400 The Later Years
one. He was not coherent as to why, and was not able to clearly explain the rela-
tionship between democracy and socialism. He wanted to give citizens as much
space as possible, asking them, however, to stay under the political umbrella of an
all-knowing leadership.^38The “inflation of norms” in terms of regulations, prescriptions, and laws
that Kardelj produced (due to his constant dissatisfaction with the results
achieved), sounded like a broken record to his own comrades in the presidency
of the LCY. Between words and practice, between the “reform of the reform”
and the moral and economic crisis that gripped Yugoslav society, there was too
wide a gap not to be noticed. In conservative circles of the party, it was not-so-
secretly whispered that “Djilas’s ideas” had been revived.^39 Kardelj was not criti-
cized openly, since everyone believed that he would succeed Tito, but nobody
valued his theories any longer. “It is the general opinion,” commented Dušan
Bilandžić in December 1978, “that the old ideas are worn out. New solutions,
new trends, new policy cannot be formulated while Tito is alive. Everybody is
waiting for D-Day.”^40
The sad truth was that behind the utopia preached by Kardelj, Tito’s autoc-
racy was hidden, the last bulwark of the failed Yugoslav experiment.^41 The
entire government structure, at the federal and republican levels, was incompe-
tent and marked by dilettantism: from 1972 until the end of the decade it spent
more than $40 billion on different development projects without any tangible
results.^42 Meanwhile, it became heavily indebted abroad, following the example
of the federal finance secretary, Petar Kostić, who took out a billion-dollar loan
to save the iron foundry at Smederevo without informing his government.^43 It
seems that no one in Yugoslavia was aware that, as a consequence of the petrol
crisis in 1973, the Soviet model of quick industrialization, to which Tito and his
comrades remained faithful, became unsustainable for a country with poor
energy resources. After the 1974 constitution, the level of foreign debt grew
substantially, since the republics, being “sovereign,” did not need Belgrade’s
permission to take out new loans. By the mid-seventies Yugoslavia had a foreign
debt of $4.6 billion, which rose to $16 billion by the end of the decade. Com-
bined with internal difficulties economic growth ground to a halt as a result of
the world economic crisis, which was caused by a steep increase in petroleum
prices. The Yugoslavs were not used to economic stagnation, and the republics
reacted with self-sufficiency, further stressing the inability of the federal govern-
ment to create a common market and to carry out the plan for the “associated
labor” that the regime’s propaganda endorsed. Although within the framework
of the five-year plan of 1971–75 the developed north gave some $3 billion to the