From Diplomacy to the Cominform Emigration : Goings-on in the Yugoslav Diplomatic Missions in the USA on Occasion of the Resolution of the Cominform in 1948
Abstract
This paper tries to reconstruct and analyse the events during the summer of 1948 that occurred on the Yugoslav embassy and other representative bodies in the United States. The Cominform critique of the Yugoslav leadership, namely, received among the stuff there stronger support than in any other diplomatic mission of Yugoslavia in the World.
The supporters of the Cominform gathered around two high rank diplomats Pero Dragila and Slobodan Ivanović. After several weeks they spent by internal discussions, controversies with loyal officials, and consultations with American communists as well as Soviet diplomats they left America and were accepted as political émigrés in Czechoslovakia.
Dragila and Ivanović became the crucial persons of the new established exile organisation, on the editorial stuff of its journal "Nova Borba" and in the external Cominformist movement in general. The group of former diplomats within the framework of the organisation made up a consistent unit that expressed radical views and advocated militant means in struggle against the Titoist regime.
The so called "Americans" were labelled by their adversaries among Czechoslovak Party officials and other émigrés with the mark of leftist faction and gradually they lost their confidence. The author of this paper assumes that the origin of such a political style should be partly sought in the group's collective experience since the summer of 1948.
The very hard decision-making had frustrating impact on them and contributed then to the cementing of their unity in pro-Soviet radicalism.