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Comments on Matthew Worley's (1999) reflections on historiography of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), deeming it disappointing for its dearth of political probing & political judgment & raising the issue of whether historians consciously or otherwise, & in various ways, illegitimately reconstruct history to synch with their preconceptions. It is argued that Worley failed to engage with the arguments & interpretations of the various works he either lauded or dismissed. He required readers to take these verdicts on trust & provided nothing explicit in way of a framework in which he passed judgment. It is contended that Worley biased his assessment in favor of those who offered a sympathetic view of the CPGB in the interest of presenting the CPGB as dissenting from the Comintern line. Attention is given to the importance of Stalin in driving CPGB policy, contra Worley who asserted the British party's autonomy from the Kremlin & essentially whitewashed Stalin's impact. Focus turns to critiquing Worley's (eg, 2000) revision of the conventional estimations of the Third Period, highlighting his (2002) consolidation of said work in a book. Seen as a rehash of earlier work, the book's similar lack of political probing & judgment is noted. The evidence presented therein does not amount to a convincing reevaluation of the Third Period; despite Worley's revisionist assertions, it is maintained that the CPGB offered no real challenge to the Comintern line. J. Zendejas

Recent reinterpretations of the history of socialist Yugoslavia, which broke up at the time of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe (1989–1991), have revived old and opened new controversies concerning the character and policy of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) at the time of the establishment of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FNRJ) following the Second World War. One of them credits the "absolutization" of Josip Broz Tito's charisma for the establishment and functioning of KPJ rule. The main aim of this article is to challenge such claims by providing an analytical account of the formative years of socialist Yugoslavia based upon primary archival sources. These sources illustrate that rather than Tito's omnipotence, the decisive factor in the functioning of KPJ power was the clientelistic structure of hierarchical party and state organization. This paper argues that the establishment of clientelistic group-rational behavioral patterns in the KPJ structure and state organization drove the institutionalization of loyalty between the patron, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KPJ (KPJ CC Politburo), and the client, the communist nomenklatura, an organized social network of party cadres occupying all significant functions in the society. The social origin of the members of the nomenklatura, that is, the new worker-peasant class organized at the level of federal units, was the basis for the legitimacy and functioning of KPJ power from 1945 through 1952. The revolutionary authority of the KPJ, which had been won through the partisan anti-fascist people's liberation struggle during the Second World War, legitimized itself in this period through clientelistic structural dynamics in the political system of a "people's democracy." In order to explore these arguments, this article applies a generic-structural historical analysis to the dynamics of the social and political KPJ structures in 1945–1952 Yugoslavia.