18 The Young Broz
and mutual hostility. He told them without mincing words that no real com-
munist, of those he had met in or outside of prison, had any faith in the Central
Committee of the CPY. Gorkić, the secretary general of the party, twirled his
red moustache. “It did not become him,” Tito later said, remembering the epi-
sode, “since it only set out his pallor.” He assaulted Broz with vulgar insults.^57
In spite of this less-than-friendly reception, on 1 August 1934 the “comrades”
brought him into the Politburo, the party’s executive body. At its Fourth Con-
ference, organized in Ljubljana the following December, he was elected to the
Central Committee (CC), although the reverse procedure would have been
more logical.^58 He was sponsored by a young Croatian communist, Ivan Krajačić,
nicknamed Stevo, with whom Broz would remain closely linked for life.^59 At
the time, the leader of the party was Josip Čižinski, known under the pseud-
onym of Milan Gorkić, or Sommer, a thirty-year-old man of Slovak-Polish
origin, born in Bosnia. He knew very little of the Yugoslav reality, since he had
left the country in 1922 at the age of nineteen for Moscow, where he had worked
in different Comintern offices. Being well connected with the NKVD (Narodnyi
kommissariat vnutrennykh del; People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) and
those in “high Soviet circles” closed to ordinary mortals, he married a woman
from this privileged class, the director of Moscow’s famous Central Park of
Culture and Leisure (later Gorky Park). Inevitably, Gorkić became a senior
bureaucrat, being appointed secretary general of the CPY in 1932. Infatuated
with himself and convinced that the communist movement in Yugoslavia was
a “mess,” he decided it needed a new leader able to impose order. He found
himself at the head of a party with only three thousand enlisted members, the
majority of whom were in prison or in exile. Among them there was no lack of
provocateurs, spies, and police agents. This transformed the CPY into a viper’s
nest, where everybody suspected everybody else and denounced each other to
the Cominform, knowing that in Moscow ears were attuned to every malevo-
lent insinuation. Not surprisingly in the Comintern a joke circulated that two
Yugoslavs represent three fractions, whose adherents hate and attack each other
so much that they forget about the class enemy.^60
Broz, aware that the internal life of the party had to be healed, wrote a report
to the CC on 2 August 1934, stressing the need to overcome abstract ideological
quarrels, strengthen ties with the working masses, and move on to action. This
was the first document he signed with “Tito,” a name not unusual in his native
region.^61 Broz did not wish to stay in Vienna but hoped to move to Moscow,
enroll in Lenin University, and meet up with his wife and son Žarko, born in
1924, who had fled to the Soviet Union after his arrest. Gorkić, however, had
other plans for him. Two weeks after the report, he sent Broz home with the
task of organizing the Party Congress for the region of Slovenia and the Fourth