222 The Postwar Period
spite of his roughness and brutality. To a journalist who asked him how he had
reacted to the news of dictator’s death, he answered: “I got the news together
with a dispatch that my dog Tiger was really sick. I was terribly distressed for
Tiger. He was a marvelous dog.”^373
After Stalin’s death, the international position of Yugoslavia took a decisive
turn since, in the spring of 1953, Moscow began attempting to reconnect with
Belgrade. The first sign of a thaw came at the Boss’s funeral, when the deputy
minister of foreign affairs, Jakov A. Malenkov, approached the Yugoslav chargé,
Dragoj Djurić, the only Yugoslav present, and shook his hand in front of the
entire diplomatic corps.^374 The Yugoslavs also made a move in this direction,
deciding to send Deputy Foreign Minister Veljko Mićunović to the Soviet
Embassy to express his condolences. Other promising signs of Moscow’s will-
ingness to resume a dialogue soon arrived through Finnish diplomats. On 29
April 1953 Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, received the Yugoslav chargé
d’affaires and spoke with him for ten minutes.^375
In the traditional May 1 message of the CC CPSU, the ritual greetings to
Yugoslav communists who had sided with Stalin after the 1948 split (called
Cominformists) were missing and, a few days later, Soviet diplomats at the
UN in New York approached Yugoslav colleagues, declaring that the Russians
and the Yugoslavs were the most brave people in the world and hinting at pos-
sible contacts between the two countries, at least initially in the field of sport.
Less than a month later, on 6 June, Molotov decided to restore diplomatic rela-
tions at the highest level, sending an ambassador to Belgrade.^376 Tito followed
these moves with vigilant but suspicious attention, although he did not exclude
the possibility of a rapprochement. In the spring of 1953, during his visit to
London, he declared to the foreign press: “In Yugoslavia, we would be happy if
one day [the Soviets] would recognize that they had behaved incorrectly toward
our country. It would please us. We will wait and see.”^377
It was not necessary to wait long, considering the rapid development of
events in Moscow and the satellite countries. Except for Poland, all of them
normalized their diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia. There were modest trade
exchanges, an agreement on Danube navigation was signed, and the border
incidents and anti-Tito propaganda gradually ceased. On June 16, Beria and
Premier Georgii M. Malenkov met to agree on a message to be sent via an
agent to Ranković. It read in part: “I seize the opportunity, Comrade Ranković,
to send you warm greetings from Comrade Beria, who remembers you well.
Comrade Beria asks me to inform you, personally and strictly confidentially,
that Malenkov, Beria and their friends would like a necessary and radical revi-
sion and improvement of relations between our countries. For this purpose,