The Young Broz 45
But his tribulations were not yet over. In autumn 1938 he was asked, together
with Vladimir Čopić and Kamilo Horvatin, to edit the Serbo-Croatian transla-
tion of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) recently
published under Stalin’s name. That meant that every word was sacred. This
“brilliant synthesis,” so it was said, had been written by the “universal genius.”^207
Before the work was finished, on 3 November 1938, NKVD agents arrested
Čopić. “They took him away,” Walter was told by the cleaning woman of the
Hotel Lux, where both were staying, “during the night.” Čopić’s important role
during the Spanish Civil War at the head of the Anglo-American Abraham
Lincoln brigade was of no importance. Kamilo Horvatin, accused of Trotsky-
ism, also soon fell victim to the Stalinist purges. Since Walter was not willing to
testify against him before the commission investigating the case, stating that in
good conscience he could not say something he did not know, he was once more
in trouble. This became even worse when the Short Course was published.^208
Marić, Kusovac, and their friends organized a new attack against him. In a series
of letters sent to the IKKI, they accused Walter of having introduced Trotskyist
formulations into the fourth chapter, which was dedicated to dialectic mate-
rialism, committing lèse-majesté against Stalin himself. They were joined by
Dragan Müller, a Jew from Osijek, known in Moscow as Ozren, who was em-
ployed at the Innostranaia kniga (foreign book) publishing house. Because of
those denunciations, Walter was once more hauled before a vigilance commis-
sion and managed to save his life a second time thanks again to Kopinič, who
demonstrated the correctness of his editing, and thus his innocence.^209 Alek-
sandar Ranković was right when he later said: “If there had been no Kopinič,
there would have been no Tito.”^210
To celebrate, Walter used the money he got from publishing the History
to buy a ring with diamonds and an opal, which he greatly treasured. Even this
threatened to ruin him, because a spy accused him of having bourgeois tastes.
Was the accuser the “young Russian girl” with whom he lived in Moscow in
1938 and who wrote—as Kopinič says—reports about him every day?^211
Important elections were held in Yugoslavia in the autumn of 1938. They were
won by the prime minister, Milan Stojadinović, but only thanks to ballot rig-
ging. It was clear that his regime would not last for long. Walter wanted to
return home as soon as possible, considering that “the situation was vitally
important for our country, and that everything should be done to achieve the
victory of democratic forces.”^212 But he was not permitted to leave. It was not
until 26 December 1938, when he had refuted all the accusations that had
poured in from Paris, Sremska Mitrovica, and from the Comintern itself, that