page_title: League of Communists of Yugoslavia
section_title: Ruling party of Socialist Yugoslavia
hierarchical_section_title: League of Communists of Yugoslavia / Ruling party of Socialist Yugoslavia
caption_attribution_description: English: Josip Broz Tito
context_page_description: The League of Communists of Yugoslavia, known until 1952 as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, was the founding and ruling party of SFR Yugoslavia. It was formed in 1919 as the main communist opposition party in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and after its initial successes in the elections, it was proscribed by the royal government and was at times harshly and violently suppressed. It remained an illegal underground group until World War II when, after the Invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the military arm of the party, the Yugoslav Partisans, became embroiled in a bloody civil war and defeated the Axis powers and their local auxiliaries. After the liberation from foreign occupation in 1945, the party consolidated its power and established a one-party state, which existed until the 1990 breakup of Yugoslavia.
  The party, which was led by Josip Broz Tito from 1937 to 1980, was the first communist party in power in the history of the Eastern Bloc that openly opposed the Soviet Union and thus was expelled from the Cominform in 1948 in what is known as the Tito–Stalin split.
context_section_description: The other parties formed before the war were banned by the Communists. Eight of them entered the coalition with the Communists and founded the People's Front of Yugoslavia (Narodna fronta Jugoslavije), while the Democratic Party of Milan Grol boycott the first post-war elections of 1945 because the elections were held under undemocratic conditions.
  The elections were held in the form of a referendum: the People's Front candidate list received 91% of the vote while the option of "no list" won 9%. Yugoslavia became a republic and the other parties were banned. The People's Front (later called the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, Socijalistički Savez Radnog Naroda Jugoslavije) remained open to those who did not consider themselves to be communists, such as members of the clergy.
  In 1948, the party held its fifth Congress. The meeting was held shortly after Stalin accused Tito of being a nationalist and moving to the right branding his heresy Titoism. This resulted in a break with the Soviet Union known as the Informbiro period. Initially the Yugoslav communists, despite the break with Stalin, remained as hard line as before but soon began to pursue a policy of independent socialism that experimented with self-management of workers in state-run enterprises, with decentralization and other departures from the Soviet model of a Communist state.
  Under the influence of reformers such as Boris Kidrič and Milovan Đilas, Yugoslavia experimented with ideas of workers self-management where workers influenced the policies of the factories in which they worked and shared a portion of any surplus revenue. This resulted in a change in the party's role in society from holding a monopoly of power to being an ideological leader. As a result, the party name was changed to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (Savez komunista Jugoslavije, SKJ) in 1952 during its sixth Congress. Likewise, the names of the regional branches were changed accordingly. LCY consisted of the following regional bodies:
  League of Communists of Bosnia and Herzegovina
  League of Communists of Croatia
  League of Communists of Macedonia
  League of Communists of Montenegro
  League of Communists of Serbia
  League of Communists of Kosovo
  League of Communists of Vojvodina
  League of Communists of Slovenia
caption: President Josip Broz Tito in 1961, official portrait in uniform of Marshal of Yugoslavia.
exif: {}