League of Communists of Yugoslavia
Nationality Total members Percent of membership Percent of total population
Serb 541,526 51.77 42.08
Croat 189,605 18.13 23.15
Slovene 70,516 6.74 8.57
Macedonian 67,603 6.46 5.64
Montenegrin 65,986 6.31 5.24
Muslim 37,433 3.58 5.24
Albanian 31,780 3.04 4.93
Hungarian 12,683 1.21 2.72
Others 28,886 2.76 4.90
Total 1,046,018 100.00 100.00
Ethnic composition
The League of Communists of Yugoslavia,[a] known until 1952 as the Communist Party of Yugoslavia,[b] 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 single-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. After internal purges of pro-Soviet members, the party renamed itself the League of Communists and adopted the politics of workers' self-management and independent communism, known as Titoism.