The Postwar Period 157
against Alexander’s reference to “territorial aggression.”^37 To Tito, however,
Stalin was equally frank: he was not ready to risk a third world war for the sake
of an Adriatic port, and he demanded the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops within
twenty-four hours. When Tito conveyed this order to Peko Dapčević, com-
mander of the Fourth Army, he allegedly included the telegram from Stalin
by way of explanation.^38 According to the testimony of Tito himself, Stalin
even refused to answer his call when he tried to reach him by phone to get him
to help. His secretary informed the marshal that the Boss was absent at the
moment, but that he would contact him as soon as possible. Tito paced around
his study the entire night waiting for the phone to ring. It did not.^39 The Yugo-
slavs felt betrayed by Stalin’s behavior. This view was expressed by the marshal
himself in his famous speech in Ljubljana on 26 May, where he subtly likened
the Soviet Union to the Western imperialists and resumed his rhetoric of “the
new Yugoslavia,” which would no longer be an object for barter and bargain
between the great powers. Stalin’s reaction was swift and severe: he threated to
make their dispute public and leave Tito to his fate. The marshal responded
with a demeaning mea culpa: “He tried to apologize with fawning embarrass-
ment,” reported the Soviet ambassador Ivan V. Sadchikov, in a dispatch. “He
claimed to have lost his head in Ljubljana because of the bad weather: ‘During
the speech there was a terrible hailstorm. The rain and hail beat my face and
made me so nervous that I spoke rashly.’”^40
On 9 June, the English and Americans and the Yugoslavs reached an agree-
ment affirming the withdrawal of Partisan troops from the Western part of
Venezia Giulia, and its division—until a final decision was reached about the
Italian-Yugoslav border—into two zones: Zone A, with Trieste, to be adminis-
tered by the Allied forces, and Zone B, encompassing the rest of the region,
which would be overseen by the Yugoslav Army.^41
The incident with Stalin had further implications. It brought to light the
latent tension between Edvard Kardelj and Tito, triggered by the latter’s auto-
cratic style. Kardelj took advantage of Stalin’s rebuff and revealed to the Soviet
ambassador his own misgivings about Tito’s behavior: Tito saw Yugoslavia
as self-sufficient, needing no help from the revolutionary and socialist camp.
Kardelj took quite the opposite view. Tito soon came to hear of this criticism
but, according to Djilas, he never reproached Kardelj, despite being displeased.
According to Vukmanović (Tempo), Kardelj was very nearly expelled from the
party. Be that as it may, the resentment toward Kardelj lingered.^42
In spite of the failure in Trieste, the Yugoslav Communists’ influence on the
masses in the late spring of 1945 flourished in a way that had not been seen
before nor after: the people were even ready to “take the sky by storm”—as the
Serb proverb goes—so convinced were they that their leaders could deliver