7 Josip Broz Tito 7pact with Greece and Turkey. After the changes in the
Soviet Union following Stalin’s death in 1953, Tito was
faced with a choice: continue the Westward course and
give up one-party dictatorship or seek reconciliation
with a somewhat reformed new Soviet leadership. The
latter course became increasingly possible after a concil-
iatory state visit by Nikita Khrushchev to Belgrade in
May 1955. However, the limits of reconciliation with the
Soviets became obvious after the Soviet intervention in
Hungary in 1956, which was followed by a new Soviet
campaign blaming Tito for inspiring the Hungarian insur-
gents. Nevertheless, Stalin’s departure lessened the
pressures for greater integration with the West, and Tito
came to conceive of his internal and foreign policy as
being equidistant from both blocs. Negotiations with
Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru of
India in June 1956 led to a closer cooperation among
states that were “nonengaged” in the East-West confron-
tation. From nonengagement evolved the concept of
“active nonalignment”—that is, the promotion of alter-
natives to bloc politics, as opposed to mere neutrality.
The first meeting of nonaligned states took place in
Belgrade under Tito’s sponsorship in 1961.
Self-Management and Decentralization
The break with the Soviet Union also inspired a search
for a new model of socialism in Yugoslavia, and Tito,
never a theoretician, depended on the ideological for-
mulations of his lieutenants, notably Edvard Kardelj. He
supported the notion of workers’ management of pro-
duction, embodied in the formation of the first workers’
councils in 1950. In the process, Soviet-style central
planning was abandoned. As power steadily shifted from