Великите победители и провалът на проектите за южнославянска федерация след Втората световна война
The Great Winners and the Failure of the South Slav Federation Projects after World War II

Summary/Abstract: Two main aspects can be outlined in the widely exploited subject of the reasons that led to the failure of the South Slav Federation projects. The first aspect concerns the objections the Soviet Union's Western allies made, namely that a union of that kind would pose the question of the unification of Macedonia which in its turn would infringe on the territorial integrity of Greece. The second one deals with the Bulgarian objections to the Yugoslav plan of the Bulgarian state being "swallowed" by the new federation and given the same status as the rest of the federal units instead of applying the dual model preferred by Sofia. In the interpretation offered the author illustrates the motives underlying the Big Three's rejection of the intended federation with newly found documents from the archives of Bulgaria, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. The stand London, Moscow and Washington took in regard to the planned state-political transformation in the Balkans are being specified with the help of original American and British sources, some of them translated for the first time in Bulgarian. Apart from the theses, accepted by most experts, of the British objections and the Bulgarian, strengthened by Stalin, dissatisfaction, the author presents a new one about the Soviet leader's fast grown (as early as January 1945) unwillingness to tolerate the birth of a South Slav Federation. An idea of this kind is suggested by Stalin's direct and indirect hints that in perspective such a union would keep up far too much Tito's aspirations for hegemony, would reduce Georgi Dimitrov's commitment to Moscow and would undoubtedly erode the Kremlin's efforts to totally control the Soviet security zone. For that reason the Kremlin only episodically tolerated the theoretical projects for a South Slav Federation in order to intimidate its Western rivals in regions that raised problems for Soviet security. The federation initiatives of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were much more strongly disputed by Great Britain and the United States in order to block Soviet claims either to Italy (Trieste) or to Greece, Turkey and Iran. While the West was successfully playing the anti-federation card Moscow did not contrive to find an adequate application of the federation instrument. By reason of Stalin's excessive ambitions for leadership the Bulgarian-Yugoslav union failed and Tito was improvidently punished. Yugoslavia's elimination from the "new democracies" bloc temporarily disciplined the Soviet satellites but it also opened to Washington and London unexpected possibilities for their erosion.

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