The Decline and Fall of Titoism
RADITSA, BOGDAN
WRITERS and WRITING The Decline and Fall of Titoism By Bogdan Raditsa Professor of modern European history, Fairleigh Dickinson University The fame and fortune of Yugoslavia's Marshal Joseph...
...He thus disregards completely the internal Yugoslav conditions which made Tito's Partisan movement a major political force in the country as early as 1942...
...Thanks to these two and several other unique sources, the book's explanation of the domestic roots of Tito's rise to power is remarkably logical and coherent...
...WRITERS and WRITING The Decline and Fall of Titoism By Bogdan Raditsa Professor of modern European history, Fairleigh Dickinson University The fame and fortune of Yugoslavia's Marshal Joseph Broz-Tito reached their peak just before the death of Joseph Stalin in Moscow...
...The book's great value derives from the fact that the authors have used material gathered by Ante Ciliga, a former member of the Yugoslav Central Committee, and have consulted Aziz Gengic (alias Zulfikarpasic), whose participation in Communist affairs has given him a rare knowledge of the inner operations of Tito's party...
...Indiana University Professor Din-ko Tomasic and his assistant Joseph Strmecki show a deeper understanding of Yugoslav historical and sociological realities in their book National Communism and Soviet Strategy...
...and thus it also ushered in the period of the decline and fall of Titoism...
...After a series of books complimentary to Tito, these studies should contribute to a deeper understanding of the Yugoslav problems that still bewilder not only Washington but also many Yugoslavs who cannot agree on the crucial question: Where did we fail...
...aid was exploited for Communist purposes but also how terror ruled a frightened and puzzled country...
...By Slobodan M. Draskovielo Regnery...
...Slobodan Draskovich, a former professor at Belgrade University, is leader of a group of political exiles called "Tsar Dushan the Mighty," a faction with strong pan-Serbian leanings...
...By D. A. Tomasic, with Joseph Strmecki, Public Affairs...
...But the persecution of Djilas and the death of Mosha Pi jade, the chief alchemist of Yugoslav Communist theory, has left Tito's party discouraged, worried, hesitant and confused...
...Here is an analysis, at last, of the Yugoslav intelligentsia, or rather semi-intelligentsia, which is the backbone of Yugoslav Communism and about which little or nothing is known abroad...
...Both the Belgrade ruling set and the old leaders of urban Zagreb failed to rally this periphery to their side, but Communist propaganda electrified mountaineers and foresters with the vision of a brave new world of national equality...
...Eric Pridonoff's book describes what happened at the end of the war...
...Though the books often differ radically in their analysis of past events, the authors still appear to agree that, whatever Washington does about Tito, it cannot do much in this manner about freeing Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia from Communist rule...
...243 pp...
...On the other hand, Professor Tomasic, while noting that the various Yugoslav guerrilla fighters (Partisans, Chetniks, Ustashi) came primarily from the so-called dinaric (mountain) regions of Yugoslavia, does not quite make clear how these people of the same stock and breed came to kill each other in the name of contrasting faiths...
...diplomacy...
...Public Affairs...
...Draskovich's silence on the prewar nationalities conflicts and the bloody Serbo-Croatian civil war which ensued in 1941 is as unjust as his attempt to blame Tito's success in later years on sympathetic coverage by New York Times correspondents in Belgrade...
...Tito's Communists, he says, strengthened neutralism and anti-Western tendencies in Asia and the Middle East among elements to whom Moscow did not have access...
...economic official and UNRRA manager...
...Moscow's Trojan llorso...
...Throughout his long, bitter and very repetitious book, Draskovich attributes Tito's rise to power exclusively to the Red Army's presence in Yugoslavia in the last days of the war and to the weakness of Anglo-American diplomacy...
...Though one might say that C. L. Sulzberger has at times tended to overestimate Tito's ideological appeal, M. S. Handler and Jack Raymond were objective, understanding and honest in their day-by-day reporting of the Belgrade scene over the years...
...A series of fundamental decisions by Tito in the four years since that time, culminating in Yugoslavia's ambiguous role in the Hungarian Revolution, have eroded the unique position Belgrade had established after the great schism of 1948...
...Pridonoff had a rare opportunity to see not only how U.S...
...Had Tito followed the counsel of Djilas in 1953 and sanctioned the formation of a legal democratic socialist opposition party, Yugoslavia today would be regarded with even greater hope than Gomulka's Poland by Eastern European dissidents and by Communists everywhere who recognize that totalitarianism has led them to a blind alley...
...222 pp...
...These three books,* written by three Americans of Yugoslav descent and one of Russian descent, are in accord in their doubts that Tito can be of service to U.S...
...3.75...
...Draskovich calls Titoism "the greatest hoax of the 20th century," and says the West will surely be defeated if it attempts to use "national Communism" as a weapon in fighting Soviet power...
...While admitting that the Soviet-Yugoslav break was genuine, he says that it nevertheless helped Soviet Communism more than it helped U.S...
...diplomacy however his regime turns...
...The Hungarian Revolution, as Milovan Djilas observed, marked the beginning of the end of Communism everywhere...
...357 pp...
...By Eric L. Pridonoff...
...5.OO...
...4.50...
...The month-by-month shifts from a warm to a cool tone toward Moscow and back again show that Tito has yet to face the great decision—-Stalinism or democratization—that Djilas grasped as inevitable four years ago...
...Tito's movement drew its dynamism—and ultimate success—from the backward, permanently rebellious, individually heroic social periphery which, during and just after the war, simultaneously assailed gullible Serbia and Croatia, profoundly anti-Communist but unable to resolve their national quarrel...
...Many of Pridonoff's pages brought me back to those terrifying days and nights when I, too, saw the realities of Yugoslav Communism in action...
...it is an honest eye-witness account by a former U.S...
...Nationol Communism and Soviet Strategy...
...Tito's Yugoslavia...
...Though only their first and last chapters deal with Soviet strategy, and both of these are vague and unconvincing, their book is thus far the most complete account of the Yugoslav Communist party, its anatomy and national character, and the revolutionary character of its adaptation of Marxism-Leninism...
...One-time minority nationalists became Communists and helped Tito seize the power that the prewar Serbian and Croatian ruling groups had abdicated by their failure to resolve petty, exhausting national antagonisms...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 33
