The Red Army in Yugoslavia

By early October 1944 Soviet troops were already fighting on Yugoslav soil. War chronologies often place the Red Army’s entry into the country on 1 October, but in fact it came several days earlier. The first units of the 75th Rifle Corps crossed the Danube near the Iron Gates as early as 22 September, and on 27 and 28 September the whole of the Soviet 57th Army under Lieutenant General Nikolai Gagen went over to the attack in eastern Serbia. 28 September is regarded as the start of the Belgrade offensive, and on 30 September the Soviets took the border town of Negotin. On 1 October, after hard fighting, the Soviet 223rd Rifle Division captured an important crossroads in the village of Rgotina, 10 km north of Zaječar. By that day, therefore, the offensive that would end with the liberation of Belgrade was already under way.

The Balkans in the autumn of 1944

The road into the Balkans had been opened to the Red Army by the German defeat in the Jassy–Kishinev offensive. After King Michael’s coup of 23 August Bucharest changed sides and joined the Allies, and in September Sofia did the same. The Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September, and three days later the Red Army entered Bulgaria without a fight. During the night of 8–9 September a coup in Bulgaria brought to power a Fatherland Front government, which declared war on Germany. The Bulgarian army, which until shortly before had been serving as an occupation force in Macedonia and southern Serbia, was placed under Soviet command.

On the Bulgarian–Yugoslav border stood the Soviet 3rd Ukrainian Front of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin, whose chief of staff was General Sergey Biryuzov. According to estimates cited in the literature, at the beginning of October three Bulgarian armies, with a combined strength of some 340,000 men, were deployed along the border with Yugoslavia. North of the Danube, in the Romanian Banat, the 2nd Ukrainian Front was deploying; its 46th Army was to strike at Belgrade from the north-east. Operations on the river were supported by the Soviet Danube Military Flotilla, re-formed in 1944: its boats covered the right flank of the advance, ferried troops and equipment, and in the first days of the operation landed assault parties at Radujevac and Prahovo. According to Soviet reports, the Germans had scuttled about a hundred vessels north-west of Prahovo and mined the river channel, so in the following weeks the flotilla had to clear its way towards Belgrade.

On the other side stood the German Army Group F of Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs, headquartered in Belgrade. Under it came Army Group E of General Alexander Löhr, which since September had been withdrawing from Greece and the Aegean islands, and the 2nd Panzer Army, which was fighting the partisans in Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro. For the defence of Serbia itself the Germans had improvised Army Detachment Serbia (Armeeabteilung Serbien) under General Hans Felber. Its forces were weak and scattered, and from 1 September the partisans and Allied aircraft, in Operation Ratweek, had been destroying the bridges, railways and roads along which the Germans moved their troops. Of the 44 trains carrying the 117th Jäger Division that left Athens on 19 September, according to German figures only 17 had reached Belgrade by 8 October.

Tito in Moscow

The decision for Soviet troops to enter Yugoslavia was taken in Moscow. Josip Broz Tito, who since the raid on Drvar had been based on the island of Vis under British protection, secretly flew out in a Soviet aircraft during the night of 18–19 September to Romania, now occupied by the Red Army, and from there flew on to Moscow on 21 September. He did not warn the British; Winston Churchill, who had met him in Naples barely a month earlier, took this with evident irritation. It was Tito’s first face-to-face conversation with Stalin. The two leaders agreed that the Red Army would take part in liberating eastern Serbia and Belgrade, and also – something Tito found hard to accept, given Bulgaria’s recent role as an occupier – that Bulgarian troops would operate on Yugoslav territory.

On 28 September the Soviet news agency TASS published a communiqué on the agreement. It stated that the National Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia and the supreme command of the partisan army had asked the Soviet command to allow Soviet troops temporarily to enter the areas of Yugoslavia bordering on Hungary, and that the Soviet side had granted the request on condition that, wherever its units were stationed, civil authority would be exercised by the committee’s administration. According to Tito’s account and Yugoslav sources, Stalin also agreed that Soviet troops would leave the country once the operation was over. In his later accounts Tito presented this as proof that Yugoslavia had largely liberated itself, with the Red Army helping in just one operation; historians point out that the communiqué was also a convenient declaration for Moscow to make to the Western Allies.

For Tito the agreement had political weight. Less than a year earlier he had proclaimed a provisional government and refused to recognise the royal government-in-exile. The TASS communiqué recognised his committee de facto as the civil authority in Yugoslavia, while the Soviet drive on Belgrade gave the partisans the chance to take Serbia – the only large part of the country where their influence was still weak and where the Chetniks enjoyed wide support among the peasantry.

The first battles in eastern Serbia

Eastern Serbia had by then become the scene of a race. The partisan 14th Corps, with the 23rd and 25th Divisions, had returned there in the summer of 1944, taking Zaječar on 7 September and entering Negotin on 12 September. That same day a partisan delegation crossed the Danube to the Romanian bank and made contact with the Soviet 74th Rifle Division. The Germans, however, moved the 1st Mountain Division to the Danube area, retook Zaječar and pushed the partisans back from the river, and then on 22 September counter-attacked and drove the units of the 75th Corps that had crossed first back onto the Romanian bank. Only when the whole 57th Army had been concentrated around Vidin and had made night crossings on 27–28 September did the Soviets gain the upper hand.

The advance of three Soviet rifle corps, supported by the partisan 14th Corps, made slow progress from one road junction to the next through mountainous, thinly populated country. The Germans defended the small towns and passes stubbornly. After Rgotina the Soviets took the crossroads at Štubik on 2 October, and on 3 October units of the Soviet 223rd Division and the Serbian 7th and 9th Partisan Brigades liberated Bor and its copper mine, which had been working for the German war economy. There the partisans freed some 1,700 forced labourers, most of them Jews from Hungary. By 4 October the German defence facing the 57th Army had broken up into three battle groups cut off from one another, and on 7 October the Soviets and partisans captured Zaječar. At the same time, further south, the Bulgarian 2nd Army of General Kiril Stanchev went over to the offensive around Niš and Leskovac, in cooperation with the partisan 13th Corps.

The Chetniks and the Nedić government

The arrival of the Red Army sealed the defeat of Draža Mihailović’s movement. Since the split with the partisans in the autumn of 1941 the Chetniks had been fighting above all against the communists, and some of their commanders had concluded local agreements with the Italians, the Germans and the government of Milan Nedić. The Western Allies had turned away from them at the turn of 1943 and 1944. On 29 August 1944 King Peter II abolished the command headed by Mihailović, and on 12 September, in a broadcast on the BBC, he called on all Yugoslavs to join Tito’s army. In September the partisans routed the main Chetnik forces in western Serbia.

Some Chetnik units in eastern Serbia tried to present themselves to the approaching Soviets as allies in the fight against the Germans. According to historians’ accounts, in a few cases the Soviet command briefly tolerated their part in the fighting, but then disarmed them and arrested their commanders or handed them over to the partisans. Stalin had agreed with Tito that the Red Army’s only partner in Yugoslavia would be the partisan army. Mihailović withdrew to Bosnia with the remnants of the units still loyal to him. Nedić’s collaborationist government in Belgrade was living out its last days: it was dissolved on 4 October, and on 6 October the prime minister and most of his ministers left for Austria via Budapest and Vienna.

Place in the war

The Red Army’s entry into Yugoslavia was part of the great turn of events in the Balkans which, within a few weeks of the coup in Romania, stripped Germany of its control over the whole peninsula. For the Wehrmacht it meant above all a threat to the escape routes of Army Group E from Greece: the capture of the Morava valley and Belgrade cut its shortest route north, through Skopje, Niš and Belgrade towards Hungary. In the first half of October Soviet mechanised units reached the valley of the Great Morava, the 4th Guards Mechanised Corps of Lieutenant General Vladimir Zhdanov linked up with the partisan 1st Proletarian Corps, and on 14 October the battle for Belgrade itself began, ending with the liberation of the city on 20 October. Army Group E, its route along the Morava blocked by the Bulgarians and the partisans, had to retreat through the mountains of the Sandžak and Bosnia.

In keeping with the Moscow agreement, the main Soviet forces did not remain in Yugoslavia. After the capture of Belgrade the 3rd Ukrainian Front turned north towards Hungary, leaving in Serbia and Vojvodina only rear-area units, air units and formations that later moved on to Baranja. The burden of further fighting against the Germans on the Syrmian Front and in Bosnia fell on Tito’s army. Yet the presence of Soviet soldiers left its mark: Yugoslav communists, among them Milovan Đilas, complained to Moscow about the rapes and looting committed by Red Army men against civilians, which Stalin brushed aside in a conversation with Đilas with a well-known remark that Đilas himself later recorded. After 1948, when Tito broke with Stalin, the memory that Belgrade had been taken jointly, and not by the Red Army alone, became an important argument of Yugoslav propaganda, which maintained that the country had liberated itself.