The Postwar Period 171
to strengthen its presence in Greece and Turkey. “The Soviet Union is allied to
Yugoslavia and Bulgaria.... The Soviet Government is obliged to declare,
however, that it cannot accept responsibility for important international agree-
ments made without its consultation.”^118
Tito tried to explain that the Yugoslav government had had no intention of
presenting the Soviet leader with a fait accompli, declaring that he was ready
to publish a retraction of the agreement, along with the Bulgarians. He did not
do this, but on a visit to Sofia on 27 November he and Dimitrov signed a pact
of friendship and collaboration that took into account Stalin’s observations.
They decided to postpone talks about a federation. At a press conference, how-
ever, Tito declared that the pact was necessary to defend the two countries
from possible German aggression and from others, saying, “We are not only
against German imperialism, but against all those who wish to question our
sovereignty.”^119 Was he alluding to the West or to the Soviets, too? According
to a still partially classified 1948 CIA document, the latter seems more likely.
Apparently the split between Stalin and Tito started to take shape in July 1947,
when Soviet Marshal Tolbukhin asked the Belgrade government to hand over
naval bases in Pula, Šibenik, and Boka Kotorska to the Red Army. The Soviets
demanded that the Yugoslav authorities completely renounce their jurisdiction
over these ports and allow the Soviets to build another near Ploče in central
Dalmatia with Yugoslav material and labor. Although it was repeated at the
beginning of 1948, Tito dismissed this request. He was well aware that conced-
ing strategic points on the Adriatic coast would signal the end of Yugoslavia’s
sovereignty and threaten his personal security.^120
It was mostly the Soviet ambassador, A. I. Lavrent’ev, who fueled doubts
about the loyalty of the Yugoslav leaders in Moscow. His dispatches from Bel-
grade missed no opportunity to denounce their errors. For example, he criticized
Tito’s speech at the Second Congress of the Popular Front on 27 September
1947, in which the marshal spoke about the success of the “people’s democra-
cies,” without saying a word about the decisive role the Soviet Union had played
in their formation and development. What disturbed Lavrent’ev more was
Tito’s silence regarding the role the Red Army had played in Yugoslavia’s liber-
ation: “All these omissions are consequences of the fact that Tito views the
liberation of Yugoslavia and its socioeconomic transformation from a local and
national point of view, making his outlook narrow and jingoistic.”^121
In Moscow, where Tito’s nationalism and his “Bonapartist” ambitions were
followed attentively, a dim view was taken of such behavior, especially because,
in all his speeches after 1945, he mentioned Marxism-Leninism just once. The
watchdogs of the orthodoxy at the party’s CC wrote, “Tito and the other leaders
of the CPY do not mention Comrade Stalin in their declarations as the most