The Postwar Period 237
All the while, Tito awaited the improvement of relations with Moscow, as
Kardelj confided to Djilas, during their return trip from Brioni.^436
Djilas FallsAfter the Brioni plenum, Djilas began to feel the urgent need to distance him-
self from Tito, in order not to be eclipsed by the splendor and shadow of his
power. In his urge to go along the path of the Western-style democracy, recently
discovered during his trips to New York and London, and particularly through
his contacts with the exponents of British Labour, he was as intransigent as he
had been in the past when he was, to quote Miroslav Krleža, a “Stalinist der-
vish.”^437 As Djilas himself put it: “The preoccupation with my fate prevented
me from continuing to glorify Tito’s personality, and to consider infallible what
I have learned from him.”^438 In his absorption with his private ideological
mutation, he lost touch with reality and did not realize that the regime gained
strength and cohesion from Tito’s charisma, which radiated its influence out to
the popular masses, even those who were basically anti-Communist, for they
saw Tito, after the split with Stalin, as the guardian of their national interests.
Djilas was convinced that the will to restore bureaucratic power had triumphed
at Brioni, and he felt the need to confront it in the name of his ideas, inspired
by hope in the progressive withering away, not only of the state, but also of the
party. He had already written an article on the possible degeneration of the
party entitled “Class or Caste,” published in the Belgrade magazine Svedočanstva
(Testimony). In it, he affirmed that a new bureaucratic class, or caste, had
emerged in the Soviet Union that obstructed the development of society.^439
There was just a short step from a critical stance toward this Soviet reality to a
critical stance toward the situation in Yugoslavia.
Tito tried to save him. He noticed the increasingly reserved attitude of
“Djido,” as he was called, revealed, for example, in his reluctance to come to
Brioni on vacation, instead coming only when he had to on party business.
Tito offered to build a villa for him on the archipelago and reproached him
from having “isolated himself from our collective.”^440 But Djilas was increas-
ingly intolerant of the marshal’s paternalism and his tendency to identify him-
self with the LCY and the state, for instance calling the CC to meet wherever
he happened to be, regardless of the inconvenience to others. “Why should I go
to his feet to Brioni?” he once asked, expressing his anger in conversation with
his new, young wife, the ambitious and socially aggressive Štefica Barić.^441
In the autumn of 1953, Tito was seriously preoccupied with the Trieste crisis.
Nevertheless, he found time to meet Djilas and discuss his ideological dilem-
mas. They met on 9 October in the White Palace, where Tito gently told him,
but not without a veiled invitation to be prudent: “You write well. You should