The Presidential Years 277
but they mistakenly made the whole matter a question of the personality cult
and not a question of the system.... What they have sown since 1948, now is
reaped: they have sown wind and are reaping a tempest.”^72
Although at Pula Tito had mentioned “certain Stalinist elements” in the
Soviet Union opposed to Khrushchev’s policy, and expressed the hope that
these elements would not prevail, his speech, more disapproval than absolution,
sent Nikita on a rampage. Khrushchev was well aware that in suffocating the
Hungarian revolt he had also saved Tito’s regime. During a reception in the
Kremlin on 17 November 1956, he attacked Ambassador Mićunović, vehe-
mently reproaching him with Tito’s accusation of Stalinism, “as if here nothing
had happened. Who does all this aid, if not our enemies?”^73 The “normaliza-
tion” between the Yugoslavs and the Soviets seemed to have failed miserably.
The press orchestrated violent anti-Yugoslav polemics, accompanied as a coun-
terpoint by a heated correspondence between Moscow and Belgrade. “It is pos-
sible to trace in his speech,” wrote the Soviet agency TASS, commenting on
Tito’s words, “declarations which contrast in form and content with the prin-
ciples of proletarian internationalism and international worker solidarity.”^74 The
Soviet ambassador in Belgrade, Nikolai P. Firiubin, arrived at dinner with the
marshal with a pile of anti-Soviet books that had been published in Yugoslavia
in recent years. In a dispatch sent to Moscow on 21 November, he examined the
principal lines of Tito’s foreign policy, stressing that he and his comrades had
started an open attack on the social and economic regime of the Soviet Union
aimed at damaging its relations with the “people’s democracies,” in the hope
that they would choose the “Yugoslav way.”^75
This quarrel decided Nagy’s fate. On 22 November, he left the Yugoslav
Embassy with his entourage, thanks to Kádár’s promise of safe-conduct, which
had been negotiated by Tito and Kardelj. Just as they were embarking on a
military bus that was to bring them home, at about 6 p.m., they were arrested,
since Khrushchev and his counselors thought that it would be too dangerous to
leave them free. They decided therefore to grant them “asylum” in Romania.^76
The Yugoslavs reacted energetically to save face, insisting on radical changes to
the political system not only in Hungary, but also in other socialist countries.
An important speech given by Kardelj at the Federal Assembly on 7 December
1956 contained several echoes of Djilas’s thought, even though he was on trial at
that moment. In particular, it contained the assertion that a bureaucratic class
had asserted itself in Soviet society at the cost of the working class. This caste,
Kardelj said, called itself communist but governed in a despotic way, hinder-
ing progress and the affirmation of a new reality in social relations: “If a party
does not understand this, it can well boast with communism and Marxism-
Leninism, recalling its historic role as a guide. In reality, it will be an obstacle