Come Back, Little Tito

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For Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the heretic who got away with it, this was a moment to savor. Splendidly adorned--braided cap, sky-blue military blouse with ribbons, red-striped slacks--he drove out to Belgrade's Zemun Airport and waited. Seven years before, Russia's masters had kicked Yugoslavia out of the Cominform, reviled Tito as "traitor," "fascist," "spy and murderer," urged his people to revolt against him, harassed his borders, shut off his country's trade. Dictator Tito, an old hand at intrigue himself, survived it all. Now, unrepentant and unintimidated, master in his own land, Tito sat in his open Rolls-Royce and puffed on his long cigarette holder as a silver two-engined Ilyushin-14, bearing Russia's top leaders, touched down and taxied to the newly asphalted ramp. TIME'S Jim Bell reported:

"Precisely on schedule at 5 p.m., the door of the plane opened, and there, half as large as life, stood stubby little Nikita Khrushchev, his arms up in a gesture which seemed to say, 'Here I am, you lucky people.' As Tito, enormously dignified, walked up the red ceremonial carpet to meet him, Khrushchev happily skipped down the plane ramp, looking for all the world like a samovar salesman arriving at Minsk for the annual convention. He was all smiles and handshakes and pats on the back, and seemed to do a happy little dance. Beaming, Khrushchev said to Tito: 'Everything's going to be all right.'

"Tito seemed relieved when he could turn to shake hands with the less-animated Premier Bulganin. Wistful and out of place in his distinctly subordinate role, goateed Nikolai Bulganin looked like a professor of geology who has suddenly been swept up in a reception for Danny Kaye. Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier, who followed him from the plane, was dark and sour, an Armenian rug merchant unsure of his sucker. First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, pale and drawn, stayed behind.

"Khrushchev shook hands with the Soviet embassy staff in the manner of a candidate on tour, then proceeded to inspect the honor guard. Bulganin trailed along behind. Khrushchev, scarcely looking at Tito's soldiers, hopped along beside his slightly taller host, talking with his hands, anxious to waste not a moment in selling his samovar. Tito frowned."

Bear Trap. Tito led Khrushchev to a microphone to make the customarily innocuous speech of arriving dignitaries. Tito had made clear in advance that he was receiving the Russians only as chief of government, not as a straying disciple prepared to discuss his reconversion and return to the Kremlin's true faith and stifling embrace. But Khrushchev had ready an ideological bear trap.

Pulling a manuscript from one pocket and glasses from another, he planted his feet widely and started reading in his loud, cocky miner's voice. "Dear Comrade Tito . . . and leaders of the Yugoslav Communist League," he bawled. Instantly, Tito's handsome features froze.

Khrushchev baited his trap with the most abject apology any Communist leader ever made. Tito's ejection from the Cominform was a terrible mistake, said Khrushchev. "We sincerely regret what happened, and resolutely reject the things which occurred, one after the other, during that period." He produced a scapegoat. The trouble, he said, all came because of "the provocative role which was played in the relations between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. by enemies of the people--Beria, Abakumov and others--who have been unmasked." (Beria and Abakumov, tidily removed by execution, are always useful on such occasions.)

Nikita Khrushchev continued: "We have thoroughly studied the materials on which the serious charges and insults directed against the leaders of Yugoslavia were based. The facts testify that these materials were fabricated by enemies of the people. For our part, we are ready to do everything necessary to eliminate all obstacles."

Silent Rejoinder. At this point in his incredible performance, Khrushchev glanced at Tito to see how he was reacting. Tito stood with his hand thrust into his blouse in a Napoleonic pose, the corners of his mouth turned slightly downward, his eyes nearly closed.

On the face of it, this seemed to be a promise that all was forgiven, come home at once. If Tito was the devoted Communist he professed to be, what more could he ask? Khrushchev gilded his poisoned apple. The Soviet bases its relations, he went on reading, on "principles of equality, nonintervention and respect for sovereignty. The desire of Yugoslavia to maintain relations with all states both of the West and in the East has met with complete understanding on our part." Then Khrushchev returned to the theme his "Comrade", opening had set. "We consider it desirable to have mutual confidence established between our parties which base their activities on teachings of Marxism-Leninism," and companionably proposed that the two make common cause "to throw off the capitalistic yoke."

Khrushchev stepped back expectantly, offered Tito the microphone for reply. Tito, poker-faced, impassively motioned Khrushchev toward the waiting cars. Obviously startled, Khrushchev docilely acquiesced. Through crowds chanting: "Ti-to. Tito, Ti-to," the cavalcade of Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs, Packards, Buicks and Mercedes Benzes sped to a constrained tea at Tito's White Palace.

Obviously, in his first hour on Yugoslav soil, Khrushchev had badly overreached himself. Anxious lest any Westerners get the wrong ideas. Yugoslav officials spent the next two days buttonholing newsmen to announce how outraged, how embarrassed, how annoyed they were at what Khrushchev proposed.

"We have no desire for ideological ties with the Soviet Union any more than we want ideological ties with the U.S.," said one official. Nor was any Yugoslav pleased by Khrushchev's transparent ruse of making Beria the scapegoat. Said a Tito official: "You can't treat history like a detective story. It's an insult to the Yugoslav people to think they would swallow this."

Another snapped: it is "ridiculous"' to suggest that Beria could deceive the whole Soviet government and party, which has, "just as our party in Yugoslavia, an extremely thorough checkup apparatus."

Bewildered Pupil. The truth was that the Kremlin, with or without lying help from the late Beria, had known exactly what Tito was up to all these years. Born in Yugoslavia, trained in Yugoslavia, admired and hated in Yugoslavia, Tito owed the Russians little except a postgraduate schooling in Marxist dogma and Communist deceit. He had run his own war with little help or advice; he planned to run his own peace. He did.

When, after World War II, the Russians sent their hordes of advisers, Tito at first took the advice and found nothing incompatible between his patriotism and Soviet tutelage. He bristled when the Russians bristled, denounced the "imperialist warmongers," swaggered truculently over Trieste, shot down two U.S. planes for "violations" of his borders, energetically supported the Communist guerrillas in Greece. When some Split fishermen welcomed a U.S. ship bringing part of the $293 million of UNRRA aid contributed by the U.S., Tito police jailed them, explaining, "You can salute a Soviet ship but no other."

Who, Me? But when the Russians began to complain with more and more insistence that he was not listening to their advice, Tito professed bewilderment. In the exchange of letters with Stalin and Molotov in 1948 which led to his excommunication from the Communist ecclesia, there was an air of incredulity that the Russians really did not mean what they said about the independent nature of each people's democracy. Answering a Soviet charge that its Soviet military advisers were treated with "hostility," Tito protested: "We are amazed, we cannot understand, and we are deeply hurt." Wouldn't the Soviet government tell the faithful Yugoslavs "the real cause" of its displeasure?

The answer, signed by Stalin and Molotov, was an eight-page letter delivered by Russian Ambassador Lavrentiev in person. Tito received the letter, laid it on his desk and read it standing up. It began: "We consider your answer untruthful and therefore wholly unsatisfactory." Said Tito, recalling the moment recently: "Scanning the opening line, I felt as if a thunderbolt had struck me. Lavrentiev peered at me coolly to see what my reaction would be. I never winced; I contained myself as much as I possibly could. Lavrentiev could no longer endure it, and before I had scanned the whole letter, he asked, 'When shall we have an answer?' I replied tersely, 'We shall consider the letter.' The meeting was at an end." Tito knew that he had one power advantage that no other satellite had: a big Yugoslav army loyal to him, not Moscow.

At first Tito tried to mollify Big Brother. In a series of exchanges, their difference became clear: "Even though we love the U.S.S.R., we cannot love our own country any less," he wrote Stalin and Molotov. "We feel it is incorrect for the Soviet Intelligence Service to recruit our citizens in our country for their service [and] to have cast doubts on our leaders . . ."

Retorted the Kremlin: "Your tone can only be described as unboundedly pretentious. Yugoslav comrades do not accept criticism in Marxist manner but in a bourgeois manner . . ."

In short, Tito, deviationist, thought he knew better than the Kremlin. There was only one possible answer. A few weeks later, Tito and his Yugoslavs were expelled from the Cominform on the charge of "nationalism" and associated crimes; Yugoslav Communists were ordered to "change the Communist leaders."

The Kremlin waited. Always before, when they denounced a man, the comrades cut him down. Nothing happened. Among the top Yugoslav leaders, all of whom had fought through the war with Tito in Yugoslavia's cruel mountains, the Kremlin had been unable to plant anyone high enough to conduct its purge.

The Years Since. Tito also took a dictator's precautions. He rounded up and put in prison more than 11,000 persons suspected of favoring the Cominform's policy--where they joined the Split fishermen. For months Tito scuffed a servile shoe outside the Cominform's closed door, angrily brushed off any suggestion of help from the West, and pleaded to be taken back. The Kremlin responded by cutting off Yugoslavia's trade with one satellite after another. In September 1949, it declared Yugoslavia "a foe and an enemy of the Soviet Union," and ended its mutual-defense agreement. Beginning with Rajk in Hungary, the Communists staged a series of satellite trials and purges--Kostov in Bulgaria, Slansky in Czechoslovakia, Gomulka in Poland--in which Communists accused of nationalistic ambitions were murdered for the crime of Titoism.

Tito began gingerly approaches to the West. "We are not going to make any concessions with regard to our foreign policy," he cried. "Anyone who does not wish to trade with us on such a basis should not trade with us, because we should prefer to go naked . . ."

But soon he was accepting loans from the U.S. and Britain, making trade agreements with Italy, getting loans from the Export-Import Bank. After the drought of 1950, Tito brusquely applied for a U.S. emergency grant and got $69 million. But Yugoslavia, Tito boasted, "stayed faithful to our principles . . . giving no concessions, making no withdrawal from our Marxist line."

A year later, Tito had discovered Russia's "aggressive designs" and asked for military aid. Yugoslavs began calling Stalin "the black beast." But Tito still jealously guarded his dictator's independence. "There can be no question of a mutual-aid agreement," he explained, "but only of an agreement in which the U.S. will give arms to Yugoslavia. The U.S. has been getting something for several years--Yugoslav resistance to the Soviet bloc. Therefore the question 'What will the U.S. get?' should not be asked."

In the years since, recognizing a major power split in the Communist front, the U.S. has poured into Yugoslavia about $500 million worth of economic aid, nearly $1 billion worth of military aid -- from Sherman tanks to F-84 Thunderjets; several hundred Yugoslav officers have been trained in the U.S. and on U.S. bases in Europe. The result is that Yugoslavia's army of some 250,000 well-trained men is the biggest in Europe outside the Iron Curtain. In 1953 Tito drew even closer to the West by signing a regional pact of mutual assistance with NATO partners Greece and Turkey, but he has carefully shied away from NATO.

Caught up in one domestic crisis after another in a nation historically hobbled by poverty, Tito tempered his doctrinaire Marxism with pragmatism. Explained one official: "If it works, it's socialism, if it doesn't, we throw it out." "What they have in Russia is not Communism at all," pontificated Tito. "The great Lenin would turn in his grave ..." Result: the Yugoslav standard of living, though lower than that of any other country in Europe outside the Iron Curtain, is higher than that of any country inside it. His Communism and his cops are not popular, but his defiance of Russia is.

Tito and his party still run a monolithic state; he is clearly the ruthless boss. The same men sit as the Federal Council and as the party's Central Committee. In fact, confessed one, the only noticeable difference is that when they sit as a party committee, they call Tito "Old One," and are served coffee and candies; when they sit as the government, they call Tito "Mr. President," and get coffee but no candy.

The Gay Divorce. After the first painful moments of separation, Tito began to enjoy his state of Kremlin outlawry and his gay life as the world's most eligible political bachelor. He has been courted by the West, wooed by the East, consulted by the neutralists. The peasant's son has been wined by queens, dined by prime ministers, taken tiger-hunting by a maharaja. His uniforms have grown gaudier and bigger over the paunch, his laugh more easy. Anthony Eden, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson have called on him. He has called on Queen Elizabeth, presented a keg of slivovitz to Winston Churchill. He has exchanged toasts with the Queen of Greece, been feted at the Dolmabaghche palace in Ankara, which he had last visited as an agent of international Communism traveling with a forged passport. He has traveled to India to see Nehru, to Burma to confer with U Nu; he has talked with Egypt's Nasser aboard a yacht.

When, after Stalin's death, even Moscow began to make friendly grunts in his direction, Tito complacently answered: "Russia smiled on us, but they will not blind us with the smiles. I personally can never believe 100% in the Soviet Union." As the Russians slacked off their invective and talked of resuming relations, Tito told Western newsmen: "We want normal relations but, naturally, there need not be friendly relations."

In February, Foreign Minister Molotov spoke kindly of the country he had so virulently reviled, and hinted that the time had come for better relations. Tito, annoyed by Molotov's suggestion that it was Tito who had erred and repented, answered waspishly that Molotov's speech "does not correspond to the truth." Swallowing his pride, Molotov persisted. As one Yugoslav said in amazement, "Tito spit in Molotov's face. But Molotov wiped the spit off his face and said, 'Gee, it's raining!' " Tito refused an invitation to come to Moscow; the Russians retorted in effect: we will come see you.

The Grim Silence. "Independence is rewarded and heresy condoned," said Secretary of State Dulles last week. "This is bound to have a profound effect throughout the Soviet zone." The Russians, by so humbling themselves, were taking a big risk. But so was Tito. If the Russians, in view of the whole world, managed to smear up Tito's claim of independence, they would, in effect, have neutralized him.

Their bumbling arrival spoiled all that for the Kremlin. Day after Khrushchev's airport blunder, formal conferences began in Belgrade's ornate Guards' Club. Tito quickly made his personal displeasure obvious. He frowned, barked at the protocol officer to ask where his seat was, then plunked himself down at the long green table without even gesturing to Khrushchev or seeing that he was seated.

Tito got right down to business. He had understood that no party matters were to be discussed, he said; the only possible discussion was on interstate matters.

Khrushchev insisted that normalization between the parties must take place before relations between the governments.

The next session was even more frigid. Over Russian protests, the Yugoslavs admitted newsmen briefly to the conference room before the second session started. Reported Correspondent Bell: "The Russians were seated glumly at the table not even talking among themselves. When the newsreel lights went on, Tito snuffed out his cigarette and leaned across the table to make jokes. The Russians got the point and suddenly broke out in great smiles. Jokes were told, and there were a few belly laughs. But as soon as the newsreel lights snapped off, the Russians turned off the grins and settled back in grim silence."

After two days of silent thought and, of course, conference at the Yugoslav summit, the official newspaper Borba finally produced a reply to Khrushchev's speech. Yugoslavia was not joining Khrushchev's "crusade for the overthrow of capitalism," Borba indicated, but would stick to a policy of "active cooperation" with all countries, "regardless of differences in their internal systems . . . Our policy is a consistent policy against joining any ideological bloc." This is not neutrality but "active coexistence," added the Sunday Informative. "Passive neutrality means to acknowledge helplessness."

As the formal conferences broke up, the Russians were invited to Tito's Adriatic island of Brioni to be his guests in his glass-fronted villa overhanging the sea. Tito seemed a man who had things under control. Khrushchev had retreated by offering a concluding toast to the success of negotiations between the Yugoslav and Soviet "states"--no parties mentioned. Tito herded his distinguished guests around with an air of authority. When photographers asked if he could get one group closer together, Tito gestured at the Russian Premier, uttered one brusque word: "Bulganin." Bulganin came closer.

Posing with Khrushchev, Tito remarked genially in English to the Western and Yugoslav photographers: "This is coex istence." Khrushchev smiled. Turning to the photographers, Tito asked in part ing, "Are you satisfied, gentlemen?" One photographer yelled: "Yes. Are you?"

Always cocky, at week's end Yugoslav Communists proclaimed that they found Khrushchev an ersatz Stalin, headlong, a little stupid, uninformed about the out side world. After a special performance of the ballet one night, the crowd cheered Tito and greeted Russia's bigwigs in silence. The Russians had the crumpled look of men who had misjudged and knew it.

As for Tito, the worried outcast of yesterday was now feeling his oats. So far, his "active coexistence" was doing well: just look at what important guests he had lured to his small country--the Premier and the party boss of Russia. And this week, Burma's U Nu is coming; after him, India's Nehru. What more could a peasant's son ask?

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