370 The Presidential Years
meeting, promising him “a future he could not dream of ” (i.e., the succession)
if he would help him mend the situation in Croatia. Tripalo answered that he
could not abdicate his principles and his loyalty to the fatherland, Croatia. Tito
commented that the problem of Croatia was the Serb minority, whereupon
Tripalo answered polemically that, in Croatia, the problem was not the Serbs,
but the Croats. They separated without an agreement.^579 In Zagreb, where
statements circulated such as “Tito, I’ll spit in your face if you won’t wear the
Ustaša uniform,” or “Until now we have drunk Dalmatian wine, now we will
drink Serb blood,” the leaders tried to hold off the nationalist euphoria of the
popular masses.^580 When he met Savka Dabčević-Kučar and other important
local politicians at his Zagreb residence on 4 July, Tito repeated his threats
regarding the use of the army if they refused to act themselves: “It is better that
the People’s Army restores order... rather than the Russians.”^581 The Croat
leadership was caught in a triple bind: on the left they were attacked by the
“Praxis” group, who asserted that the self-managed experiment had failed
because it was not radical enough; while the nationalist students, united around
“Vice-Rector” Čičak, announced a “hot autumn” of protest against the expul-
sion from the university of two “patriotic” and overly loquacious professors.
Then there was Tito, the most dangerous of all.^582
The Constitutional AmendmentsThe summer of 1971 saw the completion of the constitutional amendments, after
much hard work coordinated by Kardelj. He had abandoned his long-cherished
idea of building a Yugoslav society based on a myriad of communes—akin to
the Paris Commune of 1871—preferring to stick with the republics and the two
provinces as constitutive entities. On 30 June the Federal Assembly approved a
radical reform of the federal structure, introducing confederal elements for the
first time. Statehood was granted to the six republics, based on the sovereignty
of their nations. A new body was also established, the Collective Presidency,
composed of three representatives of each republic and two from each prov-
ince, with rotating leaders. Thus no one could assure for himself a decisive role
at the head of Yugoslavia. This, at least, was the initial idea, which Tito also
shared, as he wanted a structure at the top of the state that would allow him
to retire, as he said, “when I would like to.”^583 However, since it was decided,
mostly at the request of the Croats and Bosnians, that the marshal would stay
at the head of the presidency and that only the vice-president would be elected
every year, it was clear that, for the moment, he was not ready to abandon
power.^584 In his public speeches, he declared that he was unhappy as a result:
“Instead of being relieved of too many duties,” he seemed to lament, “they have