The Young Broz 43
IKKI. Damianov (Belov), the arrogant leader of that department, brusquely
declared that nothing could be done: “There are charges against Walter and
until they are cleared I cannot intervene.”^194 Kopinič was not disheartened. He
returned to Dimitrov, trying to convince him to allow Walter to come to Mos-
cow in order to exculpate himself. This time Dimitrov sent him to Božidar
Maslarić (nicknamed Andreev), Manuilskii’s substitute, who knew him well
because they had fought together in Spain. More articulate than Damianov,
he enumerated in detail the accusations leveled against Broz by his adversaries.
First, there was the suspicion that he was, directly or indirectly, in the service
of the Yugoslav police and the Gestapo. Since the Comintern was no longer
financing the CPY ’s press, who was financing it? The guess was that it was
probably the police. This was the only logical answer. Ivo Lola Ribar and Boris
Kidrič were the sons of capitalists, therefore probable agents provocateurs.
Even worse, Ribar’s father had been president of the Yugoslav parliament when
the decree outlawing the CPY was passed, and he was a Freemason. Not to
mention Herta Haas, a German and a Gestapo spy. Such accusations were
enough to put anyone into Lubianka, the NKVD prison in Moscow, if not
before the execution squad. Kopinič, obstinate as he was, managed to pull
through. Maslarić offered him the post of secretary general of the CPY, stress-
ing that “we have faith only in you,” but he declined and convinced him to let
Walter come to Moscow.^195
Back to the Soviet UnionBroz left Paris on 23 August 1938, flying to Stockholm and then to the Soviet
capital, where he arrived the next day after an absence of nearly two years. One
can imagine what his feelings were in view of the fact that between 1936 and
1937 eight hundred of the nine hundred Yugoslav communists living in the
Soviet Union had been arrested together with their families. He felt like the
last of the Mohicans, because it was unclear whether or not the CPY would be
abolished.^196 “What was difficult?” he mused later. “To die in the Soviet Union
under the accusation of being a counterrevolutionary. To die in Yugoslavia was
not difficult. You knew that you would die as a revolutionary.”^197
On 24 August, he was at Comintern headquarters, where he was humiliated
by having to wait for four hours before being allowed to enter the building.^198
He immediately had to defend himself before a commission of five members,
among whom were three hostile Bulgarians who wanted him condemned be-
cause of the failure of the Budva expedition. They maintained that Petko Miletić
should be named secretary general of the CPY and, if this were not feasible,
a certain Captain Dimitrev, a Bulgarian who fought in Spain, should be nomi-
nated as commissar. Walter was to be “liquidated.” Among other things, the