414 The Later Years
cause, a similar split happened with Washington. The US ambassador, Law-
rence Silberman, reacted to the behavior of the Belgrade government harshly,
which angered Tito, who accused him of meddling in Yugoslavia’s domestic
affairs. The diplomat was proclaimed persona non grata and put in a sort of
quarantine, boycotted by everybody who was anybody in town, which prompted
him to resign. Silberman took revenge by publishing a caustic article in the
magazine Foreign Policy about Yugoslavia swinging between East and West and
comparing the country to “the Fiddler on the Roof.”^110
At the end of the sixties Yugoslavia had very few political prisoners. After
the purge of the liberals in Croatia and Serbia, the situation changed dramati-
cally, compelling Tito to admit during a visit to Sweden in 1976 that there were
probably more “politicals” in his cells than in any other East European country
except the Soviet Union. He tried to recover by clumsily—and falsely—assert-
ing that those in prison were all Soviet sympathizers.^111 The secretary of the
Swedish section of Amnesty International observed that the number was about
a thousand, if not more. This public accusation struck the marshal profoundly,
especially as it came on the eve of a conference on security and cooperation in
Europe, planned for June 1976 in Belgrade as a supplement to the Helsinki
talks.^112 This important event was meant to consolidate the détente reached a
year earlier in the Finnish capital and to be a model for further such meetings.
The fact that the conference was impending moved Tito to proclaim a rather
generous amnesty. Aware of just how much the human rights violation had
harmed Yugoslavia’s prestige, he proposed striking so-called “verbal delict” from
the penal code. It seems that a special session of the CC of the LCY was planned
to implement this, but it never took place.^113
The Final Crisis in Relations with MoscowIn Tito’s final years, Yugoslavia had two faces: on the one hand it wanted
to demonstrate its democratic “respectability” to the West, but on the other it
wanted the East to see its socialist orthodoxy and its will to independence so it
could escape from the embrace of the Soviet bear. This was exemplified by an
incident in mid-November 1976, during Brezhnev’s official visit to Belgrade. At
the start of the conversation, the secretary general of the CPSU said that he
would not speak in the presence of Stane Dolanc, since he had “sold himself to
the imperialists.” Tito reacted violently. He ripped the cigarette from Brezhnev’s
mouth, crushed it on the carpet and yelled: “You ox! We are not in Czechoslo-
vakia here, and I am not called Dubček!”^114 The conversation went on, but the
atmosphere was frosty. Brezhnev asked again for naval bases on the Dalmatian
coast, military overflight rights, and closer political and economic relations