The Young Broz 29
Adolf Muck-Löwy, a candidate for the Politburo, and that the enrolment
would be carried out from Belgrade by a Jewish woman from Latvia, Brana
Voss-Nenad. Her way of campaigning differed completely from that of Walter.
Whereas he insisted that the expedition be organized in strict secrecy, Brana
Voss wanted to “publicize it as much as possible.” The people she contacted
were not those whom Walter trusted, provoking a furious quarrel between him
and Gorkić.^114
The task was difficult because police from half of Europe, including Yugo-
slavia, were trying to prevent the departure of volunteers for Spain. Gorkić did
what he had promised: early in March 1937, he sent a steamship, La Corse, from
Marseilles to the Yugoslav coast. It was to carry the enthusiastic volunteers
who wanted to combat Fascism. Gorkić was certain that this would be a note-
worthy action in the international endeavor to help Republican Spain, and
that with it he would show the Comintern how efficient the CPY was under
his leadership. However, the expedition was doomed from the start. Since the
organizers had talked too much, the police were alerted and near Budva they
stopped the ship, which had been rented for the huge sum of 750,000 francs.
Nearly five hundred young men, mostly peasants, who had started the journey
in an atmosphere of euphoria, ended up in jail. It was the largest arrest of left-
wing sympathizers carried out by the Belgrade government to date. To make
the catastrophe worse, Muck, who was arrested together with Brana Voss, con-
fessed to the police everything he knew about the CPY, as Djilas said, “without
even being touched.” Thank God, he did not know anything about the new
organization of the party.^115 In Moscow, Walter, together with Gorkić, was
considered responsible for the failure of the expedition, and an avalanche of
accusations threatened his life. Tito later scornfully related that it was Gorkić
who enrolled Muck in the party leadership: “Imagine, he made a man who
owned a coffeehouse in Budva a member of the CC, a man who was completely
unknown to the party and had no qualifications: he was a petit bourgeois.”^116
Broz returned from the Soviet Union exhausted and restless. It was obvious,
however, that he was relieved to be able to work underground once more in the
“militarist and monarchic-fascist” Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, in spite of having
experienced Stalin’s terror in Moscow, where every night one could expect the
“fatal knock on the door,”^117 he continued to believe in the Soviet brand of
socialism, in the necessity of a merciless war against the “class enemy,” consid-
ering it indispensable in destroying the capitalist world. His attitude was dic-
tated, of course, by these beliefs, which he clung to with the fanaticism similar
to that of a religious sect, but also by his personal ambitions for a career in an