Tito and His Comrades

194 The Postwar Period

we swear never to depart from your road... ’ and ‘The more the accu sations and
lies, the more Tito is dear to us and the more we love him.’”^236

The Cominformists

After the Fifth Congress, which confirmed the leadership of the party, Stalin’s
fight with Tito acquired a new slant: clandestine brochures, published by the
Pravda in Moscow, began to appear in Yugoslavia, spreading the contents of the
secret correspondence of the past months. The promoters of this action evi-
dently wanted to convince Yugoslav public opinion of the validity of the Soviet
accusations but also to frighten the people. In fact, since March, rumors had
been circulating that those who were in opposition to the Soviet Union would
be killed on the spot or sent to Siberia when the “healthy forces” came into
power.^237 Although at the congress only five of 2,323 delegates voted against
Tito, and no opposition group emerged, the marshal and his comrades feared
a pro-Stalinist uprising. For this reason, as well as to avoid a possible Soviet
attack, they decided to organize Partisan units that would back up the army,
since its cadres had been heavily Russified. After the war, seventeen Yugoslav
generals and about six hundred officers and sub-officers had attended Soviet
military academies. Stalin thought he would use them, allowing those surprised
by the Bucharest resolution in the USSR to return home. Of course, the Yugo-
slav authorities accepted them with due distrust, and with reason: Soviet agents
were discovered even among Tito’s bodyguards, above all General Moma
Djurević (called Val). According to Djilas, he organized a plot, discovered by
the UDBA, in which the members of the Politburo were to be “liquidated”
while they were playing billiards.^238
In spite of the vigilance of the UDBA, which under Ranković’s guidance be-
came particularly energetic in suffocating any activity favorable to the Comin-
form, it was not long before the “healthy forces” appeared on the scene. The
first was the former “Wahhabist,” Radonja Golubović, Yugoslav ambassador in
Bucharest. On 1 August 1948, he published a long letter in the journal Scînteia,
which he had sent a few days earlier to the presidency of the Fifth Congress.
He had been sure, he wrote, that the CPY would try to heal the fracture
with the other communist parties caused by Belgrade’s political line. But this
did not happen, and “open terror reigns within the party. All those comrades
who express—however shyly or harmlessly—their disagreement with the anti-
Marxist and anti-Soviet attitude of the Central Committee of the CPY are
being expelled from the party, compelled by various methods to recant or, if this
fails, be thrown into jail.” Golubović had no intention of following the leader-
ship on the path to bourgeois perdition, at the end of which Yugoslavia would