structural:summarization, structural:scholar_edition
Evaluation

Dominic McGoldrick writes that as the head of a "highly centralised and oppressive" regime, Tito wielded tremendous power in Yugoslavia, with his authoritarian rule administered through an elaborate bureaucracy that routinely suppressed human rights. The main victims of this repression during the first years were known and alleged Stalinists, such as Dragoslav Mihailović and Dragoljub Mićunović, but in later years, even some of the most prominent of Tito's collaborators were arrested. On 19 November 1956, Milovan Đilas, perhaps the closest of Tito's collaborators, widely regarded as his possible successor, was arrested because of his criticism of Tito's regime. Victor Sebestyen writes that Tito "was as brutal as" Stalin. The repression did not exclude intellectuals and writers, such as Venko Markovski, who was arrested and sent to jail in January 1956 for writing poems considered anti-Titoist.

Even if, after the reforms of 1961, Tito's presidency had become comparatively more liberal than other communist regimes, the Communist Party continued to alternate between liberalism and repression. Yugoslavia managed to remain independent from the Soviet Union, and its brand of socialism was in many ways the envy of Eastern Europe, but Tito's Yugoslavia remained a tightly controlled police state. According to David Matas, outside the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe combined. Tito's secret police were modelled on the Soviet KGB. Its members were ever-present and often acted extrajudicially, with victims including middle-class intellectuals, liberals and democrats. Yugoslavia was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but scant regard was paid to its provisions.

Tito's Yugoslavia was based on respect for nationality, though Tito ruthlessly purged any flowerings of nationalism that threatened the Yugoslav federation. But the contrast between the deference given to some ethnic groups and the severe repression of others was sharp. Yugoslav law guaranteed nationalities to use their language, but for ethnic Albanians, the assertion of ethnic identity was severely limited. Almost half of Yugoslavia's political prisoners were ethnic Albanians imprisoned for asserting their ethnic identity.

Yugoslavia's post-war development was impressive, but the country ran into economic snags around 1970 and experienced significant unemployment and inflation.

Declassified documents from the CIA state in 1967, it was already clear that although Tito's economic model had achieved growth of the gross national product around 7%, it also created frequently unwise industrial investment and a chronic deficit in the nation's balance of payment. In the 1970s, uncontrolled growth often created chronic inflation, which Tito and the Party could not fully stabilise or moderate. Yugoslavia also paid high interest on loans compared to the LIBOR rate, but Tito's presence eased investors' fears since he had proven willing and able to implement unpopular reforms. By 1979 with Tito's passing on the horizon, a global downturn in the economy, consistently increasing unemployment and growth slowing to 5.9% throughout the 1970s, it had become likely that "the rapid economic growth to which the Yugoslavs become accustomed" would aggressively decline.

With the passing of the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, Tito initiated what, according to A. Ross Johnson of the United States Department of State, "constituted the first effort in postwar Yugoslavia (and the first attempt in any Communist system) to establish depersonalised and institutionalised 'rules of the game' in Party decision-making bodies intended to apply to the period of succession." This system created a state and party presidency that was governed collectively, each limited to one year term of office. But this system might have contributed to the collapse of Yugoslavia, according to professor Robert M. Hayden: "While perhaps no federal structure could have contained the political pressures of Yugoslavia in 1989/91, the flaws of the 1974 constitution served to ensure that they became unmanageable, thus making civil war virtually inevitable. Responsibility for the war must thus be shared, between the Slovenes, whose actions destroyed the federal structure, Milošević, whose aggressive politics goaded the Slovenes into doing so, and the drafters of the constitution, who made the chimaera of a "confederation" seem a reasonable constitutional structure."