From Trotsky To Tito: What the Trials Revealed

From Trotsky To Tito. James Klugmann 1951

Chapter Two: What the Trials Revealed

It was the three trials that took place in the course of 1949 in Budapest, Sofia and Tirana that proved that the dangerous situation developing in the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party was not due to mere political errors, to a mistaken policy, but that it was the result of a deliberate, counter-revolutionary, anti-Communist plot carried out by a gang of police informers, agents provocateurs and intelligence agents, centred around the leading Titoites.

The indictment of László Rajk and his fellow conspirators in Hungary was published on 6 September 1949. The trial opened at Budapest on 16 September. The Chief Prosecutor of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, Dimiter Georgiev, published the indictment of Traicho Kostov and his fellow conspirators on 28 November 1949. Their trial opened on 7 December. The trial of the Albanian conspirators headed by Koçi Xoxe had already taken place at Tirana in the previous May. What type of men were these conspirators who had plotted the overthrow of the new Popular Democratic regimes, achieved by so much effort and sacrifice by their peoples, and who had conspired to assassinate such men as Dimitrov, Rákosi and Enver Hoxha?

They consisted in the main of former Communists who had betrayed their parties under duress and become police informers, and later agents of foreign imperialist intelligence, together with former right-wing officers and state officials who had assumed a left-wing mask towards the end of the Second World War. To these must be added the Yugoslav officials, Tito’s envoys, who participated in the various conspiracies.

In the Hungarian conspiracy there were eight accused. László Rajk himself had been arrested when a young Communist student by the Hungarian semi-fascist police in 1931 in Budapest in connection with the distribution of Communist leaflets. To save his skin he had agreed to become an informer and agent provocateur, and had signed a paper to this effect, putting himself at the disposal of the Hungarian secret police. From then his downfall dated. First he was sent to spy on the Communist students in Budapest University, then on the illegal Communist Young Workers’ League, then amongst the building workers, where in 1935 his provocations led to over 200 arrests. Thence he was transferred first to Czechoslovakia, and from there to the International Brigade in Spain, where he spied on and disrupted the Rákosi Battalion.

He left Spain for France, where he was confined in various of the southern French concentration camps designed for Spanish Republicans and International Brigaders – St Cyprien, Gurs and Vernet. Here he continued his informer’s and intelligence work in contact with various groups of Hungarian and Yugoslav Trotskyists. Returning to Hungary with the aid of the Gestapo, and working again as a police informer inside the illegal Hungarian Communist Party, he became, after Liberation, first the Secretary of the Greater Budapest District of the party, then Minister of Home Affairs and finally Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Two other intelligence agents and police informers involved in the conspiracy were Dr Tibor Szőnyi, who was recruited to the United States Intelligence in 1944, sent back to Hungary to ‘penetrate the left’ and became head of the Cadres Department of the Communist Party; and András Szalai, enrolled as an informer by the head of the Hungarian political police at Pecs in 1933. Szalai it was who betrayed the leaders of the illegal Young Workers’ League in 1942 and who was then responsible for disclosing the planned escapes of Yugoslav and Hungarian political prisoners from Sátoraljaújhely prison, leading to sixty-four murdered on the spot or later executed. After Liberation he worked in the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party.

Lieutenant-General György Pálffy was one of those opportunist Hungarians who used to be known as ‘insurance agents’ – who tried, whatever their real political views, to ‘insure’ themselves with the regime in power. Son of a bank director and grandson of a kulak, he received a bourgeois education, including a period at the Ludovica Academy where the old fascist corps used to be trained. This political background was further strengthened by a year’s service in the Italian Fascist army, where Mussolini’s Italy became his political ideal. As an officer of Horthy’s army he took part during the Second World War in the occupation of the Carpatho-Ukraine. In 1944, when the defeat of fascism seemed certain, he decided to insure himself for the future, and so he came to an arrangement with his colleague Captain István Lancz, fellow-officer in Horthy’s army:

I agreed with him that he should go to the west with the Horthy army in which he was then actually serving. Then the stream to the west was well under way. He should make contacts there with the British and Americans, depending on who should capture him, or under whose authority he should be. I would stay at home and would attempt to establish the strongest possible left-wing contacts, and would even try somehow to establish contacts with the Communist Party... Our idea was that, however the situation should turn out, we would cover up for one another. (Evidence at Rajk trial, Verbatim Report, p 84)

By the spring of 1946, his fascist outlook well concealed beneath the new façade, he had become a General, Chief of the Military Political Department and Commander-in-Chief of the Frontier Guards, Béla Korondy, a similar personality in a lesser way, starting as a member of the gendarmerie under the Horthy fascist regime, ended in the Frontier Guards under Lieutenant-General Pálffy.

Pál Justus, a Hungarian Trotskyist, was recruited as an informer after arrest by the police in 1932. He ended after Liberation in the leadership of the Social-Democratic Party, and, after unification of the two workers’ parties, on the Central Committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party.

Finally the Yugoslav Lazar Brankov, who came to Hungary as a member of the Yugoslav Military Mission in 1945 and was Counsellor of the Yugoslav Legation at the end of 1947, was the chief representative of the Yugoslav Secret Police in Hungary from 1947 to September 1948, when, on orders of Ranković, Yugoslav Minister of the Interior, he pretended to go over to the supporters of the Communist Information Bureau taking refuge on Hungarian soil.

The men involved in the Kostov conspiracy were of a similar background and a similar calibre – police informers and agents of foreign intelligence hiding inside the Communist Party, right-wing businessmen hiding their true opinions under a left cloak and members of the Yugoslav secret police pretending to be opponents of the Tito regime.

There was Traicho Kostov himself, who as a member of the Central Committee of the illegal Communist Party was arrested in April 1942, and saved his life by accepting the role of spy inside the party for the Bulgarian police. He became, after Liberation, acting-President of the Council of Ministers and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

There were Ivan Stefanov, a member of the Communist Party who was already working for British Intelligence in 1932; Nikola Pavlov, who deserted to the police at the same time as Kostov and was sent back by them to work in the party; Nikola Nachev, party member who made contact with British Intelligence in 1941 and who became, after Liberation, Assistant-President of the State Committee for Economic and Financial Problems; Boris Khristov, who accepted the role of police spy when arrested in 1943 and in 1946 became Bulgarian Commercial Representative in the USSR; Tsonyu Tsonchev, who deserted to the police and betrayed his comrades when arrested with a group of young Communists in Varna in 1924 and who contacted American Intelligence in 1941; Ivan Gevrenov, landowner and industrialist, who after Liberation pretended to be a friend of the People’s Government, joined the Communist Party and worked for British Intelligence; Blagoi Hadzhipanzov, who worked as a Tito spy when Counsellor of the Yugoslav embassy in Sofia and, like Brankov in Hungary, pretended in November 1948 to go over to support of the Information Bureau. Nor is this a full list even of the main conspirators.

But one thing they all had in common – all were concealing their real identity under a cloak of falsehood. Whether they were Communists who had deserted the cause of Communism and saved their skins by becoming police informers and were then made over by their former masters to the Gestapo or French or British or American Intelligence or to all of them; or whether they were reactionary gendarmes or officers or businessmen posing as sympathisers of the new People’s regimes; or whether they were Yugoslav officials pretending to be friends of the new People’s Democracies or supporters of the Information Bureau – all of them worked and plotted against their countries, against their peoples and against Socialism.

One other thing they nearly all had in common. They took their instructions through the intermediary of the Tito clique.

I: The Truth About the Titoites Emerges

The trials were long trials. The Rajk trial opened on 16 September and the verdict was given on 24 September. The Kostov trial opened on 7 December, and the verdict was given on 14 December. The defendants had every opportunity to speak for as long as and in the way they desired. Many witnesses were called. But one fact stood out in all clarity at both the Rajk and the Kostov trial. The guiltiest criminals of all were not present.

For if in the dock were Rajk and Kostov and the Hungarian and Bulgarian conspirators, who had plotted the overthrow of their People’s Democratic governments and the brutal murder of the most beloved and outstanding leaders of their peoples, behind Rajk and behind Kostov, behind the Hungarian and Bulgarian conspirators, stood the criminal group of Titoite leaders – Tito himself, Ranković, Kardelj, Djilas and some score of others; and behind the Titoites stood the real directors of the plots – British and American Intelligence, British and American imperialism.

From the trials emerged the real reasons for Tito’s false policy condemned in the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau. From the trials it emerged that the Titoite betrayal was of long standing. From the trials emerged the story of how that betrayal had started and how it had ended with Tito and his confederates as the direct instruments for carrying out in Eastern Europe, and indeed throughout the world, the policy of Anglo-American imperialism:

Not only Rajk and his associates are here in the dock, but their foreign masters, their imperialist masters of Belgrade and Washington. (Dr Gyula Alapi, People’s Prosecutor, Rajk Trial, Verbatim Report, p 753)

It was Rajk himself who gave the clearest outline of the role of the Titoite conspirators. He contacted them in the French concentration camps set up in southern France for the ex-International Brigaders:

In the French internment camps, in Saint Cyprien, Gurs and Vernet, I was together with the Yugoslavs. There were very strong Trotskyist political activities in the French internment camps. The chief organisers of the political activities, and at the same time their executors, were those inside the Yugoslav group. As far as I remember there might have been about 150 who were involved in such activities inside the Yugoslav group. The decisive majority of these were intellectuals, petty bourgeois and university students... (Rajk, Evidence at Trial, Verbatim Report, p 39)

The Trotskyites, many of whom had been sent to the International Brigade by the Yugoslav secret police, and who included some of the leading present-day Titoites, were here contacted by the Intelligence services of several nations, including the French, American and later German.

Rajk told of their contact in the camps with the French Secret Police – the Deuxième Bureau:

As a former International Brigader, who carried on Trotskyist activities, I was on several occasions called in and asked for information about what was happening in the camp by the officer of the Deuxième Bureau, the French Intelligence service in Gurs and later in Vernet... I have to add that for the French officer to call me in it was not necessary for him to know my past, because in general, the Trotskyists always, and everywhere, internationally, worked in close contact with the police... I told the French Officer, the head of the Deuxième Bureau, that a strong Yugoslav Trotskyist group was active in the camp, and roughly who were the leaders of the group. Then the French Deuxième Bureau officer took out a list which was full of Yugoslav names throughout; he carefully checked the names given by me against this list. I saw that those whom I mentioned as leaders already featured on his list as the leaders of this Yugoslav Trotskyist group. (Rajk, Evidence at Trial, Verbatim Report, pp 39-40)

He met them visiting the officials of the Deuxième Bureau:

From this it became clear to me that these Yugoslavs were, in fact, the organised men of the Deuxième Bureau, and were carrying out its instructions just as I was. (Rajk, Evidence at Trial, Verbatim Report, p 40)

There came the Hitlerite invasion of France. The Yugoslav Trotskyists, who had been passed on by the Yugoslav secret police to French Intelligence, were now taken over by the Gestapo. Rajk told of a German recruiting commission, headed by a Gestapo or Abwehr major, visiting the camps in the spring of 1941:

After the commission had worked for a few days, this Major called me to him and suggested to me that I, too, should report for work in Germany, and he would help me to get home to Hungary from Germany. He told me that he was making this proposal because Péter Hain, the head of the political department of the Hungarian police, had asked him to help me to get home to Hungary, as I was an organised agent, who had been working for the Hungarian police for a long time and he found no other solution for sending me home but this one. During this conversation, the Gestapo or Abwehr major took out a list and asked after certain Yugoslavs. The list from which he read out the names was the same list as the one the leading officer of the Deuxième Bureau had been looking at, when I was reporting to him on the activities of the Yugoslav Trotskyist group... He said that he was asking me because if Péter Hain requested him to help me to get home, then he trusted my opinion and considered me a reliable person from his point of view; on the other hand these Yugoslavs and many other Yugoslavs – roughly those that had featured on that list, that is about 150 – had asked him, that is that Major, to help them to return home to Yugoslavia. That he really did so, I consider to be proved by two facts. One of the facts is that there were very many Yugoslavs in the group with which I went to Germany. The other fact is that from time to time, biggish Yugoslav groups set out on their way home for Yugoslavia from the neighbourhood of Leipzig, where I worked, and their setting out for home in such a legal form, as it happened, could obviously not have taken place except with the support of the German official organs, the Gestapo or other organs. (Rajk, Evidence at Trial, Verbatim Report, pp 41-42)

In the course of his evidence Rajk also told how he had been contacted by American Intelligence in the French concentration camp of Vernet:

It was in the Vernet internment camp that an American citizen called Field, who was as far as I know the head of the American Intelligence agency for Central and Eastern Europe, visited me in the internment camp after the end of the Civil War. He referred to instructions he had received from Washington, that he should speak with me and help me to get out of the camp and return home to Hungary. He even told me that they would like to send me home because as an agent who had not been exposed I would, working in the party according to the instructions received from the Americans, disorganise and dissolve the party and possibly even get the party leadership into my hands. (Rajk, Evidence at Trial, Verbatim Report, pp 46-47)

Thus from the Rajk trial it became clear that in the middle and late 1930s a considerable group of Trotskyists and provocateurs remained hidden in the Yugoslav Communist Party, including in very leading positions, when similar Trotskyite groups were being successfully exposed and expelled from other Communist parties. These traitors included such men as Kosta Nadj, Vukmanović and others of the leading Titoites. A large group of them was despatched to the International Brigade, and later in the concentration camps of southern France they were in constant contact with the French and German Intelligence services, as well as with similar Trotskyites and provocateurs of other countries. Already in the early 1940s the Gestapo and US Intelligence were competing as to who would take these traitors over and send them home to carry out the disruption of the Communist parties and progressive movements in their homelands. It was finally with the aid of the Gestapo that many of them returned to Yugoslavia.

II: Betrayal of the Liberation Struggle

The evidence of the Rajk, Kostov and Albanian trials showed that these spies and provocateurs, having found their way home with the aid of the Gestapo, linked up with other similar groupings inside the Yugoslav Communist Party, and, as leaders of the Partisan and national liberation struggle, continued their work of disruption and betrayal.

Some continued to work for the Gestapo, others made contact with British and American Intelligence; some managed to work for all three; but a compact group of leading Yugoslav Communists, including Tito himself, Ranković, Kardelj and Djilas, led the betrayal in the course of the war.

When the Nazi invasion had rolled over Yugoslavia in May 1941, and when the Yugoslav peoples were being subjected to all the horrors of occupation by the Nazi chiefs and their quislings, it was, to start off with, British policy to support Mihailović and the Yugoslav Četniks. Despite the fact that the Četniks were inactive against the Axis, and despite the fact that more and more evidence was accumulated of actual Četnik collaboration with the Axis, for many months British aid in parachuted weapons and uniforms continued to be directed to the Četniks. With British tommy-guns and in British battle-dress Četnik units included in the Axis order of battle struck again and again against Yugoslav patriots and Partisans. The British wireless was even used to broadcast calls for the assassination of Partisan leaders.

An accumulation of different factors led eventually to a change of policy.

a) It became more and more clear that the overwhelming mass of Yugoslav people were turning away from the Četniks and regarded them as Axis collaborators. It became apparent that British reaction would gain no postwar foothold in Yugoslavia or the Balkans by basing themselves upon Mihailović.

b) The Četniks were actively aiding the Axis or else were totally inactive. With the growing difficulties in the North African campaign, the British military leadership in North Africa was calling for the development of guerrilla activities in the Balkans that would lead to the cutting of Axis lines of communications, to the stopping of the flow of reinforcements to Rommel.

c) More and more progressive, genuinely anti-fascist people in Britain and America, even in the army itself, were disturbed at this policy of aiding Axis quislings and demanded a change of policy.

d) At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top-secret level, must have received information, some of which it may have had all along, that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Communist Party, spies and provocateurs, Gestapo elements, Trotskyites, who could be ‘trusted’ (from the point of view of British imperialism), and could be used to betray the Yugoslav people’s liberation movement from inside, and carry out an Anglo-American imperialist policy.

This was the basis of the change of British policy from Mihailović to Tito in the period of 1942-43. It was carried out with the maximum secrecy and with that great measure of cunning and deceit for which British imperialism, with its long and unrivalled experience of cunning and deceit, has become notorious throughout the world.

On the surface it had to be presented demagogically as support for the patriotic anti-Axis struggle of the Yugoslav Partisans. Thus progressive people in Britain and America would be disarmed, they would think that their efforts and struggles were being rewarded. Contact between British (and later American) Intelligence and the Titoite group of traitors had to be kept so secret that only a tiny group of completely ‘trustworthy’ elements would have knowledge of it from both the Yugoslav and British and American sides. The others, including many in both the British, American and Yugoslav GHQs, would be led to believe that this was honest mutual military aid between Allies against the Axis.

Thus progressive peoples on all sides could be led into the trap and use all their efforts and energy to further the aid to Tito which was, in reality, to be used against all that they stood for. The high degree of secrecy led to confusion and dispute between pro-Mihailović and pro-Tito elements of the US and British ruling classes, including in the Foreign Office and State Department. But this very confusion and dispute gave an air of reality to the plot. Two systems of contact between the Anglo-Americans and Partisans were established. A general liaison which dealt with the more open side of military aid and contact, and an inner, parallel, top-secret network, for the use only of the initiated ‘trustworthy’ few, through which, unbeknown to most of the leading officers and officials on all sides, the real plot could take its shape. Only now, since the revelations of the trials, has the character and organisation of this plot begun to be revealed.

Lazar Brankov, former counsellor at the Yugoslav Legation at Budapest, and one of the accused, told of the nature of the plot at the Rajk trial:

Well they [Anglo-American Intelligence] thought that first of all there was a well-constructed plan which the British and Americans had worked out with Churchill still during the war. According to this plan, as is usually the case, they did not want to place the Balkans under their influence at the cost of the blood of Anglo-American soldiers, but wanted to achieve this through these experienced intelligence officers and they wanted in this way to place under their influence the Yugoslav leaders of these days...

While the war was still on they were trying to subjugate Yugoslavia, and then the neighbouring states, Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary, to Anglo-American influence and their primary aim was to restrict the influence of the Soviet Union, to decrease their influence, because they knew very well that the overwhelming part of the great majority of the Yugoslav people stood by the side of the Soviet Union and loved the Soviet people. At that time they planned first to win over Tito, Kardelj, Ranković and Djilas and through them Yugoslavia... (Evidence of Lazar Brankov, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 117)

Brankov spoke of the working out of what he called the ‘Churchill plan’:

The other case was – and this was more Churchill’s plan – that the Anglo-Americans should during the war occupy the coast of the Adriatic Sea. This was no longer necessary, because the coast was already mainly liberated by the Partisans and was in their hands. But for Churchill it was necessary then to extend his influence upon Yugoslavia and the neighbouring countries. At that time, too, Maclean succeeded in gaining Ranković, Djilas and Kardelj for this plan. There was a great argument in the General Staff; Tito agreed with that again, for he thought that Yugoslavia would, at any rate, be liberated by the British... The Soviet Command had another opinion on this question and gave Tito advice, so that he retreated, and thus Churchill’s plan to invade the Balkans and the Adriatic coast became a failure during the war. (Evidence of Lazar Brankov, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 119)

Traicho Kostov, in his written testimony, gave evidence of the same betrayal of the Tito group to Anglo-American imperialism, recounting the substance of what Kardelj told him at their interview in Skopje at the end of November 1944:

Then Kardelj informed me, in strict confidence, that during the war the British and Americans had supplied the Yugoslav Partisans with arms and munitions, on condition that at the end of the war Tito would keep Yugoslavia away from the USSR and would not allow the USSR to establish its influence, not only in Yugoslavia, but in the Balkans as well. The Americans and British had taken a firm decision in no case to allow the breakaway of the countries, that might be liberated by the Soviet Army, from the Western bloc.

On this basis, between Tito on the one hand and the British and Americans on the other, a definite agreement had already been reached during the war. (Verbatim Report of the Kostov Trial, p 88)

It had long been the dream of Western imperialism to build up a confederation of puppet governments in the Balkans and Eastern Europe to act under its aegis as yet one further anti-Soviet base. In the course of the Second World War, Western imperialism became frightened of the character of the popular resistance movements that grew up in these countries in struggle against Axis domination and occupation. They saw in all this struggle and sacrifice of the people, led by the Communists, not the struggle of heroic allies against Nazi fascism, but a menace to the future of imperialism in Eastern Europe. In the very midst of the war the aims of Western imperialism remained unchanged, taking on only new forms.

Whilst the Soviet Army was meeting and defeating the main forces of Nazi Germany, Churchill’s secret memorandum (now made public) of October 1942 stated: ‘It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe.’

British imperialism, whilst striving to avoid a real Second Front, planned to invade the Balkans, and set up in the very course of the war an anti-Soviet grouping of puppet reactionary states. In the midst of the war itself, when Britain was being preserved from invasion by the Red Army, when thousands of patriotic progressives were giving their lives in the resistance struggles of Europe, the Churchill plan was being drafted for Anglo-American domination in Eastern Europe and for the suppression, not of the Nazi invaders and the Balkan quislings, but of the resistance forces with the aid of the Balkan quislings.

And in the carrying out of this plan, in the effort to make the Churchill dream come true, the Western imperialists allotted a key role to the Tito clique in Yugoslavia.

There was considerable opposition to the policy of Tito, Ranković and Kardelj inside the Yugoslav Communist Party already in the course of the Second World War, and led by such men as Hebrang, an outstanding Communist leader, and General Arso Jovanović, Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav Liberation Army. But even those who led the opposition to the Tito clique did not realise that they were dealing with traitors.

The Titoites had a way of dealing with opposition, whether inside or outside the Communist Party:

Especially Ranković was important there, because he was Organisation Secretary and he led the cadres department and later the intelligence service, the counter-intelligence. The whole party apparatus was in his hands and he succeeded in putting his men everywhere. He succeeded in removing all those who did not agree with the line followed during the war by Tito, Kardelj, Djilas and Ranković, especially their collaboration, and spoke of them to party members as left-wing deviators. And, for example, it also happened – the Partisans spoke very much about this already in 1944 – that these people, who were considered leftists, and who were the followers of the Soviet Union, and who were not willing to collaborate closely with the Anglo-Americans – were sent during the war to places where it was sure that they would fall. (Brankov’s evidence, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, pp 121-22)

Thus in the course of the Second World War the group of Trotskyites and agents inside the Yugoslav Communist Party gained still more commanding positions and, disguising themselves as leading Partisans, used their positions to get rid of those who opposed them, by all means including the most ruthless. By the end of the war, they held nearly all the key positions in the Yugoslav Communist Party. The process of getting rid of the genuine internationalists from the party leadership was taken a step further with the arrest of Žujović and Hebrang in April 1948, and by the murder of General Arso Jovanović. Henceforth the Titoites reigned supreme.

It was not by chance that it was British imperialism that played the main role in the course of the Second World War in organising and coming to agreement with the Trotskyite clique inside the Yugoslav Communist Party. Of all imperialisms, British is the most experienced and cunning. Centuries of experience in victory and defeat have taught it tactics of subtlety and subterfuge, of how to combine seeming concession with ruthless force. So it was British imperialism on the Allied side that first planned and carried out on a big scale the policy of penetration and corruption of the left from inside.

The conspirator Ivan Tutev testified at the Kostov trial that he was instructed by a British agent at the beginning of 1943 to get in touch:

... with progressive circles, especially with members of the Communist Party, with the aim of creating connections in those circles, penetrating into the party and becoming later on a member, with the purpose, one day when it would be very necessary, of assuming a leading position. (Ivan Tutee’s evidence, Verbatim Report of the Kostov Trial, p 225)

It was the experienced and cunning British imperialism that made the running for the organisation of the Tito plot already in the course of the Second World War, and that organised for the postwar period:

It was obvious to the British politicians that the war was approaching its end, that the war would inevitably be lost by Hitler, that it would be won by the Soviet Union even before the second front was opened... And in such a development of events a predominance of Soviet influence would inevitably be established in the countries of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. Great Britain could not tolerate and would not endure such a predominance of Soviet influence. That is why she intended to counteract the establishment of Soviet influence in the Balkans and particularly in Bulgaria by all possible means... In order to be able to cope with this task, the British Intelligence Service should be thoroughly well acquainted with what the Soviets and the Communist Party intended to do in connection with the forthcoming development of events. (Ivan Tutee’s evidence, VerbatimReport of the Kostov Trial, p 225)

But if it was the more cunning and experienced British Intelligence and British imperialism that made the running, looking ahead to the postwar world, it was stronger American imperialism that took over at the end of the war. The agents, spies and stooges began very quickly to see which way the wind was blowing and who would be their new master:

When I questioned Tito about the orientation of Yugoslavia’s foreign policy, he expressed his disdain of the British, who, according to him, were on the wane as a great power and were obliged to cede the right of way to successful American capitalism. Tito gave me to understand that Yugoslav foreign policy was orienting itself towards America, rather than, as before, towards England. He advised us Bulgarians to establish contact with the Americans... (Kostov’s written testimony recounting interview with Tito in summer 1946, Verbatim Report of the Kostov Trial, pp 99-100)

By the end of the war, the Tito clique had become the direct representatives of American imperialism.

III: The Postwar Plots

The Churchill Plan to establish in the postwar world a reactionary Eastern Europe, subservient to Western imperialism, ended in fiasco. Eastern Europe was liberated by the Red Army. The resistance to Axis occupation had been led in these countries by the working people, who had in their turn been led by the working class and the Communist parties. The old ruling classes – capitalists and landlords, the old leaders of the old state machines, generals and police and judges – had to a large measure exposed themselves as quislings and Axis-collaborators. Though unevenly, and not yet in all countries decisively, the people led by the working class were ready to march forward in friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union towards People’s Democracy, where the working people would be the rulers.

The Churchill Plan had failed. But it was not given up. Far from it! Defeated for the moment, Western imperialism returned with more intense energy to the struggle to turn history backwards, and to restore to Eastern Europe the old regimes that the people had cast out. In Greece they did it by violence, assassination, war against those who had led the resistance struggle against the Axis, war against the Greek people, war waged in collaboration with the Greek quislings. In the other countries of Eastern Europe, where the strength of the Soviet Union could prevent an open war of intervention, they tried to repeat the Greek pattern, but through more disguised methods of plot, putsch and subterfuge.

First they tried to restore the old regimes by direct counter-revolution of the old ruling classes organised in fascist or secret militarist bands. In Poland, for example, the fascist bands, financed and armed by Western imperialism, cost the lives of thousands of Polish democrats. But these plans failed. Next they turned to the right-wing leaders of the old Agrarian and Peasant parties – men like Maniu in Rumania, Ferenc Nagy in Hungary, Mikołajczyk in Poland, Gemeto, Dimitrov and Petkov in Bulgaria. But these plots were foiled. Then they turned their hopes to the right-wing leaders of the old Social-Democratic parties, plotted against the growing unity of the working class and against the new People’s Democratic regimes that were being established. But these plots also were foiled. So, by 1948, it was the hidden agents of imperialism inside the Communist and workers’ parties and above all the organising centre of these agents – the Titoite clique in the Yugoslav Communist Party, who now became their main weapon in their imperialist plot to overthrow the People’s Democratic regimes and set up East European governments subservient to the West.

Thus by the middle of 1948 the Titoite groupings that had been an auxiliary, a reserve weapon of Western imperialism, became its principal agency in Eastern Europe.

The plots and conspiracies of imperialism against countries of Socialism or People’s Democracy are not simple and do not follow a single line. The imperialists work through all possible channels – dispossessed landlords or big industrialists, former leaders of the army, police or secret police, through kulaks, nationalists, degenerate elements, drug addicts, former common criminals, through renegade Communists or right-wing labour leaders, through agents and provocateurs inserted into revolutionary organisations. They try to keep all possible contacts, all possible counter-revolutionary elements on their string at the same time. But they usually put their main support, at any given time, on one special group, whom they hope to use to restore to power a regime of reaction that will carry out their orders.

This was shown clearly enough in the successive imperialist attempts to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union, and to restore a Russian capitalism subservient to the West. First they tried through the open war of intervention to base themselves on the Tsarist White Guards, on the Russian landlords and capitalists, the old officers and police. When this failed, for a long period they tried to base their counter-revolutionary conspiracies on the kulaks, and when the kulaks were finally eliminated as a class, it was the secret agents of imperialism inside the Communist Party, the Trotskyite and other parallel ‘opposition’ groups hitherto a reserve, who became in the middle 1930s their main hope, their main weapon, for the overthrow of Socialism and the reversal of history.

So, too, in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. At first the Titoites outside Yugoslavia were a reserve weapon. They were instructed, through the medium of the Yugoslav Titoites, to help the growth of the other reactionary groupings. The Kostov trial showed how Kostov and his fellow conspirators were used to make the Bulgarian people discontented with the new people’s authority. Rajk was at first instructed by the US agent Martin Himmler in the autumn of 1946 to aid the right-wing Hungarian plots by weakening the left through internal disruption:

He [Martin Himmler] told me that the different right-wing forces of Hungary are concentrated mainly under the leadership of Ferenc Nagy, Béla Kovács and Béla Varga. The right-wing forces of the Smallholders Party, the right-wing forces of the Peasant Party led by Imre Kovács, the right-wing Social-Democratic forces led by Peyer, Szeder, Kéthly and Szélig, as well as the very active underground Horthyist and former Szalasi-fascist forces which had no organisation of their own, were very active in working to take over the power of government and to remove the left-wing revolutionary forces, that is the Communist Party and the left-wing Social-Democrats, from governmental power. He wanted to give me the tasks of dissolving the forces of the greatest unit of the left-wing revolutionary forces, the Communist Party, by organising a separate fraction against Rákosi in the party led by Rákosi, in order to ensure the seizure of power by the right-wing forces... At the same time Martin Himmler told me that in all probability this would be my last talk with him and with the representatives of the American Intelligence agencies in general, for they would hand over their whole network to the Yugoslavs, and in the future I would get instructions for further work through Yugoslav channels. (Rajk’s testimony, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, pp 47-48)

Later, when other groupings of a right-wing character had been compromised, Rajk received special American instructions via Ranković to aid the right-wing Social-Democratic leaders, who were now receiving full Western backing:

Another message from Ranković at that time – which is closely connected with the message about the elections – was that I was to connive at the especially strong anti-People’s Democratic, anti-Soviet and pro-Anglo-Saxon policy of the right-wing Social-Democrats during the elections, and as a member of the Secretariat to try to get them to put up with it within the party leadership, within the Communist Party leadership. The content of the message was that I could argue with the party that one cannot fight on two fronts during the elections; one cannot fight against a right wing of a fascist nature, and at the same time against the right wing of a party which is after all a workers’ party, therefore one should allow free scope to the activities of the right-wing Social-Democrats on the basis of the policy of choosing the lesser evil. In connection with this Ranković’s message pointed out that to his knowledge the right-wing Social-Democrats – how he knew about it I do not know – were trying to use the elections, the election campaign, and later the election results, to blackmail the Communist Party and for the capture of various leading positions in the state apparatus. His message – based on the above political reasoning – said that I should argue within the party leadership in favour of allowing the right-wing Social-Democrats various posts with the aim of neutralising them. If needs be I should argue that we are making this concession temporarily and will win them back later. (Rajk’s testimony, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 57)

Thus at a certain stage of postwar history, due to the weaknesses of the imperialists, and not to their strength, due to their failures and not to their successes, the Titoites in Yugoslavia, who had been a reserve weapon of imperialism, were brought forward as a principal instrument of Western policy, and, similarly, their stooges in Hungary, Bulgaria, etc, were brought forward from a secondary to a primary role. This ‘evolution’ was well summed up in the final Prosecutors’ speeches at both the Rajk and the Kostov trials.

The Hungarian People’s Prosecutor, Dr Gyula Alapi, said:

There were two stages in the policy of the Tito clique. During the first stage, when the fight between bourgeois reaction and People’s Democracy in the East European countries was as yet undecided and one could still count on reaction getting the upper hand in the struggle of the forces in the People’s Democracies, the Tito clique remained in reserve, did not yet show their teeth and did not yet come forward openly as the anti-Soviet storm-troopers of American imperialism. They appeared as the storm-troopers only in the second stage of development in Eastern Europe when the democratic and Socialist forces had already won a decisive victory in these countries and the organisations of the anti-Soviet, pro-imperialist political forces could no longer be entrusted to the defeated groups of open reaction...

Just as Yugoslavia was still in reserve in the years immediately after the war and only later became the open storm-troopers of imperialism, so in the same way Rajk did not immediately, in the first stages of Hungarian democratic development, come into prominence, but remained an instrument in the hands of reaction at home and abroad. Only later, after the decisive victories of the Hungarian working class and after the routing of the different reactionary forces, did he come into prominence and, as the Tito clique’s candidate for the post of Prime Minister, become, if only temporarily, the head of Hungarian reaction. The Titoites and their imperialist bosses did not turn to Rajk because of his beautiful eyes but because they could no longer turn to Ferenc Nagy and Mindszenthy. (Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 268)

And the Bulgarian Prosecutor, Vladimir Dimchev, stated in his concluding speech at the Kostov trial:

When the attempts of the American and British Intelligence to organise and hurl against the Bulgarian People’s Republic the forces of reaction and fascism in our country came to nought, they then began to place their hopes on the conspiratorial group of Traicho Kostov who had long rendered them espionage services. In this conspiratorial plan of theirs against our country, the Anglo-American imperialists used as their chief tool the treacherous espionage gang of Tito and his confederates. (Verbatim Report of the Kostov Trial, p 509)

This is how the Titoites, who had been an important reserve weapon of imperialism, became by mid-1948 the main tool of Western imperialist plotting for counter-revolutions in Eastern Europe.

How could the Yugoslav Titoites and their ‘contacts’ in other East European countries best serve their Anglo-American masters? How was the Titoites’ plot against the peoples of Europe to be carried through? What were the main parts and stages of this plot?

It was clear that the task of the Titoites, even when they were only a reserve weapon of imperialism, was not only to prepare counter-revolutionary putsches against the People’s Democratic regimes of Eastern Europe, not only to disrupt the left, but as an essential corollary to try and undermine among the masses of Eastern Europe their love and admiration of the Soviet Union, their deep friendship and gratitude. This was no easy task. It could not be undertaken directly, frontally, but only indirectly, and as part of a whole process.

A frontal attack on the USSR would have been indignantly rejected by the mass of the East European peoples and would have at once exposed the Titoites. The plan, therefore, was to draw the peoples away from the Soviet Union in the first place by boosting Tito Yugoslavia, and the Titoite leaders, putting them in the centre of all propaganda: by stimulating interest and enthusiasm for Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union was to be put in the background. Later, this great ‘prestige’ could be used by the Titoites to continue the process of weaning the East European peoples away from friendship with the Soviet Union, and, step by step, into the orbit of Western imperialism. Thus Yugoslavia would not only itself be taken by the Titoites out of the family of progressive states into the avid grasp of imperialism, but would take with it the other East European nations. This process was, of course, complementary to the process of preparing right-wing putsches and right-wing governments inside the East European states.

Such was the essence of the Tito plan that Ranković outlined to Rajk at their meeting in Kelebia in December 1947:

... the plan was that since the right-wing forces in all the People’s Democratic countries had been defeated one by one, Yugoslavia had to undertake the role of organiser and leader of the overthrow of the People’s Democratic regimes. Yugoslavia, however – said Ranković – could not in Tito’s evaluation do this by openly coming out with the announcement of such a policy. She could not do this because both among the masses of the people in Yugoslavia, and in most of the People’s Democracies too, friendship towards the Soviet Union had strong and deep roots and the Socialist camp had immense strength. Therefore, Tito had to carry out this policy under camouflage, by deception. According to Ranković, Tito conceived this policy of deception in the following way. First of all, Yugoslavia had a great attraction for the rest of the People’s Democracies because of the war, or rather because of the heroic Partisan battles of the peoples of Yugoslavia. So Tito thought that this attraction, this popularity – outwardly emphasising and stressing friendship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies – must be taken advantage of and emphasised in order that, rallying around Yugoslavia, various federations should be concluded between Yugoslavia and the other countries. Tito wanted to carry out this grouping around Yugoslavia in a deceitful manner, again cloaked in Socialist, pro-Soviet and pro-People’s Democratic guise, by referring to the fact that Yugoslavia had an important strategic role against the aggressive policy of the United States and the Anglo-Saxons in general, because of her geographical situation. (Rajk’s testimony, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, pp 63-64)

The Tito plan included measures to set up all manner of Balkan and East European organisations, ranging from state federations to youth organisations, with Yugoslavia at the centre. The first step in weaning people and states away from the Soviet Union was to group them around Tito Yugoslavia, with the Titoite betrayers of the heroic Yugoslav liberation movement hiding behind the great prestige that the sacrifices of the Yugoslav people had rightly won.

The Tito plan therefore involved the boosting of Tito to the skies:

Tito’s visit to Bulgaria in connection with the signing of the Treaty for Friendship, Collaboration and Mutual Assistance was about to take place. I took all the necessary steps that he might be welcomed most pompously, and with greatest glamour.

Tito arrived in all the splendour of his imagined grandeur, travelling by special train preceded and followed by two other guard trains, together with his personal guards. (Kostov’s written testimony, Verbatim Report of Kostov Trial, p 106)

It involved the effort to form a Yugoslav – Bulgarian Federation in which Bulgaria would become the seventh Yugoslav state, subordinated to Yugoslavia and Tito. It involved all sorts of plans for a Danubian Confederation centred around Tito Yugoslavia. It involved the effort to set up a whole series of Balkan and East European federations of organisations – sports, youth, women, trade-union, etc, etc, centred at Belgrade. Make Belgrade the centre – this was the first step in the process of weaning away from the Soviet Union and towards the West:

Within the framework of the great plan previously mentioned, the substance of which was to wrench these countries from the side of the Soviet Union and draw them over to the American side, Tito, together with the Americans, worked out a detailed plan, a regional plan, the plan of Balkan federation. This Balkan federation would have consisted, according to the plan, of Yugoslavia as the leading power, of Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, and perhaps later... of Rumania. (Pálffy’s testimony, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 92)

There was another very important message from Ranković at this time – the second half of 1947 – which again I could not explain, and he only enlarged upon in Kelebia. This message read: ‘Should a proposal be handed to the Hungarian government from the Yugoslav government concerning the setting up of youth, women’s and trade-union Balkan federations, I, as a member of the government, should try to support it with all my might.’ (Rajk’s testimony, Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial, p 57)

The publication of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau in mid-1948 struck a heavy blow at the Tito plan. The Titoites could no longer ‘take their time’ and on American orders spurred on their Rajks and Kostovs to hasten their preparations for the assassination of the best Communist leaders of their countries and their plans for the overthrow of the People’s Democratic regimes.

But the vigilance of the people, led by the Communist parties, did not allow them to carry through their plans.

IV: Tito’s Plot Against Albania

The trial of Albanian Titoites which opened in May 1949 showed that ever since 1943 the Yugoslav Titoites had been carrying out a policy hostile to the interests of the Albanian people – that they had, indeed, with the aid of certain elements inside the Albanian Communist Party, been continuing the old imperialist policy of Mussolini.

The small but very courageous Albanian people rose up alongside the Yugoslav people to combat the Axis occupation forces. They formed Partisan units under the leadership of the newly-formed Albanian Communist Party. Already in the spring of 1943, Tito sent one of his principal agents – Vukmanović (Tempo) – to Albania, ostensibly to establish relations with the Albanian Partisans, but actually to set up a secret Titoite opposition headed by Koçi Xoxe and Pandi Kristo inside the Albanian Communist Party. With this the Titoite effort to gain control of the Albanian party began.

The first stage of Titoite intervention into the affairs of the Albanian patriots was the accusation of opportunism made against the Central Committee of the Albanian Communist Party, headed by Enver Hoxha, in connection with their attitude towards the nationalist organisation, the Balli Kombëtar. This organisation, formed and guided by the reactionary Albanian feudal nobility, presented itself as a national liberation movement, but in practice was holding the people back from joining the People’s Liberation Army (Albanian Partisans) in resistance to the Axis occupationists. But in the ranks of the Balli Kombëtar were many honest but misguided Albanian patriots.

The aim of the Central Committee of the Albanian Communists was to try, in the first instance, to win the genuine patriots in the Balli Kombëtar away from their reactionary leaders. The Titoites, who demanded immediate and direct action against the whole Balli Kombëtar, a seemingly ‘left’ policy, in actual fact did nothing but aid the Italian Blackshirts who were trying to push it into direct action against the Yugoslav Partisans.

A further stage in the Titoite plot against Albania was developed at the Congress of Berat in November 1944. Here the Albanian Titoite group, headed by Koçi Xoxe and Pandi Kristo, put forward a policy of subordination of Albania to Yugoslavia and of affiliating Albania to a ‘Balkan Federation’ of which Tito Yugoslavia would be the centre and the leader.

At the same time a strong factional campaign was launched against Enver Hoxha and other leaders of the Albanian Communist Party. Koçi Xoxe, like his prototype Ranković, held the key positions of Organisation Secretary of the Albanian Communist Party and Minister of the Interior. Other Albanian Titoites got hold of key positions in party and state – Pandi Kristo in the State Control Commission, others in the propaganda department of the Communist Party, in the press and in the Ministry of the Interior. Genuine Communist and internationalist cadres were attacked, persecuted, eliminated from key positions. Nako Spiru, Minister of Industry, President of the Planning Commission, and member of the Political Bureau of the party, was driven to suicide by the false accusations of the Titoites. Although they did not dare openly to attack General Enver Hoxha, they did everything they could to disrupt his influence and reputation, censored his correspondence and sent copies to the OZNA, Titoite secret police of Yugoslavia. All patriots who in any way resisted the Yugoslav colonisation plans were ruthlessly persecuted.

Meanwhile Albania was being colonised, economically and politically. A sort of Yugoslav Marshall Plan was carried out in Albania under the cover of customs and currency agreements, constitution of ‘mixed companies’, coordination of economic plans. A two-milliard-lek credit promised by Yugoslavia was never forthcoming. Profits of the ‘mixed companies’ were appropriated by the Yugoslavs. Yugoslav technicians spied on and sabotaged Albanian industrial developments. The demand was made that a Yugoslav division should be stationed in Albania and, when this was refused, that there should be a unified military command.

At the same time Koçi Xoxe was endeavouring to reorganise the Albanian party on the Titoite model; membership of the party was concealed as in Yugoslavia; the party was dissolved into the Democratic Front. Plots were set on foot for the assassination of Enver Hoxha and other genuine Communist leaders who resisted the Titoite policy.

Albania was saved, and the Albanian Titoites were eliminated, as a result of the vigilance of the CPSU(B) and other parties of the Communist Information Bureau, who, with the publication of the resolution on Yugoslavia in mid-1948, alerted all true Communists of the danger that their country was facing.

V: After the Information Bureau Resolution

The publication of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau on Yugoslavia in mid-1948 put the Communists of Eastern Europe and, indeed, of all the world, on their guard against the Titoites.

As for the Tito clique themselves, it forced them into the open, not all at once, but step by step.

At first the Titoites swore their loyalty to the Soviet Union, complained that they were being misjudged, and turned their attacks against the leading Communists of other countries of Eastern Europe, like Dimitrov and Rákosi. In a letter addressed to the CPSU(B) on 13 April 1948 (answering Soviet criticisms of Yugoslav Communist policy) and signed by Tito and Kardelj, it was stated, for instance:

Our only desire is to eliminate every doubt and disbelief in the purity of the comradely and brotherly feeling of loyalty of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to whom we will always remain thankful for the Marxist-Leninist doctrine which has led us unto now and will lead us in the future – loyalty to the Soviet Union which has served us and will continue to serve us as a great example and whose assistance to our people we so highly appreciate.

Such language today would mean a long prison sentence for the crime of ‘Cominformism’, if not worse.

Covering their anti-Soviet policy with a veil of hypocrisy, the Titoites quickly began the attacks on the other People’s Democracies:

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia must, however, emphasise that in certain countries of People’s Democracy a whole series of unprovoked attacks have been committed by party and state organs which are insulting to the people of Yugoslavia [etc, etc]. (Borba statement of 1 July 1948)

Meanwhile the most vicious slanders were launched against Communist leaders like Rákosi and (until his death) Dimitrov.

The second stage of Titoite manoeuvre was that in which, while beginning to direct their attacks against the Soviet Union and the CPSU(B), they tried to make it appear that Stalin did not agree with Information Bureau criticisms of Tito, that Zhdanov was responsible, and so on. Demagogic appeals were made to Stalin to ‘come out against the Cominform slanders’.

But there was little scope for such demagogy, for such unscrupulous manoeuvre. It was made perfectly clear to the whole world that the whole Central Committee of the CPSU(B), including its leader Stalin, had joined in criticising the Titoite policy. Very quickly a third stage was reached in which the Titoites began openly to slander and attack Soviet policy and the policy of the CPSU(B), to slander Stalin, to accuse him of betraying Leninism. By mid-1949 the Titoites had hoisted their real colours and were talking openly the old language of Trotskyism.

The May Day Proclamation of the Titoite Communist Party of May 1949 denounced the ‘attack upon Yugoslavia coming from the USSR and the People’s Democracies’. Though they still proclaimed, in leftist demagogic terms, the ‘dangers of imperialism’, the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies were denounced as the ‘most serious obstacle to further successful development of the struggle of the workers’ democratic peace-loving movement in the world’. The demagogy was wearing thin! At the end of May 1949, the Political Department of the ‘Communist Party’ organisation of the Yugoslav Army, dominated by the Titoites, was writing of the ‘counter-revolutionary struggle’ of the USSR and the People’s Democracies. By July 1949, Djilas was attacking the Soviet Union (Tanjug, 19 July 1949) as an ‘exploiter’ of the new Yugoslavia. The Titoite mask was lifted.

At the end of 1949, following the revelations of the Rajk and Kostov trials, the Titoite leaders and the Titoite press turned to full, unadulterated anti-Soviet slander. In 1950 they passed into the final stage – and became open propagandists for Western imperialism.

Thus the infamous Tito plan for weaning the people of Eastern Europe by stages away from the Soviet Union was defeated. The Titoites were exposed, and were themselves forced, by stages, into the open, revealed as anti-Soviet plotters, imperialist agents. And once they were forced into the open, though they remained a dangerous weapon of imperialism, the principal danger, thanks above all to the political wisdom and vigilance of the CPSU(B), was passed.

VI: Conclusion

The Rajk, Kostov and Xoxe trials revealed what had not yet been clear at the time of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau in mid-1948. They revealed that the false policy of the Titoite leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party criticised in the resolution – their anti-Soviet attitude, deviations from Marxism-Leninism, distortion of the role and organisation of the Communist Party, bourgeois nationalism – was not just mistaken policy, subject to correction by self-critical understanding of their errors.

The trials revealed that this false and disastrous policy was a deliberate and fully conscious policy on the part of the leading Titoites, like Tito himself, Kardelj, Djilas, Moša Pijade. It was a deliberate policy carried out by Trotskyites, agents provocateurs, who had gained over a whole period commanding positions in the Yugoslav Communist Party, and who, under the instructions of Anglo-American imperialism, were trying to use those positions to restore capitalism in Eastern Europe, to bring the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe into the orbit of Western imperialism, to subject these countries to Western imperialism.

The trials were a stern warning to Communists, genuine Socialists and progressives all over the world. It brought home to them in the most urgent terms the need for vigilance; the need never to forget that the class enemy is not for one moment inactive; that capitalism works covertly as well as overtly; that the leading imperialist circles will never cease from their efforts, by every means, to overthrow the states where the working people have conquered power.

They could go back with a new sense of urgency to the profound words of Stalin uttered at the meeting of activists of the Moscow Committee of the CPSU(B) on 13 April 1928:

It would be stupid to imagine that international capital will leave us in peace. No, comrades, this is not so. Classes exist, international capital exists and it cannot calmly view the development of the country building Socialism. It is one of two things: either we continue to pursue a revolutionary policy, rallying round the working class of the USSR, the proletariat and oppressed of all countries – and international capital will then in every way hamper us in our forward march; or we reject our revolutionary policy, agree to a number of fundamental concessions to international capital – and then international capital will, in all probability, have no objections to ‘helping’ us in the degeneration of our Socialist country, into a ‘good’ bourgeois republic. (Stalin, Collected Works, Russian edition, Volume 11, pp 54-55)

The trials revealed that the Titoites had rejected revolutionary policy, that they were being ‘helped’ by international capital in the degeneration of their country into a bourgeois state, destined, in the dreams of the imperialists, to help turn back history in the whole of Eastern Europe.

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