Yugoslavia

on the World Today

YUGOSLAV Communism is Communism with a difference. Just how great that difference is is now a cause of concern to at least three groups — the Western leaders, the Soviet leaders, and the Yugoslav people.

It is altogether possible that Tito and his top aides themselves are not exactly sure how great the difference is. Yugoslavia is an anomaly not only in its foreign policy. A Communist dictatorship with a decentralized economy and elements of political democracy, it is a poor and backward country that is rich in natural resources. On the streets of its cities, as if underlining its ambiguous position, colorfully dressed peasants with oxen and water buffalo are learning to skip nimbly out of the way of speeding motorcars.

The current ardent Soviet: wooing of Yugoslavia is a complete reversal of Moscow’s policy of the past seven years. In view of recent developments in Austria and Germany, this independent former satellite, with its army right under the Kremlin’s nose, so to speak, is a thorn in Moscow’s side.

The shock of Soviet excommunication

In assessing the impact of the new SovietYugoslav relations, it is important to keep in mind the manner in which the feud between the two nations began and the developments that have occurred since June, 1948, when it broke into the open. What happened was not that Yugoslavia left the Kremlin but that the Kremlin left Yugoslavia. It was the Soviet-dominated Cominform that expelled Tito’s party from its ranks.

The reason was that Tito insisted on following an independent course which led him to resist Soviet domination and develop socialism in certain ways contrary to the manner prescribed by Moscow. Tito and his Yugoslav Communists alone of the Eastern European satellites were able to do this, because only in Yugoslavia did the Communists come to power under their own steam. Unlike Tito, the Communists in Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had no national following, no army, no police of their own. They were put in office and kept in office by Soviet power.

Although insisting on their sovereignty and independence, the Yugoslav Communists were profoundly shocked by the Soviet excommunication. They were thoroughgoing Communists, and the principle of Soviet leadership was deeply ingrained. At first, Tito protested that he was misunderstood, that there was really no basic difference between Yugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. It appeared that he both hoped and expected all would be forgiven. When it was not, many Yugoslav Communists suffered real trauma. This psychological impact forced the Yugoslavs to see the Soviet Union and Soviet Communism through new eyes. When they recovered from their delusion, more than a year later, they spoke with undoubted sincerity about how they bad been “duped” by Moscow.

But Tito and company remained afraid of the capitalist West. They still felt impelled to denounce “Western imperialism.” Only when a crushing drought in 1950 brought the shaky Yugoslav economy to its knees did Tito accept American aid. When the United States did not attempt to subvert Yugoslav Communism, the grateful Yugoslav leaders then began to look at the possibilities of coöperation with the West.

The reorientation of foreign policy

A new set of Marxist theories, far different from the Soviet type, emerged; and Yugoslavia reversed its anti-Western foreign policy. The initial American grant was followed by an agreement for more aid, and soon large American economic and military missions set up shop in Belgrade.

Still Tito vacillated in foreign policy. Although agreeing that the Communists started the war in Korea and halfheartedly approving U.S.-U.N. intervention, the Yugoslavs stayed completely out of the action. NATO was viewed as a “provocative force.” The possibility of an alliance with Greece and Turkey was denied. But the virulence of Soviet hostility worried Belgrade, and Tito now denounced the U.S.S.R. as “aggressive, imperialistic state capitalism.”

Finally, with some American nudging, in August, 1954, he signed the Balkan Pact with Greece and Turkey, including a military alliance. Since Greece and Turkey are members of NATO, this meant that Yugoslavia had military relations with that organization, if only via the back door. This was accompanied by Yugoslav repudiation of neutralism as a policy and by a firm but cautious advocacy of West German rearmament.

Yet the Yugoslavs remained Eastern Communists. They could never feel happy as participants in a Western alliance erected against Communism, although they might feel they had to play along with it for security reasons. Regardless of what they said, they were frustrated neutralists. This has been clear from the way in which they have pursued friendship with India and Burma and talked about their desire for coöperation with “nations not members of any bloc.”

Decentralized Marxism

At the same time, internal developments in Yugoslavia have been important. First, the Yugoslav Communists erected a new theoretical base for Communism, geared to nationalism and eschewing intervention, direct or indirect, in other countries. They took a course which had implicit in it some steps, however faltering, toward political democracy.

The new Yugoslav theory started by explaining how the Soviet Union itself had deviated from true Marxism. According to Marx, when a nation approaches Communism, the state will “wither away.”In the U.S.S.R., it was said, a Communist bureaucracy under Stalin had seized the state, exploiting workers in place of the former capitalist exploiters. To maintain its position, this bureaucracy constantly had to become bigger and more dictatorial. There was thus no “withering away” and no progress toward Communism.

In 1950 Yugoslavia abandoned the doctrine to which the Kremlin was committed. “Decentralization,”the Yugoslavs said, “is the road to withering away of the state and the true way of socialism.” Both government and economy were decentralized, and there was a corresponding rise in the autonomy of the governments of the six republics and the municipalities.

The first and major reforms concerned the new system of worker management. Workers’ councils, elected by the workers, were set up in each factory, with almost unlimited authority to determine wages, working conditions, production, and prices. The highly centralized, top-heavy planning system patterned after that of the Soviet Union was abandoned. In its place was a plan which merely set forth desired goals of major items in the economy and provided a series of Keynesian controls.

Within this framework, the separate workers’ councils were free to do what they wished, the only condition being that they must stay out of the red. Although there was no private ownership, the Yugoslav economy became something of a free market economy, with reliance on competition, the law of supply and demand, and even the profit motive.

In addition to decentralization, the Yugoslavs came forth with a new type of legislative body — the council of producers — consisting of members elected by the workers’ councils. The theory is that where workers’ councils give workers control of production, the producers’ councils give them a say in formulation of government policies. These new bodies have become especially significant at the level of local government.

Communist Party domination

Despite this seemingly laissez-faire system, a high degree of control is maintained over the economy via the Communist Party, which is still the only party permitted. To control the workers’ councils, the Party utilizes the national trade union “Sindikat.” The Party controls the Sindikat, and the Sindikat absolutely dominates the worker-management system. Despite this, however, some workers’ councils have run away with the ball, to Belgrade’s annoyance, so that even in critical areas the economy has gotten out of balance.

In general, however, production of key industrial products has gone up since introduction of the new reforms. But the drive to industrialize has created a severe balance of payments problem. Industrial exports do not appear to be a likely way out of this situation. One reason is that Yugoslavia has so far to go in internal development, especially in the most backward areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. Progress is being made. The standard of living has improved somewhat over the past five years. But the problems ahead are enormous.

Agricultural crisis

The most important one is what to do about agriculture. Collectivization has been almost completely abandoned, but large imports of wheat and corn are still needed, and Tito has had to advise his people to eat less bread. Three serious droughts since 1950 unquestionably constitute a major factor in the plight of this once grainrich country.

Although most peasants own their own land again and discrimination against them has eased enormously, they are not adequately represented in the government — constituting from 65 to 70 per cent of the population, as they do — and the whole society is rigidly geared to an industrial and worker rather than an agricultural and peasant outlook.

The Yugoslav Communists have set as a goal the creation of “communes,” which are seen as more or less autonomous, economically selfsufficient units of local government, embracing city and surrounding countryside, industry and agriculture. They hope that when the whole country is organized into such communes, the peasants will be integrated into the socialist society. Establishment of the communes is still a long way off, however, while the agricultural crisis is now.

Even though the Communist Party is still the real residuary of political power, with the new developments has come a change in the nature of Tito’s dictatorship. At least the harsher aspects of the police state have been eliminated, and the area of tolerated freedom of expression has been widened. One sees at the Belgrade Opera, for instance, Menotti’s opera, The Consul, depicting the destruction of political opponents by the secret police of a Communist dictatorship. Independent candidates are now permitted to run for office. Although the National Assembly still operates like a rubber stamp, sharp differences of opinion are occasionally aired in local governments.

Most of the Yugoslavs seem to feel that the differences between Soviet Communism and the Yugoslavian variety are so great that any reversion to the Kremlin kind of dictatorship is no longer possible.

The Kremlin’s overtures

The change in Soviet tactics became apparent early last summer when bouncy, wisecracking Vasily Valkov, Soviet ambassador in Belgrade, paid a call on Tito. It reached a high peak with the visit of the top Soviet leaders, Khrushchev and Bulganin, to Belgrade. Even before that event, Moscow had abruptly halted its propaganda warfare against Yugoslavia, and conciliatory statements became the order of the day. Diplomacy, trade, and communications were resumed between Yugoslavia and the Soviet bloc.

The Yugoslavs call this the process of “normalization.” Thus far it has been all on Soviet initiative, but Tito has been far from unresponsive to it. The Yugoslav Communists welcome the changed Soviet attitude because, unquestionably, the scorn of the rest of the Communist community was embarrassing to them, and Soviet hostility forced them deeper into the Western alliance than they liked.

But Tito has denied over again that this means he will rejoin the Soviet bloc or that Yugoslavia’s relations with the West will be less cordial. He insists that Yugoslav foreign policy is 100 per cent independent and that it will remain so.

Tito has been at especial pains to reassure the skeptical Americans, many of whom have felt neither happy nor secure about their alliance with a Communist country. Before trade talks with the Soviet Union began last fall, he sent an emissary to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade to emphasize that nothing political was involved, and that no strategic materials would be traded to the Russians. “Even the Republicans in Washington are for more East-West trade,” Tito told an American visitor. “That is all that is involved here.”

Actually, Yugoslav foreign policy, perhaps reflecting an uncertain domestic policy, is far from clear. What is clear is that ever since the Balkan Pact was signed last August and the Trieste issue resolved soon thereafter, Tito has been pulling back slightly from coöperation with Western military plans and has once more assumed a neutralist position.