The Postwar Period 223
Comrade Beria asks you to invite Comrade Tito to organize a closed meeting
of plenipotentiaries, if you and Tito both agree. The meeting could take place
in Moscow and, if you think that this is not feasible, in Belgrade. Comrade
Beria guarantees that nobody will be informed about this discussion, besides
Tito and yourself.”^378
This message never reached Ranković. The following day, Beria was arrested
during a dramatic session of the CC CPSU, which is why this first attempt to
normalize relations between Moscow and Belgrade saw no result. The former
“comrades” of Stalin’s hated henchman considered his greeting to Ranković as
proof of his intent to enter into contracts with “imperialists” and attested to
these fact that, in Molotov’s words, he was “an agent, a class enemy.” According
to these accusations, Beria plotted to introduce a two-party system in the USSR,
and in his attempt to acquire supreme power he sought the support of persons
such as Churchill, Dulles, Tito, and Ranković.^379 Conjectures of this sort,
which were obviously concocted to sully the chief of the NKVD as much as
possible and justify his death sentence, did not have serious consequences for
relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. On 23 Sep tember, Dobrije
Vidic, Tito’s new ambassador, came to the Soviet capital and began a skillful
diplomatic action to improve mutual relations, but without ideological content
for the time being. In Moscow, Tito was not yet considered a “comrade,” as
Beria would have liked, but a “mister.” Since Belgrade knew nothing of Beria’s
failed attempt to renew contacts with Ranković, they were not saddened by his
fall. On the contrary, forgetting the secret connections of past years, about
which little is known, the marshal declared that his sudden and dramatic exe-
cution was “a progressive deed.”^380
During the second part of 1953 and 1954, internal struggles in the Kremlin
continued unrelentingly. A real turning point in Soviet-Yugoslav relations did
not take place until Nikita S. Khrushchev became secretary general of the CPSU.
Although on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Khrushchev
had praised the Boss for his “mortal” fight against all kinds of revisionism,
including the “gang of assassins and spies” in Yugoslavia,^381 as soon as he was
firmly in the saddle he changed his opinion and became convinced of the need
to revise the domestic and international policy of the Soviet Union as soon as
possible, starting with the Yugoslavs. It was necessary to prevent them from
completely adhering to the Western bloc, as their approach to NATO seemed
to forebode. Without embarrassment or shame, he set up a policy similar to
the one Beria had tried to realize some months earlier and which had cost him
his life.^382