The Postwar Period 201
the development of a modernized agriculture. Not until 1956 did production in
this sector reach the prewar level.^269 In many parts of the country the land was
cultivated in a primitive way, with wooden ploughs and without chemical fer-
tilizers. In 1960, after the 1 May festivities, Dušan Bilandžić, a young represen-
tative of the CP of Croatia, escorted an Italian delegation through Posavina, a
fertile area between Belgrade and Banja Luka. Only horses, sometimes replaced
by men, were pulling the ploughs in the fields. “Look, how they plough with
the communist tractors,” commented an Italian scornfully.^270
In such conditions the peasants could not live from agriculture alone but
had to find work in factories and in the building industry. Although after the
war more than half of the population lived in the countryside, the state was
compelled to import food, since the peasants did not produce enough for the
market. Tito was aware of this and relinquished the idea of a more rational
agriculture, albeit with difficulty, opting for methods acceptable to the peas-
ants. He admitted that “we have destroyed by ourselves our biggest factory,
the factory that produces food” and that “we have made a capital error follow-
ing the Soviet way,” regretting that the regime had not been able to organize
the cooperatives with the necessary patience and more democratic means.^271 In
November 1965, he confessed to Eleonore Staimer, ambassador of the German
Democratic Republic in Belgrade, that the implementation of a socialist agri-
culture was an extremely difficult venture, “even more difficult than the revolu-
tion itself.”^272
Exacerbation of the
Conflict with the Soviet UnionThe Yugoslav leaders made an enormous mistake in thinking that they could
get back into Stalin’s good graces with land collectivization and the national-
ization of small family businesses. On the contrary, at the end of 1948 the Boss
reinforced the offensive against them by starting to persecute all those in the
satellite countries who could be accused of being favorable to Tito. The first
to fall was Władysław Gomułka, secretary general of the Polish Workers Party
and deputy prime minister of the Warsaw government, who Stalin accused of
bourgeois and nationalistic leanings. In reality, his major crime was that he had
maintained his distance from the Bucharest resolution. He was arrested and
condemned to a harsh prison sentence.^273
Meanwhile, on 24 August 1948, Andrei A. Zhdanov, the most important
interpreter of the Kremlin’s political line after the Second World War, died
suddenly. According to information collected by the French ambassador in
Moscow, Yves Chataigneau, after his burial Tito contacted Stalin with a final
invitation to overcome the resolution crisis. The same rumors also circulated