The high-powered, bulletproof ZIS limousine sped along Belgrade's narrow streets and broad avenues, between lines of poplars and policemen, lined up in front of the Great Hall of Topchider Park. Out of the car stepped a husky man in a blue dress uniform. Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Communist dictator of Yugoslavia and a gaudily tricked-out specter to the rest of the Communist world, was going to make a speech.
He strode into the hall amid frenetic cheers from 1,642 delegates to the third Congress of the Yugoslav People's Front. While his followers stamped and cried "Tito, Tito!", he mounted the platform and put on his reading glasses. Then, as virulent as ever, he shouted defiance at Joseph Stalin's Cominform. They were trying to foment civil war in Yugoslavia, he cried. They were accusing him of doing business with the Western powers. Cocky Tito pleaded guilty to that charge. "Are we going to trade—that is, buy everything we need and sell everything we can—in order to buy imported machines?" he shouted. "Of course we will!"
He hastened to add that this did not in any way imply friendship for "all those warmongers in capitalist countries . . ." One of his listeners was reminded that in the very hall in which Tito stood (a former country club for royal guardsmen), gay officers and their girls used to do the kolo, a Yugoslav folk dance in which the dancer first takes two steps to the left and one to the right, then two steps to the right and one to the left. Tito himself was twisting his way through a difficult kolo between Eastern and Western enemies. "Well, what now?" he concluded after two hours and twelve minutes. "Reaction in the West hates us. We are not loved in the East. Can we go on this way? Of course we can, because we must . . ."
Communists at Home. It was nine months since Tito had been formally declared a heretic by Moscow for refusing to let Russia exploit his country's economy, to let Russian secret police spy on his own secret police. The world had largely believed that it would be a matter of weeks before Tito recanted or was liquidated. Last week, Tito was still in full control of his party, his army and his police force.
Yugoslavia exhibited the greatest, weirdest political show on earth: a cold war between two Communist police states. Last week a European diplomat, just returned from Belgrade, described it:
"When I was in Moscow, I thought that no other city in the world could have so many spies and informers. But Belgrade is much worse. The Communists spy on the nonCommunists, and the non-Communists spy on the Communists. The Tito Communists spy on the Cominform Communists, and vice versa. And Russian agents spy on everybody . . ."
All winter, the Cominform countries had tightened the screws of their economic blockade. The Tito press last week indignantly reported the basis on which the Russian satellite nations were prepared to do business with Tito's country. For one tractor, Poland or Czechoslovakia asked 377 tons of bauxite; for one truck engine, 60,000 tons of maize; for one motorcycle, 180 tons of raw gypsum.