136 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
welcome them with red flags.^447 On the eve of the final assault on the capi-
tal, he tried to convince Marshal Tolbukhin, commander in chief of the Third
Ukraine Front, to allow his men to enter the city first. But Tolbukhin, who had
lost 25,000 of his 414,000 soldiers in the battles for the liberation of Serbia,
refused, only allowing the Partisans to climb on his tanks and enter Belgrade in
this way on 20 October 1944, after six days of intense fighting. The event was
celebrated in Moscow with a salvo of cannon fire. Five days later, Tito arrived
in the capital aboard a small Soviet military boat.^448
The intervention of the Red Army in Serbia radically changed the strate-
gic situation in the Balkans, giving the Partisans the chance to confront the
Germans and their allies as equals during the last battles for the liberation of
Yugoslavia. Stalin contributed by providing the Yugoslav army with weapons
and dispatching a group of experts who helped to organize a strong artillery
and good aviation and tank units.^449
In the dispatch he sent to the soldiers of the Third Ukrainian Front on the
occasion of the liberation of Belgrade, Tito wrote: “Your blood and the blood
of the combatants of the Yugoslav National Liberation Army, spilled in a com-
mon struggle against the enemy, will cement forever the brotherhood of the
Yugoslav peoples with the peoples of the Soviet Union.”^450 The reality behind
this heavily pan-Slavic rhetoric was, however, quite different. The tensions that
soon emerged between the Soviets and the Yugoslavs were not so much due to
a question of prestige, but to the behavior of Tolbukhin’s men. They considered
Serbia a conquered territory, looting, killing civilians, and raping women. The
worst episode took place in a suburb of Belgrade, where a Serb engineer invited
a group of Russian soldiers to dinner. When they got drunk, one of them, a
major, began molesting the wife of their host, mother of several children. Her
husband tried to protect her, but was shut up in the bathroom while the woman
was raped by seven soldiers. After this, the husband and wife hanged them-
selves. The event provoked a rush of indignation in Belgrade, forcing Tito to
protest officially to General Korneev, who answered abruptly: “In the name of
the Soviet government, I protest against such insinuations related to the Red
Army.” “The fact is,” commented Djilas, who was present at the meeting, “that
our enemies try to exploit similar incidents in their favor. They make unfavor-
able comparisons between the correct behavior of the British liaison officers
attached to the Partisan forces, and the excesses of the Red Army.”^451 At the
end of October Tito brought up the question in a very bland letter to Stalin,
stressing that this was his duty as a communist. He added that the Red Army
was violating the agreements, according to which it promised to give the
National Liberation Army all the booty taken in Belgrade. Of the five hundred
trucks requisitioned, it had received only six. In addition, he asked for several