of not only the Soviet-Yugoslav split, but the general conditions of Eastern European communism during and immediately after WWII.
The book itself is the product of an outsider looking in, being an American research effort undertaken at the start of the Cold War, and has obvious limitations in this respect. However, the author has plainly done his homework to the best of his ability, contrasting a thorough reading of the communist press with what first hand accounts of the war and its aftermath he had at his disposal at the time.
The book itself is the product of an outsider looking in, being an American research effort undertaken at the start of the Cold War, and has obvious limitations in this respect. However, the author has plainly done his homework to the best of his ability, contrasting a thorough reading of the communist press with what first hand accounts of the war and its aftermath he had at his disposal at the time.
May 25, 2026
Published in 1952, when the great Adam Ulam was only 29 years old, “Titoism and the Cominform” was Ulam’s second book, but the first that related to Eastern European history, the field in which he would so distinguish himself. By itself this makes the book of considerable interest. It was also, sadly, the only book that Ulam wrote that dealt with Yugoslavia, but, as is obvious from the reference list, this brilliant man had at least a good reading knowledge of Serbo-Croatian, and so was able to do justice to his important subject: the break between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
Even Ulam’s title, “Titoism and the Cominform”, requires some explanation after so many decades have elapsed from its publication. Titoism today generally refers to three prongs of Tito’s program:: independence from the Soviet Union, worker self-management and the non-aligned movement. For Ulam, Titoism is more narrowly defined as basically independence from the Soviet Union. Worker self-management in Yugoslavia was still just being developed at the time of the break with Moscow, and had no meaningful part in causing the break. Tito was also years away from promoting the non-aligned movement. At the time of the break he had some hope of either getting likeminded Communist states to take over the Cominform itself or something like it and cast out the Soviet Union as a heretic from the true Marxist-Leninist path. The Yugoslavs held out great hope for Communist China as a potential ally, and were brutally disappointed when China sided with North Korea and Russia when the Korean War started.
The Cominform is not nearly as well-known as the Cominterm, the organization that it succeeded. Created by Lenin in 1917, the Communist International, Cominterm for short, was pledged to promote global revolution until Communism ruled the world. Although in principle an alliance of Communist parties on an equal basis it came to be heavily dominated by the Soviet Union. It was disbanded by the Soviet Union In May 1943, when its existence seemed to be impeding the war effort. After the Secnd World War was run, its successor organization, the Cominform, was created in 1947, and was not so much concerned with promoting global revolution as ensuring the ideological conformity of the Soviet Union’s satellite states in Europe. Neither the People’s Republic of China nor any other Asian Communist states were ever members of the Cominform. Initially based in Yugoslavia, its headquarters were moved to Romania in 1948 and remained there until it was disbanded in 1956. In political purges in Yugoslavia following the split with the Soviet Union in 1948, the heretics were often designated as Cominformists.
True to his title, Ulam wrote a book, not so much about Yugoslavia around the time of the split with the Soviet Union, as about the struggle in all of the Eastern European satellite nations between Titoists, defined as advocates of independence from the Soviet Union, and Cominformists, who believed in following the dictates of the Soviet government. In the period covered no country except for Yugoslavia broke away from the Soviet Union. Fearful that another country might, the Soviet government clamped down hard on its European satellites.
Władysław Gomułka (Wladyslaw Gomulka, to Ulam, since he doesn’t believe in showing diacritics) was dropped from the Polish Politburo in 1948 and in 1951 was sent to prison. Traicho Kostove in Bulgaria was treated even more harshly; he was executed for imaginary acts of treason. Ulam mentions that he goes into so much detail in discussing Poland and Bulgaria in large part because they did a much better job of publicizing their activities than the other satellite countries. It would be interesting to know what Ulam might have added to his account if what is known now about that period had been publicized then; I am in no position to say.
The witch hunt after Titoists in the satellite countries was one of the first things to change in the Soviet Union on the death of Stalin. Micromanaging the satellite countries’ affairs was too big a burden on Soviet officials, and they relaxed their policies. It was too late to help poor Kostov, but Gomułka made one of the great political comebacks in political history, dominating the Polish scene for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Tito himself toured the Soviet Union in triumph in 1956, signing a Moscow Declaration that recognized the equality of the Yugoslav Communist Party with its Soviet counterpart.
If one compares “Titoism and the Cominterm” with Ulam’s magisterial biography of Stalin, published in 1973 and revised in 1989, one can see how he revised his views of the period based on fresh information. He mentions Milovan Djilas’s “Conversations with Stalin”, an account of Djilas’s 1948 trip to Moscow, but only published in 1962. (Djilas received a fresh prison sentence for publishing it illegally int the West.) Ulam notes that Stalin was clearly feeling the idealistic Djilas out to see if he would take Moscow’s side in a struggle with Tito, but did so ineptly. Stalin “was no longer the master psychologist, only an irascible and vain man with occasional flashes of cunning.” And in the Stalin biography there is a greater emphasis on the declining diplomatic skills of Stalin in leading to an avoidable break with Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia’s socialist market economy had already experimented with calculating Western-style SNA frameworks alongside the MPS system as early as the late 1960s, the first Eastern European Communist country to do so. Regrettably, Yugoslavia itself never transitioned fully from an MPS-based to a GDP-based system of national accounts. That only happened one breakaway state after another, in the 1990s, as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Speculations about this would have been, of course, out of place in Ulam’s history.
I have appended a list of quotations from the book, many of which are commented on. This list itself will probably expand over time.
On p. viii of his preface, Ulam says he decided on omitting diacritics of Serbo-Croatian names from his text as these are “bothersome both to the printer and to the reader.” Seventy-five years on, the diacritics are no longer bothersome in any meaningful way to the printer. As for the reader, Alex N. Dragnich, in his book, “Serbs and Croats: The Struggle in Yugoslavia”, provides a helpful note on the pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian words in the Latin script that would seem to be more useful to readers than Ulam’s phoneticizations. These are an impediment to a reader who would like to consult the literature on a particular person online, and finds, after a while, that “Zhujovich” is identified by his proper Serbian name, Žujović. Also, Ulam just ignores difficulties with some names. The Serbian Cyrillic letter ђ, rendered as dj in the Latin alphabet, is left unchanged by Ulam. A poor reader coming across the name Djilas might wonder if it was pronounced Duh-Jill-ass, when the “dj’ combination is pronounced like “g” in the word “George”.
“The somewhat Pythian tone of the declaration was resented by the ‘right’ faction of Sima Markovich.” (13) [Pythian: (adj.) relating to or characteristic of Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Pythia’s prophecies were often ambiguous. The most notorious case was when King Croesus of Lydia asked if he should attack Persia. The Pythia said if he did, he would destroy a "great empire." Believing it to be Persia, he attacked, but it was his own empire that fell.]
“The device of the People’s Front or of a nominal coalition of political parties veiling but thinly the reality of Communist dictatorship has been used in all the satellite countries, and the Yugoslavs, even before their break with Moscow, improved upon by [should be just “improved upon”] the formula by gradually liquidating the remaining political parties save one.” (127)
“Several forms of the kolkhoz were sketched, all of them permissible, ranging from a simple producer’s co-operative for rationalizing soil cultivation and for common use of machinery, bull fully preserving the principle of private property and individual reward (analogous to the Russian toz), to a more advanced co-operative where the peasants still would own individually their cattle as well as a modicum of land. The latter, called by Minc the most advanced type of cooperative, was still not as socialistic as the artel, the prevailing type of the Russian kolkhoz.”
“In January 1948 the project of the Balkan Communist Union was shelved. Dimitrov recanted his previous public espousal of it, and the cession of 200 Macedonia to Yugoslavia, to which the Bulgarian Communists had become reconciled, or had been forced to reconcile themselves, was now abandoned.” [Yugoslavia already controlled the republic of Macedonia, today the state of North Macedonia. Bulgarian Macedonia, also known as Pirin Macedonia, lies to the east of North Macedonia. It is considerably smaller, with an area of 6,798 km2, as opposed to 25,713 km2 for North Macedonia.]
“[Following the Soviet-Yugoslav split] The Bulgarian Communist Party now recovered its position as the favourite of Soviet Russia among the Communists in the Balkans, and it was Bulgaria that was now envisioned as the possessor of Greater Macedonia once Tito’s clique had been eliminated in Yugoslavia and once the Greek Communists were free to rule over and partition their own country.” (206) [The area of Greek Macedonia is 34,177 km2 but even in 1948, a solid majority of the population were native Greek speakers. There are still people there who speak Macedonian as their first language, but their numbers are much disputed, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000.]
“Gradually, and painfully, the Yugoslav Communists replaced one dream by another. Soviet Communist [surely “Communism” was intended?] was crumbling under the weight of tis own devices.” (220)
“By August the struggle [between North and South Korea] had become, for the Yugoslavs, one between two rival imperialisms both equally unconcerned with the interests of the Korean people. And when in November 1950 the Chinese Communists joined in the fight, another illusion o f the Yugoslav Communists was well-nigh destroyed. For two years they had been glorifying the Chinese leaders. . . Now, for the time being, the hope disappeared, and the fact of the collaboration between Peiping and Moscow once again forced the Yugoslav Communists to imbibe political realism.” (221) The word “Peking” means “Northern Capital” in Chinese. The Chinese Nationalist government changame fed the name to “Peiping” meaning “Northern Peace” from 1929 forward, when it moved the capital to Nanking. In 1949, when the Chinese Communists took power, the capital reverted to Peking, and the name reverted to Peking as well. Here, Ulam chooses to stay with the old Chinese Nationalist name for the city. He was not alone. The US government continued to use the Peiping designation until the beginning of the 1960’s. The government of Taiwan uses the Peiping designation to this day.]
“A written Macedonian language has been constructed and is in use in the Federal Republic of Macedonia, thus confounding the skeptics, who still see in Macedonia but a dialect of the Bulgarian language.” (226) [The view that Macedonian is just a Bulgarian dialect allowed Bulgaria to defend the annexation of Macedonia during the Second World War, when Yugoslavia dissolved for the first time.]
Even Ulam’s title, “Titoism and the Cominform”, requires some explanation after so many decades have elapsed from its publication. Titoism today generally refers to three prongs of Tito’s program:: independence from the Soviet Union, worker self-management and the non-aligned movement. For Ulam, Titoism is more narrowly defined as basically independence from the Soviet Union. Worker self-management in Yugoslavia was still just being developed at the time of the break with Moscow, and had no meaningful part in causing the break. Tito was also years away from promoting the non-aligned movement. At the time of the break he had some hope of either getting likeminded Communist states to take over the Cominform itself or something like it and cast out the Soviet Union as a heretic from the true Marxist-Leninist path. The Yugoslavs held out great hope for Communist China as a potential ally, and were brutally disappointed when China sided with North Korea and Russia when the Korean War started.
The Cominform is not nearly as well-known as the Cominterm, the organization that it succeeded. Created by Lenin in 1917, the Communist International, Cominterm for short, was pledged to promote global revolution until Communism ruled the world. Although in principle an alliance of Communist parties on an equal basis it came to be heavily dominated by the Soviet Union. It was disbanded by the Soviet Union In May 1943, when its existence seemed to be impeding the war effort. After the Secnd World War was run, its successor organization, the Cominform, was created in 1947, and was not so much concerned with promoting global revolution as ensuring the ideological conformity of the Soviet Union’s satellite states in Europe. Neither the People’s Republic of China nor any other Asian Communist states were ever members of the Cominform. Initially based in Yugoslavia, its headquarters were moved to Romania in 1948 and remained there until it was disbanded in 1956. In political purges in Yugoslavia following the split with the Soviet Union in 1948, the heretics were often designated as Cominformists.
True to his title, Ulam wrote a book, not so much about Yugoslavia around the time of the split with the Soviet Union, as about the struggle in all of the Eastern European satellite nations between Titoists, defined as advocates of independence from the Soviet Union, and Cominformists, who believed in following the dictates of the Soviet government. In the period covered no country except for Yugoslavia broke away from the Soviet Union. Fearful that another country might, the Soviet government clamped down hard on its European satellites.
Władysław Gomułka (Wladyslaw Gomulka, to Ulam, since he doesn’t believe in showing diacritics) was dropped from the Polish Politburo in 1948 and in 1951 was sent to prison. Traicho Kostove in Bulgaria was treated even more harshly; he was executed for imaginary acts of treason. Ulam mentions that he goes into so much detail in discussing Poland and Bulgaria in large part because they did a much better job of publicizing their activities than the other satellite countries. It would be interesting to know what Ulam might have added to his account if what is known now about that period had been publicized then; I am in no position to say.
The witch hunt after Titoists in the satellite countries was one of the first things to change in the Soviet Union on the death of Stalin. Micromanaging the satellite countries’ affairs was too big a burden on Soviet officials, and they relaxed their policies. It was too late to help poor Kostov, but Gomułka made one of the great political comebacks in political history, dominating the Polish scene for many years in the second half of the 20th century. Tito himself toured the Soviet Union in triumph in 1956, signing a Moscow Declaration that recognized the equality of the Yugoslav Communist Party with its Soviet counterpart.
If one compares “Titoism and the Cominterm” with Ulam’s magisterial biography of Stalin, published in 1973 and revised in 1989, one can see how he revised his views of the period based on fresh information. He mentions Milovan Djilas’s “Conversations with Stalin”, an account of Djilas’s 1948 trip to Moscow, but only published in 1962. (Djilas received a fresh prison sentence for publishing it illegally int the West.) Ulam notes that Stalin was clearly feeling the idealistic Djilas out to see if he would take Moscow’s side in a struggle with Tito, but did so ineptly. Stalin “was no longer the master psychologist, only an irascible and vain man with occasional flashes of cunning.” And in the Stalin biography there is a greater emphasis on the declining diplomatic skills of Stalin in leading to an avoidable break with Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia’s socialist market economy had already experimented with calculating Western-style SNA frameworks alongside the MPS system as early as the late 1960s, the first Eastern European Communist country to do so. Regrettably, Yugoslavia itself never transitioned fully from an MPS-based to a GDP-based system of national accounts. That only happened one breakaway state after another, in the 1990s, as Yugoslavia disintegrated. Speculations about this would have been, of course, out of place in Ulam’s history.
I have appended a list of quotations from the book, many of which are commented on. This list itself will probably expand over time.
On p. viii of his preface, Ulam says he decided on omitting diacritics of Serbo-Croatian names from his text as these are “bothersome both to the printer and to the reader.” Seventy-five years on, the diacritics are no longer bothersome in any meaningful way to the printer. As for the reader, Alex N. Dragnich, in his book, “Serbs and Croats: The Struggle in Yugoslavia”, provides a helpful note on the pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian words in the Latin script that would seem to be more useful to readers than Ulam’s phoneticizations. These are an impediment to a reader who would like to consult the literature on a particular person online, and finds, after a while, that “Zhujovich” is identified by his proper Serbian name, Žujović. Also, Ulam just ignores difficulties with some names. The Serbian Cyrillic letter ђ, rendered as dj in the Latin alphabet, is left unchanged by Ulam. A poor reader coming across the name Djilas might wonder if it was pronounced Duh-Jill-ass, when the “dj’ combination is pronounced like “g” in the word “George”.
“The somewhat Pythian tone of the declaration was resented by the ‘right’ faction of Sima Markovich.” (13) [Pythian: (adj.) relating to or characteristic of Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Pythia’s prophecies were often ambiguous. The most notorious case was when King Croesus of Lydia asked if he should attack Persia. The Pythia said if he did, he would destroy a "great empire." Believing it to be Persia, he attacked, but it was his own empire that fell.]
“The device of the People’s Front or of a nominal coalition of political parties veiling but thinly the reality of Communist dictatorship has been used in all the satellite countries, and the Yugoslavs, even before their break with Moscow, improved upon by [should be just “improved upon”] the formula by gradually liquidating the remaining political parties save one.” (127)
“Several forms of the kolkhoz were sketched, all of them permissible, ranging from a simple producer’s co-operative for rationalizing soil cultivation and for common use of machinery, bull fully preserving the principle of private property and individual reward (analogous to the Russian toz), to a more advanced co-operative where the peasants still would own individually their cattle as well as a modicum of land. The latter, called by Minc the most advanced type of cooperative, was still not as socialistic as the artel, the prevailing type of the Russian kolkhoz.”
“In January 1948 the project of the Balkan Communist Union was shelved. Dimitrov recanted his previous public espousal of it, and the cession of 200 Macedonia to Yugoslavia, to which the Bulgarian Communists had become reconciled, or had been forced to reconcile themselves, was now abandoned.” [Yugoslavia already controlled the republic of Macedonia, today the state of North Macedonia. Bulgarian Macedonia, also known as Pirin Macedonia, lies to the east of North Macedonia. It is considerably smaller, with an area of 6,798 km2, as opposed to 25,713 km2 for North Macedonia.]
“[Following the Soviet-Yugoslav split] The Bulgarian Communist Party now recovered its position as the favourite of Soviet Russia among the Communists in the Balkans, and it was Bulgaria that was now envisioned as the possessor of Greater Macedonia once Tito’s clique had been eliminated in Yugoslavia and once the Greek Communists were free to rule over and partition their own country.” (206) [The area of Greek Macedonia is 34,177 km2 but even in 1948, a solid majority of the population were native Greek speakers. There are still people there who speak Macedonian as their first language, but their numbers are much disputed, ranging from 10,000 to 100,000.]
“Gradually, and painfully, the Yugoslav Communists replaced one dream by another. Soviet Communist [surely “Communism” was intended?] was crumbling under the weight of tis own devices.” (220)
“By August the struggle [between North and South Korea] had become, for the Yugoslavs, one between two rival imperialisms both equally unconcerned with the interests of the Korean people. And when in November 1950 the Chinese Communists joined in the fight, another illusion o f the Yugoslav Communists was well-nigh destroyed. For two years they had been glorifying the Chinese leaders. . . Now, for the time being, the hope disappeared, and the fact of the collaboration between Peiping and Moscow once again forced the Yugoslav Communists to imbibe political realism.” (221) The word “Peking” means “Northern Capital” in Chinese. The Chinese Nationalist government changame fed the name to “Peiping” meaning “Northern Peace” from 1929 forward, when it moved the capital to Nanking. In 1949, when the Chinese Communists took power, the capital reverted to Peking, and the name reverted to Peking as well. Here, Ulam chooses to stay with the old Chinese Nationalist name for the city. He was not alone. The US government continued to use the Peiping designation until the beginning of the 1960’s. The government of Taiwan uses the Peiping designation to this day.]
“A written Macedonian language has been constructed and is in use in the Federal Republic of Macedonia, thus confounding the skeptics, who still see in Macedonia but a dialect of the Bulgarian language.” (226) [The view that Macedonian is just a Bulgarian dialect allowed Bulgaria to defend the annexation of Macedonia during the Second World War, when Yugoslavia dissolved for the first time.]
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