Word: cominform
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...have no bearing on the real nature of the rift. Tito's failure to collectivize the peasants, for instance, is matched by the Polish, Czech and Rumanian Communist parties, none of which have collectivization programs. Yet these parties seem to be in good odor with Zhdanov and his Cominform...
Last week the barkers were having a picnic. It was as if Barnum & Bailey had come to the Balkans. Under the big Red top the Soviet Bear was calling the acts. In the spotlight the Cominform, nine-headed dog of the Kremlin, was beating up on Tito, Yugoslavia's own ringmaster. And the Communist puppets clapped like...
...Teacher of Love." The surface facts were easy enough to establish. Tito, in the Cominform's book of charges, was guilty of putting Yugoslavia (and himself) ahead of the Soviet Union (and Joseph Stalin). The Cominform did not really expect Tito to recant; they had tried this for weeks without success. Now they were putting it up to his party comrades in Yugoslavia to oust him and to "raise from below a new internationalist leadership...
This seemed to worry Tito not at all, nor his efficient security police. He let others do his talking. And while he kept cool-and safe-on an inaccessible island in the Adriatic, the Yugoslav comrades talked big and fast. They flatly rejected the Cominform charges as "slanders and fabrications," and countercharged conspiracy "to impair the prestige of the [Yugoslav] Communist Party." Fifteen thousand of them sent off a telegram to Comrade Stalin asking him to remove the "false accusations." The telegram was tied with baby-blue ribbons: "Long live our teacher of love toward the Soviet Union, Comrade Tito...
Tito might save himself by recanting and promising to be a good boy henceforth. Otherwise Yugoslav Communists had stern Cominform instructions to "change the Communist leaders in Yugoslavia." For Communists of Tito's position, such changes usually meant exile in haste, prison, or a firing squad...