The Battle Stalin Lost
Dedijer, Vladimir
Few writers have had so notable an opportunity directly to observe major historical events as has Vladimir Dedijer, Director of Information in the Tito government at the time the Yugoslays...
...He had read and underlined every second or third line with a red pencil...
...Various members of the Central Committee joined them—Traiche Kostov, Minche Neychev, Damyanov, Chervenkov...
...Sofia, he thought, would be the best place for the meeting...
...Our whole delegation was on that train: Kardelj, Djilas, Bebler, Veljko Mi&inovid, Milan Bartos, Janez Stanovnik, and others...
...The terrible disease had struck at a certain village, carry ing away a number of souls each day...
...Someone—I no longer remember who —said, "Now I understand how the old * Matija Gubec was the leader of a 15th-century peasant uprising against the feudal lords in Croatia and Slovenia...
...We stood the whole time, and the discussion about the federation was limited to only a few sentences exchanged by Stalin, Dimitrov, and myself...
...I was deeply immersed in them, and my head spun with the horror of it all...
...But it is all in vain, these people of mine will not listen, they simply will not...
...None of the Bulgarians dared go back to the idea of the dualistic federation, and I had no further reason to intervene...
...Dimitrov asked Neychev, who was then Minister of Education, if the university decree was ready...
...After having thus disgraced themselves, they got death sentences for their pains...
...On May 25, Tito's birthday, none of the Soviet or other East European leaders sent Tito the customary good wishes—except Dimitrov, from whom a tele gram arrived with "Fraternal greetings and best wishes for your birthday...
...everything they could lay their hands on...
...Stalin, too, toward the end of World War II and immediately thereafter, applied the same method: divide and conquer...
...They wanted Tito personally to attend...
...We regret profoundly that we believed in the malicious slanders which took these comrades to their martyrdom...
...A few days later Yudin and all the editors left Belgrade...
...No one can make the dead rise again...
...After a decisive battle at Stubica, near Tito's village, Gubec was captured and executed...
...During dinner we talked of all manner of things, even about various foods and beverages...
...He told me that the main thing was for us to stand firm, and the rest would resolve itself...
...From Austria-Hungary to Czarist Russia, the big powers bitterly opposed this policy and did everything they could to disunite the south Slav peoples so that such a federated state would never be formed...
...Few writers have had so notable an opportunity directly to observe major historical events as has Vladimir Dedijer, Director of Information in the Tito government at the time the Yugoslays defied Stalin...
...The Yugoslav argument that the paper was using the letters of Stalin and Molotov for attacks on our Party he described as an "impermissible demand for the editorial board to renounce Stalin...
...Dedijer was a close witness of the first major fissure within the postWorld War II Communist movement: the refusal of the Yugoslav regime to obey Stalin's edicts...
...Stalin, during a visit both delegations paid him at the Kremlin, had supported the Bulgarian thesis of a dualistic federation—a federation in which Bulgaria would not be just one of seven south Slav republics, but one in which all six other republics would make up one unit and Bulgaria the other...
...The Cominform Moscow left open a special radio connection for 23 hours for the reply to this tele gram...
...he must have been pressing very hard...
...He died on July 2, 1949...
...what was wanted was capitulation—confession of guilt...
...In it was a report of the indictment of Laszlo Rajk...
...In The Battle Stalin Lost, Memoirs of Yugoslavia, 1948-1953, copyright © 1970 by Vladimir Dedijer, the author has written his personal account of these events...
...The Central Committee unanimously decided not to go...
...Stalin died in 1953, and in the summer of 1955 Khrushchev and Bulganin arrived in Belgrade to repent of their deeds...
...His discomposure is evident from the fact that the red pencil seems frequently to have broken, leaving only a deep indentation on the paper...
...They stole from each other —wrist watches, wall clocks, and so on...
...Whether it was his initiative will be learned when the relevant documents from Berlin and Moscow are published...
...Pieck would come to Belgrade personally, but his own situation was complicated by his Party's coalition with the social democrats: he might be accused of going to Belgrade in response to directives, Belgrade being the headquarters of the Cominform...
...Their departure was described in a confidential report received by the Yugoslav Central Committee: "The Russian employees literally bought up everything they could in the special diplomats' shops...
...But then came Stalin's letters...
...Marshal Voroshilov had been highly respected by the Yugoslav partisans...
...We have the experience of our comrades across the border...
...Yudin spread rumors that the meeting would be held in the Ukraine and that Stalin would be coming...
...Dimitrov told me he knew about the letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU and that some of the things in it were accurate...
...The books were presented to Pieck at a ceremony in the Yugoslav military mission in East Berlin, also attended by other East German Communists, including Walter Ulbricht...
...After 1945 Tito kept up a close relationship with Pieck...
...But at the end he sided with Yudin, who took the floor once again and concluded by saying loudly, "We are here to pledge our loyalty to Stalin...
...There is ample evidence of this...
...Bitterly, while looking at me, Dimitrov said: There, you see how things are going in this country...
...In 1949, during the trials in Hungary and other East European countries, it was clear that they all followed the same pattern: like the old Bolsheviks at the Russian trials in 1936-38, the accused admitted their "errors," criticized themselves, and confessed to being foreign spies...
...It was a fact that Stalin did his utmost to make Tito and other Yugoslav leaders come to the Cominform meeting...
...But I could not resist looking over his archives from later years after he had been expelled from Russia, especially those of 1936-38...
...Stalin left the room and in a moment returned with a few bottles...
...After Djerdja had done so, Dimitrov said: "On the Macedonian question and on all other questions, before the commission and elsewhere, the Bulgarians must keep in step with the Yugoslays on everything, but a little more quietly, on a slightly lower key, as the prestige and moral right of the Yugoslays justify their pre-eminence, whereas we, as a defeated country, are in a different position...
...When, on his birthday, June 17, 1948, one member of a Yugoslav youth delegation in Sofia greeted Dimitrov and delivered a gift to him from the Yugoslav youth, Dimitrov, visibly excited, embraced him and declared that he was happy to embrace a "representative of the young people living under Tito...
...But when Stalin launched his campaign against Yugoslavia, Voroshilov was sent from one East European country to another to say the cruelest things about Yugoslavia...
...Also waiting for him at the Nis railway station were the bishop and clergy of the city, who came to thank him for the help he had given the Serbian people in the war...
...Forgive me, please...
...And I was tortured by the same thoughts one summer day in 1962 when I was studying the Trotsky papers in the Houghton Library at Harvard University...
...Then he showed Yugov the third one...
...Yugov's smile froze on his face, and I did not laugh at the embarrassing joke...
...He made this very evident both before the eruption of the Moscow-Belgrade conflict and after...
...Although I was then completely under the influence of Stalin's authority and found it highly embarrassing to oppose him, I outlined my differing viewpoint briefly...
...For years I've been telling them not to do things the wrong way...
...One day Pieck sent an urgent message through our military mission that he wanted to meet with Tito immediately...
...He blushed deeply, and I think he could see from my face how embarrassing I found the insult to him...
...In 1923 he had to emigrate to Yugoslavia...
...Dimitrov would have nothing against it, as he too was a good friend of Tito's...
...When Stalin's second letter arrived and the conflict intensified, Dimitrov found an opportunity to demonstrate his sympathies for the Yugoslays...
...What I was looking for was material on his ties, if any, with the Young Bosnians and other secret youth organizations in the years before 1914, when he had spent some time in the Balkans...
...Tito asked me what I thought about going to Bucharest...
...Later, as a high-ranking functionary in the Comintern, Dimitrov helped put relations between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia on firmer foundations...
...He was there when Kirov was killed, and in his book writes of the slaughters which followed when so many lost their lives, including Yugoslav revolutionaries who had fled the terror in their own country...
...It demanded that Yudin publish in the next issue a report on the tremendous response of the Yugoslav people to the convening of the Party's Fifth Congress, and an article on the significance of that congress, written in the spirit of a Borba editorial of June 5. Yudin called together the members of the editorial board, read them our letter, and commented briefly: the Central Committee, he said, should be grateful to the Cominform for having restricted itself to indirect criticism...
...On June 7 the Yugoslav Central Committee inquired of Yudin why his Cominform paper systematically refused to publish news or articles about the development of socialism in Yugoslavia...
...I told him that Yugoslays were well equipped to do so and asked him what they were going to do...
...It was a long time since I had devoured a book as I did Colakovid's, so strongly imbued as it was with a sense of truth and justice...
...There were other Russians at the table: Malenkov, Bulganin, Vyshinski, Beria, and others...
...Expressing his pain at the loss of one of our VLADIMIR DEDIJER most admirable revolutionaries, Rade Vujovid, Colakovic exclaims: "Stalin killed more good Communists than the bourgeoisie of the whole world put together...
...Early in 1948 he sent him four volumes of his collected works, bound in red leather and inscribed, in Russian, "to a great scholar on Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, W. Pieck—Tito...
...on June 20, when the Yugoslav answer was relayed...
...I wondered why Dimitrov did not say something more relevant to Stalin's suggestion...
...The connection was extended to 11 A.M...
...They all ended up with bullets in their heads...
...Stalin asked the Bulgarian minister Yugov if the Bulgarians had good brandy...
...Novotny agreed only to revoke the accusation that Slansky and Klementis were Yugoslav agents...
...11 Marshal Voroshilov Repents M M AN FEELS THE FULL IMPACT of evil when it strikes him personally...
...they are considerably ahead of us already, but not so much that we could not take advantage of their experience, all the more so as other conditions are similar...
...I started to link up the purges in the U.S.S.R., which began in December 1934 with the murder of the old Bolshevik Sergei Mironovich Kirov, secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committtee and member of the Politburo, with the purges in the East European countries in 1949...
...Right up to his death, Soviet agents - completely isolated him among the Bulgarians...
...In 1969 I spent New Year's Day reading materials from the trials of Rajk, Kostov, and the Czechs Slansky and Klementis...
...He told his secretary to call the Bulgarian delegates, then asked Djerdja to repeat his proposal to them...
...At a station near Cherbourg, where we were to embark on the Queen Elizabeth, I got off the boat train to buy a newspaper...
...Some sort of short circuit occurred between them...
...In the meantime Gomulka appealed to the Yugoslays to attend, and proposed that he and Berman, one of the leaders of the Polish Party, come to Belgrade to talk things over...
...Borba and some of our other newspapers hinted that he had been poisoned...
...When he got a clear and unequivocal refusal from the Yugoslav Central Committee, the Russians sent another letter (on May 22) in which, allegedly at the request of the "Czechoslovak and Hungarian comrades," they postponed the Cominform meeting for a month, to late June—a move to gain time...
...For instance, on August 22, 1949, in Budapest: How sad is the fate of the present leaders of Yugoslavia who have fled from the camp of socialism and democracy to the camp of capitalism and reaction...
...When the plague struck his own wife, he fled into the street wailing, "Help, the whole village is dying...
...I have not changed my views that Trotsky's doctrine was very authoritarian: he was the first in Russia to create an efficient state machine, the backbone of the later bureaucracy...
...It was clear that there was to be no discussion of the Yugoslav situation...
...He personally told the Yugoslav representative in East Berlin that in the Comintern before World War II he had been in charge of the Balkans and that it was at his suggestion that Tito had been VLADIMIR DEDIJER sent to Yugoslavia in 1937 as secretary-general of the CPY...
...The methods were the same: interrogation of the accused, their "softening up" before the trial, their "confession" of everything they were supposed to confess...
...Djerdja started talking through an interpreter, but Dimitrov exclaimed, "There is no need for interpreters between Serbs and Bulgarians...
...Trotsky received Pravda regularly, and his copies dealing with the trials and the accusations that he was an imperialist spy caught my eye...
...How could Stalin have fallen so low as to use such base methods, fabricate such monstrous lies...
...Like a well-trained chorus, all the nonYugoslav editors agreed...
...He started telling Dimitrov that at the next elections for the Sobranie some people from the opposition should be elected, and even if there were none, they should have about 20 fascists in the Sobranie as an opposition...
...He also appointed a young Bulgarian to deliver a relay-race baton to Tito in the name of Bulgarian youth...
...They often drew support from the dynastic and other conservative circles in each of the states concerned...
...The Yugoslav letter, in short, was the epitome of nonCommunist and non-Marxist behavior...
...Stalin then rose from the table saying that as a matter of fact he had some Bulgarian brandy, which made the Bulgarian delegates, especially Yugov, very happy...
...when he came he was met in Nis by Serbian Communists...
...It was not until after his demise in January 1968 that the rehabilitation process got under way— only to be interrupted by the Soviet invasion in August...
...Dimitrov was seriously ill and the proStalinists surrounding him took advantage of this...
...A hero of the Russian Revolution and civil war, his name was even woven into a song from the villages of Montenegro sung when fateful battles were being fought on the Eastern Front: Three marshals On three fronts All three sworn To strangle capitalists Voroshilov in the north Destroys Hitler's bands...
...But in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria as well, there were strong forces headed by Tito and Dimitrov who wanted to create a south Slav federation...
...Here and there a contrary opinion could be heard to the effect that "the gravity of the unfounded charges, even the most horrible and most monstrous accusations against us, could not justify our absenting ourselves," that "a plan was in the making which we would not perhaps perceive clearly from our vantage point...
...The people bewailed their fate to the priest, who told them, "People are dying here and there, but the village remains...
...Two weeks earlier, in Hungary, Rakosi had declared that a Supreme Court investigation had shown the accusations against Rajk to be "fabricated...
...IN ANY CASE, of all the statesmen in the East European countries, Georgi Dimitrov was the most outspoken in opposition to Stalin's hegemonistic methods, as applied not only to Yugoslavia but to his own homeland as well...
...At dinner the old Marshal wept: "What a dunce I am...
...An unpleasant smile was probably playing on my lips, for Stalin roughly said to Dimitrov, "You don't understand anything...
...I Why Didn't Tito Go to Bucharest...
...and he pointed to me...
...Another message came to Belgrade: Pieck realized Tito was busy, but it was imperative for them to meet, at least on the Bulgarian-Yugoslav boundary...
...This problem, which had been haunting me, came to mind again on May 19, 1948, when a youthful-looking fellow by the name of Meshetov, from the Central Committee of the CPSU, came to Belgrade bearing a letter signed by Suslov demanding that a delegation of the Yugoslav Central Committee attend the next Cominform meeting...
...The Yugoslav reply explained that Tito was not refusing to meet Pieck, but stressed that Pieck should come to Belgrade...
...Neychev replied that it wasn't, that he was having trouble with certain formulations, and so on...
...They want to copy Soviet decrees and achievements, and naturally these things cannot be transferred to our country because the difference between us is too great, even if it were otherwise possible...
...Josip Djerdja, the Yugoslav representative in the Security Council Inquiry Commission for the Balkans, went to visit Dimitrov in Sofia while the commission was there...
...But these opinions could not prevail...
...Once again the Yugoslays set forth the reasons why they would not take part in the Bucharest meeting, stressing that discussion on a basis of equality would be impossible, and that the entire meeting was at variance with the spirit of the agreement and the principle of voluntariness on which the Cominform was based...
...For the indictments authored by Vyshinski in 1936-38 clearly served as a model for the trials in Budapest, Sofia, and Prague in 1949-52...
...In 1938, when the Yugoslav Party was about to be banned by Moscow, Dimitrov and Pieck advised against it, and Pieck had protected Tito from direct persecution in the Russian capital...
...Stalin, however, did not find this to his liking...
...He showed us one, then another...
...And so Pieck's initiative fell through...
...Then he gripped me by the arm and said, `Be firm...
...The majority was opposed...
...THE BATTLE STALIN LOST III Dimitrov and Stalin E E VER SINCE THE STRUGGLE for liberation and self-determination began in the modern history of the south Slays, the most progressive elements in the south Slav countries have dreamed of a federation incorporating all the Slav peoples in this part of Europe...
...Waiting at the station to greet him (on instructions from the Central Committee) was Milovan Djilas: I found Dimitrov in a parlor car at the Top6ider railway station in Belgrade...
...We started to talk about the article...
...Just then the Bosnian writer Rodoljub Colakovid, an old revolutionary, sent me the second volume of his book The Story of a Generation, covering the period from early 1933 to the end of 1936, during which Colakovid spent much time in the Soviet Union...
...A year later Tito went to Moscow, and Voroshilov was among the first to greet him:"In greeting you, Comrade Tito, the Soviet people greet friendly Yugoslavia and the peoples of your country, to whom the working people of the U.S.S.R...
...In Czechoslovakia rehabilitations were slow in coming...
...History must have its say on the matter...
...It was something new to me to see a man as important as Dimitrov treated that way...
...But Pieck continued to press for the meeting...
...What stupidities I had to mouth at Stalin's orders...
...On June 19 a telegram arrived as follows: To the Central Committee of the CPY: The Communist Information Bureau, convened to discuss the situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, invites representatives of the Central Committee to participate in the work of the Cominform...
...And when the gallows were being prepared in Bucharest, when Tito was getting urgent summonses from Moscow, Dimitrov again did not fail to support us...
...Stalin repeated this three times, but Dimitrov kept on saying that Bulgaria had a Fatherland Front congress, probably meaning that an opposition was therefore unnecessary...
...Only with the period of rehabilitation after Stalin's death did we begin to learn more about this ghastly period...
...I have been persuaded of this on several occasions, one of them my trip to attend the U.N...
...In case of your concurrence, the Cominform will expect your representatives not later than June 21 in Bucharest where they should report to Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej at the Central Committee of the Rumanian Workers' Party for instructions on how to reach the place where the Cominform will sit in session...
...Two days later Mosa Pijade and I went to see Tito...
...they were not Bulgarian...
...A letter which Mosa Pijade wrote me about his meetings with Stalin showed this clearly: I came into contact with Stalin only twice, and that within a span of three days in January 1945, when I was in Moscow as the head of the Yugoslav delegation preparing, together with the Bulgarian delegation, the final text of a treaty on Yugoslav-Bulgarian federation...
...Was it in the theological THE BATTLE STALIN LOST seminary that Stalin had learned that heretics must be forced to disavow formally and publicly their sacrilegious thoughts before giving up their souls, or was this some sinister remnant of Byzantine civilization, where the emperor had been the repository of secular power and the sole true interpreter and defender of the faith...
...Tito's best friends among European Communist leaders were first Dimitrov and then Wilhelm Pieck...
...Rajk's solemn public rehabilitation took place on October 7, when the victims were buried with ceremonies in the presence of Hungarian dignitaries— a strange bit of hypocrisy...
...These traitors to socialism are restoring the capitalist system in their country, liquidating the democratic achievements of the Yugoslav people, and introducing bloody fascist terror...
...Openly and honestly, Colakovid squares accounts with Stalinism, its murder of the human soul, its slaughter of the human body...
...We print below three sections of the book with the kind permission of Viking Press, which will be publish ing it in early 1971...
...We expect an urgent reply through Filipov— Moscow...
...session in New York in 1949...
...If anyone can get along without them, we can...
...THE BATTLE STALIN LOST Even after the first hostile letters were exchanged between Moscow and Belgrade, Dimitrov continued to support the Yugoslav Central Committee...
...WHY DID STALIN, and Stalinism as a system, not only demand death for heretics but also insist on forcing the rebel to undergo self-criticism or (better still) to kill his own conscience...
...Deputy Premier Antal Apro spoke: Never have we had a more tragic duty than this one, as we rehabilitate our dead comrades whom we cannot resurrect...
...Discussions began in the Central Committee the next day as to whether a delegation should go...
...How he loved him, how he loved Russia, and how he admired the Russians' great effort to put an end to their historical backwardness, foster industrialization, and raise human relationships to a higher level...
...According to some sources, Stalin had Kirov killed so as to create the pogrom-like atmosphere needed for executing his infernal plan of murdering revolutionaries in the U.S.S.R...
...Dimitrov turned and saw he meant me...
...Tito replied the same day, saying the pressure of business prevented him from leaving Belgrade...
...Back then, in the spring of 1948, I could not answer the question why Stalin demanded that the heretics kill their own consciences before being physically liquidated...
...The host evidently thought it would be a bit much to repeat the drinking party of the night before...
...The only persons in the car were Dimitrov, myself, and another Bulgarian whose name I cannot divulge for obvious reasons...
...Leaving the bottles on the table, Stalin drew his chair up to Dimitrov, who was sitting on my right...
...the label was Bulgarian, and Yugov melted with satisfaction —but only briefly, for Stalin asked, "Is it VLADIMIR DEDIJER really Bulgarian or did you steal it from Yugoslavia...
...Traiche Kostov was rehabilitated on April 11, 1956, when Todor Zhivkov, first secretary of the Communist party of Bulgaria, stated at a meeting of Sofia Party members that the accusations against Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav leaders made at Kostov's trial had been unfounded...
...But Stalin's purges also destroyed many lives they did not kill outright...
...Later I felt even more embarrassed when Stalin insulted Dimitrov...
...I don't know why Stalin referred to me several times that evening as Metternich, and then a few times as Talleyrand...
...Pijade referred to the tragic fate of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party, headed by Kosijer, which had been invited to a "comradely consultation" in Moscow in 1937...
...are bound by firm and strong friendship...
...All those to blame for their deaths will be held responsible for their misdeeds...
...They even packed up things that did not belong to the editorial offices (rugs, telephones, etc...
...Stalin had still not given up hope that the Yugoslays would come to the Cominform meeting...
...On April 19, 1948, he passed through Belgrade on his way to Prague...
...Look at that one there, he understands...
...He said nothing to explain the allusion and it was not clear to me, as we had spoken of nothing else until then except the few sentences about the federation with Bulgaria...
...How ashamed I am...
...This was a consequence of the dinner that had been held the previous evening for our economic delegation, headed by Andrija Hebrang, at which they had drunk from normal glasses with disastrous results...
...At the second dinner two days later (at which we were served, among other things, an enormous frozen Siberian fish) we drank wine from liqueur glasses—a good thing in view of the Russian habit of giving one toast after another...
...Never again will such a grisly thing be allowed to happen...
...Dimitrov received him cordially...
...Although I had not been a Party member during the Moscow trials, I could not help linking up the truth about Stalinism in 1935-38 with the truth in 1949, when Stalin "started his mass export of gallows," as Mo"sa Pijade put it in one of his articles...
...The only exception was the Italian representative, who even stressed how grateful the Italian Party was to the Yugoslav Party and how both had solved many grave problems in agreement...
...No calculation has yet been made of how many people were killed in the purges in Eastern Europe, or how many were cast into prisons and camps between 1948 and 1953...
...Our first visit had been a courtesy visit, and I think it did not last more than a quarter of an hour...
...When we went to Stalin's for dinner two days later, he brought up the matter again, but now took the view that Bulgaria should be one of seven federal units...
...Even during World War I, Georgi Dimitrov, as a socialist deputy in the Sobranie, protested against the savagery of the Bulgarian soldiers in occupied Serbia—particularly in Toplica, where tens of thousands were put to death after the uprising of 1916...
...Pieck stuck to his guns, saying he could not, for the reasons given...
...I remembered a most instructive folk tale about a priest and the plague...
...After the Cominform resolution Dimitrov was silent for a long time, but on December 25, at the Fifth Congress of the Bulgarian Party, he inserted a few sentences against the Yugoslays in his remarks...
...In his book The Life of Josip Broz, Vilko Vinterhalter has described how various high-ranking Soviet functionaries repented what they had said and done, at Stalin's orders, against Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1953...
...In Czechoslovakia the number of arrested ran into tens of thousands...
...How warmhearted were his descriptions of meetings with the Russian man in the street...
...I replied: "The BishopGovernor Juraj Draskovic has prepared the stake and the iron crown, but this time Matija Gubec * will not appear...
...A few months later, he was taken to Russia for medical treatment, although the medical services of his own country were excellent...
...THE BATTLE STALIN LOST Bolsheviks must have felt during the purge trials in 1936-38...
...But that summer day in the Houghton Library I grasped the full weight of Stalin's crimes against the old guard of Bolsheviks and Trotsky himself, who was tracked down in Mexico in 1940 and slain its cold blood...
...Some of the older comrades recalled that the youthful-looking Meshetov had participated in the liquidation of Yugoslav Communists in Moscow in 1937-38: this probably did not bode well for us at the Cominform meeting...
...What happened meanwhile in the editorial offices of For Lasting Peace, For People's Democracy convinced those still undecided of the futility of attending the Cominform meeting...
...Djerdja presented Dimitrov with Tito's idea that the Yugoslav and Bulgarian delegations should adopt a uniform position on the Macedonian question before the Inquiry Commission, and Dimitrov agreed without hesitation...
...en masse...
Vol. 17 • November 1970 • No. 6
