Ten Years of National Communism

...With the majority of the population pro-Western and anti-Communist and a large section of his cadres endemically pro-Soviet, Tito is forced to oscillate between Scylla and Cha-rybdis, while desperately seeking issues to revive his claim to uniqueness...

...This should not be surprising: Since Communism according to its ideologists needs a dictatorship to impose it, any relaxation of the dictatorship allows other forces to come into play...

...Since these policies could no longer be justified in terms of orthodox Stalinism, Tito's ideology had to be amended...

...A private economic sector reappeared which could easily compete with the irrational, wasteful "public sector...

...selling out the country to the West and aggressive attitudes toward the West (over Trieste) which "threatened to drag the USSR into war...

...The fact that Tito enjoyed certain geopolitical advantages and a stronger grip on his party merely determined the manner in which these contradictions first worked themselves out in 1948...

...Both Moscow and Belgrade had to find post factum rationalizations of the split...

...The dictator's funeral was hardly over before negotiations began...

...But Moscow forced the Yugoslavs' hand...

...Were Gomulka to allow himself to be drawn too closely into Moscow's web, he would lose his non-Party support and the measure of good will he has earned in the West...

...Workers were permitted to form councils, students and intellectuals to express themselves...

...But the old contradictions soon reappeared...

...Now Party functionaries had rallied to Gomulka not because they had experienced a change of heart, but because the ground seemed to be crumbling beneath them and Gomulka seemed to be the best man to stabilize the situation...

...Less than two months later, a joint Belgrade-Moscow announcement on the "normalization of relations" signaled the attempt to bury Titoism along with Stalin...

...On the one hand, their power to terrorize the population was being eroded...

...Workers' control" was seen by the workers as a substitute for the trade unions, which had been transformed into an arm of the Party...

...Only a small group, symbolized by Milovan Djilas, took the premises of Titoism seriouslv and tried to carry them to their logical conclusions...

...But, in order for him to dispense with their support, he first had to improve his relations with the Soviet Government—against whose intervention he had first summoned the "non-party masses" to his side...

...Indeed, the Yugoslav Communists actually looked forward to incorporation into the USSR as a constituent republic, whereas it was the Russians who wished to retain the trappings of sovereignty in the "People's Democracies...

...The Yugoslav experience should have served as an intimation of future "thaw and refreeze" patterns, but when the Gomulka regime took power in Poland observers once again heralded a new dawn...

...But each successful somersault confronts him with new contradictions, while his cadres become increasingly cynical...

...On the other hand, to avoid this denouement, Gomulka must maintain a window to the West and a measure of support outside the Party...

...and yet its foreign policies required the establishment of powerful foci of political activity in "outlying areas" like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc.—centers which had both the appearance of complete sovereignty and considerable excutive power...

...The peasants, the townspeople and the Roman Catholic Church all received concessions...

...Tito and his associates had no alternative but to turn to the West for economic aid, diplomatic support and arms, and to carry on a bitter struggle against the Cominformists and the USSR...

...Civilian and military Communists monopolized almost the entire upper section of the power pyramid and a good deal of the middle echelon as well, and they enjoyed their new power and its fruits with an abandon that shocked visitors from "conscience-stricken*' England...

...And thus he is in danger of setting in motion the very forces which produced "the Polish October...

...Stalinism had been an integral part of the Communist power monopoly...

...The gradual reimposition of orthodox Communism, the expressions of solidarity with the "anti-imperialist camp' and so forth gave a powerful impetus to those sections of the Party apparatus which would prefer a complete return to the Soviet fold...

...The Yugoslav experience is thus a prototype for Poland, Czechoslovakia and other satellites...

...From Gomulka's point of view, this is quite logical...

...Moscow wanted complete control over satellite leadership, even to the extent of originating and directing purges from the Kremlin...

...But once this process of anti-Stalinism started, it developed a momentum of its own...

...When the 1956 crisis gave Gomulka a chance to return to power, he had to utilize the general hatred of Russian Communism and its application in Poland against his rivals in the Party and, where necessary, against Russia...

...The mitigation of "revolutionary terror" and the search for "socialist legality" allowed people to express their resentment of the lower-level Communist bosses on whom the regime rested...

...And then the way would be open for Khrushchev's men inside the Polish Party leadership to regain control over the Party, since they can promise the Party functionaries far more than Gomulka in the way of "legitimist" ideology and all the benefits of membership in the Soviet camp...

...The Yugoslav stand on the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 reflected this dilemma...

...But, with a regime pledged to social doctrines which bear no relation to his country's real problems, with a huge bureaucracy, Army and political machine eating up the country's sustenance, with the powerful pull of the two blocs on his country, Tito needs continual agility...

...Its border incidents and incitements to rebellion were followed by threats of military action, whose significance was brought home to Tito by the outbreak of the Korean War...

...Its Cominformist "underground" threatened to disrupt the Party from within...

...But without Western economic aid Tito cannot maintain the loyalty of his bureaucracy and Army, and he needs the assurance of Western diplomatic and military support in extremis, since otherwise Khrushchev might succeed where Stalin failed...

...The contradiction between the power and prestige given to the satellite Party leaders and their complete subordination to Moscow's whims (including the danger of personal liquidation) developed in all the satellites...

...Tito and his associates, on the other hand, considered the Russian danger paramount, and therefore tried to suppress "abuses" of the Titoist reformation while going ahead with the policies themselves...

...This dilemma was temporarily averted by Stalin's death...

...However, a successful anti-Communist revolution would have given him a post-Communist country along an easily passable, 400-mile frontier (with a considerable Magyar minority on the Yugoslav side of the line), and this appeared to Tito as the present danger...

...Many twists and turns since Stalin, Tito split Ten Years of National Communism By A. V Sherman Jerusalem The recurrent phenomena of "national Communism"—the alternating attraction and repulsion between Moscow and Belgrade, and the alternating thaw and refreeze inside Tito's Yugoslavia—continue to mystify many Western observers who for ten years now have sought explanations in the field of Communist ideology...

...Liberalization'' made life difficult for the lower and middle echelons of the Party...

...The regime was being driven, by the necessities of its anti-Soviet struggle, to a point where, sooner or later, it would either engender a "liberal counter-revolution" which it would be unable to halt, or would be forced to reimpose some form of Stalinism, even at the risk of falling back into the Soviet orbit...

...See the exchange of letters published by Belgrade and Moscow...

...Apologists for Gomulka have claimed that his "retreat from October'' is motivated largely by the prudent wish to avoid provoking a Soviet invasion a I'Hongroise, and that his partial refreeze is justified in order to safeguard the modicum of freedom and relaxation he had obtained for Poland...

...keeping the country in a backward state for the benefit of Western capitalism and going forward with megalomaniac plans for industrialization...

...Its economic blockade threatened them with economic collapse...

...Tito's pendulum swings become far more comprehensible when one views them as a result of the internal contradictions of satellite Communism as such...

...For Gomulka, as for Tito, the people are the greater danger...

...Peasants dissolved their collectives...

...This, however, Gomulka is determined to prevent...

...The time soon arrived, therefore, when Gomulka began to clip the wings of the workers, students and intellectuals...

...Liberalization" at home was the logical outcome of anti-Stalinist foreign policy, but whenever it passed beyond mere assertions that "Yugoslavia is different" it began to undermine the very regime it had been introduced to protect...

...And the questions came, too, at a time when Tito not only had to hold his party firm against the Cominform but also had to seek a modicum of support outside the Party as a potential counter-weight to pro-Soviet tendencies inside it...

...The workers and peasants wished to use their newly restored rights to improve their living standard, but this would have cut into the surplus that the Communist regime needs to maintain the loyalty of its new ruling class...

...Nevertheless, the tension between the two powers reflected the basic unworkability of "proletarian internationalism...

...For the first year, they insisted that it was all a misunderstanding, that Communism reigned in both Moscow and Belgrade, and that everything would turn out all right if only the Russians "understood Yugoslavia...

...Indiscriminately it accused Tito of both rightist and leftist deviations: encouraging the kulaks and collectivizing agriculture too quickly...

...They looked to him to preserve, not liquidate, the Communist dictatorship...

...The subsequent disgrace of Djilas and the piece-by-piece dismantling of "liberalization" were merely epilogues...

...So, while the masses tugged at the bit, the "lower clergy" did its utmost to sabotage the new policy and begin to hanker for the old days when Stalin was Stalin, Communism was Communism, and the masses knew their place...

...Yet, the fact is that when the danger of Soviet invasion was at its height—in October and November 1956—Gomulka's "liberalization" went farthest, because he stood in greatest need of support by the masses and the Party fringe...

...the attraction of the West and liberalization had threatened the regime with disintegration, its return to an orbit centered around Moscow once again made the latter's gravitational pull felt...

...Moscow never took its own very seriously...

...In short, the people used the new freedoms not to further the aims of the regime, but to press their own interests against those of the regime...

...The students and intellectuals, by questioning the absurdities of Communist dogma in recent years, inevitably called into question the whole of Communist social and economic theory, and with it the right of the Communist party to maintain its dictatorship...

...Russia had to be proved an imperialist country, and, since imperialism reflects a certain internal structure, it had to be denounced as a bureaucratic dictatorship, worse than capitalism...

...The only threats to that power seemed to come from the remnants of the former ruling groups, from the disaffected peasantry (exploited and harassed as never before), and from the Western powers...

...The Yugoslav leaders, for their pare, resisted drawing ideological conclusions from the split...

...Once Stalinism was denounced, the Yugoslav regime was, by inference, called into question...

...Serb Royalists, pro-Western liberals, Stalinists, "liberal Communists"—Tito has attacked each at the right moment, and has always found groups ready to applaud, often including his future victims...

...Much as he tries to gain prestige by playing at "third force" with other political mountebanks like Nehru and Nasser, his main problem remains the rival magnetisms of Moscow and the West...

...To earn this he must make concessions which run against the logic of Communist dictatorship and earn resentment in the Soviet bloc...

...Their reluctance was understandable: Stalinist Communism had proved a satisfactory ideological cement for the new society whose class structure had crystalized so rapidly after 1944...

...Whole sections of the Party favored putting an end to further Titoization, even if it meant a slackening of the struggle with Moscow...

...Khrushchev, of course, was only too glad to smooth the path of Gomulka's return to the Soviet orbit, so that at a more propitious moment he can have another try at getting his hands on the levers of power...

...On the other hand, their high living standards—which stood out against the grinding poverty of the masses and were a main target of popular resentment—were the first sacrifice the regime was willing to make to win popular approval and show its difference from the Soviet regime, whose inequalities Tito-ist propaganda seized on...

...Tito's tactics have always been based on striking hard at the immediate danger and letting future dangers wait...

...Western Europe, by the same token, was promoted to the status of nascent socialism...

...Only after this danger had passed did he begin to revoke the "October Charter" and seek better relations with Moscow...

...Writers began to criticize the negative effects of "Stalinism" on human behavior...

...The original split which led to the Cominform resolution of June 1948 was neither the accidental result of Stalin's arrogance nor the fruit of any particular "spirit of independence" on the part of Tito...

...Without a doubt, the reimposition of Soviet power in Hungary was against the long-term interests of the Tito regime...

...so, like Tito, he continues to maneuver uneasily between orthodoxy and a complete break with Soviet Communism...

...He has been able to coexist with Khrushchev for a year-and-a-half now, whereas if the masses were to get out of hand he would not last a week...

...But the concessions soon reached the point where they would have undermined Communist authority...