Soviet communism without Soviet troops
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (= Southern Slavs), established in 1921, was sometimes called 'a linguistic joke'. Yes, they all speak the same language (except Slovenians and Macedonians), but they profoundly hate each other. A multiparty democracy could never work there, because all ethnic groups tended to vote for their own ethnic monoparties (precisely the same thing happened recently). Therefore king Alexander I had no choice but making a coup d'etat in 1929, and Yugoslavia remained a monarchic dicatorship until 1941, when the country simply disintegrated becaming the next battlefield of the World War II.
The pro-Axis Croatians established their 'independent' state, where the Nazis installed in power extreme nationalist movement of the 'ustashes' and their petty fuehrer, Ante Pavelic. The pro-Ally Serbs also got their puppet government but, unlike in Croatia, it never gained universal acceptance. The officers of the royal army started to fight underground - those are the so calles 'tschetniks', led by general Draza Mihailovic. Soon the powerful communist party, seasoned in conspiracy during the dictatorship, launched their own underground.
Whilst the tschetniks were no less nationalist than the ustashes, and they soon got involved in mutual ethnic massacres of civilians, the communists appealed to all the people of Yugoslavia for the united, anti-Nazi front. Therefore this movement, initially composed mainly of Serbs but led by Tito, who was Croatian, was more acceptable to everyone, especially to Churchill. The British initially supplied weaponry to Michailovic - their nominal ally - but growing importance of Tito, and horror stories of civilian massacres done by tschetniks led them to switch alliances in 1943.
In 1944 Tito's 'partizans' defeated Germans, tschetniks and ustashes and gained control of the whole country. Thus Yugoslavia became the only European state, where Soviet-style communism was not installed by Soviet troops. The Soviets didnŐt like it at all, and in 1949 they condemned Tito. Since then Yugoslavia was a neutral communist state, trying to maintain equally good relationships with both sides of the Cold War.
The post-war Yugoslavia was not a democratic state. Actually, it was not even as much a communist dictatorship, as a personal one. The best proof is that it did not survive much longer the death of Josip Broz Tito (1980). But what was the alternative? A return of false plurality of ethnic monoparties, just as in twenties? Or just as it was recently?
Communist Yugoslavia offered to its citizens much less political freedom than the Western states, but also much more than those of the East. And, certainly, it was a much better place to live than Vukovar, Srebrenica, Mostar and other places of unspeakable martyrdom of many innocent civilian victims of the present war.