The Postwar Period 181
to Belgrade with a letter that should be forwarded immediately to the “relevant
address.” The letter had been written by Stalin and Molotov, “on behalf of ” the
CPSU, and was addressed to Tito and the CC of the CPY. It was bound to
worsen the situation.^171 Based on a report prepared by the most senior party
officials, entitled “On Anti-Marxist Tendencies among Leaders of the CPY in
Internal and Foreign Policy,” they accused Tito and his comrades of harboring
hostility toward the Soviet Union and of openly expressing their intention to
break away from it. “These anti-Soviet declarations are often masked by leftist
assertions such as, ‘In the Soviet Union, socialism is no longer revolutionary’;
or, ‘Only Yugoslavia is the true representative of revolutionary socialism.’ Once
upon a time, Trotsky used these tactics. What happened to his political career
says it all.”^172
There was more. The arrogant Yugoslavs had committed (numerous) other
sins: though the CPY was in power, it behaved as if it were not, hiding behind
the Popular Front; the CPY did not respect internal democracy, allowing the
majority of CC members to be co-opted rather than elected; instead of the
party controlling all state structures, in keeping with Marxist doctrine, they
were overseen by the Ministry for Internal Affairs. How could such an arrange-
ment be considered Marxist-Leninist and Bolshevik? Moreover, there seemed
to be no spirit of class struggle within the Yugoslav party, with the leadership
apparently unable to stop capitalist elements gaining influence over the coun-
tryside and towns. This was revisionism as theorized by Eduard Bernstein,
Georg von Vollmar, and Nikolai Bukharin. But what else could be expected
from a party whose leaders included such dubious Marxists as Djilas, Vukman-
ović, and Ranković, and that tolerated having Vladimir Velebit in the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, even though everyone knew he was a British spy?^173
Together with an assistant, Lavrent’ev delivered this letter to Tito at Villa
Weiss, his Zagreb residence. The marshal received them coldly and did not ask
them to sit down. On reading the first few lines of the letter, under the enquir-
ing gaze of the diplomats, he felt as if he had been “struck by lightning,” but he
managed to control himself and retain his composure as he read on. After three
or four minutes, he dismissed the ambassador, promising to answer as soon as
he had had time to study the letter properly. He then rushed to the phone,
summoned Kardelj, Djilas, and Ranković to Zagreb, and immediately began
writing his reply, which was finished in under two hours.^174
Stalin’s letter included several well-founded accusations, but others that, if
not false and unjust, were at least exaggerated. Among the most serious was
Stalin’s assertion that the party was not acting transparently and was using the
Popular Front as a screen. In fact, the Yugoslavs saw the Front as a new kind
of political organization, uniting the masses under the party’s leadership and