The Presidential Years 341
the most intelligent “new man,” Dabčević-Kučar was elected to the presidency
of the CC of the Croatian CP at the end of May 1969.^420 Her way of doing
politics, for instance renouncing stale verbal stereotypes, was immediately
noticed by Miroslav Krleža. After a speech, he approached her with a compli-
ment: “You would like to bring Europe into the party.”^421 The same could be
said for her colleagues in other republics: Marko Nikezić and Latinka Perović
in Serbia, Stane Kavčič and his group in Slovenia, Krste Crvenkovski and
Slavko Miloslavleski in Macedonia. Among them, the most important were
the Serb liberals, who saw in Ranković’s fall the chance to create a modern
Serbia, democratic and free from the suspicion that it wanted to rule all of
Yugoslavia.^422
In the decades following the war, Yugoslav society underwent radical changes:
in 1946 there were no more than 642,000 workers and employees, with 80 per-
cent of the population comprised of peasants, half of them illiterate. At the end
of the sixties, those who worked in industry and in the tertiary sector were 4
million strong, and peasants had shrunk to 50 percent of the population. The
number of students jumped in the same period from 16,000 to 200,000. Nev-
ertheless, Yugoslavia lingered behind Europe, registering for instance a GNP of
only $860 per capita for 1970, a figure similar to Greece, but inferior to Roma-
nia and Bulgaria, not to mention Italy, which had double the GNP. The greater
threat to Yugoslavia’s development was the existing disparity between different
republics, which continued to grow instead of diminishing: that same year, the
GNP per capita in Slovenia was $1550, whereas in Kosovo, the Serb province
populated mostly by Albanians, considered the most underdeveloped area in
the country, it was one-fifth of that.^423
The economic reforms were intended to gradually insert the country into
Western markets. In 1970, for instance, only 25 percent of foreign trade was
oriented toward the Soviet bloc, while 57 percent was conducted with the
European community and 6 percent with the United States, the rest going to
the Third World. During the first two years after their introduction, the reforms
seemed bound for success, but it later became clear that the interface between
the market and the planned economy did not yield the expected results. The
president of the Federal Council, Boris Kraigher, one of the main architects of
the reorganization, came to understand this at the end of 1966, a month before
his death in what appeared to be a freak car crash. The following year, leaders
such as Edvard Kardelj and Vladimir Bakarić likewise let go of the illusion of
possible success.^424 Industrial production began to stagnate, causing unemploy-
ment. At the start of 1968, 327,000 workers were out of a job. To these nearly
750,000 should be added, those who emigrated “temporarily” abroad (as the
authorities liked to say, implying that they would inevitably return home), to