182 The Postwar Period
allowing it to put down deeper roots. They saw it as an original contribution
to Marxism-Leninism, and offered it as a model to other people’s democracies.
In theory and in practice, however, the party did control the machinery of
state. The communists shrouded themselves in mystery and hierarchy: nobody
knew who was in the Politburo and the CC, and even the word communism
was rarely used, though in doctrinal terms Yugoslavia was perhaps the most
orthodox and “monolithic” of all the satellite states. That is why Stalin’s criti-
cism seemed so unjust: it failed to take into account the great lengths the
regime had gone to in order to adhere as closely as possible to the Soviet model,
and it did not acknowledge what they had already achieved. As Kardelj ob-
served: “In his first letter, Stalin didn’t offer the Yugoslav communists any
choice. He played judge, while imagining that they would accept the role of
the accused.”^175
Tito formulated a dignified and speedy answer by ignoring any of Stalin’s
well-founded accusations and rebutting those that were incorrect. He began
by claiming that the Soviet leaders were misinformed and that they had a
very odd view of the situation in Yugoslavia. He stressed that Stalin’s letter
had been a “terrible surprise,” and took the opportunity to raise some issues
of his own, for instance, the attempt on the part of Soviet secret services to
turn Yugoslav citizens and entice them to spy, which undermined the leaders’
authority. Appealing for mutual understanding and stressing the Soviet Union’s
interest in keeping the new Yugoslavia as strong as possible, since it was “chest
to chest” with the capitalist world, Tito wrote that he would make one conces-
sion only: Velebit would be stripped of his post as deputy minister of foreign
affairs and kept under strict surveillance.^176
In addition to his effort to clarify and justify the situation in Yugoslavia,
parts of Tito’s letter went beyond the issues Stalin had raised, getting to the
very crux of things. He knew that Stalin’s ideological accusations were mere
pretexts for weakening the CPY and subduing it to his will. The real problem,
which Stalin had deftly side-stepped, came from the new reality of the post–
Second World War landscape, in which there was not just one socialist state on
the international stage, but several. This raised the delicate question of their
mutual relations and how national sovereignty should be understood. Stalin
considered sovereignty to be mostly theoretical, arguing—more with actions
than words—that every people’s democracy should fall into line with the Soviet
Union. Tito, by contrast, believed that local circumstances and traditions should
be respected, because socialism could be strong and productive only if it was
deeply rooted in every single country. He expressed this at the beginning of his
letter, saying openly: “As much as one must love the Soviet Union, the birth-
place of socialism, one cannot love one’s own socialist homeland less.”^177