Tito, Rankovic and All That
C., L.
For some years now it has been assumed that when the Peoples' Democracies of Eastern Europe are compared, "they order things better in Yugoslavia." One begins to doubt it. Since the...
...And then it might become apparent that, after all, dictatorial and centralized rule is far less "efficient" than had previously been assumed...
...The bitter clashes between productioncentered younger technocrats and power-centered older party functionaries overlap, in part, generational and nationality conflicts...
...This is now no longer possible...
...The Croats and Slovenes argue that if they could invest their profits within their own regions these could be utilized more productively...
...Just as in the Soviet Union, the ruling party is considerably older than the nation...
...The circulation of the elites has slowed down considerably since the 1940's...
...Croatia and Slovenia, the richest and most developed regions of the country, seem no longer willing to let their resources be drained in order to help the poorer republics of Serbia and Macedonia...
...Rankovic is a Serb and his apparatus was apparently mainly of Serbian origin...
...Pretty soon, but certainly after Tito's exit and the inevitable succession crisis, Yugoslavia will have to choose...
...Tito now seems to have concluded that it is necessary at least partly to give in to the demands for greater autonomy of the non-Serbian components of the country...
...This does not make for a common language between them...
...The aging dictator thus continues his precarious balancing act...
...one half of its members are over 40...
...Nor is the dramatic re-opening of nationality conflicts the only sign of instability...
...The technocrats seem oriented toward a profitmarketand money-oriented economy, while the older generation of the party planners is unwilling to give up the essential levels of the command economy...
...Communist Yugoslavia, as Bogdan Raditsa has cogently argued, thus comes to resemble the old Serbiandominated Royal Yugoslavia in which Serbian political power kept down the economically more enterprising Croatians and Slovenes...
...These discussions have not only involved the new economic program, intended gradually to move the country from a command to a market economy...
...Tito's recent purge of Rankovic, chief of the Yugoslav secret police and once considered his probable successor, seems connected with this new upsurge of the age-old quarrel of Yugoslav nationalities...
...the top political leaders are still men who won their spurs during the partisan days of the war, and the succeeding generation has not yet achieved the position of power which it considers its due...
...while supporting economic revisionism and purging the Belgrade police apparatus, he also turns against the humanist socialism propounded by Praxis...
...The Yugoslays might then find that the devolution of central police power, the decentralization of decisionmaking, the permanent dismantling of detailed central planning and the development of a truly market-oriented socialism might point the way out of the present impasse...
...nor would it seem possible to continue for much longer the present precarious balancing act between the old and the new, between freedom and the sword...
...Under the new economic policy now adopted, more than half of all investment funds are to be retained by component republics and enterprises rather than redistributed through Belgrade...
...One may say that the Party is 16 to 20 years older than the nation at large...
...For many years the bitter tensions and conflicts that divide Yugoslav society have been methodically suppressed by the regime...
...What Gregory Grossman has called the conflict between "money and the sword" in the Eastern econo• mies has reached particular virulence in contemporary Yugoslavia...
...they have also brought to the fore deep-seated national antagonisms among the various peoples of Yugoslavia which Tito had supposedly overcome...
...What Isaac Deutscher recently wrote about the Soviet Union seems grosso modo also to hold true for Yugoslavia: "The Communist Party is considerably older than the nation...
...The devils that now plague the regime might be more easily exorcised by free debate than by the dexterous manipulation of no matter how clever a Central Committee...
...While lament ing the fact that "bourgeois nationalism" endangers the very existence of federated Yugoslavia, Tito seems nevertheless to have concluded that it was no longer possible to oppose a certain amount of decentralization of the powers and controls of the Belgrade bureaucracy...
...Yugoslavia also seems to suffer from a very sharp generational conflict...
...The country, yes even its ruling party, is now paying for the decision to suppress the voice of Djilas at a time when it would have been easier to adopt a more flexible and libertarian course...
...Finally, Yugoslavia's one-party system might then slowly develop into that multiparty democracy which Djilas began advocating twelve years ago...
...And Tito, though he seems recently to have backed the reformers and their stress on economic rationality and profitability, has at the same time used the sword, in order to suppress the magazine Praxis, published by young Croatian "revisionist" Marxists at the University of Zagreb...
...Milovan Djilas, in the meantime, is still imprisoned in the infamous Sremska Mitrovica prison, his crime being that he predicted many of the present difficulties and that he spoke about them when the powers-to-be considered it high treason to blurt out a truth which has by now become common knowledge...
...Since the beginning of 1966 a number of extraordinary sessions of the Central Committee of the League of Communists have been the scene of violent discussions between "reformers" and more doctrinaire Communists...
Vol. 13 • September 1966 • No. 5
