The Postwar Period 203
the marshal visited Zagreb at the beginning of September, he came with three
armored trains equipped with machine guns as well as two light tanks.^278
The Yugoslav leaders did not limit themselves to strengthening their de-
fenses but also went on the offensive. On 18 September, for instance, Moša
Pijade, Tito’s intellectual mentor, published an article in Borba entitled “Giving
Up the Facts for Dogma.” It was a sensation because, for the first time, the old
revolutionary attacked the CPSU with all his caustic irony, implicitly accusing
it of reactionary tendencies. He reproached the Soviet politicians for being lost
in a sea of dogmatic quotations and for being totally incapable of formulating
the new ideas that the times demanded and that were urgently needed by the
countries who were moving toward socialism. Pijade replied to the assertion
that the laws regarding the transition from capitalism to socialism, discovered
by Marx and Engels and implemented and developed by Lenin and Stalin,
were obligatory for all, by saying that the conditions for the progress of social-
ism differed according to particular places and situations and that, therefore,
every doctrinaire approach would be foreign to true Marxism-Leninism.^279
An article that appeared in Borba on 2, 3, and 4 October, under the title
“Once Again Speaking about Unjust and False Accusations,” caused even more
of a sensation. It was not signed, but this gave it special weight. Obviously such
a text could never have been published if it had not been written by Tito
himself, or at least approved by him. In fact, the marshal identified so much
with the author that during a meeting with an American visitor he mentioned
the article as if it were his. In reality, he simply gave a placet to what Djilas
had written, not without initially expressing some doubts as to whether it was
opportune to attack Stalin in person, thus destroying every illusion about his
possible change of mind. But Djilas insisted, as he reports in his memoirs,
stressing that it was public knowledge who was behind the anti-Yugoslav pro-
paganda and that remaining silent on the subject caused great confusion in the
party ranks. “All right,” said Tito, “leave it as it is, we have spared Stalin much
too long.”^280 In the article, Djilas expressed thoughts he had been ruminating
on and had discussed with Kardelj and Kidrič. He began by claiming a special
role in the socialist camp for Yugoslavia, recalling that its liberation struggle
was at the same time a revolution, with its climax the seizure of power by the
working class. This gave the CPY the right to build socialism in its own way.
Those Eastern bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, that accused the
Yugoslav party of nationalism, consequently deviated from “real international-
ism.” Yugoslavia had no intention of joining the imperialist camp and isolating
itself from the democratic socialist countries, but it was not ready to accept un-
founded criticism and foreign attempts to isolate its leadership from the people.
It also refuted the Soviet monopoly on the correct interpretation of Marxism,