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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 . . ."