YUGOSLAVIA IN WW II - POST-OCCUPATION GOVERNMENT
Although Tito could by 1944 expect to take control in most of the country when the Germans withdrew, the
Cetniks still dominated Serbia. It was with this in mind that he appealed to Stalin in July 1944 to divert the Red Army from its course into Central Europe and help hasten the conquest of Serbia.Stalin graciously complied; and the Cetnik movement, its morale sapped by three years of equivocation over its role, disintegrated under the triple blows of a Partisan-Soviet attack, western Allied abandonment, and
King Peter's endorsement of the Partisans.Belgrade was liberated on 20 October.
The Red Army then decamped for Hungary, leaving the Partisans (now fighting as a regular army) to finish the job as the Germans and their Yugoslav auxiliaries slowly fell back to the north and west.
An internationally recognized coalition government, with Tito as premier and Subasic as foreign minister, had been formed under communist domination in March 1945, but complete liberation did not come until the Germans surrendered in May 1945.
Over the next few months the communists consolidated their power, took revenge on those of their enemies who had failed to escape to Italy or Austria, and began to remake their country in the image of the only other authentically revolutionary Marxist-Leninist state -the USSR.
M.Wheeler,
Oxford Companion to the Second World War (1995), p.1297