22 The Young Broz
memoirs of Ruth von Mayenburg, the wife of the Austrian communist, Ernst
Fischer, about her stay at the Hotel Lux. “Tito moved along the long corridors
like an invisible mouse. None of the neighbors paid attention to the silent
comrade, who exchanged a word with hardly anybody, and went his own way.
The Yugoslavs were in a conspiratorial world unto themselves, one that rarely
allowed the foreign comrades to glance inside; even the Balkan section of the
Comintern building, on the Mokhovaia, worked behind closed doors.”^83
Broz arrived in Moscow only three months after the assassination of Sergei
M. Kirov (1 December 1934), leader of the Leningrad Communist Party, which
offered Stalin a pretext for his purges of all possible “conspirators,” especially
the old Bolsheviks. It is not clear whether he was as naïve as his younger com-
rades in Yugoslavia who, from their domestic safety, believed every word prof-
fered against these “traitors” by Andrei Vyshinskii, general prosecutor at the
Moscow show trials, and considered everybody who dared to doubt a “class
enemy” and a Trotskyist.^84 In any case, Walter managed to survive, although
some of the things he wrote about his comrades were not in tune with infor-
mation in possession of the NKVD (the secret police department that had
absorbed the OGPU).^85 In the shadow of Stalin’s terror Broz learned a great
deal, especially about the mechanisms of revolution and power. In accepting
Stalin’s brutal practices (arbitrary arrests, torture, deportations, slave labor, mur-
der) as a necessary tool for achieving the new social order, Broz compromised
himself morally, at the same time drawing up the main guidelines of his life
to come. This is how Milovan Djilas described Walter’s metamorphosis at the
beginning of his stay in Moscow: “The revolutionary Josip Broz... understood
at that time that the institutions and revolutionary methods, although insepa-
rable from the ideology, are even more important than the revolution.”^86 His
modest intellectual background kept Tito free from doubts, from skepticism,
and from the need to confront problems critically. Savka Dabčević-Kučar, a
prominent Croat communist and later Tito’s opponent, even affirmed in her
memoirs that he abandoned traditional values such as honesty, fidelity, friend-
ship, and fair play, considering them just bourgeois “tinsel,” in the name of
communist morale, in its Machiavellian sense, in which the end justifies the
means.^87 It is only fair, however, to counter this severe judgment with Tito’s
declaration, published in the monthly Komunist on 15 April 1959, that through
the Comintern Stalin had done enormous damage to communism and “de-
stroyed the revolutionary physiognomy of the Communists and created a kind
of Communist-weakling.”^88 The testimony of Edvard Kardelj, who in the mid-
thirties collaborated with Walter in Moscow, is also pertinent, as it shows that
the latter was not completely in tune with the Stalinist regime. According to