Conversations with Stalin Read Online Free PDF

a coalition between the Communist and bourgeois parties, inasmuch as the war and the civil war had already shown the Communist Party to be the only real political force. This view of mine meant nonrecognition of the Yugoslav Royal Government-in-exile, and, in fact, of the monarchy itself.
    During our first meeting I described for Dimitrov the developments and the situation in Yugoslavia. He generously admitted that he had not expected that the Yugoslav Party would prove to be the most militant and most resourceful; he had placed greater hopes in the French Party. He recalled how Tito, on leaving Moscow at the end of 1939, swore that the Yugoslav Party would wash away the stain with which various fractionalists had besmirched it and that it would prove itself worthy of the name which it bore, whereupon Dimitrov advised him not to swear, but to act wisely and resolutely. He recounted further: “You know, when the subject came up of whom to appoint Secretary of the Yugoslav Party, there was some wavering, but I was for Walter [this was Josip Broz’s Party pseudonym at the time; later he adopted the name Tito]. He was a worker, and he seemed solid and serious to me. I am glad that I was not mistaken.”
    Dimitrov remarked, almost apologetically, that the Soviet Government had not been in a position to help the Yugoslav Partisans in their greatest hour of need. He himself had personally gotten Stalin interested in this. That was true: as early as 1941–1942 Soviet pilots had tried to get through to Yugoslav Partisan bases, and some homeward-bound Yugoslav émigrés who had flown with them froze.
    Dimitrov also mentioned our negotiations with the Germans over the exchange of prisoners: “We were afraid for you, but luckily everything turned out well.”
    I did not react to this, nor would I have said any more than he had confirmed, not even had he insisted on the details. But there was no danger that he would say or ask something he shouldn’t; in politics all that ends well is soon forgotten.
    As a matter of feet, Dimitrov did not insist on anything; the Comintern had really been dissolved, and his only job now was to gather information about Communist parties and to give advice to the Soviet Government and Party.
    He told me how the idea first arose to dissolve the Comintern. It was at the time the Baltic states were annexed by the Soviet Union. It was apparent even then that the main power in the spread of Communism was the Soviet Union, and that therefore all forces had to gather directly around it. The dissolution itself had been postponed because of the international situation, to avoid giving the impression that it was being done under pressure from the Germans, with whom relations were not bad at the time.
    Dimitrov was a person who enjoyed Stalin’s rare regard, and, what is perhaps less important, he was the undisputed leader of the Bulgarian Communist movement. Two later meetings with Dimitrov confirmed this. At the first I described conditions in Yugoslavia to the members of the Bulgarian Central Committee, and at the second there was talk of eventual Bulgarian-Yugoslav cooperation and of the struggle in Bulgaria.
    Besides Dimitrov, the meeting with the Bulgarian Central Committee was attended by Kolarov, Čhervenkov, and others. Čhervenkov had greeted me on the occasion of my first visit, though he did not remain, and I took him to be Dimitrov’s private secretary. He remained in the background at this second meeting as well—silent and unobtrusive, though I was later to gain a different impression of him. I had already learned from Vlahović and others that Čhervenkov was the husband of Dimitrov’s sister, that he was to have been arrested at the time of the purges—the “exposé” of the political school where he was an instructor had already been published—but he took refuge with Dimitrov. Dimitrov intervened with the NKVD and made everything