Tito and His Comrades

The Presidential Years 389

economic, and cultural life were hounded from their posts and replaced by
mediocre and practically unknown careerists.^693 Meanwhile, in businesses and
institutions, a “tidal wave of primitivism” mounted—as one of the victims, the
director of the Belgrade TV station, described it—encouraged by the most
incompetent and inefficient employees and workers, who tried to take advan-
tage of the restoration of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”^694 Among the
intellectuals there was no lack of opportunists, causing Draža Marković to
comment bitterly: “How weak and fragile are our cultural coryphaeuses! They
come down like a house of cards as soon as our forces get their act together....
It is ridiculous and sad at the same time.”^695
After the Serb “anarcho-liberals” were deposed—with no regret from the
masses, since they had stubbornly opposed nationalism—it was the turn of the
Slovenes. In Ljubljana the purge was less spectacular because Tito did not par-
ticipate in it himself, instead letting his local vassals handle it. The main target
was Stane Kavčič, president of the Slovenian Executive Council, who was said
to have been guilty of paying scarce attention to the working people and to
favoring the middle classes. According to his adversaries, he had tried to inte-
grate Slovenia into Western Europe with the help of neighboring countries of
Italy and Austria as well as Bavaria; overlooked relations with the non-aligned;
and provoked an unstable situation in his domestic strategic area that would
not be tolerated in the long run by the Soviets. His faults were not limited
to these: he had on his conscience the “motorway affair,” separatist tendencies,
and the goal of restructuring the economy in order to apply market laws and
even introduce joint-stock companies. To quote Kardelj, who was envious of
him because of his popularity, under Kavčič Slovenia was governed by approx-
imately seventy directors who had eliminated the LCY from society. He added:
“We were near the collapse of self-management and of socialism.”^696

The “Old Guard” Rules

Important party personalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vojvodina, and Mace-
donia met the same fate in the following weeks. Tito and his cronies exploited
the fall of so many illustrious heads and shifted the blame for Yugoslavia’s
societal problems onto them, including inflation, corruption, unregulated for-
eign debt, mindless investments, all kinds of illegality, and social inequality, as
if the guillotine had not been manipulated by people who had been in power
for decades. Thus with a proper coup d’état, the reformatory process started
seven years before was discarded. According to Dušan Bilandžić, this was also
a personal tragedy for the top leaders: they had kicked off the democratization
of society, but when this undermined the regime and threatened their power,
they abruptly ended the process with the excuse that it was necessary to save