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To: annalex
I forget if the question of retaining the monarchy was put to a vote, but it would have been a rigged election anyway, as the one held in late 1945 which the Communists won with 80% of the vote.

There are some interesting documents in the volumes of The Foreign Relations of the United States published by the State Department, for these years, about the back-and-forth between the various parties involved and US officials. The Tito regime was very Stalinist in its methods and imposed a dictatorship pretty quickly. Ljubo Sirc, a young Slovenian former Partisan, tried to organize a political party to compete in the election and for that spent about 7 years in prison. (He later managed to leave the country and became a professor in England.)

It's hard to say what would have happened if the Allies had aided Mihailovic and he had defeated Tito, or if Tito had been killed during the war. Maybe the Soviets would have installed a compliant Communist regime like they did in other Eastern European countries. Maybe there would have been a civil war like in Greece. There was some talk of splitting the country. Churchill's famous percentages agreement with Stalin had Yugoslavia a 50-50 deal between Britain and the Soviets, but what was that supposed to mean in practice? One possibility might have been a Soviet-dominated Serbia in the eastern half of the country and a British-dominated entity embracing the western half of the country (but I don't think any serious planning was done along those lines--and that half of the country was very divided ethnically so may not have been a viable state). It can't be assumed that if Tito had been eliminated, Mihailovic would have been able to run a united Yugoslavia under the aegis of King Peter--Stalin probably would not have allowed that.

12 posted on 05/27/2013 2:42:02 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus
I forget if the question of retaining the monarchy was put to a vote

The link I gave before says that it was not. Regardless, the only legitimate way to abolish a monarchy is to get the monarch to abdicate, not voting about it.

It's hard to say what would have happened if the Allies had aided Mihailovic and he had defeated Tito, or if Tito had been killed during the war.

It would have been the right thing to do, especially if the war was fought, supposedly, on the grounds of high morality. Yes, Stalin might have upset this policy as he had upset many other policies. In that, too, there is a lesson US and Britain did not learn till 1949: helping Stalin win was a mistake all along.

13 posted on 05/28/2013 5:35:47 AM PDT by annalex (fear them not)
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