Balkan Circus

Last week the barkers were having a picnic. It was as if Barnum & Bailey had come to the Balkans. Under the big Red top the Soviet Bear was calling the acts. In the spotlight the Cominform, nine-headed dog of the Kremlin, was beating up on Tito, Yugoslavia's own ringmaster. And the Communist puppets clapped like mad.

Was it real? Was it the McCoy? This side of the iron curtain nobody knew. But it was free and it looked like the summer's biggest show on earth.

"Teacher of Love." The surface facts were easy enough to establish. Tito, in the Cominform's book of charges, was guilty of putting Yugoslavia (and himself) ahead of the Soviet Union (and Joseph Stalin). The Cominform did not really expect Tito to recant; they had tried this for weeks without success. Now they were putting it up to his party comrades in Yugoslavia to oust him and to "raise from below a new internationalist leadership."

This seemed to worry Tito not at all, nor his efficient security police. He let others do his talking. And while he kept cool--and safe--on an inaccessible island in the Adriatic, the Yugoslav comrades talked big and fast. They flatly rejected the Cominform charges as "slanders and fabrications," and countercharged conspiracy "to impair the prestige of the [Yugoslav] Communist Party." Fifteen thousand of them sent off a telegram to Comrade Stalin asking him to remove the "false accusations." The telegram was tied with baby-blue ribbons: "Long live our teacher of love toward the Soviet Union, Comrade Tito, and long live our big friend, Stalin."

By midweek Tito had returned to Belgrade. When he showed himself at the construction site of the new city of Belgrade, he was greeted by a popular demonstration. "Tito--Party! Tito--Party!" the comrades chanted. Way off to the north, like an echo, a Dane withdrew from the Danish Communist Party. "I want to join Marshal Tito's brigade," he said. The Tito Party might be contagious.

Peril of the Popular. How many comrades in the rowdy new "peoples' democracies" of Eastern Europe felt the same? In Warsaw the jittery Yugoslav Embassy had received a flood of congratulatory telegrams--unsigned. Good students of history, the men of the Kremlin must have heard other echoes: the names of Kossuth, Kosciusko and other heroes of national independence. Here was the sharp point of their dilemma. For the great incandescent fact of the "Affair Tito" was simply this: like Tito, many a non-Russian Red still wanted to think of himself as a Yugoslav, Pole, Czech or Hungarian and not just a Kremlin stooge. Its peril lay in the fact that guerrilla-wise Tito knew this, and alone among satellite satraps had the necessary independence and power to put his knowledge to use. Moscow could forgive the medals on Tito's chest, the little bust of Bonaparte on his desk. It could not forgive his double-headed weapon of power and a popular cause.

To swell his power, Tito had espoused still another popular cause. In a country where land-loving peasants comprise 80% of the population, he had been delaying Communist "collectivization" of the farms. He proposed instead what the Kremlin has long condemned as a "kulak," capitalist-inspired substitute: farm cooperatives. Next to nationalism, no program in the great peasant areas of Eastern Europe could be more popular, and in Moscow's eyes, more inflammatory. This week Premier Zapotocky of Czechoslovakia hastened to reassure the people that he had no plans to collectivize the land. In Hungary, where collectivization is already in the making, Tito's program might greatly increase the peasant resistance.

These were some straws in a wind that might become a hurricane.

"Fools . . . Asses." As Moscow clamped down on Tito last week, it was also clamping down (by example) on all other Communist parties. Reds everywhere had to stand up and be counted.

In Paris, pert little Jacques Duclos, French Communist member of Tito's Cominform jury, declared in Humanite: "The country of Lenin and Stalin is the best guarantor of the independence of small nations . . ." But he fooled no one not fooled already. Cried Maurice Schumann, M.R.P. parliamentary leader: "All the dollars in Wall Street could not have accomplished what Stalin has done." The French Communist Party would have a hard time now posing as defenders of French nationalism.

In Rome, Communist Pietro Secchia, a member of the Cominform jury, was less adroit. Praising Stalin as "a simple laborer on the throne of the czars," he defended the right of the Soviet Union to "the directive function" of all non-Russian Communist parties. Palmiro Togliatti, Italy's cagey Communist boss, was downright grumpy. "Fools . . . asses," he growled at Yugoslav heretics.

Nowhere were the comrades very happy. In Bulgaria they tried holding out a raddled olive branch to Tito with their left hand; but he would not take it. London's Daily Worker, sounding for once like the staid Times, regretted "the severe shock" to its readers. In the U.S., apple-polishing party pundits recalled their own "struggle against Browderism," praised the Cominform's "outstanding service." Other parties sent their "unlimited love" to Stalin.

The $64 question for the Cominform and the Kremlin was how to get rid of Tito. One way might be "forgiveness," pending a leisurely liquidation--or a coup d'etat staged by "loyal" Communists and backed by the arms of "friendly" satellite neighbors. Whatever the answer, it had to come soon.

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