58 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
properly—the last congress had been held in Dresden eleven years earlier—he
started with a series of provincial conferences, which took place between May
and September 1940. The general consensus of the fifteen hundred delegates
was that the Party had grown ideologically and organizationally in the past few
months. It gained the trust of broad sectors of the popular masses, becoming an
important political force. It had 6,500 regular members, to whom an additional
17,800 members of SKOJ should be added. “This number,” said Tito later,
“would grow from month to month.”^39
Although the courier who brought the IKKI’s message tried to convince
Broz not to convene the Party Congress, maintaining that under the Cvetković-
Maček police regime, it would be impossible to organize an assembly of more
than one hundred people, he did not give up the idea. The only concession he
was ready to make was that he did not call it a “congress” but rather a “con-
ference.” Between 19 and 23 October 1940, the Fifth “National” Conference of
the CPY was convened at Dubrava, a suburb of Zagreb, where Tito hoped to
pass unobserved. Money was not a problem, since the party had at its disposal
some gold inherited from the independent trade unions.^40 It was necessary,
however, to find a house large enough, with easy access in and out, and where a
meeting hall could be fashioned by pulling down some walls. In addition, chairs
and benches had to be bought, as well as equipment for the kitchen, food had
to be procured and a second bathroom had to be installed. All this with the
utmost discretion, so as not to alarm the neighbors. Even the delegates would
not know the location—they were to come at night. Just one spy would have
been enough to destroy the entire leadership of the CPY.^41 When it was sus-
pected that a local woman might inform the police about the gathering, Broz
did not hesitate: “I ordered Končar [leader of the Croatian CP] to kill her.
That’s what had to be done.”^42 The danger did not come only from the police:
the followers of Petko Miletić planned an attack against the conference. They
failed because one of their gang informed the leadership of the CPY in time.^43
The Conference adopted the Comintern’s interpretation of the war as a con-
flict between two imperialist blocs and decided to oppose it, influencing the
masses “from below” in order to organize them into a Popular Front.^44 In his
introduction, Broz condemned “the pseudo-democracies of the English and
French imperialists,” stressing at the same time that “the Fascist powers were
destroying the independence of one country after the other, and that Yugosla-
via was increasingly threatened in a direct way.”^45 It was necessary, in his opin-
ion, to exploit the contemporary crises in order to bring about the revolution:
“The imperialist bourgeoisie wish to end the war with a ‘peace’ founded on a