The Paradox of Polycentric Communism

...Why should a people which achieves real national independence continue to put up with a regime which was imposed upon it from outside and does not correspond to the wishes of the majority...

...Since Tito was rehabilitated, however, it has been impossible to contain him or to prevent him from pursuing an active party-diplomatic policy toward the satellite countries...

...The situation produced by the revolution in Hungary has divided the Communist world far more than Tito's original revolt of 1948 ever did...

...There is indeed some justification from a Communist point of view in the reproaches addressed to Tito in the letter from the Soviet Communist party of May 4, 1948: "No one can deny the services and successes of the Communist party of Yugoslavia...

...Khrushchev acted as he did in rehabilitating Tito and relaxing the Russian grip on the satellites because he believed he could both have his cake and eat it...

...It was possible, though hardly adequate for the Party's political needs, for the Russian Communists, in repudiating Stalin, to fall back on Lenin, but the Communists of the people's democracies could do no such thing...

...Hence, all the non-Soviet Communist parties looked toward Russia not only as the inspiring exemplar, the one nation which had crossed the dividing line into the new world of their ideal, but also as the power which could help them in their struggle with advice, money, arms and even, in the last resort, direct military assistance...

...De-Stalinization is risky enough in the country which made the Bolshevik Revolution and has lived under Communist rule for nearly forty years...

...It was only when he was securely in possession of the state power in Yugoslavia, with the prestige of a national resistance hero to reinforce his authority as Party leader, that he began to show the independence of attitude which so offended his political maker...

...But why should it have done so...

...in their place there is an anarchy of discordant voices...

...But neutralism within the Soviet orbit is quite another matter and could seriously restrict the strategic position acquired by Russia after the last war—a position which in a general war would render possible a rapid movement of Russian forces either westward to the Atlantic or southward to the Mediterranean or both...

...In practice, however, the emancipation of foreign Communists from Soviet tutelage must raise very serious problems for the Soviet Union...

...Gone are the great certainties...

...since the situation politically has got so far out of control, the temptation to resort to the direct use of force has become extremely strong...

...In the civil wars in Yugoslavia—which cost more lives than the national resistance to the Axis invaders—he showed a ruthlessness and cruelty quite up —or down—to Soviet standards...

...It would have lost a considerable part of its international following of the more starry-eyed type, though it would retain the services of hard-core fifth columns in Western countries and probably its new-found Arab allies...

...Yet, it is Tito himself who has done more than anyone to provoke a Stalinist reaction in Russia...

...The opportunity to deal with Tito by a Blitzkrieg may or may not be taken by Russia, but it has to be regarded as more than a possibility in present circumstances...

...After they had sacrificed whatever patriotic scruples they may ever have had in submission to the will of the Soviet dictator, and had done everything possible in their respective countries to glorify his reign and conceal his crimes—among the worst of which were those he committed in order to put them in power—they were suddenly told from Moscow that he had been a tyrant and a monster utterly unworthy of the adulation which had been officially ordered for more than two decades...

...Elsewhere—except in China, where the Communists after 1927 controlled a small part of the national territory—they were an organization which, whether constitutionally tolerated or outlawed and driven underground, was in permanent revolutionary opposition not only to the government of the day but to the whole political and social order of the state in which they were located...

...No Communist leader was more entirely Stalin's creature in his rise to the leadership of his party...

...But no such factors were operative in Hungary, and inevitably the effect there of Titoism was to produce a movement which was not only anti-Soviet but also "counter-revolutionary" in the sense that it demanded rights of opposition, free elections, and an end to the monopoly of politics by the Communist party...

...Tito thus became the exemplar of "national Communism"—the maintenance of a Communist party dictatorship with full national sovereignty independent of Moscow...

...Tito, on the other hand, has for months been telling foreign statesmen and diplomats that everything depends on Khrushchev, that he is the enlightened apostle of de-Stalinization who must be supported against the old guard of the CPSU...

...As one of his maneuvers in the field of Soviet foreign relations, Khrushchev carried out his dramatic reconciliation with Tito by going to Belgrade and apologizing for the charges against the Marshal, which, he said, had all been due to misrepresentations devised by the recently deceased Beria...

...It was too much to expect that the Soviet Union, which, whatever the divisions and vacillations of its leadership since Stalin's death, remains a mighty industrial and military power, would allow the head of a small state, originally promoted to local party command by the Kremlin, to dictate what should be done and who should hold power throughout Eastern Europe...

...their dictatorships were essentially creations of the Stalin era, and if that was discredited they were left morally bankrupt...

...The status of Tito as a national resistance leader may suffice to keep his party's rule going in Yugoslavia...

...There can be no guarantee that a Titoist development will stop at a national Communist government even if Russia is willing to recognize such a government...

...But it would not be quite the same empire...

...Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Albania are not less than those of the Communist party ol Yugoslavia...

...But the leaders of these parties behave modestly and do not boast about their successes, as do the Yugoslav leaders, who have pierced everyone's ears with their unlimited self-praise...

...Most of the governments owed their existence to the direct military intervention of Soviet forces operating against Germany or Japan in the course of the war...

...He imagined he could grant a measure of freedom but retain ultimate control...

...Even though the French and Italian Communist parties have so far achieved less success than the Communist party of Yugoslavia, this is not due to any special qualities of the latter, but mainly to the fact that after the destruction of the Yugoslav partisan headquarters by German paratroops, at a moment when the people's liberation movement in Yugoslavia was passing through a serious crisis, the Soviet Army came to the aid of the Yugoslav people, crushed the German invader, liberated Belgrade, and in this way created the conditions which were necessary for the Communist party of Yugoslavia to achieve power...

...Far from being grateful for the favor of Russian forgiveness, he has taken up an attitude of such insistence and censoriousness with regard to other Communist parties, including the CPSU, that a joke recently circulated in Europe that the Soviet Union had become Yugoslavia's satellite...

...the disruption is beyond repair...

...They are not, and never have been, prepared to do that...

...However, we must also say that the services of the Communist parties of Poland, Czechoslovakia...

...Polycentric" Communism—to use the term coined earlier this year by Togliatti —has developed too far for the international movement to be brought into line in the old manner by a mere declaration from Moscow...

...he accepted, if he did not actually take part in, the liquidation of his predecessor Gorkich during the Great Purge in the Soviet Union, and even the death of his own wife in a Soviet prison did not shake his loyalty to Stalin...

...There is in Tito's character a touch of megalomania which leads him to act with an audacity far beyond what is appropriate to the actual strength of his country...

...the outcome would have been not Titoism but Djilasism, and the repercussions would have been felt in all the neighboring countries, not least within the Soviet Union itself...

...The outcome, however, was not so much the reabsorp-tion of Yugoslavia into the Soviet-satellite bloc as the disruption of that bloc...

...abandoned by its own army and supported only by the hated secret police, it had to either invoke Russian protection or else yield to the forces of political democracy...

...There can be little doubt that Khrushchev considered this a master-stroke of policy, the fruits of which would be well worth the public humiliation which it involved...

...Tito was denounced not merely as a dissident Communist but as a traitor to the movement and a fascist who had sold Yugoslavia to Western imperialism...

...But, even on the assumption that Titoism would not pass into Djilasism in an ex-satellite country, the mere recognition of "different roads to socialism" cannot fail in the long run to have an extremely deleterious effect on Communist morale everywhere, and above all on the Russian Communists, who have become habituated to the idea of one faith and one law given from Moscow...

...Russia has suffered political defeat, but her military power is gigantic and relatively greater than at any time since 1945, for NATO is paralyzed by the dissensions among the Western powers, West German rearmament has been an utter fiasco, and a considerable part of Anglo-French strength has been diverted to North Africa and the Middle East...

...anxiety about the Oder-Neisse line may serve to deter the Poles from demolishing the political structure which is bound up with their security against a German revanche...

...If Tito were to be driven from Belgrade, accounts could be settled later with Gomulka and Stalin's empire could be fully restored...

...A sense of dependence and the humility of pupils conscious of their own inadequacy led them willingly to subordinate themselves to Russia and accept direction from Moscow within the highly disciplined and centralized association of the Comintern...

...now that it has failed, he is following a different course with equal recklessness...

...If the people's democracies are merely less advanced along the path that the Soviet Union has traveled, their institutions can offer no challenge to those of Russia, but if there are indeed different roads to socialism and not simply different stages on the same road, may not Yugoslavia's abandonment of collective farming be just as good socialism as Russia's enforcement of it...

...The regime in Hungary had not the strength to survive at all without the aid of Russian tanks...

...Stalin's Russia refrained from any military action against Yugoslavia—where there were no Russian troops stationed—but organized political and economic pressure against Tito with the support of all the other Communist parties throughout the world, including both those in capitalist countries and those in power in "people's democracies...

...Polycentric Communism implies the disintegration not only of Stalinism, but also of Leninism, as a centrally organized world religion—for it was Lenin who by founding the Comintern, with its rigorous conditions for membership, proclaimed that there were not many roads to socialism but only one...

...The situation inevitably brought Khrushchev under fire from "Stalinist" colleagues who originally doubted the wisdom of the decision to go to Belgrade...

...There has never, indeed, been any explicit dogma that non-Soviet parties must take orders from Moscow any more than there has ever been an explicit dogma that the leadership of a Communist party should be an autocracy, and it might seem appropriate for politicians who had restored collective leadership in the Soviet Union to recognize also the independence of Communist parties abroad...

...Khrushchev, therefore, having staked his political career on the bid for reconciliation with Tito and being under the necessity of showing results for his policy to his colleagues in the Soviet leadership, was constrained to make one concession after another to Titoism in the hope of reaching a firm understanding with the Yugoslav party and detaching it definitively from its Western connections...

...It must have become evident to Khrushchev some time ago that his reconciliation with Tito had involved a heavy adverse political balance for Russia, that it had indeed been a colossal blunder from the Kremlin's point of view...

...A new state of affairs arose after the end of World War II with the establishment of Communist or Communist-controlled governments in a number of countries outside the Soviet Union...

...Yugoslavia herself has for years been neutral, without formal attachment to either the Soviet or Western bloc, and has become an opponent on principle of all military blocs...

...Only now the tanks are on the move, and it is the peace of the world that is in danger...

...In the first place, it tends to destroy the system of alliances on which Russia's international power position has been based since the end of World War II...

...Fear of German revisionism may be sufficient to bind Poland and Czechoslovakia to a Russian alliance, but no such fear exists to hold Hungary, Rumania or Bulgaria...

...There was no Communist state other than Russia to compete for the allegiance of the international movement or to pursue as a sovereign government a foreign policy divergent from the Russian...

...The neutralization of Austria and the formation of the much-publicized "peace area" of Asian and African neutrals has inevitably increased the neutralist yearnings within the Soviet bloc...

...The danger of a major international war would be intensified, and it would be only a limited consolation for the West that Russia, by being driven to destroy so openly the independence of small nations, would have reduced her capacity to employ Trojan Horse tactics under the cover of peaceful coexistence...

...At some point, there was bound to be a hardening of Russian policy and a reversal of the relaxation of control which was leading not to pacification of the satellites but to intensified agitation and fresh demands...

...If Khrushchev originally overestimated Yugoslav willingness to go along with Soviet policy when readmitted to the Communist fold, Tito in turn appears to have greatly underestimated the forces of the recoil if Russia were pressed too far along the road of concession...

...It would necessarily be more definitely Russian, more openly imperial, and above all more militarist, than it was in Stalin's day...

...That worldwide ideological unity cannot now be revived...

...The outcome, however, was much less satisfactory from the Soviet point of view...

...But Titoism in Eastern Europe has likewise gone too far for the Russians to accept it unless they are willing definitely to renounce that position of dominant continental power which Stalin gained for them...

...it is infinitely more hazardous in countries where the system was imposed by Russian arms and has lasted only just over a decade...

...After Stalin's death, the quarrel with Tito was left as one of the principal foreign-policy problems inherited by his successors...

...Individual Communists elsewhere who manifested sympathy for Tito were executed or imprisoned where the Party held state power, or expelled from the Party where it did not...

...it is likely that he himself has come to feel toward Tito all the resentment and rancor which a man can harbor toward someone who he feels has let him down...

...What journalists are agreed in describing as his "ebullience" of temperament caused him to plunge impetuously ahead on a line of policy without considering the risks it involved...

...No wonder the faithful felt bewildered and confounded while anti-Communist elements began to raise their heads from the subjection to which Stalin's revolution from above had reduced them...

...If the Russians had not acted against the Hungarian Revolution, it would certainly have meant the end of Communist rule in Hungary...

...Russia has accepted the neutralization of Austria to keep her out of the Western camp and has actively promoted the neutrality of the Eastern nations, which might have been drawn into the Baghdad or SEATO Pacts...

...Yugoslav national pride and patriotic sentiment supported him in his stand against Russia, but the recoil against international Communism did not carry the country away from the Soviet model of one-party dictatorship toward political democracy...

...Tito declined to abandon the ties with the West which he had formed during the period of his estrangement from Russia, while at the same time he began to demand direct relations, unimpeded by Moscow, with the Communist parties of the satellite states and the removal from office in them of those leaders who had been foremost in attacking him...

...Tito's revolt against the Kremlin naturally evoked the sympathies of the Western world, but it is important not to be unduly sentimental about Titoism...

...Tito relaxed the economic policies of the regime, particularly by his virtual abandonment of the collective-farm program, but he did not modify the political structure of the state, and when his colleague Milovan Djilas reached the point of advocating political rights for a non-Communist opposition he was subjected to strong disciplinary action...

...But what remains is the most powerful army in the world and a government in the hands of men who, however they may revile the dead tyrant, were trained in Stalin's school...

...But, apart from the strategic consequences for Russia of a breakaway of any of the satellites, there are the political dangers inherent in any dissolution of Stalin's imperial system...

...Yugoslavia survived the onslaught, but was completely isolated from the rest of the Communist world...

...The notable exception—though it was not entirely an exception—was Marshal Tito's regime in Yugoslavia, and it was this government which soon began to show signs of the insubordination toward Moscow which finally led to an open breach in the spring of 1948...

...They are men whom neither moral scruples nor international law will restrain from any violence that they deem expedient...

...It is held by Titoists that what happened in Hungary was due merely to the slowness of the Hungarian Communists in de-Stalinization, that if only Nagy and Kadar had been given power a few days earlier everything would have been all right and Hungary would have been content to go on living indefinitely under a reformed version of the old dictatorship...

...Stalin refrained from military action against Tito, but he isolated him politically by declaring him an enemy and rigorously excluding him from the Communist camp...

...Theoretically, there was no good reason in Marxist-Leninist doctrine why there should not be in the world a group of equal, sovereign and mutually independent states all ruled by Communist parties but free to pursue separate national policies...

...By 1948, nevertheless, Tito's power in Yugoslavia was so strongly established that he was able to suppress the "Cominformist" faction within the Yugoslav Communist party while at the same time maintaining the Party's dictatorial rule over the nation...

...So international Communism continued to have only one center and that was in the Kremlin...

...Unfortunately, the Soviet Army did not and could not render such assistance to the French and Italian parties...

...But it was probably not only pressure from these "reactionaries" which forced Khrushchev to modify his policy...

...Logically, the action in Hungary should be followed by moves to deal with Titoism also in Poland and at its source in Yugoslavia...

...The loosening of control in these countries must unleash forces that are at once anti-Soviet and anti-Communist...

...With the acceptance of Tito's principles, there is no longer the one great authoritative interpretation of doctrine that resolves all doubts, no longer the single disciplined community of believers outside which there is nothing but decaying capitalism and its Social Democratic lackeys...

...The loosening of Soviet control over the satellites demanded by Tito was accelerated by the turn against Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, when Khrushchev by his reckless denunciation of his former master called in question the very foundation of the Communist satellite regimes...

...He evidently expected that, after this amende honorable, Yugoslavia would be drawn back into the Soviet orbit and he would have the credit for healing the scandalous breach in the unity of the international Communist movement...

...Complete independence would mean that former satellite states could choose neutrality instead of military alliance with Russia...

...the defections have been more serious than they were even after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and entire national parties have been wavering over the Hungarian i'ssiie...

...Khrushchev now found too late that he had taken an irrevocable step in rehabilitating Tito and that, having repudiated the former accusations, it was no longer possible either to curb Tito's diplomacy or to give the other people's democracies any good reason why they should not follow the Yugoslav example...