140 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
bring the general discouragement that was spreading among his followers to
a halt. When on 31 August and again on 22 November 1944 Tito proclaimed
an amnesty for all collaborationists who had not committed war crimes, invit-
ing them to join the Partisans, the Croat Domobrani (but not the Slovenian
Domobranci and the Chetniks) began deserting en masse.^466
The Tolstoy Conference and the
Tito-Šubašić AgreementWhile the conquest of Serbia was in full swing, a diplomatic struggle was raging
in Moscow. The so-called Tolstoy Conference, attended by Stalin and Churchill,
was held there from 9 to 18 October 1944. Churchill arrived in the Soviet capi-
tal fully aware of his weakness in the Balkan and Danube area.^467 As Harold
Macmillan, the British minister resident in the Mediterranean, put it, “We
cannot hide from ourselves that our military strategy, by concentrating all our
efforts on the west of Europe, has deprived us of effective power in Romania,
Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and hardly gives us sufficient strength to
finish the Italian campaign. We must certainly do all we can by bluff, but it is
no good using bluff so transparently that it is easily called.”^468
The deal Churchill proposed to Stalin with regard to the respective spheres
of influence in the Balkans and in the Danube valley (for Yugoslavia, they would
divide the country fifty-fifty, each controlling half ) was just such a bluff.^469
The British prime minister was offering the Soviet dictator land that the Red
Army had already conquered, or had at arm’s reach, and asking for political
influence in territories where—aside from Greece—British troops were not
present. Stalin, not wanting to unnecessarily compromise his relations with the
West, accepted this proposal, in accordance to his assertion to Churchill that
he did not aim to carry out a Bolshevik revolution in Eastern Europe.^470 The
Moscow “naughty document” had little influence on the development of events,
however, and left few traces in the memory of British diplomats, considering
that four years later no one at the Foreign Office could remember exactly what
its terms were. The same cannot be said of the Yugoslavs. They were already
beginning to suspect that something odd was going on behind the scenes by
the end of April or beginning of May 1944, when in a moment of rage Ran-
dolph Churchill mentioned the division of spheres of influence between his
father and “Uncle Joe.”^471 The next November when Stalin himself confided to
Kardelj the terms of the fifty-fifty agreement, the Yugoslav were furious, real-
izing they were the object of a bargain between the Great Powers. For many
years they maintained the impression that the Big Three were forging secret
pacts between them, detrimental to Yugoslav interests, and often quoted the
fifty-fifty agreement as clear proof of the greed of the Great Powers, both east