232 The Postwar Period
line, we would move towards bureaucratization, in spite of efforts to avoid this:
the party could not evolve from the agent of proletarian dictatorship into an
instrument of education of the masses. Our Communists will not have privileges,
will not have social functions only because they are party members. We want
to avoid the Soviet practice that has transformed the party into a bureaucratic
organism. Those two entities, the Socialist Alliance and the Communist League
are in same way linked together and complete each other.^414Djilas went even further, speaking about democracy and the universal value of
the Yugoslav experience, while Kardelj stressed that in Western Europe social-
ism could develop in different ways and through different parties, “even non-
Communist ones.” Tito held back this wave of audacious thought, recalling the
importance of democratic centralism in the party, even if it aimed to be first
an educator. This was the principle by which members took part in policy dis-
cussions at all levels, but once the party line was established, they had to fol-
low it, in order to avoid internal squabbles. Remembering his own fight against
the “factions” in the past, he added: “Without democratic centralism, there is
no harmonious development.”
Djilas observed that the democratic centralism so praised by Lenin was
not his invention. The Jacobins (the members of the most influential and radi-
cal club of the French Revolution) had already practiced it, but the Russians
had distorted it completely. When speaking about democratic centralism,
one should distinguish between state and party: in the frame of the party it
was acceptable, but at state level it would mean dictatorship. Tito corrected
him: “In Russia there is no democratic centralism: there exists only bureau-
cratic centralism.”^415
The Sixth Congress reverberated with rhythmic hosannas in honor of the
“hero Tito” and the other leaders, “not always because of heart’s drive or convic-
tion, but because of habit and ritual convention,” as the Serb writer Dobrica
Ćosić noted.^416 There was no lack of unanimity among the votes cast by the
two thousand delegates. In spite of the watchful organization and direction,
disturbed only by the unexpected public accusation from the secretary general
of the federal government, Moma Djurić, that the president of the Serb Coun-
cil had seduced his wife, the congress was a dynamic one: the Soviet Union was
branded as having hegemonic appetites, betraying the October Revolution,
renewing imperial tsarist policy, introducing serfdom in the countryside, and
abandoning the workers to the mercy of a despotic bureaucracy. In his intro-
duction, Tito repeated Kidrič’s assertion about “state capitalism” in the Soviet
Union and also criticized the theory of the “leading nation” in the USSR, which
ensured the domination of Russians. He was echoing Kardelj, who had stressed