Tito's Final Test

...Yet the programs cannot succeed unless the Party cadres give up their control over factories and business enterprises...

...The Slovene author V. Vidmar rebutted by charging that the Serbians were trying to stamp out entirely the distinct Slovenian language...

...In Supek's view it has been the tragedy of Marxism that ignorant and uneducated people who distrust science, art and culture have come to power in Communist countries...

...Although his charismatic personality has long been Yugoslavia's greatest national and international asset, the heroic legend is now succumbing to the present reality of an old and sick dictator who is grappling unsuccessfully with a host of problems and is even the subject of vulgar jokes...

...For this reason many top Serbian Communists have dragged their feet, or have even sought to sabotage the reform, prompting Tito's accusation that they are violating the sacred Leninist principle of "democratic centralism" which requires all Party members to carry out directives even if they do not approve of them...

...And in the background looms the biggest question of all-that of Tito's succession...

...He lamented that "bourgeois nationalism" had wormed its way into the Party and the state apparatus...

...Unemployment and the cost of living are mounting, he noted, while the growing separatism of the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Macedonians threatens to divide the state...

...There Tito mournfully admitted that the policy of "brotherhood and unity" had suffered a serious reverse, and he condemned Serbian efforts to impose "Yugoslav integralism...

...This was followed by sessions at the beginning and then at the end of March-still without resolving the complex economic and nationalities issues that convulse the Party...

...Meanwhile, the underlying conflicts may be expected to grow...

...The Serbian writer Dobrica Cosic, has accused his Croatian and Slovene colleagues of glorifying their own national cultures and history at the expense of the common Yugoslav heritage...

...But in fact nothing had been settled...

...But here Tito got caught in the contradiction that led to the need for a fourth session...

...Yet, while calling for renewed Party discipline and threatening to expel all dissenters, Tito is supporting the "liberals" on the very political and economic reforms that undermine discipline and challenge the positions of entrenched Party functionaries...

...The views of the triumvirs are thus ultimately likely to split them and end their joint rule...

...In Bakarich's opinion, centralism had completely superseded the constitutionally proclaimed national federalism...

...The disillusionment of intellectuals with the failure of the system to resolve the nationalities conflict is expressed even in the writings of Marxist ideologists...

...And, recently, the Croat writers seceded from the Yugoslav Writers Association and formed their own separate Croatian association...

...But "it is absolutely absurd and very harmful," he said, for Serbs "to seek to impose centralism...

...Time is running out, however, and Tito's juggling act is proving increasingly difficult...

...In essence, Tito was merely repeating what Bakarich had said in an interview published in the March 8, 1964 issue of the Belgrade weekly Nin, on the eve of the Eighth Party Congress...

...The enemy is still alive and it is necessary to bludgeon him to death.' However he made it plain that he was calling not for a return to the harsh measures of the Stalinist days, but for renewed ideological militancy...

...Not since the Sixth Party Congress in 1952, which under the ideological leadership of Milovan Djilas decisively broke with Stalinism, has the Party suffered so much disagreement, groping and sheer confusion-all reflected in Tito's plenum speech...

...The Party was further directed to rally the nationalities around the Communist state, under the new slogan of "Socialist patriotism...

...As he approaches the end of his regime, Tito will find it increasingly difficult to modulate the factional dispute...

...This reform, if consummated, would represent a dramatic victory for the revisionist faction led by Vladimir Bakarich, the Party's Secretary General in Croatia, who in a sense initiated the crisis two years ago by advocating some of the same measures...

...At the third plenum session his indecision and hesitancy became almost petulant...

...These conditions have aroused doubt in the so-called Socialist societies that the revolution will eventually lead to a better, more just human order...

...Often, due to our lack of vigilance, articles appear that have nothing to do with our thinking...

...As Popovich sees it, now and always the Party's role is to run the state...

...But despite attacks from the highest Party officials, Praxis keeps publishing...

...And now the committee is meeting again, this time reportedly to consider proposals by President Josip Broz Tito designed to end exclusive Party control of national administration and give elected officials and technicians the dominant role in government...

...The police rounded up 400 suspects, brutally beat them, and confined many in concentration camps on Goli and Sveti Grgur in the Adriatic...

...Such a rethinking of Marxism is being pursued by the magazine Praxis, published by the leading younger Marxist professors at Zagreb University...

...This regional struggle is exacerbated by a generational conflict: The Party functionaries in Belgrade, most of whom owe their management positions to their record as wartime Partisan fighters, are older and far less well educated than the new breed of young technocrats who are insisting that investment be based on economic and not political criteria...

...But that they are happening after 20 years, and that chauvinism is in fact on the rise, is our fault and proof of our lack of vigilance.' It has come as a shock to Tito that Croatian or Serbian Communists should respond essentially as nationalists rather than as Marxist internationalists...

...And then the ensuing struggle for power may jeopardize the very existence of the multinational Yugoslav state...

...Djilas felt the Party was exploiting the nationalism issue to maintain its rule over the feuding Yugoslav nations, but was not allowing them to develop their individual identities...

...Such aberrations were to a certain extent understandable in the early years [of Communist rule]," said Tito...

...Also undermining Party discipline and encouraging deviation is the constant contact with people from the West...

...The Communists maintained that the bitter conflicts, which inspired terrible fratricidal massacres during World War II, were engendered by "bourgeois capitalism," and that once a Socialist economic order was established, national antagonisms would vanish...

...Tito urged the Party to fight "nationalistic outbursts and chauvinism" not by "administrative interventions," in other words police repressions, but through a new "ideological struggle...

...economic assistance and conceded limited freedom to his subjects without really dismantling his totalitarianism...

...Tito is therefore forced to rely on the young technocrats to carry out the program...

...From its very foundation, in 1918, at the first Congress in Varazdin, Croatia, the Communist party has been plagued by the nationalities issue...

...The thousands of tourists that pour into Yugoslavia each summer, particularly to vacation on the Adriatic coast, bring not only cars, Beatle records, and bikinis but also Western political and social ideas...

...One cannot expect," Supek goes on to say, "people who have only recently shed their rags and acquired limousines, and who worship material comfort above all else, to grasp the humanist essence of Marxism...

...Modulation was the only positive achievement of the first three plenum sessions...

...In addition, 250,000 workers, technicians, architects and engineers unable to find work in Yugoslavia have migrated abroad with the blessing of their government, which is anxious to relieve domestic unemployment and lay its nands on the $80 million they annually send home to their families...

...Tito has sadly conceded that the Eighth Party Congress in December 1964, though primarily concerned with the growth of national conflicts, failed to reconcile the antagonism between the Serbian and the Croatian Communists...

...They have made Socialist societyfor example, the Soviet Unioninsufficiently attractive for freedomloving people...

...Under the new economic policy perhaps as much as 70 per cent of all investment funds would be retained by the separate republics and individual enterprises, and they would be controlled more by industrial technicians than by Party officials...

...Until the very end of the War in 1945, though, the Communists were relatively weak in Serbia proper and they understandably feared that if the capital of Yugoslavia were removed from Belgrade, the Serbs would be further alienated...

...A paramount reason for the victory of the Communist-led Partisans in the civil war was their advocacy of federalism and the "brotherhood and union" of the feuding Yugoslav nationalities...

...Tito frankly admitted the seriousness of the situation in a speech at one of the earlier meetings...

...Initially, under the leadership of the Serb Sima Markovich, the Party was definitely committed to centralism, and, secretly, to the doctrine that Yugoslavia was a unitary nation...

...But in Belgrade, the Federal government has increasingly fallen under the influence of Serbs, and by its militant centralism has aroused the bitter resentment of the other national groups...

...While economic necessities compel his regime to condone and even encourage multiplying personal and financial contacts with the West, Tito is alarmed by the disruptive effects they are having on the Communist party...

...But these are the people whom he previously attacked for having allowed themselves to be seduced by negative Western ideology, and for being more concerned with productivity than with Communist doctrine...

...Unlike most other Communist parties in Eastern Europe, the Yugoslav Party won power in World War II largely through its own efforts and strength...

...Later, Djilas ventured that the Yugoslav Party was unable to solve national conflicts because it was estentially a Stalinist party committed to the view that all problems could be resolved from the top and by police methods...

...After threatening to purge the opposition, Tito was satisfied with the issuance of a further warning to those "within the highest circles of the Party" who are sabotaging its policies, and with a resolution, adopted unanimously, which stresses unity and determines to push vigorously the implementation of the economic reform...

...Supek blames the "Stalinist positivists" for ending "creative Marxist thinking" in the Party...

...According to one of them, Professor Rudi Supek, the present Yugoslav crisis is rooted in the dichotomy between "Stalinist positivism" and "Socialist humanism...

...The Serbian Communists, on the other hand, are suspicious of the reform precisely because they feel that transferring investment resources from Belgrade to the individual republics will weaken Serbian control of the country and may encourage eventual Croatian and Slovene secession...

...Interestingly, Djilas foresaw this tragic development and criticized the Party's approach to the nationalities problem as early as 1945...

...While Tripalo is more critical than Bakarich of the "Marxist humanists" around Praxis, he welcomes the long-delayed revival of interest in Marxist studies stimulated among young intellectuals by Praxis maverick writings...

...Tito's genius has been his ability as a master juggler: He has accepted massive U.S...

...Yet today these national conflicts have revived with a vengeance, and in Tito's words have "grown even more violent than before,' infecting the Party itself...

...Before the Communist takeover the Yugoslav Communist party drew its main support from the peripheral areas-from the backward hills of Montenegro, from the nationally mixed population of Bosnia and from the Croats of Dalmatia who resented being incorporated by Mussolini into Italy in 1944...

...In the most recent issue Supek wrote, in an article entitled "The Mystery of Silence," that the Party must jettison "Stalinist positivism" for a more creative Marxist approach...

...Echoing his master's voice, Milentije Popovich, one of the foremost Serbian Stalinist ideologues, assailed Praxis for advocating "pseudoliberal ideas,' for denying the leading role of the Party, and seeking to transform it into a "mere debating club...

...These programs were devised principally by Slovene and Croatian economists who have long resented Belgrade's policy of concentrating Federal investment in the less developed republics of Serbia and Macedonia rather than in the advanced industrial economies of Croatia and Slovenia, where the money would be used more productively...

...Thus, Tito again is caught in contradiction...

...Tito's Final Test By Bogdan Raditsa The persistent crisis of Yugoslav Communism, long repressed or palliated, has now turbulently emerged in an extraordinary series of meetings of the League of Communists' Central Committee...

...For a long time Tito and his associates sought to chase the specter away by denying that it existed...

...At the Central Committee plenum he lashed out at "decadent Western ideology," and accused the West of seeking to spread subversion "with money, by hatching coups d'états, and by infiltrating its ideology...

...By far the toughest of Tito's prospective heirs is Rankovich, the head of the police apparatus and primarily responsible for maintaining Party discipline...

...He attacked unnamed members of the "highest Party circles" for sabotaging the latest economic program, launched last July to stabilize the economy by retrenching new development investments and closing down hundreds of inefficient factories...

...He complained that it is often impossible to distinguish between the views of Communists and those of the idlers gossiping in sidewalk cafes...

...The rebellion reached the point where Alexander Rankovich, the leading Serbian Communist and long-time head of the Secret Police, warned the Central Committee of an alarming upsurge of chauvinism in Serbia...

...The question remains whether he is acting soon enough and decisively enough to avert it...

...This danger is the nightmare of Tito's old age...

...And today the Croatian and Slovenian Communists are feuding with Communist Belgrade, just as in prewar days the Croatian and Slovene peasant and Catholic parties fought the Serbian Royalist government...

...A current favorite making the rounds in restaurants and sidewalk cafes tells that Tito is going to get the Nobel Prize for chemistry: for turning the dinar into "drek...

...Later, in the 1930s, when the leadership of the Party passed into the hands of the Croat Tito, the Party denounced centralism and advocated the creation of a federal state...

...Convening somberly at the end of February, the initial plenum session erupted in violent dissension between "reformers" and more doctrinaire Communists, forcing adjournment for an attempt at conciliation...

...in recent years he has veered back toward Moscow in foreign affairs without compromising his nation's independence...

...Bakarich argued that the Communists had solved the nationalities issue only in theory, while in practice they had sought to impose "Yugoslav integralism," just as King Alexander and his prime minister General Petar Zivkovich sought to do during the King's illfated dictatorship from 1929-1934...

...He categorically demanded the implementation of new economic programs aiming at the gradual creation of a free-market economy...

...They are anxious to strengthen economic ties with Western Europe and even talk of inviting private Western capital to invest in industrial development...

...But by 1964 the national conflict had reached such alarming dimensions that it became the chief topic of concern at the Eighth Party Congress...

...Although Djilas was expelled from the Party's leadership in 1954 on the charge of being a heretic and is still a prisoner in Sremska Mitrovica jail, his views on the nationalities issue were echoed by Tito himself at the last Party Congress, and more recently at the FebruaryMarch Central Committee plenums...

...But only a few months after the Eighth Congress, in the spring of 1965, Tito admitted in a speech in Varazdin that the nationalities conflict had worsened to the point of endangering the very existence of Yugoslavia...

...All the contradictions which gave rise to the crisis remained, making a further plenum necessary, and further political reform...

...And, indeed, after twice being devalued in the last yearfrom 750 to 1,250 to the dollarthe dinar currently sells "drek"cheap on the Yugoslav black market, 2,000 to the dollar...

...Hero of the wartime Partisan struggle and the subsequent revolution of over 20 years ago, Tito at 74 appears to be having a difficult time with his squabbling followers...

...The success of the economic reform has been further endangered by its connection with the highly explosive nationalities conflict...

...Consequently, instead of becoming a wholly new state creation-with its capital in Sarajevo, say-Communist Yugoslavia has come increasingly to resemble the old Serbian-dominated Royal Yugoslavia...

...The Party, he went on to say, was still confronted by the class enemy, the capitalist bourgeoisie, "the same enemy we fought, rifle in hand, during the War...

...This street mentality, he emphasized, has contaminated Party members with "bourgeois thinking," and they no longer can reason as "true Communists should.' In short, Tito warned, a real danger exists that the Communist state may be transformed into a bourgeois state with the Party serving as a new ruling class...

...Accordingly, the Communist Constitution recognizes Yugoslavia as a multinational state, and in 1945 the country was divided into six republics, with a separate political unit for the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Montenegrins, and an autonomous region within Serbia for 1 million Albanians...

...We must," he said, "fight against conceptual deviations in our press, as for instance in the writings of Praxis...

...As a result, the Yugoslav League of Communists, is splitting along national lines...

...During the third plenum, Tito condemned such theories...

...But the issues run too deep, Tito is too old and ambivalent, and the opposition remains too strong for the reform to be effectively implemented in the near future...

...These ideological parvenus conceive of the "Socialist revolution as a 'locomotive of history' roaring down the tracks" which has "carried them to positions of power, and they will not give them up.' "Such people,' Supek further observes, "have not been able to subject the failures of bourgeois society to a meaningful criticism, and at the same time have provoked a revolt within Socialist society...

...The Slovenes are particularly bitter over what they regard as Belgrade's systematic exploitation of their republic, charging that though Slovenia has only 8.6 per cent of the country's population it pays 38 per cent of the Federal taxes, but has received almost no Federal investment funds to build up its industries...

...But, when several hundred Croat students and workers printed anti-government leaflets and showered them upon Zagreb from a tall building in the center of town, the government "intervened administratively...

...These dogmatists have actually created objective conditions for anti-Communist criticism of the first Socialist experiment...

...If Bakarich should not be able to assume a leading role because of his own failing health, the Croat representative would be Mika Tripalo, his heir apparent in Croatia...

...The best guess is that Tito's death or incapacitation will bring a triumvirate to power consisting of Rankovich, a Serb, Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene, and Bakarich, a Croat...

...The Communist leadership repeatedly ordered the Party apparatus to respect the individual historical and cultural identities of separate nations within Yugoslavia...

...The revival of the nationalities conflict, the growing unemployment (which is not supposed to exist in a Socialist state), and other failures of the system, have forced Marxist theoreticians to take a new hard look at the validity of their long-revered ideological assumptions...

...Bluntly conceding that despite more than two decades of Communist rule, national "chauvinism was in fact on the increase," he blamed historians and writers for "poisoning relations among the nations" of Yugoslavia...

...If this happens, the Party is ultimately doomed, he said...

...They worship "wise leaders" who once in power impose a system of "mental-hygienic censorship...

...The overwhelming majority of the Slovenian and Croatian Communists have come out in favor of it...