Conversations with Stalin (17 page)

However, I regarded as most important of all the atmosphere that permeated above and beyond the words during the course of the entire six hours of that dinner. Behind what was said, something more important was noticeable—something that ought to have been spoken, but that no one could or dared bring up. The forced conversation and the choice of topics made this something seem quite real, almost perceptible to the senses. I was even inwardly sure of its content: it was criticism of Tito and of the Yugoslav Central Committee. In that situation I would have regarded such criticism as tantamount to a recruiting of me on the part of the Soviet Government. Zhdanov was particularly energetic, not in any concrete, tangible way, but by injecting a certain cordiality, even intimacy into his conversation with me. Beria fixed me with his clouded green, gaping eyes while a self-conscious irony almost dripped down his square flabby mouth. Over them all stood Stalin—attentive, exceptionally moderate, and cold.

The mute gaps between topics became ever longer and the tension grew, both in and around me. I quickly worked out a strategy of resistance. Apparently it had been half consciously in the making inside of me even earlier. I would simply point out that I perceived no differences between the Yugoslav and Soviet leaders, that their aims were the same, and the like. A dumb, stubborn resistance welled inside of me, and though I had never before felt any inner vacillation, still I knew, knowing myself, that my defensive posture might easily turn into an offensive one if Stalin and the rest forced me into the moral dilemma of choosing between them and my conscience—or, under the circumstances, between their Party and mine, between Yugoslavia and the USSR. In order to prepare the ground, I referred to Tito and to my Central Committee several times in passing, but in a way that would not lead my interlocutors to launch into what they intended.

Stalin's attempt to introduce personal, intimate elements was in vain. Recalling his invitation in 1946, made via Tito, he asked me: “And why did you not come to the Crimea? Why did you refuse my invitation?”

I expected that question, and yet I was rather unpleasantly surprised that Stalin had not forgotten about it. I explained: “I waited for an invitation through the Soviet Embassy. I felt awkward about forcing myself and annoying you.”

“Nonsense, no annoyance at all. You just didn't wish to come!” Stalin tested me.

But I drew back into myself—into chill reserve and silence.

And so nothing happened. Stalin and his group of cold, calculating conspirators—for I felt them to be so—certainly detected my resistance. This is just what I wanted. I had eluded them, and they did not dare provoke that resistance. They probably thought they had avoided a premature and thus erroneous step, but I became aware of that underhanded game and felt inside myself an inner, hitherto unknown, strength which was capable of rejecting even that by which I lived.

Stalin ended the dinner by raising a toast to Lenin's memory: “Let us drink to the memory of Vladimir Ilyich, our leader, our teacher—our all!”

We all stood and drank in mute solemnity, which, in our drunkenness we soon forgot, but Stalin continued to bear an earnest, grave, and even somber expression.

We left the table, but before we began to disperse, Stalin turned on a huge automatic record player. He even tried to dance, in the style of his homeland. One could see that he was not without a sense of rhythm. However, he soon stopped, with the resigned explanation, “Age has crept up on me and I am already an old man!”

But his associates—or, better said, courtiers—began to assure him, “No, no, nonsense. You look fine. You're holding up marvelously. Yes, indeed, for your age . . .”

Then Stalin turned on a record on which the coloratura warbling of a singer was accompanied by the yowling and barking of dogs. He laughed with an exaggerated, immoderate mirth, but on detecting incomprehension and displeasure on my face, he explained, almost as though to excuse himself, “Well, still it's clever, devilishly clever.”

All the others remained behind, but were already preparing to leave. There was truly nothing more to say after such a long session, at which everything had been discussed except the reason why the dinner had been held.

We waited no more than a day or two before they invited us to the General Staff to present our requests. Earlier, while yet on board the train, I mentioned to Koča Popović and Mijalko Todorović that their requests seemed excessive and unrealistic to me. What I particularly could not get into my head was why the Russians would agree to build up the Yugoslav war industry when they did not wish to help seriously in developing our civilian industry, and it seemed even less likely to me that they would give us a war fleet when they lacked one themselves. The argument that it was all the same whether Yugoslavia or the USSR had a fleet on the Adriatic, since both were parts of a united Communist world, seemed all the more unconvincing to me precisely because of the cracks that were appearing in that very unity, not to speak of Soviet distrust of everything beyond their grasp and their unconcealed concern primarily for the interests of their own state. However, since all these requests had been elaborated and approved in Belgrade, there was nothing left for me but to stand by them.

The building of the General Staff was a pile whose external cheapness and artificiality they had in vain tried to compensate for internally by the lavish use of shrieking drapes and gilt. The meeting was presided over by Bulganin, surrounded by the highest military experts, among whom was also the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Vasilevsky.

First I presented our needs generally, leaving the detailed presentation to Todorović and Popović. The Soviet officials did not commit themselves but they carefully went into our problems and took notes on everything. We left satisfied, convinced that matters had proceeded beyond a standstill and that the real concrete work would soon begin.

It indeed looked like it. Todorović and K. Popović were soon invited to further meetings. But everything came to an abrupt halt, and Soviet officials hinted that ‘‘complications'' had set in and that we would have to wait.

It was clear to us that something was going on between Moscow and Belgrade, though we did not know exactly what, nor can I say that we were surprised. In any case, our critical attitude toward the Soviet reality and Moscow's stand toward Belgrade could only make the postponement of our talks all the more unbearable, especially since we found ourselves without anything to do, forced to kill time in conversation and by attending Moscow's old-fashioned but, as such, unsurpassed theaters.

None of the Soviet citizenry dared to visit us, for although we were from a Communist country, we still belonged to the category of foreigners, with whom citizens of the USSR could not associate, according to the letter of the law. All our contacts were limited to official channels in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the Central Committee. That annoyed and offended us, all the more so since there were no such limitations in Yugoslavia, especially not for the representatives and citizens of the USSR. But this is what prompted us to draw critical conclusions.

Our criticism had not yet reached the point of generalization, but it abounded in examples taken from concrete reality. Vukmanović-Tempo had discovered faults in the army buildings which he did not conceal. In order to lessen our boredom, Koča Popović and I gave up our separate apartments in the Moskva Hotel, but we did not get a joint apartment until an “electrician” had put it in order, which we took to mean the installation of listening devices. Despite the fact that the Moskva was a new hotel and the largest, nothing in it worked as it should—it was cold, the faucets leaked, and the bathtubs, brought from Eastern Germany, could not be used because the drainage of water flooded the floor. The bathroom had no key, which gave Popović an occasion for his sparkling wit: The architect took into account that the key might get lost and he built the toilet near the door so that one could keep the door closed with one's foot.

I frequently recalled with envy my sojourn in the Metropole Hotel in 1944. Everything was old there, but in working order, and the superannuated help spoke English and French and demeaned themselves with grace and precision. But in the Moskva Hotel . . . One day I heard groaning in the bathroom. I came upon two workers there. One of them was repairing some fixtures on the ceiling, and the other was holding him up on his shoulders. “For heaven's sake, Comrades,” said I, “why don't you get a ladder?” The workers complained, “We've asked the management for one lots of times, but no use—we always have a hard time like this.”

Walking about we viewed “beautiful Moscow,” most of which was a big village, neglected and undeveloped. The chauffeur Panov, to whom I had sent a watch as a gift from Yugoslavia and with whom I had established a cordial relationship, found it impossible to believe that there were more cars in New York and Paris, although he did not hide his dissatisfaction with the quality of the new Soviet cars.

In the Kremlin, when we visited the imperial tombs, the girl guide spoke of “our tsars” with nationalist pathos. The superiority of the Russians was vaunted everywhere and assumed grotesque forms.

And so on down the line . . . At every step we discovered till then unnoticed aspects of the Soviet reality: backwardness, primitivism, chauvinism, a big-power complex, although accompanied by heroic and superhuman efforts to outgrow the past and to overtake the natural course of events.

Knowing that in the thick skulls of the Soviet leaders and political officials every least little criticism was transformed into an anti-Soviet attitude, we spontaneously entrenched ourselves in our own circle when in the presence of Russians. Since we were at the same time a political mission, we began to call each other's attention to anything “awkward” in our behavior or speech. This entrenchment began to assume an organized quality. I remember how, aware of the use of listening devices, we began to watch what we were saying in the hotel and in offices, and to turn on radios during conversations.

The Soviet representatives must have taken note of this. The tension and suspicion grew apace.

By that time Lenin's sarcophagus, which had been hidden somewhere in the interior during the war, had been brought back to Red Square. One morning we went to visit it. The visit itself would have had no importance had it, too, not provoked in me, as well as in the rest, a new and hitherto unknown resistance. As we descended slowly into the mausoleum, I saw how simple women in shawls were crossing themselves as though approaching the reliquary of a saint. I, too, was overcome by a feeling of mysticism, something forgotten from a distant youth. Moreover, everything was so arranged as to evoke just such a feeling in a man—the granite blocks, the stiff guards, the invisible source of light over Lenin, and even his body, dried and white as chalk, with little sparse hairs, as though somebody had planted them. Despite my respect for Lenin's genius, it seemed unnatural to me, and above all anti-Materialist and anti-Leninist, this mystical gathering about Lenin's mortal remains.

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.