192 The Postwar Period
reappeared in public, visiting the building site of the New Belgrade, one of the
flagships of his regime. In order to stress the closeness of the Yugoslav peoples,
he was accompanied by two Serb-Montenegrin generals, Svetozar Vukamanvić
(Tempo) and Koča Popović, and by two Croat personalities, Vladimir Bakarić
and Ivan Krajačić (Stevo). For the first time, he wore a civilian suit rather than
one of his flashy uniforms: evidently, it was his way of showing the new face of
the CPY. The youth brigades building the New Belgrade greeted him with
great enthusiasm. Without special security measures, Tito passed among thou-
sands of young people, speaking with them and asking them how the work was
progressing.^230
The quick, firm, and dignified Yugoslav answer to the Bucharest resolution
gave London and Washington the impression that Tito would not follow the
example of so many Communists, however brave and powerful, who in the
past had shamefully recanted when accused of revisionism. According to Cecil
King, the British chargé d’affaires in Belgrade, this was one of the most impor-
tant events in the history of Communism. For the first time there appeared a
chance that a “heresy” might develop that could count on having a territorial
basis. Lev Trotsky, for instance, did not have at his disposal anything more than
a villa in Mexico, nevertheless it had been deemed necessary to kill him with
an ice pick. The consequences of opposition in a European country would be
much worse, equal only to those uprisings in the distant past when the schism
between Rome and Byzantium occurred.^231
If the Bucharest resolution raised a storm of rumors, commentaries, and
interpretations in the West, it created an even bigger surprise in the satellite
countries and in circles close to the summit of power. As in Yugoslavia, so in
other countries party discipline and the conspiratorial mentality did not allow
the news of the Tito-Stalin split to spread very far, so that it did not reach those
who had no right to know. The testimony of Wolfgang Leonhard, a young and
promising functionary of the CC CP Germany in East Berlin, is significant.
When the news of the excommunication came, he compared the main seat of
the party to a beehive, even though Stalin had just decided to block the former
capital—administered after the war by the victorious powers but located within
the Soviet zone—isolating it from the West. The Cold War had reached one of
its peaks. But so surprising was the expulsion of the CPY from the Cominform
that practically everyone was talking about it rather than the blockade. When
the Yugoslav answer came—which no satellite country newspaper dared to
publish—the news was spread by the Voice of America and the BBC, causing
even greater amazement. Tito’s refusal to slavishly submit himself or recog nize
his errors had a profoundly subversive subtext, not just with regards to the
abused system of criticism and self-criticism but to the entire Stalinist regime.^232