World War Two and the Partisan Struggle 53
involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and above all Stalin’s terror with its
farcical trials and Siberian gulags. The chief critic was Miroslav Krleža, nick-
named Fritz, the most famous writer in Croatia at the time, who knew a great
deal about the Stalinist purges since he was acquainted with one of the “liqui-
dators.” When they met in Zagreb they conversed until dawn, although what
they discussed is something that Krleža never told anyone. He said only that he
had never heard a more demonic tale.^9
Broz tried to overcome the so-called “conflict on the literary left.” Before his
departure for Moscow in August 1939, he met Krleža in an inn on the edge of
Zagreb and tried to convince him that the party’s authority should not be
undermined. His interlocutor observed, during their discussion, the arrival of
a highly suspicious group. “Now I had my first chance to see Tito in action,”
Krleža later said. “He is seated calmly and looks to the entrance, where sev-
eral small steps lead to the garden. From his pocket, he takes his gun, puts it on
the bench and says: ‘In any case, I will resist. I cannot do otherwise, but you,
jump over the fence and try to flee.’ He gave me advice, which way I should go.
In cold blood.”^10
But Miroslav Krleža and the intellectuals associated with his magazine Pečat
(The seal) were not as easy to influence as the students in Belgrade. Consider-
ing the difficult international situation created by Hitler’s aggressive policy, he
was convinced that it was not wise to insist on a sterile radicalism. “He did not
believe in the victory of the revolution,” Tito explained later, “because he kept
in mind the relationship of material forces. I said to him: ‘It is true, what you
are saying, but what is missing is the moral factor. The will and the conscious-
ness of victory.”^11
The following autumn, when in Moscow, Broz tried more than once to con-
vince Krleža and his friends to change their minds, but without success. In a
report about the situation in Yugoslavia, written in September 1939, he observed,
more in sorrow than in anger, that the “Trotskyists” active in the literary field
were confusing the intelligentsia with their revisionism, and that the party was
strenuously attempting to oppose them.^12 This policy was approved by the
Comintern’s leadership, which endorsed Broz’s work in a session on 23 Novem-
ber.^13 Not everyone in that organization was appreciative, and the IKKI’s approval
did not stop them from plotting against him. Broz, who had come down with
the flu, was unable to leave Moscow until 26 November 1939. (Many of his
comrades in Yugoslavia already feared he was behind the bars of the NKVD).^14
On the eve of his departure his old chum Karaivanov counseled him not to
return home by train via Prague, because of a possible assassination attempt,
but to go via Turkey. Broz went to the railway station, boarded the train for
Prague, descended by the opposite door and embarked on the train for Odessa.