In the Yugoslav revolution the Yugoslav Communist Party, a small elite political organization, contrived to amass both power and to some extent legitimacy -by providing successful leadership in a war of national liberation. The reason why it was successful in this struggle was partly geopolitical. The Communist Parties of France and Italy, for example, played prominent roles in their respective resistance movements and the relative absence of success of these movements was due to the concentration of German military force, the density of military occupation to which the countries were subjected and to the difficulty of providing really massive assistance to resistance forces under these circumstances. It was also, no doubt, due in part to the terrain in the first instance. Yugoslavia was particularly favourable geographically as an area in which to begin widespread guerrilla resistance. But if it was geopolitical considerations which helped to explain the military success of the resistance in Yugoslavia and if the organizational skills and determination of Communist cadres were a factor common to all three countries, there were clearly rather different sorts of reasons for the comparative dominance of the Communists in the Yugoslav resistance. Some of these are rather obvious. Charles de Gaulle was no Mihailović. Far from being, as Yugoslavia was, a semi-colonial economy, France belonged to the core countries of developed capitalism. Unlike Yugoslavia, France was no longer a synthetic political unit, but one with a core historical identity reaching back for more than half a millennium.