204 The Postwar Period
contesting Stalin’s carapace of infallibility. Until then, the Yugoslav press had
not mentioned the Boss, not because of any illusion harbored about his posi-
tion in the controversy, but because it seemed inappropriate to argue with him
since he had not personally entered the arena. Be that as it may, the party mem-
bers knew what his ideas were: “Stalin is the greatest living authority, not only
of the international workers movement, but of the entire democratic world.
Nevertheless, in the struggle with the CPY he is not on the right side.”^281
The article was immediately recognized by Yugoslav public opinion and by
foreign observers as a deliberate attempt to reshape Stalin’s myth and an open
recognition that the split was irreversible. “Yugoslav criticism of the infallible
prophet of Moscow eliminates all possibilities for reconciliation, if there ever
had been any,” commented the American ambassador to the Kremlin.^282 In fact,
as Djilas affirmed, it set off within Yugoslavia a reexamination of the Soviet
system and marked the beginning of its detachment from the Soviet Union
and its political practice based on lies and abuse of power. Against the vision of
a society crystallized in orthodoxy, Djilas affirmed ethical and revolutionary
values, remarking: “Authority is not everything, truth is above authority.”^283
Sir Charles Peake soon realized the importance of the article, confirming that
the underground struggle had at this point come out into the open: “Indeed
the present stage of this quarrel may not unfitly be likened to a game of chess.
Up to the present there has been little more than a wearisome movement of
pawns, but now for the first time the queens have a sight of one another, and
are beginning to move up. It would be rash indeed to predict the result of the
game; all it seems safe to say at the moment is that Tito is unlikely to give up
without a struggle.”^284
Tito was able to survive in part thanks to the prevailing opinion in Wash-
ington and London that his rebellion against Stalin was relevant for strategic
as well as psychological and propagandistic reasons. “A new factor of funda-
mental importance surfaced in the international Communist movement sub-
sequent to the fact that one of its members had successfully challenged the
Kremlin,” the analysts of the American State Department wrote. They com-
pared Tito with Martin Luther and Henry VIII, hoping that his example
would fatally shake the monolithic Soviet bloc. At the same time, they thought
it essential for the East that the “Ljubljana gap” under Mount Nanos (the easi-
est passage from Pannonia to the Padania Plains), as well as the Dalmatian
coast and the Vardar Valley near the Aegean, should be controlled by forces free
from Soviet influence. This meant that Moscow would no longer be able to
exercise immediate pressure on the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle
East.^285 On the basis of these considerations, the Americans and the British
soon decided to support Tito and to free him from the grip of Stalin, who had