The Later Years 409
From there he traveled to the Soviet Union and then went to Brussels in 1967,
more or less in agreement with the Soviet authorities (who were not orthodox
enough for his tastes) to engage in anti-Tito propaganda with the guest work-
ers in Western Europe.^81
During his conversations with Tito after Khrushchev’s fall, Brezhnev admit-
ted that secret contacts between some émigrés and those circles in Moscow that
were hostile to the Yugoslav regime may have occurred. But he categorically
denied that they were supported by the Soviet authorities: “For us, this does not
exist. Something similar can be speculated only by our enemies.”^82 In reality,
however, even in May 1971 the émigrés could “celebrate” Tito’s birthday in Mos-
cow with two conferences attacking him personally. Consequently, polemics
flared up between Belgrade’s newspaper Politika and the Russian daily, Izvestiia,
accompanied by an official note of protest from the Yugoslav foreign secretary.
The following September, during their meeting in Karadjordjevo, Tito and
Brezhnev discussed the Cominformist machinations and the Soviet leader
assured him again that he did not support hostile activity against Yugoslavia.
In fact, the Moscow government had banished the Cominformists from its
territory but with some advice: “If you wish to do something, do it abroad.”^83
1974: The New Yugoslav Communist PartyOn 6 April 1974, at a time when Tito was loudly proclaiming that the Soviet
Union did not present any danger to Yugoslavia and was protesting against
Western attempts to use it as a scarecrow, a congress of a “renewed” Yugoslav
Communist Party was convened in the Montenegrin port of Bar. It came in
response to Kardelj’s constitution, which provoked a wave of criticism in Mos-
cow because it “lacked not just Marxist analysis, but even the most elementary
class approach.”^84 Among the organizers of the meeting, which happened while
the preparations for the Tenth Congress were underway, was Dušan Brkić, a
former prisoner on Goli Otok who had apparently learned no lessons from his
time there. Under his chairmanship, the participants voted on a program and
a statute diametrically opposed to the policy implemented by Tito and his
comrades from 1948 onward. They declared the “disbandment of the LCY ” and
proclaimed the constitution of a “new CPY ” that would restore the Stalinist
regime and recognize the Brezhnev “doctrine” of “limited sovereignty” in order
to align the country with the Soviet Union. Tito was dismissed from his office
as secretary general and replaced by the old Cominformist, Mile Perović, all in
absentia and purely theoretically, of course.^85
The Yugoslav authorities certainly did not learn about the clandestine con-
gress by chance, since they had their own informant in the “Kiev group.” When
it was clear that the material needed for the Bar gathering would be smuggled