Tito Against the People:
RADITSA, BOGDAN
Tito Against the People Tito's Promised Land. By Alex N. Dragnich. Rutgers. 337 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by Bogdan Raditsa Professor of Modern European History, Fairleigh Dickinson College TO THOSE...
...At the same time, corruption and embezzlement on the part of Communist officials have reached new heights, ft should he plain by now that the West will never succeed in making Communist Yugoslavia a going concern...
...Many American officials have been told by Yugoslav Communists: "You and we are enemies...
...The author, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, is an American of Yugoslav descent...
...Before the war, Yugoslavia exported more than 40 per cent of its agricultural produce...
...Education and public-opinion media, as well as the entire national economy, are a monopoly of the Communist state...
...Reviewed by Bogdan Raditsa Professor of Modern European History, Fairleigh Dickinson College TO THOSE who thought Tito would liberalize his Communist dictatorship after the break with Moscow, this book will come as a bitter disappointment...
...The major part of this book deals with the period from Tito's seizure of power to the present...
...Unlike some of his compatriots, who were eager to find something new and attractive in Communist Yugoslavia, Professor Dragnich was fully aware of the deep gulf between the regime and the people it uses as guinea pigs...
...The answer is that the West should help the people and not their tyrannical rulers...
...As for the Communist-party membership and top Army personnel, Mr...
...asks Mr...
...Only when the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians work out a basis for multinational coexistence will there be a real chance for democracy in Yugoslavia...
...How can we justify contributing to an indefinite enslavement of these people...
...On another occasion, Rankovich admitted that, since the Communists took power, over 6 million Yugoslavs had been arrested out of a population of 16 million...
...As cultural attache at the U. S. Embassy in Belgrade, he had a first-hand opportunity to observe the functioning of Tito's government...
...One of the reassuring aspects of this hook is the evidence it presents that Yugoslav youth has not embraced Communism—a conclusion I arrived at myself in conversations with many young refugees from Tito...
...It shows that, contrary to many predictions, his basic aim of transforming Yugoslavia into a monolithic Communist state has not changed since the break in 1948 between the advanced Communist outpost in Yugoslavia and the main fortress in the Soviet Union...
...The alleged concessions to the workers and peasants, which have made such an impression on some Western observers, are merely "strategic retreats" like those made by Lenin and other Soviet leaders at various times ?designed not to "liberalize" the regime but to pursue with temporarily less brutal means the same unchanging goal: fastening the power of an organized minority on the helpless majority...
...Dragnich corroborates the belief of many observers that their devotion to the Soviet Union has remained unshaken...
...It is a complete, thorough analysis of the Yugoslav state organization and Communist-party leadership, written by a man who knows how to read between the lines of official statements and view them in the context of living realities...
...My only criticism of this book is directed at the author's exclusive emphasis on the Serbian role in the resistance against Communism...
...The reason is not the drought which Tito uses as a lever against the West and his own people, but the silent resistance of the peasantry, which prefers freedom to a collectivized economy...
...The "judicial reforms" that have been hailed by people like U. S. Supreme Court Justice William 0. Douglas have not gone very far, judging from the statement in 1949 by Alexander Rankovich, chief of Tito's secret police, that "47 per cent of secret-police arrests were unjustified" and that the new reforms did "not involve changing the basic principles of our socialist [read Communist] justice...
...The bankruptcy of the Communist experiment should give pause to those who are still in favor of pouring money into Tito's realm...
...today, it does not come close to that record...
...Stalin's death and Malen-kov's so-called "new look" have merely made it easier for Tito to "preserve the fiction that governmental policies stem from popular initiative," while in reality it is the Communist party that wields all power...
...In any war, the people of Yugoslavia will rise against their oppressors, but the Western policy of supporting Tito has caused them to feel betrayed...
...Despite the vast economic aid which Yugoslavia has received from the United States, the Tito regime has incorporated more than 30 per cent of all arable land in the "socialist sector...
...The Communists have been successful in Yugoslavia largely by introducing themselves as moderators in the Serb-Croat and other national antagonisms...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 45
