The Postwar Period 235
to collaborate with the West, and he began to apply pressure on the members
of the CC who were dealing with the economy, pushing them to get rid of
American aid as soon as possible. He considered it demeaning and limiting to
Yugoslav freedom of action in foreign policy. “Without an autonomous foreign
policy,” he used to say, “there is no sovereignty.”^426 Not to mention the fact that
he had a fundamental suspicion of Western democracy, which guaranteed the
personal freedom of the individual, allowing people to do what they wanted
at the expense of society and to exploit a thousand others.^427 The sudden left-
wing turn of the regime was evident especially in the agrarian sector. In order
to address the discontent of the peasants, on 30 March 1953, three weeks after
Stalin’s death, the government issued a decree on the reorganization of rural
cooperatives.^428 The decree announced the end of the ideological war on the
countryside, allowing the abolishment of the collective cooperatives and the
reestablishment of private property. Although the law stated that the peasants
could leave the cooperatives the following autumn, there was an immediate
stampede, which had the flavor of an open protest against the socialist regime.
The liberalization process was halted shortly afterward, however, because of
the violent opposition of local bureaucrats and landless peasants, numbering
about one-hundred thousand, who saw in it an attack against their interests.
Hence, on 22 May 1953 the government approved a series of supplementary
measures that annulled any of the advantageous effects the abolition of collec-
tivization might have produced. It was decided, in fact, that the cultivable land
in possession of single families could not exceed ten hectares (twenty in the
mountainous areas) and introduced a fiscal system that heavily penalized the
wealthier peasants and preserved state control over the sale of some of their
products. In this way, every possibility for the healthy economic development
of the countryside was suffocated in its embryonic phase, fueling the masses’
distrust of the regime.^429 The by-product of this was the halting of a larger
democratization of public life, the development of the Socialist Alliance into
an autonomous force, and the integration of capable individuals not affiliated
with the party into the economic and administrative structure of the country.
In spite of this return to orthodoxy, the Yugoslavs favorably greeted the
uprisings of workers that occurred in June and July 1953 in East Berlin, Pilsen,
Ostrava, and elsewhere. On 8 July, Radio Zagreb broadcast a commentary pro-
claiming: “The unrest in East Berlin, suppressed in blood by Soviet tanks and
police, the insurrections in Czechoslovakia and in Hungary, are not symptoms
of a devious disease. The ice is broken for a while and is moving.... It is im-
possible to deny that the Yugoslav case has had an important psychological
influence, showing that human beings can successfully oppose such a terrible
despotism as the Soviet one.”^430 At the same time, the leadership did not ignore