The Postwar Period 155
Ljubljana with his forces, so that even now they’d still be in charge. It wouldn’t
be us in power, but the Russians in Belgrade and the English in Zagreb.”^24
Immediately after Alexander departed, sure that “he could get from Tito
what he wanted,” on 2 March 1945 Tito ordered the formation of a new army—
the fourth—in Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose task was to reach as soon as pos-
sible the Isonzo, the river near Gorizia considered by the Slovenians to be their
natural Western border.^25 His agreement with the field marshal, as with
Churchill a year before, had been purely tactical, hiding completely different
political and strategic goals. On 5 April, he went to Moscow on his first official
visit, where the Soviets received him with a level of pageantry reserved, until
then, for the likes of Edvard Beneš and Charles de Gaulle. The pomp, in fact,
was a little excessive: Tito was ill from the flight to Moscow, and upon arrival he
struggled to make his inaugural speech.^26 On 13 April, in the presence of Stalin,
he signed an agreement at the Kremlin with Molotov, similar to that between
the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak government in exile in 1943, consenting
to twenty years of collaboration and friendship. But in 1945, in the new world
emerging after Hitler’s defeat and already marred by the East-West confronta-
tion, this clearly meant that he was siding with the socialist bloc. The implica-
tions of this were clear in the United States and Great Britain, where the treaty
was openly criticized, which contributed to even more strained relations between
Yugoslavia and the two superpowers.^27 How much Tito wanted to strengthen
his relations with the Soviets is revealed by a minor but significant fact; he
chose Gustav Vlahov as his private secretary, a Macedonian who was educated
in Moscow and became a high ranking officer of the NKVD during the war.
Tito brought Šubašić, and also had Djilas join him on the trip in a bid to
smooth over ill-feeling caused by his remarks about the bad behavior of the
Red Army during its stay in Yugoslavia that past autumn. Stalin, who on that
occasion had been outraged, was ready to accept Djilas’s explanation and his
excuses, saying, “Why did you not write about all this? I had no idea. To me,
the whole thing is forgotten.”^28 The atmosphere thawed, as demonstrated by
the toast Stalin raised at a banquet held in the Catherine Hall of the Kremlin
Palace: no longer would he address Tito as “sir.” He would call him “comrade.”
He invited the guests twice to dine in his dacha at Kuntsevo, but did not stop
speaking contemptuously about the Yugoslav Army, which Tito found hard to
swallow. “In the relationship between Tito and Stalin,” wrote Djilas, “you could
sense something amiss, something unsaid—as if there was a mutual dislike
which they both had to hide.”^29
On 15 April 1945, the Soviet Army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda (The red
star) published an interview with Tito, in which he stressed that “the Istrian
population [in Venezia Giulia] wants to be annexed to Yugoslavia, and we are
confident this will soon be accomplished.”^30 During a meeting with Yugoslav