Source: Antena M
Rehabilitation of Stalinists 77 Years after the Resolution of the Information Bureau
At the end of February, President Jakov Milatović submitted an initiative to the Parliament of Montenegro for the adoption of a law on the “rehabilitation and compensation of political prisoners from Goli Otok” and other prisons where over 3,000 people from Montenegro were imprisoned from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. It was a heterogeneous group of prisoners who, after Yugoslavia was expelled from the system of Soviet satellites under the control of Stalin’s Moscow, were arrested for anti-state activities in favor of the Soviet Union and Stalinist political beliefs.
The Resolution of the Information Bureau (Cominform) today represents a more distant historical event than the Montenegrin-Ottoman War, the Battle of Vučji Do, and the Berlin Congress were at the time of the split between Tito and Stalin. The key question is why, in 2025, it is necessary for the state to interfere in historical debates and topics and to instrumentalize issues that historians have already thoroughly researched and explained in the meantime.”
Thoroughly Researched “Taboo Topic“
Events related to the Information Bureau Resolution and its consequences, including the fate of political prisoners from Goli Otok, for nearly four decades have not represented any taboo topic or “hidden side of history”. These events have been openly discussed and written about since President Milatović was born. Montenegrin historiography and journalism, along with numerous historians from other post-Yugoslav republics and abroad, have dedicated a significant number of works to this topic, public gatherings have been organized, and many testimonies have been revealed. Goli Otok has long been present in the public culture of remembrance – several Montenegrin cities, such as Podgorica, Cetinje, Budva, and Danilovgrad, have had squares and streets named after “the victims of Goli Otok” since the early 1990s.
In historiography, there is a consensus based on undeniable evidence that between 1948 and the mid-1950s, Yugoslavia was genuinely threatened with annihilation by the Soviet Union and its then-loyal satellites which surrounded the country on multiple sides (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania), including the possibility of military intervention and occupation. Considering the fact that there were pro-Stalinist groups within the country, ready to collaborate with Moscow against Tito and the independent path of their own country, for security reasons, there was objectively a need to identify and temporarily isolate people with a pro-Russian orientation. Unfortunately, as is often repeated in historiography, Tito’s Yugoslavia fought against Stalinism using Stalinist methods.
In addition to members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia who were genuinely involved in treasonous pro-Soviet activities and were more loyal to Stalin than to Tito, many communists who had no intention of engaging against Tito’s leadership but simply could not imagine that Yugoslavia could survive without the help of the Soviet Union and publicly expressed their opinion, also ended up in prison. The cult of Stalin and Soviet Russia was deeply rooted in Montenegro, and many people were confused in the new situation, because, unlike the narrow circle of leading communists like Tito and Milovan Đilas, they had no personal experience with Stalin and the totalitarian nature of his brutal dictatorship. In addition to those who sympathized with Moscow in some way, a large number of innocent people also ended up on Goli Otok and in other camps, arrested based on indirect evidence or weak and often entirely fabricated charges that the security authorities, in the interest of a “frontal attack on the Cominformists”, never even bothered to verify. Goli Otok had the character of a true concentration camp, where prisoners were treated inhumanely and often with extreme brutality. All these facts have been well known and explained in detail for decades.
Descendants of “Goli Otok martyrs” as lottery winners
However, the idea of financial compensation and rehabilitation for the victims of the struggle against real and alleged Stalinists, as announced by President Milatović seventy-seven years after the Cominform Resolution, is questionable, harmful, and realistically difficult to implement for many reasons. Some representatives of the current Montenegrin authorities label all political prisoners as “Goli Otok martyrs”. This term, clearly borrowed from church discourse, treats all prisoners as innocent victims, without individual responsibility, which absolutely does not correspond to the much more complex historical facts. Furthermore, advocates of the rehabilitation and financial compensation for the “Goli Otok martyrs” themselves admit that they lack data on whether any of them are still alive today.
In light of this fact, the idea of financial compensation for their descendants sounds very questionable – if the state doesn’t know whether any of the former prisoners are still alive, it is even more certain that it has absolutely no records of their descendants or criteria for their compensation. At the same time, the draft law refers to the “alleged support for the Information Bureau Resolution”, which again, in many cases, is not true. Numerous Montenegrin communists openly and loudly expressed their support for the resolution, and Stalin, especially during the first few months after June 1948, at public meetings. It is clear that this law aims to create a new mythology that deliberately obscures and distorts the complex historical truth.
In order for President Milatović’s idea to be actually implemented, a large team of historians and lawyers would need to be formed, who would probably have to review individual cases for years, and resolve possible objections and lawsuits, all with a very uncertain outcome. We will list just a few important issues that the law would have to take into account.
First, if all former “Cominformists” are treated as innocent victims, does this apply only to those who ended up in prisons? Some of the most radical Stalin supporters did not end up on Goli Otok but were killed while attempting to escape abroad. The most well-known cases are those of General Arso Jovanović, Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), who died in August 1948 while attempting to illegally cross into Romania, and the leadership of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in Bijelo Polje, whose members collectively fled into the forest in January 1949, intending to cross into Albania, but were all liquidated by security forces while still on Montenegrin territory. Furthermore, while many Montenegrins were arrested on the territory of the People’s Republic of Montenegro and sent to Goli Otok and other prisons for Stalinists outside Montenegro, the number of those arrested in other republics by the local security authorities is not negligible. Montenegrins were also numerous in the party, state, military, and security apparatus in Serbia, i.e. at the federal level, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is unclear whether the proposed law would include all Montenegrin Cominformists or only those arrested in Montenegro.
Considering the fact that there were over 3,000 prisoners from Montenegro, the number of their descendants who could be entitled to financial compensation today likely reaches several thousand. Given that the historical events to which the compensation would apply occurred three-quarters of a century ago or even longer, there are multiple generations of descendants: children (if they are still alive, they are mostly members of the older generation), grandchildren, great-grandchildren… Considering the migration of the population within the former Yugoslavia and beyond, a significant number of descendants of the “Goli Otok martyrs” live abroad, in Belgrade, in Vojvodina, in Paris, in America, some perhaps even in Russia.
It is unclear whether the compensation would cover all descendants or only those currently living in Montenegro and holding Montenegrin citizenship. Other logical questions related to the compensation also arise: will the compensation be paid “per capita” that is, a lump sum amount per prisoner (based on the number of months/years spent in prison) that will be divided among all living descendants? If one of the former Goli Otok prisoners has only one living descendant today, that person will end up being a winner in the lottery. However, in other cases, if someone has children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren still alive, possibly even from multiple marriages, the compensation will likely become a nightmare for the state authorities and a seed of discord for the entire extended family.
Will the compensation also include potential illegitimate children or only “legitimate” heirs? And what will happen with the compensation if former prisoners have no direct descendants today? In any case, the idea of financial compensation for the descendants of the “Goli Otok martyrs” would, on a practical level, create a true Rashomon—a significant, long-term burden for state administration, bureaucracy, and the judiciary. It would almost certainly create new divisions and rifts in Montenegrin society and within many families of both real and false descendants. If the minimalist version, discussed twenty years ago when some of the former prisoners were still alive, were to be applied, the compensation would only apply to them, their spouses, and children. Considering how much time has passed since the mentioned events, in this case, financial compensation would largely be a cheap and empty gesture, because neither the former prisoners nor their spouses are alive anymore, and there are fewer and fewer of their descendants from the first generation.
Rehabilitation of Stalinists = Vote Buying
Those who personally experienced injustices in the mid-20th century are no longer around. No one disputes the inhuman suffering that former prisoners once endured. However, there is one important fact that is practically never discussed in Montenegro, or rather, it seems to go unnoticed.
Former prisoners from Goli Otok, even under Tito’s regime, were generally not discriminated against or persecuted after their release from prison. On the contrary, for the most part, they were given the opportunity to integrate into society and progress in every respect. Former political prisoners were employed and had the right to continue their education at universities after being released from prison. Many of them were re-admitted to the party and by the first half of the 1960s they held leadership positions. They were provided with apartments, built houses, and started families that they could financially support. They were free to travel the world just like other Yugoslavs. Compared to the fate of the far greater number of victims of political repression in Stalinist regimes and countries that remained loyal to Moscow until 1989, such as Czechoslovakia, their reintegration into society and their lives after leaving prison were mostly at an enviable level.
In Czechoslovakia, people who became victims of Stalinist terror at the same time when Stalinists (and alleged Stalinists) in Yugoslavia were sent to Goli Otok were usually discriminated against until their death or the fall of the communist regime. Even after serving their sentences, they were considered unfit: they lost their homes and apartments, their property was confiscated, and they did not receive pensions. At the same time, their entire families, including parents, descendants, and close relatives, were usually persecuted for decades as part of collective retribution, despite having committed no offense themselves. Their children and grandchildren were, as a rule, permanently prevented from studying at universities, often were not allowed to attend high school or any other secondary school, could not obtain passports or travel, even to neighboring socialist countries, and because of the alleged sins of their parents, sometimes even their grandparents, a large number of people were informally condemned to live on the margins of society, doing the hardest manual labor. Therefore, it can be said that most of the “Goli Otok prisoners” and their families were, in their own way, quietly rehabilitated by Tito’s regime, and compared to other communist states, neither they nor their families and descendants suffered lifelong consequences.
It seems that the main purpose of the initiative to pass the law on the rehabilitation and compensation of the “Goli Otok martyrs” and its timing are the result of cheap political calculation. First, there is the impression that the representatives of the current Montenegrin political establishment are not particularly well-educated and, as a result, are clearly unaware that they are not opening any taboo subject. Judging by their statements, they have absolutely no idea about the existence of serious historiographical and journalistic works, many of which were published as early as the 1990s.
Secondly, considering the fact that much time has passed since the Cominform and Goli Otok events, financial compensation, in a minimalist version, will either be symbolic (if it includes only spouses and children from the first generation) or will burden state administration and the judiciary for many years to come if it covers all living descendants. And thirdly, in Montenegro, there is a general but mostly incorrect assumption that people follow primitive determinism in their political preferences. In this case, it means that the descendants of former “Cominformists”, who in the mid-20th century truly or allegedly supported Stalin and the Soviet Union against their own country and leadership under Tito, must automatically support Putin’s Russia, Vučić’s Belgrade, and the Serbian Orthodox Church, i.e., the current Montenegrin government. This assumption has no basis in Montenegrin reality because, fortunately, a large number of people in Montenegro still think for themselves.
In Montenegro, as well as in the Montenegrin diaspora during the independence movement before the 2006 referendum, many people who survived Goli Otok, their descendants, and relatives actively supported Montenegrin independence and, to this day, vote for civic and pro-Western oriented parties. The initiative put forward by President Milatović, which was also predictably publicly supported by the leaders of the former Democratic Front, most closely resembles a desperate attempt to divert attention from current hot topics and an intention to buy the votes of those who would receive compensation from the state treasury and, in return, vote for the political parties and individuals who unexpectedly provided them with several thousand euros under the guise of correcting historical injustices.
