The Postwar Period 225
necessary to take drastic measures in the fight against the dangers to which the
revolution was exposed.”^386
The need to confront Stalin on an ideological level was not immediately
clear to Tito. Kardelj and Djilas had to convince him, stressing the need to
take a critical attitude toward the Soviet regime, as it had features of state
capitalism that should be condemned like any other form of capitalism. They
were supported in this by Boris Kidrič, Vladimir Bakarić, and other comrades
who had reached the conclusion that the split with Moscow was a consequence
of the crises suffered by the USSR from the October Revolution onward and
that this should be rejected. In condemning the bureaucratic inertia of the
USSR they noted, however, that the CPY too was at risk of falling into the
same trap. This was a peril to be avoided at any cost. Although their more
pragmatic comrades—Tito and Ranković above all—were less interested in
this reasoning, they too started to have doubts about the dogma they had so
long believed in.^387
The Soviets well knew that in spite of their “revisionism” the Yugoslav leaders
remained Communists, and thus dialogue was possible. It was not easy, how-
ever, to mend fences, since hostility and distrust toward Moscow still reigned
in Belgrade. In any case, these feelings gradually dissipated thanks to several
conciliatory moves on the part of the Soviets. There was a lively discussion of
the Yugoslav question in their Politburo, which resulted in Khrushchev’s deci-
sion, on 31 May 1954, to send a personal letter to Tito. He evidently wanted to
tell him that it was he who was now in charge in the Kremlin, although in the
past he had been one of the lesser personalities in Stalin’s circle. In the letter,
he proposed a summit “in Moscow, in Yugoslavia, according to your wishes,”
trying at the same time to put the blame for the 1948 split on Beria, an “agent
of imperialism,” and his collaborators, as “new facts,” recently discovered, bore
witness. The other scapegoat, he said, should be Milovan Djilas, “a false Marx-
ist, a man to whom the interests of Communism are foreign,” who had in the
meantime also been disgraced.^388
Tito and those few comrades who were informed about this letter were
taken by surprise, thinking at first that it was a propaganda move. At a time
when the Trieste crisis was still ongoing and the signing of the Balkan Pact was
imminent, it was not hard to imagine that Khrushchev wanted to obstruct
Yugoslav relations with the West. Tito’s tactics were, therefore, extremely pru-
dent. He did not answer personally but, a month later, asked Edvard Kardelj
to get in touch with the Soviet ambassador and inform him that Yugoslavia
welcomed the initiative, but at the moment was not able to act because pre-
mature news of a dialogue with the Soviets could influence the Trieste negoti-
ations. On 21 July 1954, during a reception in honor of the emperor of Ethiopia,