Tito and His Ism
WOLFF, ROBERT LEE
WRITERS and WRITING Tito and His Ism By Robert Lee Wolff Professor of History, Harvard University; author, "The Balkans in Our Time A Croatian peasant's son born in 1892 learned a metalworker's...
...Nor, it might be added, does Maclean enable us to follow in any detail the changes in Yugoslavia after 1949-1950: He does not ask, much less attempt to answer, the question of whether the new workers' councils are effective as instruments of economic management or as the base for a new social and political system...
...He rode out the storm, and Stalin's successors, humbly apologetic, came to woo him...
...Martin's...
...Finally, he reviews the ideological thinking that preceded and accompanied the political changes...
...But Maclean's very intimacy with his subject is a source of weakness as well as strength...
...322 pp...
...Both Churchill and Maclean knew that they were probably contributing to the eventual triumph of Communism in Yugoslavia...
...But Stalin distrusted his vigor, his ambition and his very success, and sought to destroy him...
...Through hellish hardships, Tito and his men successfully survived seven enemy offensives and countless minor engagements...
...Harper...
...author, "The Balkans in Our Time A Croatian peasant's son born in 1892 learned a metalworker's trade, served in the Austrian armies in the First World War, fell into Russian hands, and played a role in the Bolshevik Revolution...
...What becomes of McVicker's thesis in the light of Tito's treatment of Djilas, whose real sin is criticism of Communism as such...
...He returned to the new state of Yugoslavia to rise through the ranks of the Communist party, ruthless, brave and intelligent, until he had elbowed his way into the Secretary-Generalship on the eve of the Second World War...
...Now Fitzroy Maclean—Foreign Office alumnus, Conservative MP, and recently Baronet—who knows Tito personally better than any other citizen of a Western country, has written his own account.1 Commander of the military mission sent by Churchill to the Yugoslav Partisans in 1943, Maclean wrote the reports that persuaded his chief to help Tito...
...Never losing sight of politics, he began while still a hunted man to transform his guerrilla movement into a government...
...By Charles P. McVicker...
...We hear in passing of the secret police, of peasant resistance to the collectivization of agriculture, of an over-ambitious five-year plan...
...He examines the "decentralization" and the workers' councils in the factory, changes in agricultural, social and legal policies, and the constitutional changes in which these reforms have been embodied...
...So far as he can (and he has had experience on the spot) he tells us something about how the system works in practice...
...Few would deny that here we have one of the most arresting and eventful lives of the 20th century...
...Or in the light of Tito's recognition of East Germany...
...defied the USSR, and got the help he needed from the West...
...Nor does he give sufficient attention to the possibility that Tito, restored to Soviet favor for the second time after the interval following the Hungarian uprising (during which Khrushchev had to backtrack until he could get rid of his opponents), may himself contribute to the destruction of Titoism elsewhere...
...In 1953, Vladimir Dedijer, Tito's one-time close companion, now disgraced, gave us a semi-official biography, pious and admiring...
...The author documents his belief that the present Yugoslav system is "a much more humane variety of Marxism than the world has yet known...
...This he transformed into the most thoroughly Stalinist of any of the new Soviet satellites...
...This is a function the reader might expect to find in McVicker's work on Titoism,2 a political scientist's study of the transformation in Yugoslav political thinking and action since Stalin expelled Tito from among the elect in 1948...
...Or in the light of Tito's complete espousal of the Soviet position with regard to Hungary...
...But the full horror of police brutality, the anguish experienced by the peasant who tried to protect his property and his independence, the utter stupidity and dogmatism of Tito's economic planners fail to come through...
...He obviously likes Tito and is fascinated by his personality...
...It may even be only an interlude between two eras of totalitarian tyranny in Yugoslavia itself, both dominated by Tito himself...
...With Yugoslavia under enemy occupation and smashed to fragments, he took command—after the Soviet motherland had also been attacked—of a guerrilla movement, completely controlled by Communists, yet exerting a wide appeal for all Yugoslavs who wanted to resist the Germans and Italians...
...Ironically enough, he got little help from Stalin, but succeeded in convincing Winston Churchill, that diehard foe of all he stood for, of his worthiness as an ally...
...So, while he does not gloss over his hero's own ruthless-ness, he fails to convey what institutionalized ruthlessness has meant to the Yugoslavs who have had to live under a Communist tyranny, even one with a difference (and for some years there was no difference...
...The reader will learn from Maclean many new details of Tito's life, and will enjoy the crisp, clear style that makes it a pleasure to follow the intricacies of the wartime campaigns, though Maclean himself had already told the story before in his earlier book, Eastern Approaches (1949— American title, Escape to Adventure...
...Perhaps "Titoism" is not at all the model for future liberation elsewhere...
...5.95...
...he believes that the Titoist system points the way to changes we may expect elsewhere in the Soviet world...
...They took the chance for military reasons...
...436 )>p...
...Indeed, in saying that Titoism "by 1956 threatened to ruin the existing Communist world," he seems to overstate the case...
...For almost five years he 3 The Heretic: The Life and Times of Josift Broz-Tilo...
...He avoided the full force of their embrace and, though his country was poor and small, sought to wield great international influence and to establish himself as a prophet in the direct line from Marx and Stalin...
...6.00...
...Yet Maclean sensed, even then, the self-confidence and independence that made Tito a Communist with a difference...
...As a result, he was able, once the war was over, to take command of the Yugoslav state...
...McVicker's conclusions are optimistic, as hinted by the title of his book...
...By Filzrov Maclean...
...2 Tiloism, Pattern for International Communism...
...What we have then is an excellent yarn, not deeply analytical itself or providing the materials for analysis...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 47
