404 The Later Years
the last of the eminent personalities that Tito removed from power during his
long life. (It did not even help that he entertained him with dirty jokes and
played cards with him, knowing that it was a better strategy to lose.^60 ) Dolanc’s
dismissal confirmed Tito’s ruling style: keep his potential successors uncertain
of their status and play them against each other. His comment when Stalin
died could be applied to himself too: “Stalin never built up a successor.”^61
After Kardelj’s burial, Tito rid himself of both his beliefs and his followers.
Faithful to the maxim “divide et impera,” he disavowed the reformism of the
Slovenes, favoring a group of conservatives, whose eminent representative was
Dušan Dragosavac, a member of the Serb minority in Croatia, called now to
be the new secretary of the LCY. Meanwhile, there was also a change at the top
of the army: the Slovenian general Stane Potočar, chief of the General Staff,
had to give way to Admiral Branko Mamula, a Dalmatian Serb. Other Serbs,
originally from the former Habsburg provinces, came to power with the clear
assignment of keeping Slovenes and Croats in check, but also monitoring their
own compatriots in Belgrade.^62
The Changing Relations between
Washington and BelgradeThe fall of the Serb, Slovene, and Macedonian liberals in 1972 was welcomed
by the Soviets, who saw it as a restoration of party centralism. The diplomats
of the Eastern bloc in Belgrade noted with favor that the Yugoslav officials
once again began “to speak our language” in their fight against nationalism and
liberalism.^63 Tito did not, however, revive the old nomenklatura system, which
Ranković had used with such ability, but assigned the administration of the
party to his trustees in different republics, reserving for himself the appoint-
ments to key positions at the federal level and making sure that the strong Serb
and Macedonian influence of the past would not be restored. In the years after
1971–72, the party’s grip on society was strengthened: in the publishing houses,
uni versities, factories, and administrative institutions of every kind “collectives”
reappeared (groups of engaged communists, or people who pretended to be),
which became an important instrument for the restoration of political ortho-
doxy.^64 The press removed the term “Stalinist” from its lexicon and avoided any
criticism of Soviet reality. The leitmotif of the new trend was the danger com-
ing from the West. It was championed by Tito himself, who mentioned at the
Third Conference of the LCY in Belgrade on 3 December 1972 the three hun-
dred thousand reserve soldiers who were “temporarily” working in Western
Europe. These reservists were enough to man three armies. In saying this he
wondered if, in “case of a conflict,” the Western governments would allow these
reservists to return home, and asserted that “the party has until now been too