270 The Presidential Years
seemed logical, since Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev had meanwhile accepted
the idea that communism could be attained not only through revolutionary but
also parliamentary means, and that war was not the only way to solve the prob-
lems of the contemporary world.^34 The conditions ripened for Tito’s visit to the
Soviet Union, for which the two parties were preparing with a series of telling
moves. In the summer of 1954, a Yugoslav parliamentary delegation of ten
members from the CC and a member of the Executive Committee of the LCY
came to Moscow. A commercial agreement followed, signed on 1 September
and aimed at doubling trade between the two countries. At the same time,
there was also an increase in Yugoslav trade with the Soviet satellite countries.^35
In February 1956, the Twentieth Congress CPSU approved a motion that rec-
ommended improving “friendship and collaboration with the fraternal peoples
of the Yugoslav people’s federation,” and shortly afterward the Kremlin granted
Yugoslavia fairly favorable financial loans.^36 It was rumored that Dobrije Vidic,
Tito’s ambassador in Moscow, had contacts with his American colleague that
were too close, so at the beginning of March 1956 Tito recalled him, replac-
ing him with Montenegrin Veljko Mićunović, at that time deputy secretary
of foreign affairs and the “number two man in the Yugoslav secret services.”^37
At the valedictory lunch organized for Vidic, Khrushchev took a booklet from
his breast pocket and handed it to the ambassador: “Give this to Comrade
Tito, he will read it with interest. To my mind, you Yugoslavs could not write
better.” It was the speech in which he had denounced Stalin. Tito was much
impressed by this gesture, which strengthened his conviction that the admin-
istrative structure of the Soviet Union would be healed once and for all.^38 On
17 April, the Soviets decided to disband the Cominform, tacitly accepting
the Yugoslav assertion that the organization had become anachronistic. In
May, the two countries signed a treaty of collaboration and at the end of the
month Tito recognized, in his own way, that the cult of personality in Yugosla-
via was also outdated: he proposed that his birthday should no longer be cele-
brated on 25 May, but replaced instead by “Youth Day.” Increasingly, he also
spoke of the need to better relations not just between states but also between
parties, in spite of the promises he had given to some leading comrades during
Khrushchev’s trip to Belgrade that this would not happen. On 2 June, after a
triumphal journey through Romania and Moldavia, he finally arrived in the
Soviet capital with a large entourage and his wife, Jovanka, who was abroad as
first lady for the first time. At the railway station, where he was greeted by all
the Soviet leaders, led by Khrushchev, he was welcomed with a large sign that
read: LONG LIVE COMRADE TITO AND HIS CLIQUE.^39 (This pejo-
rative term was used so often by the Soviet propaganda that it had lost its
original meaning.)