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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."