The Presidential Years 269
become known as the non-aligned policy. This policy effectively challenged the
reigning division of the world into two opposite blocs, which had long been
a source of fear and international tension. As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in Bonn observed, with this move Tito left the European and communist
spheres, where he had been active, in order to assume a political role of global
dimensions.^28
Moscow DeclarationKhrushchev’s journey to Belgrade in May 1955 was of great importance to
subsequent events in the Soviet Union. As the Soviet leader recognized in his
memoirs, it was only after his conversations with Tito in Yugoslavia that he
fully understood how wrong Stalin’s policy had been.^29 In the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, to which he submitted a report, a discus-
sion developed that proved decisive to the destruction of Stalin’s myth. It was
Mikoyan who expressed the essential idea about this, noting that if Beria was
not culpable for the split with the Yugoslavs, then it was necessary to target
“others.”^30 This was the start of the demolition of the “cult of personality,”
which peaked the night of 24–25 February of the following year at the Twenti-
eth Congress of the CPSU, which had been convened in Moscow with the
telling slogan: “Back to Lenin.” In harmony with this program, Khrushchev
denounced Stalin in his “secret speech,” affirming, among other things, that the
conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was not Yugoslavia’s fault.
The real culprit was Stalin, who had completely lost any contact with reality. “It
will be enough that I move my little finger and Tito will not exist anymore,”
Stalin had allegedly said before excluding the CPY from Cominform. “But this
did not happen,” said Khrushchev. “Although Stalin moved not only his little
finger, but everything he was able to move, Tito did not fall. Why? Because...
he had his country and his people behind him, formed in the arduous school of
freedom and struggle for independence, people who supported their leaders.”^31
This bold affirmation opened new possibilities for cooperation between Mos-
cow and Belgrade. The LCY did not send a delegation to the congress, but Tito
wrote a letter of greeting to his “Soviet comrades,” in which he barely hid his
contentment.^32 Slobodan Stanković, a collaborator on Radio Free Europe, the
American propaganda radio station, affirmed that reading the newspapers and
magazines of this period it was clear that the Yugoslav leaders were in seventh
heaven: “In their eyes, Marshal Tito was a genius since, as the leader of a small
country, he had been brave enough to successfully confront a giant. The Bibli-
cal story about David and Goliath was often quoted.”^33
Tito’s letter to the Twentieth Congress was the first public answer from the
Yugoslav side to Khrushchev’s proposal to resume party and state relations. This