Tito and His Comrades

The Postwar Period 227

and their “friendly” pats on the back were of no avail: “Be careful, keep your
eyes open, they can even kill you there.”^394
Going to Belgrade, Khrushchev ventured to a country outside the Musco-
vite orbit for the first time, and meeting Western diplomats and journalists who
were merciless in describing his clumsiness and that of his escorts, and their
pale blue suits, poorly tailored and rumpled as soon as they were worn.^395 Even
if he were not fully aware of it, with that journey he began to demolish Stalin’s
myth, completely dismantling the “cult of personality” at the Twentieth Con-
gress of CPSU the following February. “For you, it was easy to be victorious
(in the conflict with Stalin),” he told Tito, in a moment of sincerity. “You had
at your disposal a state and forty divisions. If I had had even one battalion,
I would have rebelled against him much earlier than 1948.”^396
The “pilgrimage to Canossa”—as the New York Times labeled that peniten-
tial journey, recalling the 1077 trip of Emperor Henry IV to the Tuscan castle
where he was absolved by Pope Gregory VII, who had excommunicated him—
was not a complete success. In fact, Khrushchev did not succeed in convincing
Tito and his comrades to return to the fold, despite a meaningful admonition:
“If the bourgeoisie were able to settle accounts with the USSR... it would
also quickly settle them with Yugoslavia.”^397 The Yugoslavs were aware of this.
But they were ready to collaborate with the Soviet Union only as equals, to
which the so-called Belgrade Declaration, signed on 2 June 1955 by the two
delegations and bound to be a kind of Magna Carta of their future relations,
bore witness.^398

Self-Management

Even before this happened, the leaders of the CPY had worked out a socialist
doctrine that, from Moscow’s point of view, was wrong. Party ideologues in the
Kremlin muttered that “they like to introduce themselves as ‘theoreticians,’
who are discovering ‘new,’ ‘specific,’ ‘autonomous’ ways of constructing a demo-
cratic Yugoslavia, and boasting that they were accelerating the development
of Marxism-Leninism.”^399 If, in the first postwar years, the most learned of
Tito’s comrades felt they were called on to interpret Marxism-Leninism cre-
atively, even if they had to be prudent because of Stalin’s supreme authority,
after the expulsion from the Cominform they hesitated no longer. During 1949
and 1950 the idea of workers’ councils and self-management was born, based on
Marx’s Das Kapital and the work of the French utopian socialists, who were the
first to develop the doctrine of “free producers,” but also on the basis of Lenin’s
“Soviets,” the councils organized at the time of the October Revolution as
political and governmental bodies.^400 Djilas recalled in his memoirs: “The orig-
inal idea of self-management was mine.... I thought that the system should be