The Later Years 411
Rumors about the congress began circulating in the spring, but Tito prohibited
anyone from writing about it publicly before he could clear things up with
Brezhnev. The Executive Bureau of the LCY sent a note to the Politburo of
the CPSU on 25 July 1974 recalling that subversive Cominformist activity had
been discussed at the highest level during meetings between Yugoslav and
Soviet representatives. It read in part: “The Bureau is therefore convinced that
the anti-Yugoslav activity of the Cominformist emigration is not unknown to
the competent Soviet organs. These organs did not take any efficient measure
against them.”^93
After the exchange of two diplomatic notes that did not yield any results,
and after Stane Dolanc had held several conversations with the Soviet chargé
d’affaires and with the Hungarian and Czechoslovak ambassadors, Kardelj went
to the Soviet Union at the beginning of September, officially “on vacation” but
actually to ask questions. The result of this trip was not positive: the Kremlin
leaders denied, as in the past, any involvement in the affair, stressing that the
most important Cominformists who remained in the Soviet Union after 1956
had been ordered long ago to emigrate to the West. They also tried to mollify
Tito with shipments of modern arms and energetic reassurances of good will.
They reaffirmed, however, their critical attitude toward self-management and
non-alignment. To their way of thinking, the Yugoslavs ignored the reality of
the modern world, which was split into two blocs, reproaching them not just
for “deifying” Tito but also his policy, so that it became impossible to make any
critical observation.^94
This swinging between denying responsibility for the Cominformists and
criticizing his regime convinced Tito that the Soviets had not given up either
their hostile attitude toward his “revisionism” or their proposal to be rid of it
and to pull Yugoslavia into their orbit.^95 Meanwhile, since the Washington Post
had revealed the Bar plot, there was no reason to remain silent about it. Two
days after Kardelj’s return from Kiev, on 12 September 1974, Tito denounced the
discovery of the conspiracy against the LCY in a speech to the workers of the
Jesenice steel mill. A different message was sent to Moscow two days later with
the sentencing of thirty-three Cominformists, who were condemned collec-
tively to more than two hundred years in jail. At the same time, the security
services carried out an extensive witch hunt against their alleged sympathizers.
In the following days the press was full of news about the Com inform émigrés,
725 persons in all, mostly Serbs by nationality.^96
This helped sour even further relations with the Soviets, who replied in their
typically perfidious and oblique manner. In the spring of 1975, on the thirtieth
anniversary of the victory of the Second World War, Marshal Ivan I. Iakubov-
skii and his colleague, Andrei A. Grechko, published two articles in Prague