348 The Presidential Years
1964, he was unpleasantly surprised by the sudden demise of Khrushchev, with
whom he had kept on good terms over the previous two years, even taking on
the role of mediator between the Soviet secretary and the Romanian leadership
in its aspirations for autonomy. He especially valued Khrushchev’s willingness
to listen to the interlocutors, to think about what had been said, and sometimes
even change his own mind. For a long time he had not been sure whether the
new Kremlin leaders, starting with Leonid I. Brezhnev, would be worthy of
filling his shoes.^462 When he visited Moscow, Minsk, and Siberia again between
18 June and 1 July 1965, he managed to establish a good relationship with the
“troika” at the head of the USSR, who conferred the greatest of honors upon
him: on the route from the airport to the Kremlin, he was greeted by an enor-
mous crowd and once there he was installed at the Great Palace, its main
entrance opened for the first time to a foreign statesman.^463
Flattered by such attentions, in Sverdlovsk Tito declared that in case of
war Yugoslavia would fight “side by side” with the Soviet Union. These words
did not surprise the Westerners who, thanks to intelligence sources, were well
acquainted with this line of thinking, but they were unpleasantly struck by the
fact that such sentiments had been uttered publicly.^464 Back in Belgrade, Tito
stressed that his views had been “identical or extremely close” to the Russian
viewpoint on the problems discussed. This was mostly due to the increasing
extremism of Chinese opposition to both Titoism and Soviet communism. Not
surprisingly, wrote the British ambassador in Moscow in his dispatch, the Chi-
nese were quick to attack Tito’s reception in the Soviet Union and to proclaim
that it proved all that they had been saying about both parties.^465
In 1966, Ranković’s fall troubled the cordial atmosphere between Belgrade
and Moscow, since the Soviets were at least initially concerned about the re-
forms of the LCY, considering them without precedence in the history of
socialism. They wondered whether Tito “was still controlling the situation,”
although they did notice that Yugoslavia did not try to hinder their efforts
to form a coalition of the entire international communist movement. They
were ready to take a tolerant attitude toward the changes underway, consider-
ing them internal questions that could not harm the “camp.”^466 In this spirit
Brezhnev visited Yugoslavia in 1966 for the first time as secretary general of the
CPSU, and the following year Tito took part in the celebrations of the fiftieth
anniversary of the October Revolution.^467
The Prague SpringAt the end of 1967, when signs of a political thaw began appearing in Czecho-
slovakia, the Yugoslav leaders supported the “new course” with open sympathy,