Yugoslavia Turns Back the Clock

...Just a few weeks after Kosygin's visit, Tito, in a display of the close working relationship that has now developed between the two countries, was in Kiev conferring with Soviet Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev on international problems...

...Since the workers provide about $1 billion a year in needed hard currency, and since Yugoslavia now has about 400,000 unemployed within its borders, there are no serious thoughts about bringing the workers back...

...Now the announced intent of Tito and his hardline associates is to use the new constitution and party congress to tighten central control of the party, government, and economy, and to destroy the middle level of managers and technicians—a class that was essential to the decentralized society but one that is now being blamed for the country's chief ills, from nationalism to inflation...

...Though the movie was never shown publicly, the court called it "hostile propaganda...

...Tito suddenly became alarmed last year at the fact that the million Yugoslavs working in Western Europe included 300,000 of draft age—"three whole armies outside our borders," he said...

...This purge swept out the Yugoslav foreign minister, Mirko Tepavac, top officials in the Belgrade city party, and regional party leaders in Vojvodina, the largely Hungarian-populated northern section of Serbia...

...Croatia had become "a free hunting ground for Yugoslav big business," one prominent party member complained...

...has not returned to Yugoslavia...

...Documents prepared for the congress and the ratification of the constitution argue that the presence of technocrats has prevented the workers' self-management system, in its twenty-three years of existence, from realizing its full potential as the basis of Yugoslavia's socialism...

...The other readily recognizable threat to Yugoslavia's continued existence after Tito's death is the Soviet Union, and Moscow's footprints can be found at each decisive step in Yugoslavia's retreat from relaxed controls...

...Hundreds of students were arrested and student leaders were sentenced to prison for up to four years...

...I said, 'Please, go ahead.' He asked, 'And what will happen if no one attacks Yugoslavia?'" Since there seems little chance of attack, the future of Yugoslavia appears to lie in the answer to that perceptive question...

...Tito established his country's current policy line toward the Soviet Union in a special interview with the Yugoslav press in early 1973...

...But Kosygin pledged Yugoslavia $130 million in credits, to assist projects begun with $540 million in Soviet credits a year earlier...

...In the present jargon, the managers, many of them acquisitive operators who incautiously allowed their new wealth to show, are "technocrats," and the official press is suddenly full of criticism of them...

...Another has demanded their "complete eradication...

...Tito and his men tighten the reins to end their country's experiment in decentralization Yugoslavia Turns Back the Clock RICHARD L. HOMAN "The Yugoslav experiment is undoubtedly the most advanced experiment at decentralization this century has seen...

...What will happen when Tito dies...

...In Yugoslavia today, freedoms that were taken for granted just two years ago are feeling the pinch of the new order...

...Once again, Milovan Djilas, the oft-imprisoned architect of the 1952 policy and an outspoken critic of misuses of power, is under attack by the official press as "a traitor and enemy of his country...

...By September of that year, Tito, in a speech in Zagreb, announced his enthusiasm for the Croatian plan and said he would submit proposals to the federal parliament that would strengthen the authority of the governments of Yugoslavia's six republies and two provinces and give them the authority to handle their own economies...

...Besides temporary economic assistance from the U.S.S.R., which has been considerable, it is obvious that Tito is seeking an unspoken hands-off promise from Moscow as repayment for putting his house in what the Kremlin considers order...

...Tentative economic reforms that went into effect in 1968 and 1969 had had only limited success in addressing Yugoslavia's chronic problems, but they inspired among leaders in Croatia a suspicion that the republic could accomplish more for itself if decisions were made at its capital, Zagreb, instead of Belgrade, the federal capital...

...Blazevic, who was chief prosecutor in the almost forgotten trial of Archbishop Stepinac, said, in a televised speech to the newly constituted Croatian Central Committee, "We are faced with a civil war which in fact has already started, if only in mild form, [and] would have led to genocide...

...Technocratism—a phenomenon which today undoubtedly represents the greater danger for self-managing and social relations," says another...

...Then Tito began dismantling party and government strongholds throughout Yugoslavia's provinces and reestablished power in Belgrade...

...This year new laws ban foreign travel by youths who have not served in the military and by workers possessing skills needed in Yugoslavia...

...In November, too, Czechoslovak Party Chief Gustav Husak paid a visit to Yugoslavia—the first meeting of top officials of these countries since 1968—to announce with Tito that relations between Prague and Belgrade were once again excellent...

...Jakov Blazevic, president of the Croatian parliament and a spokesman for the hardliners, set the official tone for the harsh crackdown...

...Technocratism is a direct prop for nationalism in all its aspects," a Sarajevo newspaper warns...

...In Sarajevo, plant employes were ordered to report to work on a Saturday so that a crowd could be produced for him, and, in Dubrovnik, guests in a wedding procession shouted, "To hell with Kosygin," when police tried to clear them from his path...

...Yugoslavia's current troubles grew out of nationalist demands and jealousies which were accelerated by decentralizations in mid-1971 and erupted into student riots at Zagreb University later that year...

...In the same interview, Tito said that as far as Yugoslavia was concerned, "things which happened in Czechoslovakia" in 1968—that is, the Soviet-led invasion which Tito at the time condemned as "a serious blow inflicted on socialist and progressive forces all over the world"—were now "over...

...We gave democracy too wide a scope before the path was clear for it...

...A report by the secretariat of the Belgrade city party in September said that "the process of an ideological clearing out" was necessary in the information media because "a spirit of toleration is dominant among Communist journalists" and a "neutral stance has not yet disappeared from the columns and broadcasts...

...Sidney Lens "Yugoslavia's New Communism" in The Progressive, December 1968 Belgrade Yugoslavia, this winter, is preparing a new constitution and making plans for a major party congress in the spring...

...Now they listen, and they 'don't dare be impolite...

...The press, which was hit hard during the initial Croatian purges, is apparently in for more repression...

...So managerial decision-making will be turned over to the workers' councils, and at the same time, party representation in the workers' councils will be significantly strengthened so that the party can once again have a command role at the lowest levels...

...latter-day Titoism, a bit more cantankerous as the president and party chief nears his eighty-second birthday, remains...

...Marko Nikesic, fifty-two, head of the Serbian party since 1968 and a former ambassador to Washington, and Mrs...

...A new two-chamber Federal Assembly will have 278 delegates, who must all be bona fide "workers...

...The next major purge took place in Serbia, ten months later...

...The cumbersome twenty-three-member collective presidency, instituted by Tito in 1971 to provide continuity of government upon his death, will be reduced to nine members—one from each of the six republics and two regions, with the president of the League of Communists as an ex officio member...

...Stalinism Richard L. Homan is the Central European correspondent for The Washington Post...

...When 30,000 students were rampaging in the streets and nobody was doing anything about it, it was clear who should be scolded...

...Increasingly, individuals and organizations whose hardline views had been ignored for years in Yugoslavia are now getting their way again...

...Documents prepared for the upcoming congress have, for the first time, dropped all reference to the "withering away" of central authority, which was the central theme of recent congresses...

...In a thundering speech that was to set the tone for the coming months, Tito, in December 1971, accused the leadership of the party in Croatia of "rotten liberalism" and of tolerating nationalism...

...The purpose of both is to halt decentralization and reestablish the Communist Party as the central authority of the land...

...Decentralization, which in most countries simply means a degree of local autonomy, quickly translates into separatism in multi-national Yugoslavia...

...most have simply been fired from their jobs and expelled from the party, or, in some cases, allowed to resign...

...The Yugoslav experiment did not work, and aging strongman Josip Broz-Tito, who had once energetically boosted it, was among the first to acknowledge its failure...

...Intellectuals are notably less in favor with the regime than they were five years ago, and once again writers and artists are being imprisoned for incautious portrayals...

...Aleksandar Petrovic, a leading Yugoslav film director whose most recent work was Master and Margarita, was fired from his teaching position for awarding the student a high grade for the film (Petrovic has since moved to France), and veterans' organizations have called for the prosecution of officials of the Yugoslav archives who made the news-reels available to the student...

...Tito had already begun to express second thoughts about the decentralization moves following an official visit by Brezhnev, two months after they were decreed by the Federal Assembly...

...Tito's recent denunciation of the landmark 1952 congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party indicates the turn his thinking has taken...

...Officials in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Slovenia were the next victims...

...During 1973 the purges spread to the lower ranks of party officials, the universities, and the enterprises...

...None can serve more than one term, so there will be no such thing as a career legislator...

...But," said Dolanc, "I also said that, should anyone try to attack us or threaten our independence, then we Yugoslavs have no disagreements and no conflicts among ourselves, but rather stand as one to face a threat of attack from abroad...

...He listened to me and then, you know, he said very politely that he had only one question...

...The movement took on an anti-Serbian look and Croatian nationalist organizations and publications suddenly ballooned...

...These managers, whose abilities were necessary for the development and functioning of a decentralized market economy, have now been declared the enemies of self-management, the unique ingredient of Yugoslav Communism by which industrial plants and other enterprises are controlled by majority vote of the employes...

...Despite all its posturing against possible outside foes and its professed confidence in its ability to deal forth-rightly with domestic differences, there is, apparendy, a high level awareness in Yugoslavia that the future holds ponderous uncertainties, as this thoughtful anecdote, related by Stane Dolanc, the number two party official, during a Belgrade television program, reveals: Speaking with a "high-ranking official from a Western country," Dolanc tried to explain the current situation in Yugoslavia and admitted, "To be honest, we have conflicts and contradictions in our country...

...A provision that allowed the republics to keep a larger portion of their hard currency earnings was agreed on months later, after the riots and purges, as Tito attempted to win public acceptance for the new leadership...

...Now, however, with party ranks fairly thoroughly purged, targets present themselves with less clarity...

...Before the congress assembles this spring, one said, the party "must clean its ranks of those people and ideas which are not in accordance with our orientation and program...

...Reading between the lines, one can see that the technocrats are being blamed for contributing to horrendous inflation, which has neared twenty per cent annually...

...In Croatia, instead of attempting to consolidate these achievements and put the new relationships between Zagreb and Belgrade in good working order, political and student leaders rashly began pressing immediately for even greater autonomy...

...In January 1970, the Croatian Communist Party launched a movement for economic home-rule that put the republic in open confrontation with supporters of Belgrade centralism...

...had we not restored the unity of our leadership, we would not be sitting in this air-conditioned hall but would have had to fight on the streets...

...Miko Tripalo, forty-six, and Savka Dabcevic-Kucar, forty-nine, the first genuinely popular Croat leaders since World War II, immediately were forced to resign from the two top offices of the Croatian party, along with party secretary Pero Pirker...

...The disturbances spread to Serbia, where they touched off disorders in the largely-Hungarian region of Vojvodina and the Albanian-populated region of Kosovo, and then, to a lesser degree, in the other republics...

...Several of the original twenty-three members had already been purged or tainted by nationalism...

...Central authority will be further narrowed by the dismantling of Yugoslavia's unique five-chamber Federal Assembly...

...Two years ago, the newspapers would say, 'Why don't the veterans shut up?' when they complained about something," one Yugoslav told me...

...Then in November and December 1971, as 30,000 university students and other youth demonstrated for twenty-one days in Zagreb with the open support of local party leaders, Tito, pressured by hardline veterans organizations and military leaders, changed his mind about decentralization...

...Yugoslavia's decision to end its experiment in decentralization stems from Tito's preoccupation—a valid one, certainly—with the question that becomes more urgent as the man who created present-day Yugoslavia grows older...

...We do not give any political concessions," he insisted, but he noted pointedly that nobody but the Soviet Union has been willing to give Yugoslavia "half a billion dollars or even more," and added that "in a year or two this sum will have increased to one billion dollars...

...Under a mechanism devised by Edvard Kardelj, sixty-four, Tito's chief ideologist and a durable party power, assembly delegates who disagree with majority decisions may be removed by their sponsoring organizations or the majority itself so that the decisions can be unanimous...

...Few, in fact, have been arrested...

...Croatia, potentially the nation's richest republic, has twenty-three per cent of Yugoslavia's population, accounts for thirty per cent of the foreign trade, and brings in thirty-five per cent of the foreign currency acquisitions...

...A twenty-eight-year-old film student was sentenced last summer to two years in prison for making, as part of his classwork, a movie that juxtaposed news-reels of Hitler and Tito speeches...

...In an era when the youth on both sides of the Cold War cry out against dehumanization and alienation, it is an experiment worth watching...

...But the purge, which has already toppled a number of highly respected figures in Yugoslavia and shattered the careers of some of the most promising young politicians, has been thorough, and it is not yet over, as top Tito aides have made clear in recent weeks...

...No doubt the party congress, to be held this spring, and the new constitution will deal with the technocrats, if the purgers have not by then...

...Latinka Perovic, thirty-nine, the party secretary and one of the most influential women in Yugoslav politics, were forced to resign after Tito accused them of paying too little attention to central party authority and allowing laissez-faire economic development that benefited enterprise managers, bankers, and the middle class at the expense of the workers...

...The political figures who offended Tito have not been executed...

...In preparation for it, he said, "Each individual member of the League of Communists should be examined under a magnifying glass to determine whether he is fulfilling his social role...

...We shall have to be ruthless," he grumbled two years ago after pressures for more local autonomy led to student riots and nationalistic demands by provincial leaders...

...Tripalo, who had been a favorite of Tito, also was dropped from the twenty-three-member collective national presidency that was created earlier in 1971 to succeed Tito...

...But there are fears that exposure of impressionable young Yugoslavs to the West may do ideological damage...

...Constitutional amendments gave the republics considerable sovereignty and equal voices in federal decision making, established a new banking system that provided for control of funds within the republics, and cut by half the amount of taxes that the republics had to pay the central government...

...But under laws then in effect, Croatia had little control of its own economy and all but seven per cent of its hard currency earnings had to be turned over to central banks in Belgrade...

...After six months of difficult, closed-door politicking, the federal assembly, in June 1971, approved sweeping decentralizations of government power...

...Stane Dolanc, the forty-seven-year-old hardnosed but lackluster party functionary who, many believe, is being groomed by Tito as his possible successor, said last summer that the coming congress, the first since 1969, "should trace the road for the next twenty years...

...That congress, which decided that the party would henceforth be known as the League of Communists and would be merely an ideological guide rather than a commanding force, took place, Tito now says, "in a euphoria of democratization...

...The newspaper of the Roman Catholjc archdiocese of Zagreb has been seized three times in recent months because of articles that the federal government said interfered in political life...

...A dour Premier Alexei Kosygin paid a week-long visit to Yugoslavia last September that aroused little joy among the citizens...

...Instead, they find new justifications for a strengthened party apparatus with closely coordinated supervisory functions throughout the government and economy...

...In the old sense—as he might have meant the word in the late 1940s—Tito has not been ruthless...

...So the hardliners, in the firm belief that more punishment is called for, have turned their attention to the entire class of middle level managers in the enterprises...

...That separatism would shatter the fragile balance of economic and political interests that has enabled a scattering of minor states to unite into a powerful Balkan nation...

...Newspaper staffs are being purged and Catholics as well as Moslems and Orthodox are targets of the once-muted hostility of party officials...

...Yugoslavs still enjoy greater personal freedom and better economic opportunities than citizens of any other Eastern European nation, as a visitor familiar with the area can readily see...

...At the height of the rioting in Zagreb, Soviet Deputy Premier Nikolai K. Baibakov arrived in Yugoslavia for a planned ten-day official visit that stretched into three weeks and included meetings with party chieftains in each of the six republics...

...The consequences of technoc-ratism and liberalism in Belgrade are very serious," the Belgrade city party leadership has declared...

...Foreign travel has become more difficult, though a million Yugoslavs, mostly unskilled laborers, are permitted to work in Western Europe—a situation that relieves the country's economic burden but creates ideological problems when these workers write home or return...

...The Serbian Orthodox Church has been accused by the government press of propagating nationalism...