the

late 1920s the KPJ was ripped apart by the internal struggle between the “Moscow” group,
which acted on behalf of Comintern, and the “native” faction, which advocated the adjustment
of the party activities to the national and confessional specifics of Yugoslavia. In addition, the
police crackdown resulted in mass arrests of the party activists, and in April 1929 police
agents murdered the KPJ's first secretary, Đuro Đaković.16
Political relaxation under the regency allowed the KPJ to reemerge from obscurity.
According to the instructions of Comintern, the party stepped up a propaganda campaign
against fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which eventually mutated into vicious attacks against
“imperialist” Western democracies and the “bourgeois” Yugoslav state. In fact, promoting the
destruction of Yugoslavia, the communists effectively pursued the same goal as the Ustasha.17
In August 1937, Josip Broz (Tito) was elected general secretary of the KPJ. A dedicated
communist and a skillful leader, Tito realized that the main cause for the party's weakness in
Serbia was its narrow social base, since most communists were workers and the urban
intelligentsia. Under his leadership, the KPJ reorganized its decimated cells, began to expand
into the countryside, and abandoned the idea of destroying the Yugoslav state, instead aspiring
to a federalist solution to the country's national question.18
The KPJ was shocked by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact of August 1939, but a
prominent communist, Vladimir Dedijer, recalled that the party accepted it “like disciplined
communists, considering it necessary for the security of the Soviet Union.”19 Consequently, the
KPJ duly ceased its propaganda against Italy and Germany, promoting instead Yugoslavia's
nonintervention into the “imperialist” war in Europe. Still, the party prepared for a
revolutionary situation or a crisis that would propel it to the forestage of national politics. It
organized secret courses where students learned military tactics and clandestine activities,
based on the experiences of the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars. In 1940 Tito proposed to the
Comintern a plan to overthrow the government and to establish the “people's power” on the
Soviet model. Moscow rejected the plan, but the KPJ leadership did not abandon the idea of
socialist revolution, patiently waiting for an opportune moment.20
By the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, the KPJ had eight thousand members, augmented
by 2,000 party candidates and 9,400 SKOJ members. The party's small size was compensated
for by its discipline and the nucleus of highly dedicated revolutionaries, among them Tito,
Alexander Ranković, Edvard Kardelj, Ivo Lola Ribar, and Milovan Djilas.21
As with communism, fascism found little appeal in Yugoslavia, but from the mid-1930s
some small groups adopted fascist rhetoric, symbols, and ideological postulates. Like their
counterparts in Romania and Bulgaria, Serbian right-wing groups blended fascism,
nationalism, Christianity, and monarchism.22 The assassination of King Alexander facilitated
the fusion of these groups into a single organization. On January 6, 1935, they formed the
Yugoslav National Movement (Jugoslavenski narodni pokret), Zbor (lit., assembly or rally),
with Dimitrije Ljotić as chairman of its provisional committee. Born in the family of a Serbian
diplomat, Ljotić was deeply religious and spent time in France as a student, where he was
mesmerized by the ideology of Charles Maurras, who rejected parliamentary rule. After having
fought in World War I, Ljotić entered civil service and briefly, from February to September
1931, was minister of justice. In that capacity he proposed to King Alexander that Yugoslavia