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Tito's remark that Yugoslavia would have "to swallow" attacks from the Soviet right wing was interpreted as meaning that any show of aggressive independence at this point would merely help the rightists. After the surprise departure last week, a Belgrade spokesman said that Tito had gone to Yalta to "strengthen Khrushchev's hand." But if Khrushchev is in trouble with his own party, how does Tito's presence at Yalta help him? There were no firm answers to this question last week, but hints dropped through Communist channels over the past few months indicated how Tito might be of value to the Khrushchev faction, at considerable help to himself. It is known that during his visit to the Soviet Union last June Tito stubbornly resisted tentative suggestions that he join some kind of new Communist International, for the reason that it would put him in an inferior position, beneath the bulk of the mighty Soviet and Chinese members, and ruin his relations with the West. But a new Communist International in which all the satellite countries were autonomous would give Tito a powerful seniority, perhaps even tab him as political and ideological straw boss of some of the European satellites, and at the same time provide an excuse for Khrushchev to crush the opposition faction. Properly done to emphasize Tito's strength and independence, this might conceivably even please the West.
Such a development, admittedly speculative but known to have been considered by the Khrushchev faction, still seemed a distant objective. Another suggestion, coming from Paris and Vienna, had it that Khrushchev, far from checking or reversing the destalinization program in deference to the Stalinist group, might be planning to accelerate it with the posthumous trial of Joseph Stalin. No newcomer to the ranks of rumor, this suggestion springs from a careful study of Khrushchev's Feb. 25 speech denouncing Stalin, much of which is couched in legalistic language.
In that document Khrushchev charges Stalin with "the most brutal violation of Socialist legality" and treason during
World War II for having "ordered that the German fire be not returned." Some observers have conjectured that the party commission set up by Khrushchev to "investigate what made possible the mass repressions" has actually been preparing a legal case against Stalin. Huge public trials have long been used by the Communists to dramatize their message to the Russian people. They have also served as a means by which those who control them can, by involving oppositionists, destroy them. A leading witness for the prosecution in a posthumous trial of Joseph Stalin would, of choice and necessity, be Josip Broz Tito.
Watching Yalta from afar last week the West could not avoid the automatic twinge of uneasiness that comes whenever Communists get together. It would be a jar, indeed, to have strong, rambunctious Marshal Tito and his husky army march back at full flag to the service of Communist expansion. But in almost every clue to the Yalta meeting and in every conjecture, however farfetched, there was a basic cause for composure: the primary reason for the conclave seemed to be a schism in world Communism.
*Lenin once said of them: "We shall support the Social Democrats like a rope supports a hanging man."