The Great Schism

The high-powered, bulletproof ZIS limousine sped along Belgrade's narrow streets and broad avenues, between lines of poplars and policemen, lined up in front of the Great Hall of Topchider Park. Out of the car stepped a husky man in a blue dress uniform. Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Communist dictator of Yugoslavia and a gaudily tricked-out specter to the rest of the Communist world, was going to make a speech.

He strode into the hall amid frenetic cheers from 1,642 delegates to the third Congress of the Yugoslav People's Front. While his followers stamped and cried "Tito, Tito!", he mounted the platform and put on his reading glasses. Then, as virulent as ever, he shouted defiance at Joseph Stalin's Cominform. They were trying to foment civil war in Yugoslavia, he cried. They were accusing him of doing business with the Western powers. Cocky Tito pleaded guilty to that charge. "Are we going to trade--that is, buy everything we need and sell everything we can--in order to buy imported machines?" he shouted. "Of course we will!"

He hastened to add that this did not in any way imply friendship for "all those warmongers in capitalist countries . . ." One of his listeners was reminded that in the very hall in which Tito stood (a former country club for royal guardsmen), gay officers and their girls used to do the kolo, a Yugoslav folk dance in which the dancer first takes two steps to the left and one to the right, then two steps to the right and one to the left. Tito himself was twisting his way through a difficult kolo between Eastern and Western enemies. "Well, what now?" he concluded after two hours and twelve minutes. "Reaction in the West hates us. We are not loved in the East. Can we go on this way? Of course we can, because we must . . ."

Communists at Home. It was nine months since Tito had been formally declared a heretic by Moscow for refusing to let Russia exploit his country's economy, to let Russian secret police spy on his own secret police. The world had largely believed that it would be a matter of weeks before Tito recanted or was liquidated. Last week, Tito was still in full control of his party, his army and his police force.

Yugoslavia exhibited the greatest, weirdest political show on earth: a cold war between two Communist police states. Last week a European diplomat, just returned from Belgrade, described it:

"When I was in Moscow, I thought that no other city in the world could have so many spies and informers. But Belgrade is much worse. The Communists spy on the nonCommunists, and the non-Communists spy on the Communists. The Tito Communists spy on the Cominform Communists, and vice versa. And Russian agents spy on everybody . . ."

All winter, the Cominform countries had tightened the screws of their economic blockade. The Tito press last week indignantly reported the basis on which the Russian satellite nations were prepared to do business with Tito's country. For one tractor, Poland or Czechoslovakia asked 377 tons of bauxite; for one truck engine, 60,000 tons of maize; for one motorcycle, 180 tons of raw gypsum.

Plain Yugoslavs were feeling the pinch of the U.S.S.R.'s blockade, but most were still eating better than their Russian comrades. The West was quietly giving Tito limited economic assistance. A French trade delegation arrived in Belgrade last week, joining U.S. and British engineers who are helping Tito build some steel plants. The U.S. State Department let it be known that Yugoslavia fitted into "the general picture" of American trade.

Where Alexander Came From. When it became clear that economic pressure would not dislodge Tito, the Cominform decided on a more drastic strategy. The new base of operations against Tito's Yugoslavia was to be Macedonia, the wild, barren stretch of country which is distinguished in history chiefly for sending Alexander the Great into the world.

Macedonia is divided among Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. The Cominform plan calls for the several parts to be united in a separate "free" Macedonian state (see map). This would isolate Yugoslavia by creating a link between Bulgaria and Albania (both loyal to Stalin), and provide a base from which well-organized Macedonian terrorists would try to foment rebellion within Tito's Yugoslavia. Last month the Communist Macedonian Peoples' Liberation front called for a "struggle to free the Macedonian people from Yugoslav and Greek domination." The Cominform's long-range goal was common knowledge, even in Belgrade: dismemberment of Yugoslavia into "sovereign" republics which would become part of a larger Balkan federation, probably headed by Bulgaria's Georgi Dimitrov.

The plan was bound to run into serious troubles. Not the least of these was the fact that all around Yugoslavia and throughout Eastern Europe, Titoism was breaking out like a fever rash.

Unhealthy Ambitions. Last September Poland's Vice Premier Wladislaw Gomulka fell into disgrace because he disagreed with Soviet economic plans for Poland. Next to go was Greece's Communist Boss

Markos Vafiades, who was ousted last February for deviation from the Moscow line. Last week, it was rumored that Hilary Minc, who had succeeded Gomulka as Poland's economic boss, was also on the skids. The most spectacular new outbreak of Titoism occurred in Georgi Dimitrov's own Bulgaria, where Deputy Premier Traicho Kostov was arrested last week with five high Communist officials and 300 lesser fry. Their crime: "Spying."

Last summer, when Kostov returned from a trade mission to Moscow, he still talked about the magnificent assistance Bulgaria could expect from her Soviet ally. But he soon found out that trade with Russia is a one-sided affair. He began to rebel against the slow, deliberate sacrifice of Bulgaria's economy to Russia. "He followed a policy which lacked sincerity and friendship toward the U.S.S.R.," said the Communists' bill of particulars against Kostov. "Comrade Kostov was moved by a conscious individualism [toward] unhealthy ambitions . . ."

What Is Titoism? There was no direct connection, and not even much sympathy, between Titoists in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Poland. Kostov himself was one of the first to join in last year's general cry denouncing Tito. In his turn, Tito last week denounced Kostov as a capitalist agent. The various men who are becoming known as Titoists are not connected by political machinery or common purpose--although they may be some day. Titoism is not an ideology. It is a human reflex against Stalin's policy of putting Soviet Russia, the "Motherland of the Revolution," ahead of all other Communist states.

Paradoxically, Titoism is a consequence not of Communist weakness but of Communist strength. Before the war, few national Communist parties questioned Russia's leadership. But when the Reds actually conquered power, or came close to it, in half a dozen European countries, personal ambition and the patriotism of a Yugoslav or a Bulgar or a Frenchman, even though Communist, was apt to be stronger than loyalty to Moscow.

The Communists had often used a people's nationalist feelings as an instrument of their own power drives; they are now doing so in Asia. But Tito and his followers are driven by a genuine nationalism as strong as Russia's own. World communism had been rent by differences and ideological conflicts before; most were over tactics. Titoism stabs at the very heart of Communist power and doctrine.

How Far to Go? Titoism presents a tremendous opportunity to the West, as well as a serious problem. How far can the West go in supporting Titoist regimes? It makes sense to support Tito just enough to keep him in fighting trim against Stalin. But if this policy were to be extended indiscriminately, the U.S. might soon find itself subsidizing Communist police states hostile to itself (e.g., Yugoslavia), without real assurance that they will remain hostile to Moscow. A case in point is China's Mao Tse-tung, who is currently being sold to the U.S. as the Tito of Asia by Authors Edgar Snow, Owen Lattimore and others who until recently used to peddle the disastrous line that China's Communists were mainly "agrarian reformers."

The conditions for Titoism exist in Communist China: a separate army, strong nationalism, economic interests possibly conflicting with Russia. The Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee, meeting in Peiping last month for the first time in four years, formally decided that the period of agrarian communism--Mao's policy--was over, that emphasis would now shift to the cities and to speedy industrialization. At least on the face of it, Mao was in complete agreement with the new line. If he was turning into a Tito, he gave no evidence of it.

Whether Stalin can contain Titoism within its present manageable proportions, or whether it will widen into an irreparable schism, is a question for the best Russian brains. But Titoism has already achieved one thing--it has exploded the theory that communism, if it came to power, could bring the world unity and peace. For that, at least, loudmouthed Dictator Tito deserved the West's gratitude. As one American observer in Europe put it last week: "The time is surely come when the West should stop thinking of communism as a block which might splinter but can never crack."

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