TITO'S MUTINY
Petrovich, Michael B.
Tito's Mutiny TITO AND GOLIATH, by Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Mac-millan. 312 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Michael B. Petrovich DURING a recent visit to the U.S. General Assembly, Yugoslav Foreign...
...First, in emphasizing that the Stalin-Tito rift is a power conflict, which in substance it is, he unduly ignores the ideological differences involved...
...The result, Tito and Goliath, shows a thoughtful penetration and responsible exposition such as one has come to expect of him...
...Perhaps, replied the sober Yugoslav, but David won...
...For Communists in Eastern Europe and everywhere, however, such internal questions as the place of the peasantry in predominantly agrarian states, the role of the Communist Party in a Popular Front, the tempo and methods of socialization—all these are issues which have shaken the Communist world before, and which have not been solved with the demise of Kautsky and Bernstein or the liquidation of Bukharin and Trotsky...
...Hamilton Fish Armstrong is widely known as the veteran editor of Foreign Affairs, the distinguished journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, and as the author of more than a dozen books ranging from The New Balkans in 1926 to The Calculated Risk in 1947...
...Inasmuch as the Soviet Union found it physically difficult and strategically impossible to punish Tito himself, it elected to sacrifice ceremonially some of its once most useful servants in Eastern Europe: Gomulka in Poland, Kostov in Bulgaria, Xoxe in Albania, Patrascanu in Rumania, dementis in Czechoslovakia, and especially Rajk in Hungary...
...Naturally the power aspect is of more immediate concern to those of us on the outside looking in...
...The conclusion Armstrong reaches is that Tito was cast into the outer darkness not as an ideological deviationist, a heresiarch, but as a rebel against the Kremlin's claim to temporal as well as spiritual hegemony...
...It is to be hoped that Armstrong will write a sequel to Tito and Goliath with this emphasis...
...What he does offer is a competent, concise chronicle and a penetrating analysis of an increasingly momentous schism within Communism whose import few Americans yet understand or fully appreciate...
...Armstrong was confronted with the task of explaining to pragmatist fellow-Americans, long separated from Eastern Europe by a curtain of indifference and nescience, the actual and potential importance of a family quarrel somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon...
...Since the writing of this book, the evidence of disaffection in these countries has continued to pile up...
...Should he do so, we can fully expect it to be as honest and competent a job as is the present work...
...Somewhat less known is his wartime service with the State Department in a series of highly important advisory posts here and abroad...
...After reading this itemized record of what may develop into the most farreaching disaffection in history since Luther, it is beyond comprehension how some can still suspect that the whole affair was a hoax to confuse us into supporting Tito...
...It is to these other satellites that the latter half of the book is devoted...
...If Titoism holds any larger significance beyond the borders of Yugoslavia, it is in its influence not only on the Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, but on the even more significant Communist parties of countries outside the Kremlin's physical reach...
...It was Tito's insubordination that called for exemplary punishment by Moscow, especially in view of signs of dissatisfaction among the other Soviet satellites...
...He bases his absorbing account largely on the published correspondence between the Yugoslav and Soviet leaders as well as significant articles in Soviet, Comin-form, or Yugoslav official publications...
...Since World War I, when he was sent as acting military attache to the new-born Kingdom of the Serbs-Croats-Slovenes, Hamilton Fish Armstrong has personally followed the devious destinies of this tragic land, visiting it almost every year for a quarter of a century...
...But it is his long and intimate acquaintance with Eastern Europe, particularly Yugoslavia, which lends an uncommon insight to his disciplined observations of another world at once crude and subtle...
...Armstrong attempts this by examining in the first half of his succinct work the origins, development, and present state of the Stalin-Tito break...
...While these issues may seem distant to us, they must, one may surmise, trouble Mao Tse-tung and other Communist leaders very much indeed...
...He had to show why the revolt of a Balkan puppet has developed into the Kremlin's worst setback since the siege of Stalingrad...
...Despite his able presentation and analysis, Armstrong's book appears to me to suffer from two defects...
...Accused of various deviations and grievous sins, these men were punished for that most unpardonable of all sins—refusal to subordinate their own country's interests to those of the Soviet Union...
...To one who had himself known Titoland, he appeared weighted down with the knowledge of having witnessed something significant which he had yet to collate, assimilate, organize before he could impart...
...Armstrong himself indicates various signs of mutiny within the Communist parties of Italy, France, and Germany, and he does point out the potentialities of Titoism in China, but all this is set down merely for the record...
...Despite the suggestive title of his excellent book, Armstrong promises no such victory for Tito...
...The reviewer met Armstrong in Prague in 1949 just after he had arrived from Belgrade...
...Again the reader confronts the same thesis of a power conflict rather than a quarrel over dogma...
...General Assembly, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Edvard Kar-delj was asked whether the struggle between Tito and Stalin was not an uneven match reminiscent of David's encounter with Goliath...
...Included, too, are many choice bits of interviews Armstrong had with Tito and other leaders...
...II This leads to a second omission...
...Two of these visits to Yugoslavia and the "People's Democracies" of Eastern Europe date after World War II...
...He looked weary, and not only with travel...
...Even the briefest session with him was sufficient to ascertain that here was emphatically no hit-and-run reporter, no professional globe-trotter, partisan enthusiast, or aesthetic devotee of black lambs and grey falcons...
Vol. 15 • April 1951 • No. 4
