224 The Postwar Period
The ThawIt was not easy to implement this policy, since Soviet propaganda had long
equated Tito’s regime with the worst revisionism, and since, after 1949, ideo-
logical mutations took place in Yugoslavia that were incompatible with the
Soviet system. Yugoslav leaders began to criticize Stalin’s foreign policy even
before the expulsion of the CPY from the Cominform, and increasing their
criticism after its second session, when they stressed openly that it was “hege-
monic” in that it aped the tsarist policy in the Balkans and had nothing to do
with socialism. Kardelj eloquently compared Napoleon Bonaparte and Stalin:
“The nations who hoped to be liberated by the French experienced a delusion
similar to that experienced today by the peoples of Eastern Europe.”^383 He was
even more laconic when asked about the real reason for the excommunication
of the CPY from the Cominform: “Genghis Khan.”^384
After taking the first step toward criticism of the Soviet system, the Yugo-
slavs did not wait long to take the next one and began to ask questions
about the soundness of a regime where power was entirely in the hands of the
party, whereas the working class had none. Convinced that this was an “Asian”
deviation, they reread the classics, first of all Marx and Engels, but also the
French utopian socialists. They thus discovered a “European way” to socialism,
founded not on coercion and bureaucracy, but on a freely organized society.
In it, every individual should be able to decide autonomously about the results
of his work, thus favoring the development of a real democracy better than the
bourgeois one. In nurturing these ideals, they recalled their experience of the
liberation struggle, claiming that there are also “many specific traits useful for
the revolutionary development of other countries” to be dis covered. In a letter
from 13 April 1948, sent to Moscow at the very start of the dispute with Stalin,
they had written: “This does not mean that we place the role of the CPSU and
the social system of the USSR in the background. On the contrary, we study
and take as an example the Soviet system, but we are developing socialism in
our country in a somewhat different way.... We do not do this to prove that
our road is better than that taken by the Soviet Union, that we are inventing
something new, but because this is forced upon us by our daily life.”^385
This was in 1948. The following year, they were more audacious in rejecting
the Soviet model and yearning for a new path toward social development. After
the traumatic experience of their schism, they realized that “centralism, positive
during the revolution, could regress to conservative bureaucratic autocracy.”
Kardelj wrote: “We opposed these tendencies even before [the expulsion from
Cominform], but not methodically and decisively enough. An analysis of the
reasons that moved Stalin to attack the CPY taught us, however, that it was