Communist state
Following the defeat of Axis forces in Croatia in 1945, the Communist Partisan leader Marshal Josip Broz Tito established the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a Communist state which lasted until 1991. Yugoslavia was the only post-war Eastern European Communist state which had not been conquered by the Red Army. After the war, writer Evelyn Waugh, a Roman Catholic convert, advised the British Foreign Office, and Pope Pius XII that Tito "threatens to destroy the Catholic faith in a region where there are now some 5,000,000 Catholics." According to Phayer, "even before the end of the war, Tito had begun to settle the score with the Ustaša, which meant with the Catholic Church as well, because of the close relations between the two."""