From Trotsky To Tito - The Resolution of the Communist Information Bureau

FROM TROTSKY TO TITO  James Klugmann 1951
The Resolution of the Communist Information Bureau

The question of Titoism – the role of Tito and the Titoites – is not a question for specialists in problems of the Balkans and of Eastern Europe. Nor is it in any sense whatsoever a private quarrel between Communists and Communists on questions of tactics and strategy, of means and methods of fighting for Socialism. It is a question from which no one who wants Socialism and, indeed, no one interested in the preservation of peace, can stand aside.

This is not the first time in history that there have been traitors in the labour movement, as those who have worked and fought in the British labour movement throughout its history have found out, indeed, to their cost. Capitalism always remains a force of corruption. By every method, from duress to bribery, from threats to cajolery, the capitalists seek and have sought to gain an influence inside the labour and progressive movement. Often they have failed, but sometimes in different countries and at different times they have met with a temporary success.

The betrayal of Tito and his leading confederates came as a shock to progressive people all over the world. It came as a shock partly because their treachery had been long and carefully concealed and partly because they were able to hide themselves behind the great prestige that the masses of the Yugoslav people had so rightly won in the long years of heroic struggle against reaction and dictatorship at home and against the encroachment of foreign imperialism and fascism.

The purpose of this book is to describe in detail the record of this betrayal. And it is believed that a study of the facts will show to all – Communists, Socialists, progressives and lovers of peace – that the Titoites today have become tools of the big capitalists and instruments of war, and that, therefore, every sincere Socialist and lover of peace should seek to understand the question of Titoism and the Titoites.

In June 1948, the representatives of eight Communist parties met in Rumania to attend a conference called by the Communist Information Bureau. They met to discuss the situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Twenty of the world’s leading Communists participated in the conference. They were the three representatives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: A Zhdanov, G Malenkov and M Suslov; from the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (Communists): V Chervenkov; from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia: G Bareš, B Geminder, V Široký and R Slánský; from the Hungarian Workers’ Party: M Farkas, E Gerő and Mátyás Rákosi; from the Polish Workers’ Party came J Berman and A Zawadzki and from the Rumanian Workers’ Party: G Gheorghiu-Dej, V Luca and Anna Pauker. The French Communist Party sent Etienne Fajon and Jacques Duclos and from the Communist Party of Italy came P Secchia and Palmiro Togliatti.

One traitor, not yet unmasked, attended the meeting – Traicho Kostov of Bulgaria. Whilst from the Yugoslav Communist Party itself, up to then the ninth member of the Communist Information Bureau, despite repeated invitations, came no representative, but only abrupt and brutal refusal.

After prolonged discussion the Information Bureau adopted a resolution, Concerning the Situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which was made public by press and radio. The resolution contained a series of profound criticisms of the policy of the Yugoslav Communist leadership, and above all of the four figures who in a literal sense dominated the party – Tito, Kardelj, Djilas and Ranković.

I: The Main Criticisms

The resolution stated that in the recent period preceding the meeting of the Communist Information Bureau the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party had ‘pursued an incorrect line on the main questions of home and foreign policy, a line which represents a departure from Marxism-Leninism’.

It approved the action of the CPSU(B) which had taken the initiative in exposing the incorrect policy.

It pointed out that in a whole number of ways the Yugoslav Communist leaders had been pursuing an unfriendly policy towards the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It revealed that, for instance, slanders were being spread about the Soviet military experts who were visiting Yugoslavia on the invitation of the Yugoslav authorities, that a ‘special regime’ had been instituted for Soviet civilian experts in Yugoslavia, who were being watched and followed by Yugoslav security police, that representatives of the Information Bureau in Yugoslavia, like Yudin, the Editor of its journal For a Lasting Peace, for a People’sDemocracy, were being shadowed by secret police, and that similar treatment was being dealt out to official Soviet representatives in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav party and government statements on the USSR and the CPSU(B) remained friendly on the surface and were expressed in terms of gratitude and admiration. But at the same time anti-Soviet propaganda was being spread inside the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party: there was talk of the ‘degeneration’ of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, these slanders being couched in the old language of counter-revolutionary Trotskyism.

The resolution outlined three ways in which Tito, Kardelj, Djilas, Ranković and other Yugoslav leaders were rejecting the experience of the international labour movement, and above all the experience of building Socialism in the USSR, and were turning from both the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism.

1: They were putting forward a theory of a smooth and peaceful transition to Socialism, in the style and tradition of the Mensheviks and of Ramsay Macdonald:

They deny that there is a growth of capitalist elements in their country and consequently a sharpening of the class struggle in the countryside.

2: They were refusing to recognise any class differentiation among the peasantry. Yet if their aim of building Socialism was a sincere one, they would have had to differentiate, both in theory and practice, in their attitude towards different categories of peasants:

The Yugoslav leaders are pursuing an incorrect policy in the countryside by ignoring the class differentiation in the countryside and by regarding the individual peasants as a single entity, contrary to the well-known Leninist thesis that small, individual farming gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie, continually, daily, hourly, spontaneously and on a mass scale.

3: They were rejecting, both in theory and practice, what had been taught consistently by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, and confirmed by the whole history of the working-class movement, that the working class is the only consistently revolutionary class, and that only under its leadership can the transition to Socialism be realised:

Concerning the leading role of the working class, the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party, by affirming that the peasantry is the ‘most stable foundation of the Yugoslav state’, are departing from the Marxist-Leninist path and are taking the path of a populist, kulak party.

The resolution then proceeded to criticise in the severest terms the conception of the role and organisation of the Communist Party itself, revealed in the theory and practice of the Yugoslav Communist Party. It showed how the party was being dissolved into the wide Popular Front organisation:

In Yugoslavia... the People’s Front, and not the Communist Party, is considered to be the main leading force in the country. The Yugoslav leaders belittle the role of the Communist Party and actually dissolve the party into the non-party People’s Front.

Inside the party what the resolution called a ‘Turkish regime’, a system of military despotism exercised by a small power-group from above, had replaced the Marxist-Leninist principles of democratic centralism. A system of issuing commands from above, which had to be obeyed without questioning or discussion, had replaced criticism and self-criticism within the party:

There is no inner-party democracy, no elections and no criticism and self-criticism in the party.

Far from heeding the criticisms of the CPSU(B) and of the other fraternal Communist parties, the Yugoslav leaders withheld this criticism from their own members, took it as an insult and rudely rejected it without discussion:

Instead of honestly accepting this criticism and taking the Bolshevik path of correcting these mistakes, the leaders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, suffering from boundless ambition, arrogance and conceit, met this criticism with belligerence and hostility.

The resolution made it quite clear that the Yugoslav Communist Party was not expelled from the Communist Information Bureau because of its mistakes and incorrect policy. Any individual Communist Party branch or even Central Committee can make mistakes. It was not even expelled because it would not accept the criticisms made. It often takes time, a prolonged period of deep discussion, for a party organisation or member to come to understand and correct a mistaken policy.

But to refuse to discuss criticisms made by some of the most leading and experienced Communists in the world, above all the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to withhold those criticisms from the membership, to refuse to come and meet with the representatives of the other eight Communist parties, was a course of action which could not but place the Yugoslav Communist leadership outside the family of Communist parties:

The leaders of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia have placed themselves in opposition to the Communist parties affiliated to the Information Bureau, have taken the path of seceding from the united Socialist front against imperialism, have taken the path of betraying the cause of international solidarity of the working people, and have taken up a position of nationalism... The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia has placed itself and the Yugoslav party outside the family of the fraternal Communist parties, outside the united Communist front, and consequently outside the ranks of the Information Bureau.

The resolution closed with a stern warning. Nationalist elements, previously disguised, had in the course of the first half of 1948 reached controlling positions in the leadership of the Yugoslav party. The party had broken with its international traditions and taken the road of bourgeois nationalism. Tito, Kardelj, Djilas, Ranković and their group were hoping to curry favour with the Western imperialists by making concessions to them. They were putting forward the bourgeois nationalist thesis that ‘capitalist states are a lesser danger to the independence of Yugoslavia than the Soviet Union’. They were turning from friendship with the USSR and looking westwards. Such conduct could only have one end:

... such a nationalist line can only lead to Yugoslavia’s degeneration into an ordinary bourgeois republic, to the loss of its independence and to its transformation into a colony of the imperialist countries.

This warning seemed harsh to some people at the time. But in the three years that have elapsed since the first publication of the resolution, it has been confirmed in every detail. The logic of history was inescapable. Between the camp of peace and the camp of war there is no third path. And the nationalist policy of Tito’s gang led straight to the camp of reaction.

II: Problems of the Transition to Socialism

In the course of the war and the postwar years, under the leadership of such men as Tito and Kardelj, the conception had grown up in Yugoslavia that the peasants and not the working class would be the leading class in the transition to Socialism and the pillar of the new Yugoslav society.

This conception grew out of certain features of the Yugoslav resistance during the Axis occupation. No progressive person, least of all a Communist, would want in any way to belittle the struggles of the Yugoslav peoples, their heroism and sacrifices in the struggle for national liberation against the forces of the Axis. But despite those great military achievements, in some respects the liberation struggle in Yugoslavia was actually weaker than in neighbouring countries, for instance in Bulgaria.

Into the Partisan units on the rugged terrain of Yugoslavia, into the mountains and forests, the people and the youth came to fight against the occupiers. As was natural in a country like Yugoslavia, where the great majority of the population are peasants, the majority of the Partisan recruits came from the peasantry. Many of the best elements of the working class left their jobs, left their factories, left the towns and cities, and joined the Partisan units in the hills, forests and ravines. In the towns themselves, under the heavy and oppressive Axis occupation, the illegal resistance movement was not far developed. In a number of East European countries, where the armed guerrilla struggle did not take on the proportions of Yugoslavia, the movement of anti-Axis sabotage inside industry, the illegal underground resistance in the towns and cities, the activity of the illegal trade-union movement, was more developed. With the Liberation it was found that the working-class movement in the Yugoslav towns, after three to four years of Axis occupation, was politically backward compared with that in neighbouring countries.

The leading Titoites, completely lacking in self-criticism, instead of seeing this as a weakness which would have to be combated and overcome, tried to make a weakness into a virtue by renouncing Marxism and preaching that the peasantry would be the leading force in Yugoslavia. They not only tried to revise the most elementary idea of Marxism-Leninism, the idea of the leading role of the working class, but actively discouraged the working class from playing an independent and leading role in liberated Yugoslavia.

Tito declared in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, in 1946:

We tell the peasants that they are the firmest basis of our state not because we want to win their votes, but because they really constitute such a basis.

Djilas in January 1947, explained that:

It is absolutely incorrect and senseless to call special trade-union meetings and special meetings of the People’s Front. They should be merged into one since the trade unions, too, are affiliated to the front.

So the trade unions were reduced to third-rate bodies, their activities hidden, and the working class merged into the broad front that contained more than half the population of the country.

Moša Pijade, would-be theoretician, wrote in Borba, the party daily newspaper, in early 1948 that the Yugoslav trade unions had played no role in the liberation struggle, and would, therefore, not represent a leading force in the system of state power of the new Yugoslavia.

This attitude of underestimation of the role of the proletariat, which turned into an attitude of contempt for the workers, was revealed very clearly in the composition of the Yugoslav Communist Party itself. There were some 12,000 members of the illegal Yugoslav Communist Party when the Axis launched its invasion in 1941. In the course of the resistance struggles 8000 of these were killed, and only 4000 survived till Liberation. But the Communist Party had 140,000 members when the war ended, and nearly 500,000 by mid-1948.

During the war, recruitment to the party was carried out on the basis of attitude to the national liberation struggle. Thousands of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and kulak elements were admitted into the party, and the proportion of working-class members was reduced. When the war ended and large-scale recruiting was carried out, instead of remedying the position by special attention to the recruitment of industrial workers and by the promotion of proletarians to leading positions, the position was still further aggravated.

An examination of the social composition of the Yugoslav Communist Party in July 1948 shows that not only were there tens of thousands of kulaks and bourgeois elements in the party, including in most leading positions, but that only 30 per cent of the membership were workers, and of these the greater part were handicraftsmen. In the big factories, that should have been the main bases of the Communist Party, recruitment was very restricted. For instance, by mid-1948, in three industrial enterprises in Slovenia, each employing 7000 workers, the total party membership was 245. At five big enterprises in Croatia with total personnel of about 18,000, there were only 32 party members. In one enterprise in Bosnia-Hercegovina with 7000 workers there were 92 Communists, whilst there were 125 party members amongst the 952 office personnel.

But what policy could more openly violate the principles of Marxism-Leninism and the experience of the Soviet Union? From the first development of scientific Socialism the theoreticians of Marxism had insisted on the necessity of the proletariat playing the leading role in the Socialist revolution and in the building of Socialism. Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

Of all classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

They had shown that the proletariat was the only consistently revolutionary class:

Marx and Engels taught that the industrial proletariat is the most revolutionary and therefore the most advanced class in capitalist society, and that only a class like the proletariat could rally around itself all the forces discontented with capitalism and lead them in the storming of capitalism. (Stalin, Short History of the CPSU(B), Chapter I, Section 2)

The whole conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which alone could make possible the building of Socialism, was founded on the hegemony, that is, the leading role, of the working class:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a special form of class alliance between the proletariat, the vanguard of the toilers, and the numerous non-proletarian strata of toilers (the petty-bourgeoisie, the small proprietors, the peasantry, the intelligentsia, etc), or the majority of these; it is an alliance against capital, an alliance aiming at the complete overthrow of capital, at the complete suppression of the resistance of the bourgeoisie and of any attempt on their part at restoration, an alliance aiming at the final establishment and consolidation of Socialism. (Lenin, Collected Works (Russian), Volume 24, p 311, quoted by Stalin in The October Revolution and Tactics of the Russian Communists)

And again:

If we translate the Latin, scientific historical-philosophical term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ into more simple language, it means just the following: only a definite class, namely that of the urban workers and industrial workers in general, is able to lead the whole mass of the toilers and exploited in the struggle for the overthrow of the yoke of capital, in the process of this overthrow, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, Socialist social system, in the whole struggle for the complete abolition of classes. (Lenin, ‘A Great Beginning’ (June 1919), Selected Works, Volume 9, p 432)

The Yugoslav Communist leaders around Tito, neglecting, belittling, despising the role of the working class, were flagrantly violating one of the most essential principles of Marxism-Leninism.

Equally flagrant was their violation of the Marxist-Leninist teaching on the role of the peasantry and on the need to differentiate between the different sections of the peasantry at the various stages of advance to Socialism.

On the one hand Tito and Kardelj liked to regard the peasantry as a single undifferentiated entity. They rejected the Soviet example. They coined slogans about the peasantry, not explaining the class structure of the peasantry, and the difference in attitude and role of poor peasants, middle peasants and rich peasants (kulaks). Because a number of kulaks had joined in the national and patriotic war of liberation against the Axis invaders and occupiers, they taught that these kulaks would play the same progressive role after Liberation in the advance to Socialism. When the land of the big landowners was divided by the post-Liberation land reform, they denied that the kulaks would inevitably exert every effort to exploit the small and middle peasants and resist the advance to Socialist agriculture. They denied that the individual ownership of the land would give birth to capitalism unless prompt and effective measures were taken against such a development.

And finally, when criticised for such a pro-kulak policy in the letters of the CPSU(B), they began, in a totally adventurist way, typical of the ultra-leftist utterances of Trotsky, to make boastful proclamations about the liquidation of ‘the last remnants of capitalism’ in a few weeks or a few months.

In a letter to the CPSU(B) dated 13 April 1948, Tito and Kardelj wrote that ‘the plenum of the Central Committee approved the measures proposed by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee to liquidate the remnants of capitalism in the country’.

And Kardelj declared in the Skupština (Parliament) at Belgrade on 25 April 1948: ‘In our country the days of the last remnants of the exploitation of man by man are numbered.’

But the right-wing attitude to the kulaks and the ultra-leftist phrases, as always, amounted to the same thing. The refusal to analyse the class structure of the peasantry and to differentiate accordingly, and the boastful phrases and paper decisions on the ‘liquidation of capitalism’, both led to the same passivity and to the same reliance on and favouring of the kulak element.

The great exponents of Marxism-Leninism had always shown that small-scale production engenders capitalism.

In estimating the ‘strength of the overthrown bourgeois’, Lenin drew attention to three main factors, of which the third was:

... the force of habit, in the strength of small production [which] engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale. (Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, Chapter II)

Stalin wrote:

Under capitalism the countryside followed the towns spontaneously because capitalist economy in the towns and the small-commodity economy of the peasant are, at bottom, the same type of economy. Of course, small peasant commodity economy is not yet capitalist economy. But it is, at bottom, the same type of economy as capitalist economy, for it rests on the private ownership of the means of production. Lenin was a thousand times right when, in his notes on Bukharin’s Economics of the Transition Period, he referred to the ‘commodity-capitalist tendency of the peasantry’ as opposed to the Socialist tendency of the proletariat. (Stalin, ‘Problems of Agrarian Policy in the USSR’ (December 1929), reprinted in Problems of Leninism)

The teachings of Marxism and the experience of building Socialism in the USSR had shown that, in the stage of transition to Socialism, the alliance of the working class with the peasantry does not mean an alliance with the whole of the peasantry. It means an alliance with the mass of working peasants, the small and the middle peasants. This alliance involves a prolonged struggle against the capitalist elements in the countryside – the rich peasants, the kulaks – whilst taking every step to aid the small and middle peasants, and to win them for the collective Socialist form of agriculture:

We of course are decidedly on the side of the small peasant; we shall do everything at all permissible to make his lot more bearable, to facilitate his transition to the cooperative should he decide to do so, and even to make it possible for him to remain on his smallholding for a protracted length of time to think the matter over, should he be unable to bring himself to this decision. We do this not only because we consider the small peasant who does his own work as virtually belonging to us, but also in the direct interest of the party. The greater the number of peasants whom we can save from being actually hurled down into the proletariat, whom we can win to our side while they are still peasants, the more quickly and easily the social transformation will be accomplished. (Engels, ‘The Peasant Question in France and Germany’, Marx – Engels Selected Works, Volume 2, p 394)

But neither Marx nor Engels, Lenin nor Stalin, ever made bureaucratic empty declarations about the liquidation of capitalism in the countryside in a few weeks or a few months. They knew, and the Soviet experience confirmed, that in order to ‘liquidate’ the kulaks as a class, it is necessary to win the mass of the working peasantry voluntarily for large-scale collectivisation of agriculture. And in order to win for this aim the small and middle peasants it is necessary to go through a whole period of ‘restricting’ the kulaks, giving concrete aid from the state to the small and middle peasants, giving them the experience of joint cooperative labour through the use of advanced technical equipment, providing them with a number of models so that they can be convinced with their own eyes of the superiority of collective farming. And of course, for all this, it is essential to create an industry which will provide the necessary advanced agricultural equipment needed for the mass turn to collective farming. Any other method is bureaucratic. It either leads to hostility between workers and working peasantry instead of cementing the worker – peasant alliance, or else remains a demagogic manoeuvre and mere paper decision.

For fifteen years after the October Revolution, the CPSU(B) never lost sight of the need for measures to restrict the kulaks until a situation was reached when the kulaks as a class could be ended.

In the period of the ‘New Economic Policy’ the Communist Party of the Soviet Union introduced progressive taxation so that the greatest burdens of taxation would fall on the rich peasants, they restricted the leasing out of land, they expanded the industry supplying agricultural equipment, they supported the small peasants with credits, rallying the small and middle peasants to the side of the working class and isolating the kulaks. This policy they continued until the precondition was created for leading the masses of working peasants, voluntarily, along the path of collectivisation. This was also the precondition for destroying the kulaks as a class:

Prior to 1929, the Soviet government had pursued a policy of restricting the kulaks... At the end of 1929, with the growth of the collective farms and state farms, the Soviet government turned sharply from this policy to the policy of eliminating the kulaks, of destroying them as a class... This was a profound revolution, a leap from an old qualitative state of society to a new qualitative state, equivalent in its consequences to the revolution of October 1917... The distinguishing feature of this revolution is that it was accomplished from above, on the initiative of the state, and directly supported from below by the millions of peasants, who were fighting to throw off kulak bondage and to live in freedom in the collective farms. (Stalin, Short History of the CPSU(B), Chapter XI, Section II)

Whilst they belittled the proletariat and favoured the kulaks, the Yugoslav Communist leaders were busy preaching a new road to Socialism, by which, unlike the Soviet Union, without intensifying class battles, liberated Yugoslavia would slide into Socialism – capitalists, kulaks and all. Looking back, some of the formulations might have been framed by the British Fabians. Nikola Petrović, Minister of Foreign Trade, for example, outlined the following perspective in mid-1947:

Without constituting an insurmountable and fundamental obstacle to the Socialist sector and to its development, agriculture which is closely linked with the Socialist sector and is included in the general economic plan will itself gradually change its nature as the plan is realised and will gradually reach the phase where all spontaneity in economic laws will be completely and finally destroyed regardless of the spontaneity of economic laws in this sphere. (Slavyane, no 5, 1947)

This peaceful perspective, which would have warmed the heart of Ramsay Macdonald – ‘In human history one epoch slides into another’ – disregards the most elementary tenet of Marxism-Leninism, that after the first serious defeats, the overthrown exploiting classes fight back ten times, a hundred times, more desperately than ever before to regain what they have lost:

In the transition, the class struggle grows more intense. The transition from capitalism to Communism represents an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch has terminated, the exploiters will inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope will be converted into attempts at restoration. And after their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters... will throw themselves with tenfold energy, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of their ‘lost’ paradise. (Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, November 1918)

In Yugoslavia, as in the other countries of Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army, the working people were faced in their struggle to advance to Socialism, not only with the embittered remnants of former capitalists, landowners and displaced officials of the old reactionary state apparatus, not only with the whole strength of international capitalism operating from its main American and British centres and determined to restore, by any and every means, the old class forces to power, but also with their own kulaks. Moreover, the majority of the population engaged in individual production was ‘engendering capitalism and the bourgeoisie, continuously, daily, hourly’.

To combat such enemies, therefore, it was necessary that Yugoslav popular democracy should be systematically consolidated, the struggle against the kulaks undertaken, the state machine still further (and far further) purged of reactionary elements, the leadership of the working class and of the Communist Party reinforced, so that, fulfilling the functions of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it could suppress the exploiters, defend the country from imperialist intervention, strengthen the ties of Yugoslavia with other People’s Democracies and above all with the Soviet Union, detach the working masses from the bourgeoisie and cement their alliance with the proletariat, and speed on the economic advance of the country to lay the foundation for Socialism.

As Lenin put it:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, against the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by its overthrow... and whose power lies, not only in the strength of international capital, in the strength and durability of the international connections of the bourgeoisie, but also in the force of habit, in the strength of small production.(Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism)

The leading Titoites, however, far from organising to resist international capital, were already actively engaged in collaborating with it. The propaganda of their ‘new road to Socialism’ not only aided the restoration of capitalism in Yugoslavia, but, put forward with the prestige of the Yugoslav liberation movement by those who in reality were betraying it, actively influenced, and thereby weakened, the struggle for advance to Socialism of a number of other Communist parties.

III: Destruction of the Party

In the period after Yugoslav Liberation, the Titoite ‘theoreticians’ were busy developing a ‘new’ conception of the Communist Party – a ‘development’ of Marxism which in fact went back on and repudiated every principle of party organisation for which Marxism had ever fought.

This ‘theory’ was that the Communist Party should be hidden from the people, that it should dissolve itself into the wider popular organisation of the People’s Front, which should become the main organisation of the Yugoslav people. Should the Communist Party openly put its programme before the people and openly work to win support for it? No, replied Tito, for the Communist programme is in no way different from that of the People’s Front:

Has the Communist Party of Yugoslavia any programme other than the programme of the People’s Front? No. The Communist Party has no other programme. The programme of the People’s Front is the programme of the party. (Tito’s report to the Second Congress of the People’s Front of Yugoslavia, 27 September 1947)

Is the Communist Party the vanguard organisation of the working class, the highest form of class organisation of the proletariat? No, once again replies Tito:

Since the People’s Front last of all represents not only the political unity of our people, but also fraternity and unity in the national sense, it cannot be replaced by any other party. Hence the People’s Front is becoming the permanent political organisation of the people. (Tito’s report to the Second Congress of the People’s Front of Yugoslavia, 27 September 1947)

The first point in the statutes of the Yugoslav People’s Front ('Main Organisational Principles of the People’s Front of Yugoslavia’) stated that: ‘The People’s Front of Yugoslavia is the main political force.’ [My italics – JK]

And what was the People’s Front? The People’s Front played a great and progressive role in the liberation war and could have continued to do so in the period following Liberation. It was developed on Communist Party initiative prior to the German attack on Yugoslavia, formed from different groups (including a number of the old political parties) as well as individuals. It embraced representatives of the Croat Republican Peasant Party, the Republican Party of Serbia, the Democratic Party and the Independent Democratic Party, the National Peasant Party of Serbia and the Agrarian Union (which later merged to become the United Agrarian Party of Serbia), as well as representatives of the trade unions and of the mass organisations of the youth and the women, etc.

The People’s Front, therefore, contained bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties, kulaks, traders and manufacturers, as well as workers, peasants and intellectuals. Djilas, reporting at the initial foundation conference of the Communist Information Bureau in August 1947, stated that: ‘There are no ideological, religious nor any obstacles to joining the People’s Front.’

Conceived of as a mass popular organisation led by the working class and the Communist Party, and being drawn into action against home and foreign reaction, shedding its reactionary members, the People’s Front could have played an important role in consolidating the popular democratic regime. But instead of that, it was built up by the Titoites to absorb, and eventually to replace, the Communist Party.

What was the result? The Communist Party was hidden, concealed from the people. In a regime that was supposed to be led by the Communists, the party had a semi-legal status. If you went in 1946 or 1947 to Belgrade you could find no open office of the Communist Party. There were no declarations, resolutions, statements made by the Communist Party. The membership of the party was concealed from the working people. Even the daily organ of the Communist Party, Borba, carried next to no news or information on the life and activities of the party. Between Liberation and July 1948, not one party decision was published by Borba.

Take a typical practical example of the fruits of this policy. In the big Železnik works near Belgrade there were some 4000 workers employed, of whom 160 were party members. Party meetings were held secretly. None of the non-party workers knew where the meetings took place, what was discussed at them or what decided. None of the non-party workers knew who were the members of the party. Party members shamefacedly tried to put across party decisions without saying that they were proposals of the Communist Party. New recruits were recruited by secret invitation.

Therefore for the mass of Yugoslav working people the Communist Party appeared as a type of secret conspiratorial society that dominated their lives without showing itself. Its decisions were manoeuvred across the working people by individual ‘Communists’ holding positions in the state. The habitual attacks of the enemies of Communism on the party as a ‘secret conspiracy’ became in the case of Yugoslavia the truth. Thus instead of acting as an open vanguard trying to raise the political level of the working class and the working people, the party was reduced to the level of the most backward, and was merged, dissolved into the People’s Front.

This was a complete break with Lenin’s conception of a Communist party and its role.

Lenin wrote:

We are the party of a class, and therefore almost the entire class (and in times of war, in the period of civil war, the entire class) should act under the leadership of our party, should adhere to our party as closely as possible. But it would be Manilovism and ‘khvostism’ [that is, complacency and ‘tailing behind’ reality – JK] to think that at any time under capitalism the entire class, or almost the entire class, would be able to rise to the level of consciousness and activity of its vanguard, of its Social-Democratic [that is, Communist – JK] Party... To forget the distinction between the vanguard and the whole of the masses which gravitate towards it, to forget the constant duty of the vanguard to raise ever wider strata to this most advanced level, means merely to deceive oneself, to shut one’s eyes to the immensity of our task, and to narrow down these tasks. (Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, quoted by Stalin in the Foundations of Leninism, Chapter VIII)

Of course, in the period of illegality between the wars, the Yugoslav Communist Party could not hold open meetings; but despite all the difficulties its line and policy was brought before the people through illegal leaflets and publications. But now, in a period of the most complete legality, the party was concealed, dissolved, its programme and policy hidden, its leading role abandoned. Instead of proudly appearing before the people, and proudly and publicly proclaiming their aims, the membership of the party, on orders of the Tito clique, were losing their party identity.

But it was not only in relation to the role of the party that the Titoites were violating the tenets of Marxism-Leninism and throwing overboard all the most valuable experiences of the CPSU(B). The same applied to their ‘theory’ and practice of the internal organisation of the Communist Party.

Tito, Kardelj, Djilas and above all, in this field, Ranković were virtually, as a narrow dominating power-group, dictating party policy from above. They practised the ‘military method’ of party leadership advocated by Trotsky. It was not by chance that Trotsky’s ‘rightist’ conception of a party composed of all and sundry was combined with Trotsky’s ‘leftist’ conception of ‘orders from above’. As usual the ‘rightist’ and ‘leftist’ practices led to the same result of destroying the revolutionary character of the Communist Party. Party elections at all levels ceased. Leaderships were organised by cooption. Internal discussion was discouraged. Criticism and self-criticism were suppressed. And Ranković abused his position of Minister of Internal Affairs and head of the security police (UDBA) to take ruthless disciplinary measures against party members who dared to discuss or criticise the dictates of the ruling clique.

Only a study of the organisational methods of the CPSU(B), as taught by Lenin and Stalin and practised by the CPSU(B), can bring out to the full the extent to which the Ranković regime in the Yugoslav party was a violation of Marxism-Leninism.

Once again there was no excuse in the fact that the Yugoslav party had been illegal between the wars and on a war footing during the liberation struggles. The Bolsheviks had known and had taught how to move from illegality and war to a position of legality.

In 1923, after the period of War Communism in the Soviet Union, Stalin had explained the new tasks of the party:

First, in every way and tirelessly to combat the survivals and habits of the war period in our party, combat the incorrect view that our party is some kind of a system of departments and not a militant organisation of the proletariat which thinks actively, is self-sufficient, lives a full-blooded life, destroys the old and creates the new.

Second, it is necessary to increase the activity of the party masses by submitting for discussion all questions that interest them, since there is no reason why these questions should not be discussed openly, by ensuring the opportunity for free criticism of each and every point raised by party organs. For only thus can discipline be transformed into a really conscious, really iron discipline, only thus can the political, economic and cultural experience of the party masses be raised.

Third, it is necessary to elect all party organs and officials. An end must be put to the practice of ignoring the will of the majority of the organisation when nominating comrades for responsible party posts. We must see to it that the election principle is carried out. ('On the Tasks of the Party’, 2 December 1923, Collected Works, Russian edition, Volume 5, pp 362-63)

It was under the guidance of Lenin and Stalin that this adaptation of the party to the new period was carried out. With the elimination of Tsardom, the victory of the October Revolution and the defeat of the interventionist forces, the principles of democratic centralism, as Lenin outlined them, were fully established in the Bolshevik Party:

In order to function properly and guide the masses systematically, the party must be organised on the principles of centralism, having one set of rules and uniform party discipline, one leading organ – the party congress, and in the intervals between the congresses, the Central Committee of the party; the minority must submit to the majority, the various organisations must submit to the centre, and lower organisations to higher organisations. Failing these conditions, the party of the working class cannot be a real party and cannot carry out its tasks in guiding the class.

Of course, as under the Tsarist autocracy the party existed illegally, the party organisations could not in those days be built upon the principle of election from below, and as a consequence, the party had to be strictly conspiratorial. But Lenin considered that this temporary feature in the life of our party would at once lapse with the elimination of Tsardom, when the party would become open and legal, and the party organisation could be built up on the principles of democratic elections, of democratic centralism. (Stalin, Short History of the CPSU(B), Chapter II)

Lenin and Stalin always taught that there can be no democratic centralism within the Communist Party without criticism (from below upwards as well as from above downwards) and without self-criticism:

But testing from above far from exhausts the whole business of checking up. There is still another kind of check-up, the check-up from below, where the masses, the subordinates, examine the leaders, point out their mistakes, and show them ways of correcting them. This kind of verification is one of the most effective ways of testing people.

The rank-and-file party members verify their leaders at meetings of active party workers, and conferences and congresses, by listening to their reports, by criticising their defects, and finally by electing or not electing some or other leading comrades to the leading organs. Precise operation of democratic centralism in the party as demanded in our party statutes, unconditional submission of party organs to election, the right of putting forward and withdrawing candidates, secret ballot, freedom of criticism and self-criticism, all these and similar measures must be carried into life, in order incidentally to facilitate the check-up on and control over the leaders of the party by the rank-and-file party members. (Stalin, On Practical Work, Little Stalin Library, no 6, p 15)

It has always been stressed in Marxist-Leninist teaching that you cannot proceed towards Socialism smoothly and easily, nor will the party be able to lead that advance without its members, including its leaders, making mistakes. Self-criticism is not just a passing phenomenon. It is something essential to the life and theoretical progress of the party; it is a method of training the cadres of the working people in the spirit of Marxism. A party or a party member can be judged by their attitude to their own mistakes. Do they reject criticism, take it as a personal insult, a blow to their prestige? Or do they welcome it, learn from it, self-critically review their own work, recognise their mistakes, look for the reasons for them, and try to correct them? True Communists will never be frightened of recognising their own mistakes. It is only bourgeois parties and bourgeois politicians who fear the truth:

The attitude of a political party towards its own mistakes is one of the most important and surest criteria of the seriousness of the party and of how it fulfils in practice its obligation towards its class and towards the toiling masses. To admit a mistake openly, to disclose its reasons, to analyse the conditions which gave rise to it, to study attentively the means of correcting it – these are the signs of a serious party; this means the performance of its duties, this means educating and training the class, and then the masses. (Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, Chapter VII)

All revolutionary parties which perished hitherto did so because they became conceited, failed to see wherein lay their strength, and feared to speak of their weaknesses. (Lenin, at the Eleventh Congress of the CPSU(B), March 1922)

But the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party were supremely arrogant. They not only refused to recognise their mistakes, to learn from them and correct them, they refused even to admit that it was possible that they might have made mistakes.

All the letters received from the CPSU(B) and from the other Communist parties in the first half of 1948 were concealed from their membership and rejected without a party discussion. It might have been possible to consider them wrong-headed but sincere if, after full party discussion, they had for a period held to their policy. But what did they do? Is it possible to think of any sincere and honest party leadership, having received criticism from a party of the experience and achievements of the CPSU(B), rejecting these criticisms without a full discussion throughout the party from top to bottom? Is it possible to think of an honest Communist who would not be proud to receive criticisms from the parties whose leaders were Stalin, Dimitrov, Rákosi, Togliatti or Thorez?

And when the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau was published, and the Yugoslav Communist leaders could no longer conceal it from their members, what did they do? They sent a long 10,000-word arrogant reply, not admitting a single error, before their party members could possibly have time to discuss the resolution. They sent 10,000 words of reply without one word of self-criticism. Two leading revolutionaries, Žujović and Hebrang, members of their own Central Committee, were already in prison for having dared to criticise the leading Titoites.

At the time when the Information Bureau’s resolution was published (end of June 1948) the Yugoslav Fifth Party Congress was fixed for the third week in July. Any honest party leadership would have postponed the congress:

If I were asked at this moment what I would do if I had the power to do anything in relation to the Yugoslav congress, I would postpone it for three months in order to allow internal party discussions to take place in the factories and branches on the Communist Information Bureau resolution, so that when the congress takes place, the issues would have already been discussed and a certain clarity gained. (Harry Pollitt, Reply to Discussion at Aggregate Meeting of London Communist Party Members on 7 July 1949, World News and Views, no 28, 1949, p 302)

Far from pursuing such a democratic course, the Titoite reply to the Information Bureau tried to distort the whole character of the criticisms made. The Titoite press immediately launched a large-scale open attack on the resolution. Meetings were hastily summoned at which all those criticising the Titoite leadership were ruled out of order, after which many were expelled from the party and sent to prison. Hand-picked delegations were despatched to the party congress which, instead of being a congress of criticism, self-criticism and prolonged discussion, was transformed into a series of bitter harangues of the Titoite leaders against the Information Bureau. The Fifth Congress had nothing whatsoever in common with Communism.

A letter sent from leading Belgrade Communist students to the Information Bureau reveals what methods were used to force on the party membership the Titoite line. Here are a few extracts from this letter, the full text of which was published in For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy, no 17 (20), 1 September 1948:

We are approaching you in this fashion since through our party organisations it is impossible for us to express our solidarity with the resolution of the Information Bureau...

We wholeheartedly agree with you that the slightest criticism is followed by reprisals. The party is ruled by military methods. With regard to the case of Žujović and Hebrang, the first we heard was different versions of the matter from non-party people and from abroad. Only later were we summoned to a party meeting and informed that they had been removed from the Central Committee because of inimical activities. We were told that the matter was being investigated and that we would be kept informed. At the next meeting the report of the commission which conducted the investigation and a statement of the Political Bureau of the party was received. According to these documents, Žujović during the Fifth German Offensive against the Partisans influenced one of the Partisan divisions to try and break through the enemy encirclement... Due to this action, the Partisans allegedly found themselves in a critical situation. But our questions: why was Žujović not tried then and there as a traitor, and why was he promoted to the rank of general for his part in that particular operation, remained without answer...

The letter outlined how all genuine criticism of Titoite policy was smothered and suppressed in the party branches at the university:

The procedure at the conference in the Veterinary Faculty was as follows. On the first day a meeting of all the party members was summoned for the purpose of expressing confidence in the Central Committee. Due to disagreement among the members a unanimous vote was not forthcoming. Next day, when the majority of party members in the faculty were engaged elsewhere, the Secretary of the party group and members of the University Committee got together far less than two-thirds of the party membership and manipulated a vote of confidence in the Central Committee.

In the Mining Faculty the meeting lasted two hours. One and a half hours were devoted to reading the two texts – the remaining half hour was given over to discussion. However, the moment one of the members suggested that the Central Committee should have attended the meeting of the Information Bureau the discussion was stopped.

The letter continues with a detailed description of how, in the Polytechnic Faculty, the Technological Department and the Mechanics Department, efforts were made to suppress discussion and force decisions favourable to the Titoites on the party members. During the meetings lists were compiled of all those daring to support the Information Bureau or disagree with the Titoite line in any way. There followed mass expulsions and mass arrests of party students in the university. An American correspondent, June Cannon, was expelled from Yugoslavia for reporting the opposition of Belgrade student Communists to the Titoite leaders. Thus a brutal attack was made on what had always been one of the best and most combative centres of Communism in Yugoslavia, and a ‘purge’ of progressive students carried through.

This is how the Yugoslav Communist leaders put into practice the Marxist-Leninist principle of democratic centralism.

IV: Bourgeois Nationalism

The national liberation struggles of the Yugoslav peoples justly won the admiration of progressive people throughout the world. But when the war was over and when Yugoslavia was liberated, the leaders of the Yugoslav Communist Party in the clique around Tito began to paint a picture of the Yugoslav struggle which depicted it as qualitatively different from the resistance movement of other peoples, such as that of the French people or the Bulgarian people, for instance. They began to spread the myth that, unlike other peoples, the Yugoslavs had been liberated solely by their own efforts. And they began to forecast a perspective of Yugoslav development separate from and ‘independent’ of the other People’s Democracies and the Soviet Union.

In the postwar period from 1945 to mid-1948 the leading Titoites praised the Soviet Union and its Communist Party in their open pronouncements; but already in secret, in their own circles, they were attacking and defaming the USSR; and by publishing a distorted picture of the Yugoslav liberation movement, they were trying to belittle its role amongst their own people and to weaken their gratitude to and admiration for the Soviet people and the CPSU(B).

For what could be more distorted than a picture of the liberation of Yugoslavia from Axis occupation and of building Socialism in Yugoslavia apart from and ‘independent’ of the USSR?

Could the Yugoslav national liberation movement ever have taken the form that it did and reached the proportions it did, if the main Nazi forces had not been contained and then driven back and defeated by the Red Army?

Could the Yugoslav Partisan forces that were scoring such successes in the hills and forests ever have driven out the Nazis from the main cities without the Red Army? Would Belgrade and other great Yugoslav cities have been freed without the Red Army?

The Soviet troops of the Second and Third Ukrainian Fronts crossed the rivers Drava and Tisa in the latter half of 1944, liberated Serbia and the Vojvodina, and on 20 October 1944, fighting alongside the First and Twelfth Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Liberation Army, liberated Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.

Commenting on the role of the Red Army in those days the Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav forces, Colonel-General Arso Jovanović, wrote in his pamphlet The Belgrade Operation:

The great Russian people has been our hope and guarantee throughout the ages. Such was also the case this time... The Soviet Army gave us fraternal disinterested aid. Soviet soldiers shed their blood on the soil of our native land – in Serbia, in the streets of Belgrade, in Srem. Out of the joint suffering and bloodshed there grew the invincible fraternity and unity of the two Slav countries. This is the only correct foreign political orientation which corresponds to the age-old strivings, cultural and historical development of our peoples. This is the sole guarantee that our peoples will save themselves from national misfortune – and there have been many misfortunes in our bitter history.

Colonel-General Arso Jovanović knew and recognised the decisive role of the Red Army in the liberation of Yugoslavia. But for this knowledge, and above all for the frank and open recognition of this historical fact, he was to be assassinated by the Tito clique.

The liberation of Belgrade was a mortal blow at the Nazi forces in Yugoslavia and their quisling allies inside the country. Over 150,000 German soldiers and great quantities of equipment were captured. The Soviet Army rendered every assistance in reorganising the Partisan units into a modern and regular army. It provided modern equipment – artillery, tanks and aircraft. On the request of the Yugoslavs, Soviet military experts helped to train the reorganised units.

The Red Army handed over to the Yugoslav Army all the equipment captured at Belgrade. More than ten infantry divisions were supplied with arms from the Danube supply line. When in January 1945, the Germans broke through on the Srem front, and once again threatened Belgrade, Marshall Tolbukhin detached large forces from the Hungarian front around Lake Balaton, and smashed the Nazi offensive.

Could Yugoslavia or any of the other People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe ever have established their People’s Democracies and set the course for Socialism without the aid, friendship and protection of the USSR which alone saved them from ‘liberation’ in the Anglo-American imperialist manner, which alone preserved them from armed imperialist intervention, as dreamed of by Churchill?

Was it not the Soviet Union that sent in without delay, and despite the devastation of its own territories, food and economic aid of all kinds in the most critical period in 1944-45, when the West was still trying to extort from Yugoslavia political concessions in return for food for its starving population?

How could it be thought, even for a moment, that in face of the greedy onslaught of Western imperialism Yugoslavia could preserve its independence except in alliance and friendship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies?

Indeed, what genuine Communist would have been anything but proud and content to acknowledge the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the liberation of Yugoslavia and in its advance to Socialism?

The truth is that the Tito clique was following a bourgeois-nationalist and not a Marxist and proletarian-internationalist path. Though at first secretly, and undercover, it was trying to wean the Yugoslav people away from friendship and alliance with the USSR and other People’s Democracies. No sooner had the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau been published than the Titoites began to come into the open as nationalists, stirring up the old chauvinist hatreds that had been played on for so long by the ‘Great Serbs’, the old Serb chauvinists, against the Hungarian, Rumanian, Greek and Albanian peoples and gradually turning to direct open attack on the USSR and the CPSU(B). The open turn of the Titoite leaders to nationalism reflected their efforts to restore capitalism in Yugoslavia; they opened a fatal path before the Yugoslav people of return to the old order, of becoming once again a semi-colony in the orbit of Western imperialism:

What is the deviation towards nationalism? ... The deviation towards nationalism is the adaptation of the internationalist policy of the working class to the nationalist policy of the bourgeoisie. The deviation towards nationalism reflects the attempts of ‘one’s own’ ‘national’ bourgeoisie to undermine the Soviet system and to restore capitalism. (Stalin, Report to the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU(B), January 1934, Problems of Leninism)

V: Conclusion

There is no doubt that the resolution on the ‘Situation in the Yugoslav Communist Party’ came as a shock to Communists and progressives all over the world. Most of us had made the mistake of confusing the achievements and sacrifices of the Yugoslav peoples with the actions of the group of leading Titoites. We took men like Tito, Kardelj, Ranković and Djilas for what they claimed to be, viewed their actions uncritically, and failed to see how they were, beneath the surface, betraying the cause of the national liberation movement and leading their peoples down a false and dangerous path.

The resolution pierced the curtain of deceit. It revealed the departure from Marxism-Leninism of the Yugoslav party leaders around Tito, pointed to the nationalism that was rising to the surface and that earlier had been concealed beneath the surface, and showed where this policy would inevitably lead.

It was in the first place the vigilance and deep political experience of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that pointed to the errors of the Tito clique. It was on the initiative of the CPSU(B) that the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau was adopted. In years to come this resolution will be seen as one of the most decisive documents in the history of the international working-class movement. For it not only showed in the clearest terms the errors of Tito, Kardelj, Djilas, Ranković and other Yugoslav party leaders, but it enabled other Communist parties which had been influenced by Titoite doctrines to correct their mistakes, and raised before all parties deep theoretical principals which aroused profound discussion and allowed them to continue their struggles with greater understanding and clearer perspective. To the Soviet comrades who took this initiative we should express our deepest gratitude.

The discussion of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau which took place in all Communist parties won the complete support of Communists throughout the world. There was not the vestige of a rift in the ranks of the parties. All those who participated in the discussions came in the course of them to understand the correctness of the principles outlined.

But there was one question that remained open. How was it that these errors had come to be committed? Were they simply mistakes of policy or was there something else behind them? Why did British and American reaction seem to attach so much importance to the Tito clique? How could such a group of men as the Yugoslav Communist leaders around Tito refuse to discuss criticisms made by other fraternal parties?

What explanation could be behind the totally un-Communist behaviour of the Yugoslav Communist leaders?

These questions did not receive a full answer until the Rajk, Kostov and Koçi Xoxe trials showed that the mistakes of the Titoites were part of a conscious, counter-revolutionary plan of direct agents of Anglo-American imperialism.