188 The Postwar Period
from the party. Fatty did not react. “All right,” he said, and that was all.^206 In his
case, the inquisitors wanted to know primarily about his contacts with Pavelić’s
entourage in 1941 and about his behavior in the Ustaša prison in 1942. Since
they needed to show him guilty, false documents were produced in order to
incriminate him. They also accused him of having sabotaged the formulation
and implementation of the Five-Year Plan. It seems that he was not maltreated
until the end, although he was subjected to psychological pressure with the
help of false witnesses.^207 His fate was sealed on 10 June 1949, when he was
taken from the prison for an interrogation and did not return. The story of
his death comes in different versions: officially, he hanged himself from a radi-
ator in his cell. However, there were rumors that he was strangled with a belt
and that Tito, Kardelj, Ranković, and Djilas had “accepted” his “liquidation”
since the Croat leadership requested that he not be put on trial.^208 Tito’s testi-
mony, given some months before his death, is probably the most reliable: he
was given a lethal injection.^209 Tito mentioned Hebrang’s story in spring 1952,
on the occasion of a dinner given for Randolph Churchill, lamenting his dou-
ble treason, first to the Gestapo and later to the Soviets. However, he did not
say that Hebrang was already dead at the time and responded to Churchill’s
request to see him, at least from afar, with a sharp: “No!” On 21 May, Randolph
published an article about this conversation in The Daily Telegraph and four
days later the Yugoslav authorities sent a communiqué officially announcing
Hebrang’s death.^210 Sreten Žujović was more fortunate. He confessed his sins
and was released after two years of solitary confinement. Regime propaganda
even used him for an unusual show. On Djilas’s initiative, the rumor was spread
that he had been tortured and killed in prison. When this news appeared in the
Western media and there were furious protests in the East, a press conference
was organized at which Žujović appeared in person to deny such “lies.”^211
During the spring of 1948, Tito continued to irritate Stalin with his autono-
mous foreign policy decisions. On 22 March, for instance, without consulting
the Soviet Union, he answered a diplomatic note from the United States, Great
Britain, and France regarding the Free Territory of Trieste (the three powers
proposed its return to Italy). He thereby violated the agreement signed in
Kremelj by Kardelj after an acrimonious meeting with Stalin on 10 February
1948, which then allowed Molotov to renounce any further collaboration with
the Yugoslavs, who made excuses for their behavior and asked the Soviets not
to cancel the agreement, but to no avail.^212 In a letter that Stalin and Molotov
sent on 4 May 1948 in the name of the CC CPSU, they accused Tito and his
comrades of the worst left- and right-wing deviations known to the Bolshe vik
doctrine, starting with Trotskyism and Bukharinism, so called after N. I. Buk-
harin, one of the most prominent of Stalin’s victims among the old Bolsheviks,