Word: tito
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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...
...midweek Tito had returned to Belgrade. When he showed himself at the construction site of the new city of Belgrade, he was greeted by a popular demonstration. "Tito-Party! Tito-Party!" the comrades chanted. Way off to the north, like an echo, a Dane withdrew from the Danish Communist Party. "I want to join Marshal Tito's brigade," he said. The Tito Party might be contagious...
...received a flood of congratulatory telegrams-unsigned. Good students of history, the men of the Kremlin must have heard other echoes: the names of Kossuth, Kosciusko and other heroes of national independence. Here was the sharp point of their dilemma. For the great incandescent fact of the "Affair Tito" was simply this: like Tito, many a non-Russian Red still wanted to think of himself as a Yugoslav, Pole, Czech or Hungarian and not just a Kremlin stooge. Its peril lay in the fact that guerrilla-wise Tito knew this, and alone among satellite satraps had the necessary independence...