408 The Later Years
that was transferred to Moscow at the beginning of the fifties to be on hand in
case of an attack against Yugoslavia.
During the dramatic years of the struggle with Stalin, the émigrés were
considered “healthy forces,” true Marxists, destined to be the nucleus of the
future new CPY. Their representatives took part in every party congress of
the socialist “camp” and when Stalin died they placed a wreath on his coffin
with the dedication: “To the greatest friend and defender of Yugoslav peoples.”
After 1954, when the “normalization” between Khrushchev and Tito took root,
their organizations were closed, although only formally, and their press and
radio stations were silenced. The problem of the Cominform diaspora was not
solved until after 1956 when, on the occasion of Tito’s visit to the Soviet Union,
Khrushchev asked him to meet a delegation of émigrés in Kiev. It was then that
an agreement was signed between the two governments that aimed to guaran-
tee amnesty to the Cominformists and to allow those who wished to return
home to Yugoslavia from the USSR and other bloc countries to do so.^78
Although Tito tried to resolve this delicate issue, groups of émigrés con-
tinued to plot against his regime. When amnesty was proclaimed about 1,300
of them made use of it and left the “camp.” However, the Soviet secret serv-
ices prevented a significant number of émigrés from being informed about the
amnesty (nearly all those who lived outside Moscow). Consequently, the major-
ity accepted Soviet citizenship, a decision welcomed by the authorities, who now
had at their disposal a group of people they could manipulate at will.^79 Their
anti-Tito activities were not completely interrupted: they continued to meet in
the “patriotic clubs” that became active when relations between Moscow and
Belgrade returned to a heightened state of tension. In 1956 they sent a letter to
the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU that was not read to the delegates be-
cause of Khrushchev’s decision to demolish Stalin’s myth. But at the end of the
fifties, when Kardelj’s “revisionist” party program rekindled the struggle between
the CPSU and the LCY, they reappeared with a message to the Twenty-First
Extraordinary Congress of the CPSU, which was included in its official docu-
ments.^80 In subsequent years they split into two streams: an extremist one led
by Mile Perović, and another more moderate group headed by Vlado Dapčević.
The latter was a much more interesting personality than Perović (who was just
an aging fanatic) and had an adventurous past worth remembering. He was a
half-brother of the legendary General Peko Dapčević and a close collaborator of
Arso Jovanović. Together with Jovanović he had tried to expatriate to Romania
in August 1948 but had been arrested and sentenced to prison. After the amnesty
in 1956 he was banished to his native village near Cetinje in Montenegro from
where, three years later, after the Seventh Congress of the LCY, he escaped to
Albania with eight prison mates who were opposed to Kardelj’s “revisionism.”