A Special Brand

...Its detractors, who range all the way from Chinese Communists to stalwart conservatives in the United States Congress, dismiss it as a facade for the unholy dictatorship of Tito and his clique...

...But it may be as important for the future of the country, whatever the inner thoughts of the present leaders may be, that for the many Yugoslav citizens with whom Tornquist came in contact in various segments of society, in the Party and outside it, the Socialism of the Soviet Union held no lure at all...

...Nor does his book, despite its title, attempt to cover the subject of Yugoslavia's relations with the Soviet Union and with the West...

...Now comes David Tornquist, a free-lance writer, who went to Yugoslavia unburdened by prior knowledge of the country or fixed ideas other than a general sympathy with the "Socialist adventure...

...But beyond that, anyone who tries to tackle a question such as what is happening to Communist party political authority amid all the experimenting with "direct democracy" is bound to find a jumble of contradictory trends...

...It did not serve the cause of general enlightenment that most Western comments in the early years came from Socialists and fellow travelers who at their moment of disillusionment with Russia opportunely found in Tito's regime a Socialism that was independent, humane, practical, democratic, and without the curse of terror, purge, or imperialism...

...He is quite optimistic, having no doubt that the general trend is toward a genuine kind of democracy, perhaps even the twoparty system that Milovan Djilas advocated, under the benevolent guidance of the Communist party...

...some non-Communists are lending their talents to the cause while for others the only guiding slogan is that of 19th century bourgeois liberalism, "Enrichissez-vous...

...Of what was actually happening in the workers' councils and local assemblies he knew and cared little...

...The filling of this sandwich, however, is solid meat...

...some Communists are sincere believers in a new society in which party control will be unnecessary, while others would not think of giving up the old models...

...All this hardly justifies firm conclusions, yet the author makes them anyway, and as one who saw so much on the local level he deserves a hearing...

...Author, "American Policy Toward Communist Eastern Europe: The Choices Ahead" For some 15 years now Yugoslavia's special brand of Socialism has been vaunted by its creators as a true adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to local conditions and therefore a shining example, if not a precise model, for other nations...

...Then, after Stalin died and the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe experienced their own thaw and de-Stalinization, Yugoslavia's system was no longer an intellectual novelty and did not excite much comment at all...

...Yugoslavia has been so much a symbol of what governments and individuals, as a result of their own attitudes and complexes, wanted to see in it that a penetrating or even reasonably objective account has been hard to find...

...and that the liberalization, the economic reforms, and even the Communist-invented "direct democracy," however one may judge their meaning, in the minds of the people were inevitably associated with the West...

...The only choice is between a faster and a slower rate for the democratization already underway...

...Tito plots the middle course, slow enough to keep the conservatives in line, not so slow as to disillusion the liberals...

...The crisis in the Party today, evident in the recent move against Vice President Alexander Rankovich, has been boiling under the surface for the past several years because of the inability of the leadership to cope with its economic problems, compounded by the old nationality conflict and by the uncertainties over the political succession to Tito...

...The same seems to be true of the present Brezhnev and Kosygin regime...

...The difficulty is in knowing just what is being praised or deplored...

...Some workers' councils work well and others not at all...

...Neither the journalists nor the scholars have gone much beyond citing the laws and regulations and the pronouncements of the high priests of the regime...

...Tornquist, having chosen a different vantage point, did not concern himself much with politics at the top...

...As for the Soviet government, Khrushchev gave up Stalin's campaign to bring down Tito and stopped calling him a Fascist...

...It is a fascinating story, calling for the keen political sense of a Richard Lowenthal or an Anatole Shub to be well told...

...But thereafter he vacillated, according to the exigencies of events in Eastern Europe and relations with China, between accepting Yugoslavia as a proper Socialist state and condemning it as a bearer of the bacilli of antiLeninist revisionism...

...Fortunately, there are no questionnaires or tabulated results, just conversations and appropriately mixed conclusions...

...It has not really been that easy...

...The heart of the book describes the author's exploration of the new institutions of "Socialist self-management"-by the simple expedient of living in the country for two years, learning the language, getting a job in a Yugoslav enterprise (a publishing house), keeping his eyes and ears open, and asking a lot of questions...

...The State Department, eager to persuade Congress to vote the annual aid appropriations, was quick to cite any Uberai or democratic tendencies in Belgrade, but was skeptical about how far Tito would go...

...The beginning chapters are devoted to disabusing his own innocence and to filling in background (slanted) on South Slav history and the Communist revolution, and the last chapters are a kind of travelogue on the Rebecca West model...

...One proven conclusion is that you cannot know much about Yugoslav Socialism without knowing Yugoslavs...

...The Western governments, which provided impressive amounts of economic aid, concerned themselves little with Yugoslavia's internal system except to encourage the most efficient use of available resources...