The Postwar Period 243
When Tito summoned him at the beginning of January 1954 to have him
clarify his position in the presence of Kardelj and Ranković, Djido was accused
right from the start of having criticized even Marxist classics (texts by Marx,
Engels, Lenin), claiming that they were not always right. Tito was aghast: “Are
you ready to say this publicly?”
Djilas answered, “At any moment, and gladly.”
“You are not the same anymore,” said Tito, before requiring him to renounce
the presidency of the Federal Assembly.^463
Djilas tried to defend himself by recalling his attachment to Tito, the articles
where he sang his praises, and those in which, polemicizing with the Soviets, he
claimed the core values of his policy. It was to no avail. This does not mean that
Djido’s discharge was not painful for the marshal, as well as for Kardelj and
Ranković. When, during the meeting, he asked for a cup of coffee, saying that
he did not sleep at night, Tito remarked: “And others cannot sleep either.”^464
On 7 January, the Norwegian ambassador to Belgrade invited Djilas to visit
Scandinavia, together with Tito’s biographer, Vladimir Dedijer. Djilas accepted
the invitation. But on 10 January, Borba published a statement by the Executive
Committee of the CC asserting that Djilas’s articles, especially “Anatomy of
a Moral,” had provoked a great deal of worry among members of the LCY,
considering his high office. It read in part: “The articles by Comrade Milovan
Djilas are the result of his own opinions, contrasting with those of the Execu-
tive Committee, with the spirit of decisions of the Sixth Congress and of the
Second Plenum. He has published them without warning the comrades of
the Executive Committee about the ideas that he intended to put forth and,
indeed, he ignored admonitions by comrades, after the appearance of the first
series, regarding the damage he could cause to the development of the LCY
and the construction of socialist democracy in our country.”^465
That same day, a public showdown started with the appearance in the press
of some critical notes by Boris Ziherl, one of the more orthodox Slovene theo-
reticians. In Belgrade, it was rumored that Djido was a “Trotskyist,” which
upset him greatly. Dedijer, who at that time spent every evening with him,
described how he moved around his office, troubled, pale and slimmed down,
with eyes bulging out; how he brandished the pistol with a silver grip, a gift
from General Korneev; how he threatened to kill his slanderers and immedi-
ately after that his wife and newborn son.^466
The End of the Yugoslav “Quartet”After his expulsion from the Executive Committee on 13 January 1954, Djilas
wrote a letter to Tito to “tell him some things related to our private relations,
after seventeen years of common work.” He apologized for the “Anatomy of a