The Presidential Years 311
[to subject Kardelj to strict surveillance], which is why we spent the rest of the
day pleasurably. I was happy.”^242 Happy because he had calmed Tito, or because
he thought that he had rid himself of a dangerous rival?
American diplomats and secret services noticed the tensions within the
Yugoslav leadership, and also the fact that in 1956 Kardelj had affirmed that
some Yugoslav politicians (i.e., Tito) had gone too far in their uncritical sym-
pathies for the Soviet bloc. They said that Kardelj, backed by the Slovenian and
part of the Croatian CC, had tried to oppose the extent of the rapprochement
with Moscow by stressing that the most developed republics in Yugoslavia
would not accept such a policy.^243 The disagreement was nurtured by Ranković’s
agents, who told Tito what his principal collaborators said about him in pri-
vate—Kardelj had been bugged since 1947—and this contributed to the cool
relations between them. Contact became more and more sporadic culminating
in an eight month period in the early sixties in which they did not speak to
one another.^244
At the end of 1956, the relations between the two saw a temporary improve-
ment because of the Hungarian crisis, which showed how right Kardelj had
been in counseling prudence in dealing with the Russians. Nevertheless, the rift
soon reappeared. In 1957, for instance, Kardelj highlighted the ethnic question,
which Tito considered obsolete, predicting the imminent formation of the
“Yugoslav nation,” something that never really occurred.^245 After Djilas’s fall,
Kardelj became preoccupied with the centralizing trend in the country, and
worked to oppose this, although in an “Aesopian” way, as the East Europeans
say, only revealing his thoughts in an oblique manner. He republished an essay
that had appeared before the war under the pseudonym Sperans under the title
“The Development of the Slovene National Question,” and added a long pref-
ace in which he affirmed that socialist Yugoslavia could not and would not
become a melting pot of the American or Soviet kind. In his opinion, Yugo-
slavia could be acceptable for the Slovenes “today and in this moment,” but
not necessarily in the future, when he imagined that the state might split into
new political bodies (which, of course, it did). In a discussion with Dobrica
Ćosić, he even said that the Yugoslav idea of a common nation could not be
an ethnic concept; “It can only be a socio-political category, which means a
socialist one.”^246
Because of Kardelj’s role in the party, nobody had the guts to contradict him,
especially because Tito had decided not to react. Actually, Tito had wanted to
prohibit the publication of the essay, but on the advice of Ranković, he did
not.^247 The essay was received, however, in a hostile silence that meant that the
national struggle would be deferred for some years. It became manifest in 1961,
when in the Zagreb magazine Telegram Dobrica Ćosić called attention to the