The Presidential Years 287
the party, and enjoyed enormous prestige at home and abroad thanks to the
recent successes in space discovery. He was not ready to swallow “Titoism,” as
presented by Kardelj, nor to accept his criticism of “hegemonism” and “Stalin-
ism,” nor his belief that the main goal for a communist society should be to
function without any state and party. There was nothing in the LCY ’s program
that the Yugoslavs had not already said, but since it was proposed during a pas-
sionate anti-revisionist campaign in the Soviet Union and was proclaimed as
the only path to socialism, Khrushchev felt it necessary to react. Some days
before the Seventh Congress, in the April issue of the Moscow magazine Kom-
munist, a critical article appeared in which three important ideologues accused
the LCY of having distanced itself too much from “the theory and practice of
Marxism-Leninism,” and of having tried to undermine the unity of the com-
munist parties and socialist countries. “The heroic Yugoslav peoples,” they
wrote, “who have spilled so much blood for freedom and justice, in order to
build their life on a socialist basis, deserve a better fate. Do not lead them along
isolated and confused byways to the great goal—to communism and socialism—
but only by one common and bright road.”^122 According to CIA analysts, “not
since Stalin expelled Tito from the Cominform in 1948 has Moscow so force-
fully declared that Tito must change his basic dogma before he can again be
considered acceptable in Moscow’s eyes.”^123
In mid-March, the Yugoslavs presented the program to the public, as well
as the objections to it, breaking from the Bucharest agreement, which bound
them not to make known their mutual disputes with the Soviets. In a text
published over the course of ten articles, Kardelj, in his own fussy and convo-
luted style, elaborated on his vision of socialism and international relations as it
had evolved in the awareness of the Yugoslav leaders, above all his own, during
the last decade. It emphasized equality between all states and parties, refused all
“bureaucratic tendencies” in the frame of the social body, exalted self-managing
socialism, predicted the withering away of the state, and affirmed that even the
dictatorship of the proletariat was transient. The Moscow dogma that com-
munist parties should head up all progressive movements, and that socialism
could be achieved only by and through the Soviets, was branded by Kardelj as
wrong from a theoretical point of view, as well as harmful. Influenced by his
Scandinavian experience, he reached the conclusion that socialism was to be
found not only in the Soviet bloc, nor only in Yugoslavia, but was widespread
everywhere, even in capitalist countries. (In private he even confessed that in
Sweden there was “more socialism” than in Yugoslavia).^124 In short, the pro-
gram denied the communists their monopoly over socialist practice and action,
opening the door to collaboration with all “progressive” forces. This principle
introduced a new dynamic into their mutual relations in which there was no