Conversations with Stalin Read online

  Even if we had not been idle we still would have wished to see Leningrad, the city of the Revolution and the city of many beauties. I approached Zhdanov concerning this, and he graciously agreed. But I also detected a certain reserve. The meeting lasted barely ten minutes. Nevertheless, he did not fail to ask me what I thought of Dimitrov’s statement in Pravda, on the occasion of his visit to Bucharest, in which he urged the co-ordination of economic plans and the creation of a customs union between Bulgaria and Rumania. I replied that I did not like the statement, for it treated Bulgarian-Rumanian relations in isolation and was premature. Neither was Zhdanov satisfied with the statement, though he did not bring out his reasons; they came out soon after and will be presented later at great length.

  Somewhere at about the same time there arrived in Moscow a representative of Yugoslavia’s foreign trade, Bogdan Crnobrnja, and inasmuch as he could not overcome some basic obstacles with the Soviet agencies, he importuned me to go with him on a visit to Mikoyan, the Minister of Foreign Trade.

  Mikoyan received us coldly, betraying impatience. Among our requests was one that the Soviets deliver to us the railroad cars from their zones of occupation which they had already promised us—inasmuch as many of these cars had been taken out of Yugoslavia, and the Russians could not use them because their track gauge was broader than ours.

  “And how do you mean that we give them to you—under what conditions, at what price?” Mikoyan asked coldly.

  I replied, “That you give them to us as gifts!”

  He replied curtly, “I am not in the business of giving gifts, but trade.”

  In vain, too, were the efforts Crnobrnja and I made to change the agreement on the sale of Soviet films, which was unfair and damaging to Yugoslavia. Excusing himself on the grounds that the other East European countries might consider it a precedent, Mikoyan refused even to take up the question. He was quite different, however, when the subject turned to Yugoslav copper. He offered to pay in any currency or in kind, in advance, and in any amounts.

  Thus we got nowhere with him except to prolong sterile and endless negotiations. It was obvious—the wheels of the Soviet machine had ground to a halt as far as Yugoslavia was concerned.

  However, the trip to Leningrad brought some relief and refreshment.

  Until my visit to Leningrad I would not have believed that anything could outdo the efforts of the natives of rebel regions and the Partisans of Yugoslavia in sacrifice and heroism. But Leningrad surpassed the reality of the Yugoslav revolution, if not in heroism then certainly in collective sacrifice. In that city of millions, cut off from the rear, without fuel or food, under the constant pounding of heavy artillery and planes, about three hundred thousand people died of hunger and cold during the winter of 1941–1942. Men were reduced to cannibalism, but there was no idea of surrendering. Yet that is only the general picture. Only after we came into contact with the realities—with concrete cases of sacrifice and heroism and with the living men who were involved or were their witness—did we feel the grandeur of the epic of Leningrad and the strength of what human beings—the Russian people—are capable of when the foundations of their spiritual, political, and general existence are endangered.

  Our encounter with Leningrad’s officials added human warmth to our admiration. They were all, to a man, simple, educated, hard-working people who had taken on their shoulders and still bore in their hearts the tragic greatness of the city. But they lived lonely lives and were glad to meet men from another clime and culture. We got along with them easily and quickly—as men who had experienced a similar fate. Though it never occurred to us to complain about the Soviet leaders, still we observed that these men approached the life of their city and citizens—that most cultured and most industrialized center in the vast Russian land—in a simpler and more human way than was the case in Moscow.

  It seemed to me that I could very quickly arrive at a common political language with these people simply by employing the language of humanity. Indeed, I was not surprised to hear two years later that these people, too, had failed to escape the totalitarian millstone just because they dared also to be men.

  In this radiant, yet sad, Leningrad episode of ours there was also an unpleasant blot—our escort, Lesakov. Even at that time one encountered officials in the Soviet Union who had emerged from the lower strata of the working masses. One could tell—by his inadequate literacy and rusticity—that Lesakov had recently been a worker. These deficiencies would not have been vices had he not tried to conceal them and had he not made a conspicuous display of pretensions beyond his capacities. In actual fact, he had not made his way up by dint of his own forces and abilities, but he had been dragged to the top and planted in the apparatus of the Central Committee, in which he was charged with Yugoslav affairs. He was a cross between an intelligence agent and a Party official. Cast in the role of the Party man and “Partyness,” he collected in crude fashion information about the Yugoslav Party and its leaders.

  Slight as he was, with a knotty face and short yellow teeth, a tie that hung crookedly and a shirt that kept spilling out of his pants, always afraid he might look “uncultured,” Lesakov would have been pleasant as an ordinary workingman had he not been charged with such a great duty and hence kept provoking us—mostly me—into unpleasant discussions. He boasted of how “Comrade Zhdanov purged all the Jews from the apparatus of the Central Committee!”—and yet he simultaneously lauded the Hungarian Politburo, which at that time consisted almost entirely of Jewish émigrés, which must have suggested to me the idea that, despite its covert anti-Semitism, the Soviet Government found it convenient to have Jews at the top in Hungary because they were rootless and thus all the more dependent upon its will.

  I had already heard and observed that when they want to get rid of someone in the Soviet Union but lack convincing reasons for this, they usually spread some infamy about him through agents of the Secret Police. So it was that Lesakov told me “in confidence” that Marshal Zhukov had been ousted for looting jewelry in Berlin—“You know, Comrade Stalin cannot endure immorality!”—and about the Assistant Chief of the General Staff, General Antonov: “Imagine, he was exposed as being of Jewish origin!”

  It was obvious, too, that Lesakov was, despite the limitations of his intelligence, well informed concerning affairs in the Yugoslav Central Committee and the methods of its work. “In no Party in Eastern Europe,” said he, “is there such a closely watched foursome as yours.”

  He did not mention the names of that foursome, but I knew without asking that he was referring to Tito, Kardelj, Ranković, and myself. And I asked myself and concluded: Is not that foursome also one of those “peanuts” in the eyes of the Soviet leadership?

  7

  After days of idleness, Koča Popović decided to return to our country, leaving Todorović in Moscow to attend the outcome, that is, to wait for the Soviet leadership to take pity and to resume talks. I would have gone off with Popović had not a message arrived from Belgrade announcing the arrival of Kardelj and Bakarić, and thus I had to join them in conversations with the Soviet Government concerning “the complications that had set in.”

  Kardelj and Bakarić arrived on Sunday, February 8, 1948. The Soviet Government had in fact invited Tito, but in Belgrade they made the excuse that Tito was not feeling well—even from this, one could see the mutual distrust—so Kardelj came in his stead. Invited simultaneously was a delegation from the Bulgarian Government, that is, the Central Committee, about which the ubiquitous Lesakov informed us, purposely underlining that the “top brass” had arrived from Bulgaria.

  Prior to that, on January 29, Pravda had disavowed Dimitrov and disassociated itself from his “problematic and fantastic federations and confederations” and customs unions. This was an admonition and a foretaste of the tangible measures and stiffer course that the Soviet Government would undertake.

  Kardelj and Bakarić were lodged in a villa near Moscow, and so I moved in with them. That same night, whil
e Kardelj’s wife was sleeping, and Kardelj was lying next to her, I sat down on the bed next to him and, as softly as I could, informed him of my impressions from my stay in Moscow and of my contacts with the Soviet leaders. They boiled down to the conclusion that we could not count on any serious help but had to rely on our resources, for the Soviet Government was carrying on its own policy of subordination, trying to force Yugoslavia down to the level of the occupied East European countries.

  Kardelj told me, then or just after his arrival, that the direct cause of the dispute with Moscow was the agreement between the Yugoslav and Albanian Governments regarding the entry of two Yugoslav divisions into Albania. The divisions were already being formed, while a regiment of the Yugoslav fighter Air Force was already in Albania when Moscow vigorously protested, refusing to accept as a reason that the Yugoslav divisions were needed to defend Albania from possible attack by the Greek “monarcho-fascists.” In his dispatch to Belgrade, Molotov threatened an open breach.

  The day after Kardelj’s arrival, while promenading in the park under the surveillance of Soviet agents on whose faces we read fury at our having a conference that they could not overhear, Kardelj and I continued our conversation, in Bakarć’s presence. It was broader and more consequential in its analyses, and, despite insignificant differences in our conclusions, completely unanimous. As usual, I was the more severe and peremptory one.

  No one informed us of anything and there was not a sign from the Soviet side until the next evening, February 10, when they picked us up in a car at nine o’clock and drove us to the Kremlin, to Stalin’s office. There we waited fifteen minutes or so for the Bulgars—Dimitrov, Kolarov, and Kostov—and as soon as they arrived, we were all immediately taken in to Stalin. We were seated so that to the right of Stalin, who was at the head, sat the Soviet representatives—Molotov, Zhdanov, Malenkov, Suslov, Zorin; to the left were the Bulgars—Kolarov, Dimitrov, Kostov; then the Yugoslav representatives—Kardelj, myself, Bakarić.

  At the time, I submitted a written report of that meeting to the Yugoslav Central Committee, but inasmuch as I am not able to get at it today, I shall rely on my memory and on what has already been published about the meeting.

  The first to be recognized was Molotov, who, with customary terseness, brought out that serious differences had appeared between the Soviet Government on the one hand and the Yugoslav and Bulgarian Governments on the other hand, which was “impermissible from both the Party and the political point of view.”

  As examples of these differences he cited the fact that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria had signed a treaty of alliance not only without the knowledge of, but contrary to, the views of the Soviet Government, which held that Bulgaria should not sign any political treaties before signing a peace treaty.

  Molotov wished to dwell rather longer on Dimitrov’s statement in Bucharest concerning the creation of an East European Federation, in which Greece was included, and a customs union and co-ordination of economic plans between Rumania and Bulgaria. However, Stalin cut him short. “Comrade Dimitrov gets too carried away at press conferences—doesn’t watch what he’s saying. And everything he says, that Tito says, is taken abroad to be with our knowledge. For example, the Poles have been visiting here. I ask them: What do you think of Dimitrov’s statement? They say: A good thing. And I tell them that it isn’t a good thing. Then they reply that they, too, think it isn’t a good thing—if that is the opinion of the Soviet Government. For they thought that Dimitrov had issued that statement with the knowledge and concurrence of the Soviet Government, and so they approved of it. Dimitrov later tried to amend that statement through the Bulgarian telegraph agency, but he didn’t help matters at all. Moreover, he cited how Austria-Hungary had in its day obstructed a customs union between Bulgaria and Serbia, which naturally prompts the conclusion: the Germans were in the way earlier, now it is the Russians. There, that’s what is going on!”

  Molotov continued that the Bulgarian Government was going ahead with establishing a federation with Rumania without even consulting the Soviet Government about this.

  Dimitrov attempted to temper the affair, emphasizing that he had spoken of federation only in general terms.

  But Stalin interrupted him: “No, you agreed on a customs union, on the co-ordination of economic plans.”

  Molotov followed up Stalin: “. . . and what is a customs union and co-ordination of economics but the creation of a state?”

  At that moment the substance of the meeting came drastically into view, though no one expressed it, namely: no relations among the “people’s democracies” were permissible beyond the interests and without the approval of the Soviet Government. It became evident that to the Soviet leaders, with their great-power mentality (which found expression in the concept of the Soviet Union as “the leading force of socialism”), and especially with their cognizance that the Red Army had liberated Rumania and Bulgaria, Dimitrov’s statements and Yugoslavia’s lack of discipline and willfulness were not only heresy but the denial of the Soviet Union’s “sacred” rights.

  Dimitrov tried to explain, to justify himself, but Stalin kept interrupting without letting him finish. This was now the real Stalin. His wit now turned into malicious crudity, and his exclusiveness into intolerance. Still he kept restraining himself and succeeded in not going berserk. Without losing even for a moment his feel for the actual state of affairs, he upbraided the Bulgars and bitterly reproached them, for he knew they would submit to him, but in fact he had his sights fixed on the Yugoslavs—according to the folk saying: She scolds her daughter in order to reproach her daughter-in-law.

  Supported by Kardelj, Dimitrov pointed out that Yugoslavia and Bulgaria had not announced a signed treaty at Bled but only a statement that an agreement had been reached leading to a treaty.

  “Yes, but you didn’t consult with us!” Stalin shouted. “We learn about your doings in the newspapers! You chatter like women from the housetops whatever occurs to you, and then the newspapermen grab hold of it!”

  Dimitrov continued, obliquely justifying his position on the customs union with Rumania, “Bulgaria is in such economic difficulties that without co-operation with other countries it cannot develop. As far as my statement at the press conference is concerned, it is true that I was carried away.”

  Stalin interrupted him, “You wanted to shine with originality! It was completely wrong, for such a federation is inconceivable. What historic ties are there between Bulgaria and Rumania? None! And we need not speak of Bulgaria and, let us say, Hungary or Poland.”

  Dimitrov remonstrated, “There are essentially no differences between the foreign policies of Bulgaria and the Soviet Union.”

  Stalin, decidedly and firmly: “There are serious differences. Why hide it? It was Lenin’s practice always to recognize errors and to remove them as quickly as possible.”

  Dimitrov, placatingly, almost submissively: “True, we erred. But through errors we are learning our way in foreign politics.”

  Stalin, harshly and tauntingly: “Learning! You have been in politics fifty years—and now you are correcting errors! Your trouble is not errors, but a stand different from ours.”

  I glanced sidelong at Dimitrov. His ears were red, and big red blotches cropped up on his face covering his spots of eczema. His sparse hair straggled and hung in lifeless strands over his wrinkled neck. I felt sorry for him. The lion of the Leipzig Trials, who had defied Göring and fascism from his trap at the time of their greatest ascendancy, now looked dejected and dispirited.

  Stalin went on: “A customs union, a federation between Rumania and Bulgaria—this is nonsense! A federation between Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania is another matter. Here there exist historic and other ties. This is the federation that should be created, and the sooner, the better. Yes, the sooner, the better—right away, if possible, tomorrow! Yes, tomorrow, if possible! Agree on it immediately.”

  Someone, I think it was Kardelj, observed that a Yugoslav-Albanian federation was
already in the making.

  But Stalin stressed, “No, first a federation between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and then both with Albania.”

  And then he added, “We think that a federation ought to be formed between Rumania and Hungary, and also Poland and Czechoslovakia.”

  The discussion calmed down for a moment.

  Stalin did not develop this question of federation further. He did repeat later, in the form of a directive, that a federation between Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania should immediately be formed. But from his stated position and from vague allusions by Soviet diplomats at the time, it seemed that the Soviet leaders were also toying with the thought of reorganizing the Soviet Union by joining to it the “people’s democracies”—the Ukraine with Hungary and Rumania, and Byelorussia with Poland and Czechoslovakia, while the Balkan states were to be joined with Russia! However obscure and hypothetical all these plans may have been, one thing is certain: Stalin sought solutions and forms for the East European countries that would solidify and secure Moscow’s domination and hegemony for a long time to come.

  Just as it seemed that the question of a customs union, that is, the Bulgarian-Rumanian agreement, had been settled, old Kolarov, as though recalling something important, began to expound. “I cannot see where Comrade Dimitrov erred, for we previously sent a draft of the treaty with Rumania to the Soviet Government and the Soviet Government made no comment regarding the customs union except with regard to the definition of the aggressor.”