From Trotsky To Tito : Inside Tito Yugoslavia

FROM TROTSKY TO TITO . James Klugmann 1951

Chapter Six: Inside Tito Yugoslavia

The Communist Information Bureau, in its resolution on Yugoslavia of June 1948, warned the Yugoslav people where the false policy of the Tito group would inevitably lead their country:

The Yugoslav leaders evidently do not understand or, probably, pretend they do not understand, that 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.

Has that stern warning been proved correct? A study of the conditions inside Tito Yugoslavia since the Information Bureau’s resolution shows to what hard extremes of misery the rule of the Titoites has brought the people of Yugoslavia.

I: The Working Class

It was inevitable that those who were secretly working for the betrayal of the Yugoslav national liberation movement, for the betrayal of the aims and struggles of the Yugoslav Communist Party, should hate the Yugoslav working class. The Titoites squeezed out the industrial workers from leading positions in party and state, denied the leading role of the working class, belittled the actions of the workers in the Partisan movement.

The lot of the workers in Tito Yugoslavia has been a very hard one. Their living conditions have grown steadily worse in the last three years. The cost of living has soared, wages have remained unchanged. Working hours have been steadily lengthened, speed-up systems and various forms of forced labour introduced; safety measures in dangerous industries are neglected and accident rates are rising. At the Ikarus factory in Belgrade, for instance, working hours at the end of 1949 were in the neighbourhood of twelve hours per day, beyond which the workers were compelled to offer a number of unpaid ‘voluntary’ labour hours. In a number of enterprises a system was introduced by which the workers had to pay ‘compensation’ to the enterprise if they did not reach the norms established by the management.

The position of the Yugoslav miners is typical of the general position of the working class. In 1949 some 450,000 were employed in the mines of Bosnia, Slovenia and Croatia and accident rates were conspicuously high. Lead and mercury poisoning is frequent in the Trepča mines in Serbia. There have been repeated accidents through the collapsing of mines at Bor. In Mostar miners are working knee-deep in water. Even Borba, the official Titoite daily, admitted (8 July 1951) that in the Rastoka coal mines near Despotovac ‘the condition is sad’.

‘We, the miners’, writes a worker from the Trepča lead mines, ‘live in torn-down barracks, ditches and stables.’

The reaction of the workers to their miserable conditions has been expressed in a steadily growing mass absenteeism that has reached such proportions that even the official Titoite press has been forced to admit it. Workers leave their factories. The poorer peasants, despite their own miserable conditions in the countryside, refuse to enter industry, and when forcibly mobilised to do so flee away from the towns.

In 1949 absenteeism on the majority of Yugoslav building sites reached an average of over 60 per cent, in the mines 40 to 45 per cent. The Titoite trade-union organ Rad reported towards the end of 1949 that during the first half of July 1949, 4306 new workers arrived for work at the Bor copper mines, whilst 5070 left Bor during the same period. Borba admitted in July 1949 that no less than 10,500 workers left the Trepča mines out of 11,000 who had been directed there.

In a speech at Split in March 1950, Tito admitted that 400,000 workers out of 2,200,000 were absentees. Writing in Borba in July 1950, the Yugoslav Minister of Labour reported that the majority of peasants ‘mobilised’ for work in the mines had returned to the countryside. ‘We have not yet succeeded’, he reported, ‘in getting the majority of them to become permanent workers.’

By mid-1951, 400,000 of some 630,000 peasants mobilised for compulsory labour had absconded.

The ‘voluntary labour brigades’ have been transformed into their opposite, into squads for forced labour. In 1948, in ninety-six Yugoslav mines, over one million hours were extorted unpaid from the workers. In 1949, 465,000 were enrolled, compulsorily, into the ‘voluntary work brigades’ in Croatia.

To combat mass absenteeism, the Titoite government has been trying to use hunger as a weapon of compulsion. In 1949 the government tried to compel the workers to sign long-term labour contracts. They were met in general with widespread and stubborn refusal. So there was started a system of withdrawing ration cards and ration privileges from those who refused to accept long-term contracts, thus putting them at the mercy of the profiteers of the free market for food, clothing and all the necessities of life, which means virtual starvation. The official trade-union organisation (Zemeljski Sindikalni Savez, ZSS), instead of protecting the workers and defending the living standards, has been transformed into a weapon of the regime for enforcing the hard conditions on the workers. All the militant and fighting elements have been purged from official positions and many arrested as ‘Cominformists’. All the important officials, from Djuro Salaj downwards, are ‘reliable’ Titoites. The ZSS agreed that workers who would not sign long-term labour contracts should be punished, expelled from the unions, and forfeit their food and clothing cards, often along with their entire families.

The anti-Titoite paper of Yugoslav political exiles in Czechoslovakia published the following letter from a factory worker in Rijeka (Fiume):

Here, at the works, a new method was introduced; henceforth, it was decided, food and supply cards would be distributed at the works office by the management, instead of at the Municipal Office of Public Supply. In case of an ‘unjustified’ absence of a worker, his coupons for the day, including those of his family, are removed by the management. Textile and shoe coupons are distributed by the factory management only to those workers who have worked three to six months without absence from the works...

The meeting at which these fresh Titoite terror methods were announced to the workers of the factory was called by the works committee of the union. After the announcement the attitude of the workers was very hostile. Although those protesting were threatened with arrest, many remonstrated against these methods of slavery and declared that they would stop paying trade-union dues because the union represented the fascist interests of the regime and not the interests of the workers. (Nova Borba, no 24, 1950)

The Belgrade-published Republika reported on 30 January 1951:

Under the influence of diverse factors, particularly mental depression, which seems to be spreading like a contagious disease, and concern about the future, many intellectuals and manual workers, who until recently performed their duties conscientiously, now work only out of fear of punishment, at best they do their work mechanically.

Even the legal Titoite press is forced to admit the growing opposition of the working class to the Tito regime.

II: The Position of the Peasants

We saw in the first chapter that one of the main criticisms of the policy of the Titoites put forward by the first resolution of the Communist Information Bureau was their attitude to the peasantry. The Titoites, claiming that they were leading Yugoslavia on the road to Socialism, made no differentiation in their attitude to the peasantry, no efforts to restrict the kulaks, the rich peasants, no efforts to give special aid to the poor and middle peasants. They denied the existence of the class struggle in the countryside. They developed a special theory of ‘Yugoslav exceptionalism’.

After the publication of the Information Bureau resolution the Titoites made strenuous efforts to justify their position. The Serbian Titoite leader Nešković claimed at a Belgrade conference on 8 February 1949 that the kulaks in Yugoslavia would play a progressive part in ‘building Socialism’:

There is no need to add to the fiction about a class struggle in our countryside. Our kulaks are not the same as those in the USSR. They helped us in the war. They should therefore be regarded as part of the working peasantry. We must draw the kulaks into the committees of the people’s power, into the People’s Front, into the cooperatives and so on.

Bebler, Assistant Foreign Minister, and one of the immediate entourage of Tito, Kardelj and Ranković, developed the same thesis (29 April 1949):

We have no kulaks such as there were in the USSR. Our rich peasants took part en masse in the people’s liberation war. What is more, our kulaks, taking into account the existence of the USSR, learned a great deal about the fate of the kulaks in the USSR. Bearing this in mind they showed themselves to be more sensible and capitulated... Do we have to destroy the kulaks in order to satisfy fossilised dogmatic survivals? Would it be a mistake if we succeeded in getting the kulaks to pass over to Socialism without a class struggle?

Tito himself went further. He denied the very existence of kulaks, or of classes in the countryside (speech as Skopje, beginning of August 1949):

We cannot say where the border between the middle peasant and the kulak begins or ends... One cannot judge an individual to be a kulak according to the number of hectares of land in his economy.

This is the theory of classes in the countryside which the Titoites daily claim to be ‘true Leninism’ – a theory of ending capitalism with the aid of the capitalists, denying the existence of classes, denying the stages in revolutionary advance to Socialism and the different class alliances necessary at the different stages.

Lenin showed, again and again, that to build up Socialism it was necessary first to restrict the kulaks as a class, to aid the poor and middle peasants, and to prepare the way for the eventual elimination of the kulaks as a class. He showed that a failure to do this would lead to a restoration of capitalism, to the exploitation of the poorer peasants, to the betrayal of the revolutionary struggle.

The last two years of development in the Yugoslav countryside have shown that the Titoite theory of the denial of class struggle in the countryside has led, in practice, as it was inevitably bound to do, to the growth of the kulak class, to the domination of the countryside by the kulaks, to the wholesale impoverishment of the mass of the working peasantry, to the wholesale exploitation of the poorer peasants by the rich.

The Titoite taxation policy spells ruin for the poor and middle peasants. Poor peasants who received land in the belated and restricted land reform were left without government aid in cheap credits, seed, agricultural equipment, draught animals, and therefore, with a taxation burden that they could not bear, quickly fell under kulak domination. The quotas fixed by the state for compulsory sale of agricultural produce at cheap prices to the authorities fell heavily on the poor and favoured the wealthy peasants. Obligatory quotas fixed in October 1949 compelled small peasants with five to seven acres of land to hand over 450 kilograms of wheat, regardless of the quality of the land or the size of the peasant’s family. Peasants with seven to 11 acres had to hand over 850 kilograms, peasants with 45 acres or over a maximum of 1700 kilograms. The result of these and other similar measures has been wholesale ruin for the masses of working peasantry. For non-fulfilment of compulsory contributions in kind, penalties are very heavy. Those not complying in time or in full are fined as much as 50,000 dinars, with an alternative of three months’ forced labour (clearing the forests, building roads, work in the mines under police surveillance).

In its issue of 9 September 1950, the paper Vjesnik, organ of the Titoites in Croatia, highly praised the authorities in one region for raising the compulsory grain quota for poor peasants by 20 per cent, leaving the peasants only 63 kilograms of grain per person per year for themselves. It called on other districts to follow suit. An early decree exempting the poorest peasants from taxation has been annulled, and, according to the Montenegrin paper Pobeda, which describes the work of the ‘people’s’ administration in the Podgorica area, the peasants in this area pay equal taxes irrespective of differences in income and property.

The result has been that poor and middle peasants, unable to meet the compulsory quotas, and endeavouring to escape the heavy penalties, borrow from the kulaks, to whom they become indebted, and under whose exploitation they increasingly fall.

Meanwhile the kulaks flourish. In 1948 a regulation was issued by which the peasants, irrespective of their category, could sell grain from their surplus products (quotas paid) to the state and receive in exchange, in lieu of money, coupons which could be exchanged for cheap industrial commodities – clothes, tools, furniture, etc – all of extreme scarcity in Tito’s Yugoslavia. This enabled the kulaks to use their surpluses not only to trade in grain but to speculate in coupons. Kulaks who accumulated large quantities of coupons or of the industrial goods which are exchanged for them began to trade them in the villages. So in the village market kulaks began to be seen not only selling draught animals, grain, milk, fats, but furniture, shoes, boots, spades, scythes, tools and even American gramophones – at inflated prices. Meanwhile the poor peasantry, the workers, lower civil servants and intellectual workers were often unable to purchase a toothbrush. To obtain these industrial goods from the kulak traders the poorer peasantry have to make over portions of their land or pay by their labour on the kulak farms.

The former Assistant Finance Minister of Serbia, Todor Todorović, who took refuge from the Titoites in Bulgaria, revealed that Secret Order no 17 of 18 March 1949 of the Serbian Ministry of Finance instructed the provincial authorities to revise (of course downwards) kulak taxation. In the Pančevo district taxes on kulak produce were reduced from 200 million dinars to 110 million; in Negotin district from 112 million to 65 million.

Meanwhile the theory of the Titoites on the role of the kulaks in ‘building the new Yugoslavia’ is being put into practice by wholesale admission of rich peasants into key positions in local administration organs in the countryside and in the ‘Popular Front’ committees.

III: Phoney Collectives

Nothing illustrates better the duplicity of Titoism, the hiding of reactionary right-wing policy under left-wing forms and phrases, than the phoney collective farms of Tito Yugoslavia. What is boosted as a striking illustration of advance to Socialism turns out on closer examination to be a cunning form of maintaining kulak domination in the Yugoslav countryside.

Formally the Titoites began to establish their ‘agricultural cooperatives’ in 1946. By January 1950 they claimed 6615 producers’ cooperatives with some four million acres. The form of organisation is that the members ‘pay in’ their land, draught animals and agricultural animals and draw out according to what they have paid in. Nor is this form of organisation considered as a first step to further development towards Socialist agriculture at a later stage. Rather is it taken as the final form of collective farming. The kulak – poor-peasant relationships are thus permanently conserved and even reinforced in these phoney collectives, in which the kulaks not only exercise economic domination but hold all the leading positions. This is why there is often willingness or even eagerness amongst the kulaks to enter the ‘cooperatives’ and wholesale resistance from the poor and middle peasants.

Take the example of that rich agricultural area the Vojvodina. Here there are some 251,000 farm-holdings, of which 14,672 are kulak farms. In 1946 the ‘rural cooperatives’ in the Vojvodina contained 34 kulak farms; in 1947, 217; in 1949, 7122 or 50 per cent of the kulak holdings.

The incomes of the poorer members of the ‘cooperatives’ reveal the exploitation which they outwardly conceal. In the Babić cooperative in the village of Dragotin near Prijedor the peasants receive 15 dinars per work-day unit; in the Naprijed cooperative (also Prijedor district) about 11 dinars. The average daily earnings of the poor peasants in the ‘cooperatives’ are 15 to 20 dinars. Up to 30 per cent of the income goes as ‘rent’ for the land contributed. In addition there are large payments made to the various office-holders, who are in general kulaks. Of 28 office-holders in the ‘cooperative’ of Vrbanje in Croatia, 16 are kulaks. The rank-and-file ‘cooperative’ members share out about 15 per cent of the total income of the cooperative in payment for their work. But even on these payments there are often long delays.

The chairman of a Titoite ‘cooperative’ in one Bosnian village drew out in cash and kind more than all the other 15 members put together, and sat at leisure while poor peasants did his work and cultivated his land. Some of the kulaks divide their land, putting part into the ‘cooperatives’ as a profitable investment and using the profits to pay poor peasants to cultivate the rest. It was announced at the Slovenia party conference in 1950 that during that year the membership of the ‘cooperatives’ in Slovenia had increased by four per cent whilst the land ‘pooled’ had increased by 17 per cent. This shows the character of the peasants who are joining.

The capitalist press all over the world raged and stormed in the 1920s and 1930s against the development of collective Socialist agriculture in the Soviet Union. No words have been strong enough in this same press to storm at and slander the development towards genuine Socialist collective agriculture in the People’s Democracies of Eastern Europe. But in Yugoslavia there has happened what, at first sight, might seem a miracle. Here is a ‘new kind of Communism’ that captivates the capitalists, a ‘new type of collective’ that warms their hearts. The Economist writes (18 February 1950):

In Yugoslavia collectivisation is more rapid than elsewhere, but persecution of kulaks is less severe. Kulaks are not, as in the other ‘popular democracies’, excluded in principle from the collective farms... Communist doctrinaires regard attempts at the collectivisation of agriculture without first liquidating the kulaks much as a dentist would regard the filling of a tooth without drilling away the decay. Tito’s reason for this policy is, however, simple. His policy has already won him enough hatred; if he is to maintain his regime... he must at least abstain from antagonising the whole upper layer of the peasantry.

The phoney collectives of Tito Yugoslavia which the kulaks eagerly join, the poor peasants abhor and the Economist praises, are as much like the collectives in the People’s Democracies as the Federation of British Industries is like a trade union of industrial workers. The collective farms of the People’s Democracies bring together the small and middle peasants, raise their living standards, and reinforce their struggle against the village rich, the kulaks. In Tito’s Yugoslavia the phoney cooperatives bring together the kulaks for the more ruthless exploitation of the working peasantry.

The kulak domination of the countryside, both inside and outside the phoney collectives, leads to increasing resistance of the working peasantry to the Tito regime, a resistance that is growing so widespread that even the official Titoite organs have to reckon with it and even Tito’s most ardent capitalist supporters abroad have to comment on it. It is reflected in the refusal of masses of peasants to sow their crops. Even Tito had to admit in a speech in mid-March of 1950 at Drvar that the peasants were unwilling to comply with the compulsory taxes in kind. He was forced to recognise that ‘the local authorities have been incorrectly imposing taxes on the peasants. Many have had their barns thoroughly cleared... Peasants are refusing to sow bread grain.’

It is reflected in the refusal of the working peasants to join the phoney collectives or in their sabotaging them when forced to do so. As Tito admitted at Drvar: ‘When forced to join the cooperatives the peasants sell their implements and livestock or slaughter the cattle and thus commit a crime.’

But his remedy was – threats, and a new law on ‘cooperatives’ which provides for the death sentence for those ‘conducting undermining activity in the cooperatives’ or ‘damaging cooperative property’, and long terms of imprisonment for those illegally leaving the cooperatives.

The resistance of the peasants is reflected in refusal to pay taxes in cash or kind, resistance which is increasingly reaching the level of what are reported in the Titoite press as peasant ‘riots’.

All the evidence of the developments in the Yugoslav countryside in the last three years goes to show that kulak domination is extending, that the Tito clique is basing itself on the kulaks in the countryside, and supports the justice of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau of November 1949, which stated that:

The compulsory pseudo-cooperatives in the countryside are in the hands of kulaks and their agencies and represent an instrument for the exploitation of broad masses of the working peasants.

IV: Yugoslavia’s Economic Plight

The peasants resisted. And one of the main expressions of their resistance was the refusal to till the land. Why should they cultivate the land to have their produce seized by the Titoite tax collectors?

Already in 1949 the area of arable land was below that of the previous year and in 1950 it fell lower still. Even the official press had to admit it. The Sunday Times Belgrade correspondent quoting from Borba reported on 14 May 1950 that:

‘... with less than a week left for making good our leeway, the spring-sowing campaign on the private sector of agriculture – still about 80 per cent of the arable land – is lagging dangerously behind.’ In Serbia, the newspaper said, only between 60 and 70 per cent of the land still tilled by ‘free’ peasants had been sown, in Bosnia-Hercegovina about 51 per cent, and in Croatia 45 per cent. In Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro the figures are all under 40 per cent.

As the year progressed the extent of the collapse of Yugoslav agriculture became ever clearer. A food-producing country was threatened with famine. Speaking in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, Kraiger, the Chairman of the Economic Council of Slovenia, declared in October 1950:

This year the maize crop in the republic is 35 per cent below that of last year... The sugar yield will be far less. There will not be enough sugar to supply the population. Fodder has not been stocked and peasants are slaughtering their cattle... In the third quarter the delivery programme was carried out badly. Worse still was the situation with meat supplies to the population...

Observers of the internal developments in Yugoslavia had long forecast this disaster. They knew that the resistance of the mass of the peasantry, their refusal to cultivate the land, would lead to a catastrophic harvest. But as the results became known, the Titoites tried to find a pretext for the disaster by explaining it away by the drought. Drought there indeed was, but it does not account for more than a small proportion of the Yugoslav food shortage. The basic causes were non-cultivation of land by the peasants, the general kulak domination of the countryside and oppression of the working peasantry, together with the mass exports of foodstuffs to the Western capitalist countries. The Times correspondent at Trieste reported on 10 October 1950:

This year’s harvest in Yugoslavia is said to amount to less than half the 1949 harvest, and to have been poorer than that of 1944, a year of heavy fighting in most parts of the country... peasants have been openly refusing to deliver their produce to the government... The slaughter of cattle temporarily improved meat supplies in the towns, but last week’s reports indicate that the meat ration has again become minute.

The correspondent admits that if the drought was one of the causes of this disaster it was ‘not the only one’ and adds:

According to official admissions, no more than three-fifths to four-fifths of the acreage tilled in Yugoslavia before the war was cultivated this year. The reason is in part the peasants’ lack of inducement to do more work than strictly necessary, because the prices paid for their crops are low and no consumer goods are available. Contributory causes are the lack of agricultural machinery, and even of ordinary tools... Production also fell on state-owned collective farms...

The Swiss National-Zeitung wrote at the end of October (26 October 1950):

Not since the end of the war has the situation been so bad and never has the Titoite regime encountered such difficulties as was the case at the end of the autumn, on the threshold of a winter that threatens the Yugoslav people with hunger and hardship, and the Yugoslav regime with disorder and anxiety... Prices are soaring and poverty is growing month by month.

Rákosi, the Vice-Premier of the Hungarian People’s Republic, exposed the Titoite ‘excuse’ that the cause of the famine was solely the drought:

The Tito gang puts responsibility for the economic crisis and chaos on this year’s drought: we in Hungary also experienced a drought this year. Certainly no milder than that in Yugoslavia. As is also known, the vital agricultural regions of Yugoslavia are located along the Hungarian border; the drought was absolutely the same in Makó and Velika-Kikind, in Szeged and Subotica, Baia and Sombor, Pécs and Osijek. And yet the drought in our country did not cause such misfortunes as in Yugoslavia because our peasants, helped by the People’s Democratic State, enthusiastically, promptly and in good time, completed all agricultural work, which, to a considerable degree, offset the effects of the drought. (Rákosi, Speech to Plenum of the Hungarian United Working People’s Party, 27 October 1950)

The drought hit Yugoslavia’s other neighbours, Bulgaria and Rumania; but the states of People’s Democracy, with a working peasantry supporting the government and state, and a government and state supporting the working peasantry, were able to withstand it and offset its consequences.

Nor is the situation any better in Yugoslav industry than in the countryside. The Five-Year Plan, even according to official sources, has failed dismally. In 1948 the plan targets were not reached (officially) in the electrical, metallurgical, coal, food, textile, glass, chemical and other industries. In 1949 the situation was worse. The report of the Tito government to UNO’s Economic Committee for Europe (ECE) admitted that in the first half of 1949 Yugoslav industrial output fell by 20 per cent. In 1950 a whole series of industries failed to complete even 50 per cent of the year’s targets, and Kardelj and other Yugoslav leaders were speaking of the need for at least a further year’s extension to begin to reach towards the five-year targets. In all the countries in Eastern Europe with long-term plans, in Yugoslavia alone was failure reported.

The inevitable result of the disastrous situation in agriculture and industry was the rapid fall in living standards. Whilst rationing remained in force the rations were more and more unfulfilled and the working people forced to turn to the free market with its profiteers’ prices. Rations, in theory, in 1950 were supposed to cover some 35 per cent of the requirements of the people. In fact they hardly covered 15 per cent of their essential needs. The meat, sugar, fat and oil coupons were often not worth more than the paper on which they were printed. The New York Herald Tribune, in general an enthusiast for the Titoites, recognised (16 September 1950) that the entire population depended on the free market. And what was the situation in the free market? It was a situation of incredible shortages of the most elementary consumption goods and of fantastically inflated prices. Study for a moment the reports of eye-witnesses published in journals that on matters political are ardent supporters of the Tito regime.

The correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote from Zagreb (11 May 1950):

The shortage of goods is just as grave in Zagreb as everywhere else in Yugoslavia. Even the most common everyday necessities such as needles, cotton, soap, etc, are unobtainable. The lucky foreigner who receives a parcel from home could make his or her Yugoslav friend very happy indeed by giving a toothbrush or a card of snap-fasteners as a present. The shop-windows look miserable! A few metres of light material, a few bottles of inferior Eau de Cologne, a range of coarse brushes, cane baskets...

In the same month the Neue Züricher Zeitung correspondent reported (14 May 1950):

In the Explanade Café in Zagreb one is served with some sort of a liquid in a chipped cup which resembles coffee by its colour only. People in the streets show signs that they must be living under difficult circumstances. The shortage of goods – in cloth, soap, needles, cotton, razor-blades, and in every possible kind of everyday necessities – is just as great in Zagreb as everywhere else in Yugoslavia.

GER Gedye, an enthusiast for Tito’s anti-Soviet activity, wrote in Tribune, a journal which ardently boosts the Tito regime (9 June 1950): ‘... fantastic prices are paid for such simple things as razor-blades and pocket-combs. I myself saw a Yugoslav sell a used comb, which was worth new perhaps 3s 6d, for 350 dinars.’ Viz, £1 15s, at 200 dinars to the £ sterling, before the devaluation of the £; after devaluation, still more in terms of sterling.

In July 1950, the New York Herald Tribune correspondent Gaston Coblentz reported in detail on the living conditions of the Yugoslav people:

With practically the entire Belgrade population depending on the free market to eke out sufficient nourishment, it was seen today that prices of some basic items have gotten so far out of hand that it takes about 20 per cent of an average city dweller’s monthly income to buy two pounds of butter.

The situation can be gauged by measuring a few other items against the average city wage of 4000 dinars a month.

Two pounds of sugar, 500 dinars. Last year, about 200.

Two pounds of coffee, 1700 to 2000 dinars. Last year, 1000 to 1200.

Two pounds of lard, 550 dinars. Last year, 250.

A litre of cooking oil (sunflower seed), 650 to 700 dinars. Last year, 200 to 300.

A pair of chickens, 450 to 700 dinars. Last year, 200 to 300.

Two pounds of tomatoes, 150 dinars. Last year, 30 to 40.

Two pounds of pork, 500 dinars. Last year, 300 to 400.

The conditions are causing a great deal of scarcely veiled grumbling. They are attributed by qualified Western economic observers mainly to the following causes.

1) Premier Marshal Tito’s government is failing to supply the peasant population with any but the shoddy rationed consumer goods. This is driving peasants to demand higher and higher prices for their free-sale produce in order to be able to buy consumer items at exorbitant prices on the free market in the capital.

2) Large-scale exporting of food by the regime...

3) Heavy monetary taxation of sizeable sections of the peasant population. (New York Herald Tribune, continental edition, 10 July 1950)

It is only necessary to comment on this report that the surplus goods for sale in the free market at ‘exorbitant prices’ came only from the kulak section of the peasantry, whilst the ‘heavy monetary taxation’ falls overwhelmingly on the working peasantry, the poor and middle peasants.

The same correspondent visited the town of Subotica near the Hungarian border and in a strongly pro-Tito, anti-Hungarian article reported that:

The shops around a small and pretty park in the middle of the city are an index of the economic situation. The meaning of the following prices in the Narodni Magasin (People’s Store) may be graphed by measuring them against an average city-dweller’s wage of 4000 dinars a month: a plain tablespoon, 520 dinars. [remember that there were 200 dinars to the £1 before devaluation of sterling, now less – JK]; poorest quality men’s shirts, 721 to 1000 dinars [no others available]...; ‘woollen’ blankets that customers poke their fingers through, 2878 dinars; poor quality men’s sweaters 1895 dinars...

Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, MP, who is very approving of Tito’s ‘liberal Leninism’, as he calls it, who sees Tito, whom he has done so much to promote, as a useful anti-Soviet instrument, nevertheless had to admit, reporting on his journey through Yugoslavia in September 1950, that there is:

... a devastating shortage of consumer goods. The difficulty of finding anything for money to buy has led to large-scale absenteeism in industry and an ever-increasing tendency on the part of the peasants, already disgruntled by government interference, to produce only as much food as they need for themselves. (Sunday Times, 17 September 1950)

Ian Mackay, reporting from Belgrade to the News Chronicle, stated early in September 1950 that:

... the ration [of butter and sugar] has not been honoured for several weeks. Prices in the free market are soaring astronomically. Compared with last year, butter is up from 40s to 60s per lb; sugar from 20s to 50s; potatoes from ls 6d to 10s; lard from 20s to 50s; coffee from 70s to 200s; and eggs from 1s 8d to 3s each [they were about 3d each when I was in Belgrade in 1946 – JK]. (News Chronicle, 18 September 1950)

Denis Martin, reporting his trip through Yugoslavia at the end of 1950, in the Daily Herald, which has surpassed itself these last two years in friendliness for Tito, wrote in these terms about the situation in Belgrade:

I found myself in a milling mass of human scarecrows, people whom the desperate shortage of suits, dresses, coats, stockings, shoes and hats has robbed of all style and fashion. Sparse meals remind them hourly of what the winter will bring. The basic rations have not been honoured in full for many weeks...

The Yugoslavs are forced more and more into the so-called ‘free markets’, where soaring prices and a primitive barter system mirror the impossibility of any sort of normal life. Here for the desperate housewife, potatoes fetch 3s 8d a pound; bread 3s 10d a pound; and meat 14s a pound. Sugar, butter and cooking fats are well out of reach at between 25s and 30s a pound, while tea and coffee have risen to the incredible levels of £10 and £5 per pound respectively... The most elementary needs of daily life are lacking. To buy a pair of weather-worthy shoes the workers must save a month’s pay. No one can find good soap. A tube of toothpaste will change hands at 30s. Anxious-faced women spend days in the search for needles, thread, darning wool and buttons...

Public morale is not good and public health gives cause for anxiety. ‘These people’, said an overworked and weary doctor, ‘are ravaged by tuberculosis.’ Shortages of soap and hot water are inducing a record incidence of scabies and give encouragement to the sicknesses of social distress. (Daily Herald, 28 November 1950)

The US News and World Report, an extreme right-wing journal of the United States, which has given much favourable publicity to the Titoites and constantly presses for US support for the Tito regime, describes how Tito is selling the Yugoslav people into bondage, ‘mortgaging’ the country’s wealth to the US capitalists:

Not much question Tito is in a jam, and desperately needs outside help. Starvation in some parts of Yugoslavia is possible unless food comes from abroad... Tito is already mortgaging Yugoslavia’s future exports to pay for past imports... Quality of even heavy goods is often inferior. Half-finished buildings testify to bad planning. Labour turnover is very high. At the big Trepča lead mines, for instance [also mortgaged to the USA – JK], of 11,000 workers taken on, 10,500 quit within a few months. (US News and World Report, 24 November 1950)

These are the ‘glories’ of the ‘new kind of Communism’ proclaimed by Zilliacus. This is the fruit of the Titoite policy of breaking the friendship and mutual cooperation with the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies. This is the fruit of that ‘benevolent generous aid’ of the USA and the other Western imperialist states. With wages frozen, rations unfulfilled, fantastic rise of prices of all essentials, incredible shortage of the most elementary consumption goods, ill-health spreading, the unhappy Yugoslav people have very rapidly been brought to the depths of misery by the Titoites from the high hopes at the end of the war.

An unending stream of similar reports could be quoted, reports culled from the pro-Titoite press of the West, as well as reports smuggled out from Tito Yugoslavia from the people themselves. They confirm one another. Meanwhile a few ‘guests’ of the West, some bought, some misled, are wined and dined and fêted at the best hotels by Titoite officials, personally conducted to a few well-prepared ‘model’ institutions, and come back as Titoite propagandists – just as the ‘guests’ of Hitlerite Germany used to return swearing that Hitler wanted peace, that the German people were prosperous, and that concentration camps and Jew-baiting were a ‘myth of the Comintern’.

The condition of the Yugoslav masses corresponds more every day, under the regime of the Titoites, to that of a typical semi-colony of Western imperialism.

V: The Oppression of the Yugoslav People

And, like the people of any colonial or semi-colonial country, the Yugoslav working population faces not only economic but political oppression. The arrests of leading Communists and national liberation leaders began, even before the publication of the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau, with the arbitrary arrest of Hebrang and Žujović, members of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party, in April 1948.

As soon as the resolution had been published and the criticism of some of the world’s greatest and most experienced Communist parties could no longer be withheld from the members of the Yugoslav party, the Titoites began a full-scale drive of arrest and persecution. All who stood up for continued friendship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies or who in any way openly criticised the betrayal of the Titoites were expelled from the party, arrested, imprisoned or thrown into concentration camps.

In Novi Sad, for instance, about eighty Communists were expelled from the party in the first few days after the publication of the resolution. Of seventeen members of the party committee at Kladovo, only two supported Tito (one was the local secret police chief). Of the twenty-five leading propagandists of the Regional Committee of Bosnia-Hercegovina, only one supported Tito. Thirty-nine out of forty members of the City Party Committee at Sarajevo supported the criticisms of the Communist Information Bureau. The reply was mass expulsion and arrest. The Fifth Congress of the party, which was held in July 1948, was preceded and followed by a wave of arrests and even assassinations. Members of the leading party committees were expelled at Sarajevo, Rijeka, Zaječar, Negotin, Bijelo-Polje, Crkvenica, Pola, Priština, and from towns and villages all over the country. More than twenty ministers were arrested from the federal and state governments.

In 1949 and 1950 the attack on the people grew ever more open. Whilst war criminals and former collaborators were released from the prisons, their places were filled by leading Communists and Partisans. But as the old prisons were not sufficient there was large-scale extension of prison installations and establishment of old-style fascist concentration camps. Communists often went back to the same prisons that they had known under the dictatorship between the wars.

Amongst the arrested were some of the foremost leaders of the National Liberation Army. General Arso Jovanović was assassinated. He had been one of the main organisers of the first Partisan detachments in 1941, and from July 1941 for the rest of the war Chief of Staff of the liberation forces. Always disliked by the British and American military liaison leaders for his firm adherence to the interests of the Yugoslav people, he had been replaced by Koča Popović (a former surrealist and persona grata with the Western missions and embassies) when the war ended. Appointed head of the Yugoslav Military Academy in July 1948, he supported the criticisms of the Titoites made by the Information Bureau, and was assassinated in August.

General Slavko Rodić, youngest Partisan general, was murdered in jail. Amongst those arrested in the highest Army circles were General Branko Petričević, General Krdjić, the National Hero Colonel Sava Stanojević, Colonel Vlado Dapčević and Major-General Moma Djurić, who organised the insurrection in the Mačva and commanded Tito’s Guards Battalion. Five members of the editorial staff of the Army paper Narodna Armija were ‘purged’. Major-General Pero Popivoda of the Yugoslav Air Force had to take refuge abroad to escape arrest. His brother, a major in the Army, a Partisan from the first days of struggle in 1941, was deprived of his rank, arrested and put to torture on the news of his brother Pero’s action. General Popivoda’s mother, who had given six members of her family to the Partisan forces, was exiled from Belgrade. And these are only a handful of examples from thousands of officers and soldiers, with brilliant records in the liberation struggle, who met with a similar fate.

The same oppression – arrest, torture and often murder – was turned against all sections of the working population. The highest state crime was to be a ‘Cominformist’, that is, to stand for friendship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies, for loyalty to Socialist principles. Amongst those who suffered most were the youth and students. Thousands of students were expelled from the universities and hundreds arrested. It was in Belgrade University with its great traditions of struggle against fascism and dictatorship, a centre of strong Marxist influence even in the old days of the dictatorship, that the first and strongest resistance to the Titoites arose. And it was the students of Belgrade University who suffered the heaviest blows.

Many of Yugoslavia’s leading left-wing intellectuals were arrested, including several of the best-known professors of Belgrade University and the poet Radovan Zogović, one of the most prominent of the Partisan poets.

The oppression turned against the foreign population. A whole number of Soviet citizens who had lived long years in Yugoslavia were arrested on trumped-up charges. Two thousand Macedonian and Bulgarian citizens who wanted to leave the country for Bulgaria were refused permission. Foreign journalists who reported the opposition to the Titoites were expelled from the country, whilst the doors were opened wide to all the representatives of the worst red-hating and red-baiting press of Britain and America.

The Belgrade correspondent of The Times summed up his observations in these words:

Persons may be arrested without reason given and kept in prison for months without trial on a simple order from the Minister of the Interior...

To root out Cominformist opposition within the Communist Party and to enforce the collection from the peasants of produce quotas the government has made numerous arrests... Most observers estimate the number of persons now in prison at anything from 100,000 to 200,000. Certainly, in spite of a grave shortage of labour and materials for building, prison accommodation has been steadily expanded. It is impossible to say how many of the prisoners have actually been tried.

It was estimated that by mid-1951 there were 200,000 patriots in Titoite jails, including 15,000 officers and several thousand NCOs. Some 9500 trade-union functionaries were arrested in 1950 alone.

Inside the jails and concentration camps there is a Hitlerian regime of starvation, floggings, and all the refinements of the Gestapo.

To carry through these repressive measures against the working people the Titoite clique has had to convert the key organs of state power into organs of repression directed against the mass of people who want Yugoslavia to move forward to Socialism. In this the development of a ‘reliable’, that is, anti-Socialist, anti-working-class, army and secret police has been amongst Tito’s first aims.

Right from the formation of the first Partisan detachments in 1941 the Titoite group, operating secretly inside the Yugoslav Communist Party and inside the liberation forces, conspired to place their own men in the key positions in the armed forces. Some of Tito’s main associates like Peko Dapčević, Koča Popović, Ivan Gošnjak were pushed into leading positions. A number of officers from the old Royal Yugoslav Army, renowned for its reactionary Great Serb (Serb chauvinist) outlook, were admitted into the Partisan forces, confirmed in their original ranks, and quickly promoted to the most vital positions. Officers who came over from the various quisling forces – Ustaši (Croat terrorists), Domobranci (army of the ‘independent’, that is, Axis puppet Croatian state), Slovene ‘White Guards’, and followers of Mihailović – were treated likewise. Such men were Colonel Krišanić who commanded a Pavelić unit, but was taken prisoner by the Partisans and promoted by Tito to the rank of major-general, or Suleiman Filipović who was a lieutenant-colonel in the puppet Croatian army and is now a highly-placed army instructor.

Today the Yugoslav Army, with Tito himself as its Supreme Commander, with his chief associates in key positions – Ivan Gošnjak, Koča Popović (son of a Belgrade millionaire), Peko Dapčević, Otmar Kreačić, etc – and with former Četniks, Ustaši and reactionary officers of the old regime Royal Army in positions of command, is an open weapon of reaction. Lieutenant-General Ulepić of the old Royal Army commands the Air Force; Josip Černi from the Royal Yugoslav Navy is a vice-admiral in Tito’s fleet; Major-General Jovanović, formerly of the Royal Yugoslav Army, Četnik and Great Serb chauvinist, commands Tito’s artillery; Apostolski of the old Royal Army is a Lieutenant-General, chief of the Sarajevo military district. A key position is occupied by Colonel Radoslav Djurić, one of the main associates of Mihailović in Serbia and renowned for his ill-treatment of the Serb population.

No sooner had the resolution of the Communist Information Bureau been published at the end of June 1948, than a furious purge started in the Yugoslav Army, which has continued to this day. The mass of the soldiers came from the people and wanted friendship with the Soviet Union. Many had fought heroically to defeat the Axis and build what they hoped would be a new Yugoslavia of the people. They could not be trusted. And so while in every People’s Democracy in Eastern Europe a new people’s army is being forged, new cadres of officers are being drawn from the people, workers and small peasants become generals and air marshals, in Tito Yugoslavia the leading ranks of the Army are filled with Tito’s own chief associates and with the officers of the old regime.

That is why the right-wing press of America speaks of Tito’s Army, alongside the forces of Franco and the Nazis, as an integral part of the Western imperialist bloc. That is why that reactionary of reactionaries, former Secretary of State James F Byrnes, could proclaim in January 1951, on taking the oath as Governor of South Carolina:

Since last September we have been discussing with France and Britain what limitations should be placed on military forces recruited in Western Germany. That time should have been spent encouraging Western Germany to raise an army... we should send Spain more than an ambassador. We should send military supplies as rapidly as possible... We should seek the friendship of Tito and furnish military supplies to Yugoslavia. Tito has trained soldiers... (US News and World Report, 26 January 1951)

That is why President Truman rushed in during the last weeks of 1950 to despatch the $12 million worth of food to Tito’s Army. The Nazis, Franco’s forces and Tito’s Army were considered ‘reliable allies’.

Equally, and perhaps even more vital for the Titoites was the problem of converting the secret police, the civil and military security forces, into a ‘reliable’ anti-popular weapon.

The evidence given at the Rajk, Kostov and Koçi Xoxe trials showed that from 1941 onwards the Titoites had filled the leading positions in the security forces with foreign agents, members of the police and secret police of the old regime, reliable members of the clique headed by Ranković. It was from such sources that, from the beginning, the leading cadres of OZNA (the so-called Department for the Defence of the People) were picked. It was such ‘reliable’ enemies of the working class who engineered the removal and murder in one way or another of leading Communists like Ivan (Lolo) Ribar, leader of the Young Communist League, General Milutinović and General Petar Drapšin in the course of the war.

In 1948 the purge of the security forces by the Titoites was taken a step further, even before the publication of the Information Bureau resolution. OZNA had been replaced by the UDB (State Security Board) comprising police, frontier guards and all types of secret police.

Veselin Popović, a former colonel of the UDB who escaped from the Titoites, disgusted by the role that he was ordered to fulfil, reports that in April 1948 a meeting was called of UDB representatives from all over Yugoslavia, presided over by Ranković, to discuss action against the genuine Communists, increased activity abroad, and the establishment of a special agency for ‘removing Cominformists’. Following this meeting a new purge was carried out inside the UDB since many previously considered ‘reliable’ could no longer be counted on to carry out the openly anti-Soviet, anti-progressive programme of sabotage in the People’s Democracies and of physical liquidation of the genuine left now openly outlined by Ranković and Tito.

The UDB, suitably purged of all progressive elements, has come to dominate all sections of the Yugoslav state machine in a way reminiscent of the role of the Gestapo. UDB officials dominate the ‘party’ organisations, the local councils, the mass and so-called ‘popular’ organisations.

Ranković himself serves as General Secretary in the ‘Union of Veterans of the People’s Liberation Struggle’, and leading positions are held by the Police Ministers of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia. UDB officials hold leading positions in the cultural and educational organisations. UDB officials have been put into many of the key posts in the national economy.

Lieutenant-General Mičunović, a former deputy of Ranković, has been made Director-General of Metallurgy; Lieutenant-General Maks, former chief of the espionage department of UDB, has become Minister of Marine Transport; Colonel Jovan Bojović, who once organised in Bulgaria and formerly held the post of chief of the personnel department of UDB, has been put in charge of civil airlines.

The Titoites, therefore, have turned the state machinery of the Yugoslavia that emerged from the Second World War into the very opposite of that for which people made their sacrifices and gave their lives in the national liberation struggle. The state that should have operated in the interests of the working people against the old ruling class and external reaction, has been transformed into an apparatus operating against the working people of Yugoslavia in the interests of foreign reaction and of the restoration of capitalism at home.

While some external forms of popular democracy were conserved to confuse progressive people at home and abroad, the content of the state of Tito’s Yugoslavia became one of open repression of the workers, working peasantry and progressive intelligentsia. The Army and security organisations that the people helped to forge for use against the Axis murderers and domestic quislings were transformed by treachery from within into organs for attack on the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies abroad and the working masses led by the genuine Communists at home.

Power was taken into the hands of the Titoites by a secret putsch organised from within the Communist Party and the state. For a time the rulers of Yugoslavia were compelled publicly to carry out the political and economic policy demanded by the people. As Ranković explained to Rajk:

It should be clearly understood that neither Tito, nor other members of the Yugoslav government wanted, after Liberation, to establish a democratic system in Yugoslavia and to build Socialism. And if they were compelled, nevertheless, to undertake... revolutionary measures... this was not because they wanted seriously to carry out this programme of Socialism; they were forced to do this only under the pressure of the masses of the Yugoslav working people. (Verbatim Report of Rajk Trial)

And with power in their hands the Titoite clique proceeded to transform the Yugoslav state into a repressive state of a fascist type, conserving wherever possible the earlier external forms of organisation in order the better to conceal their real aims and in order to confuse the people.

But the Titoites, with their plan of restoring capitalism, could not simply transform Yugoslavia into a bourgeois democracy. The Yugoslav people had strong revolutionary traditions, deep experiences of the national liberation struggle. If allowed even a limited democracy, they would have used this to throw out the traitors, to remove the Titoites. In trying to turn history backwards, to lead their people from incipient People’s Democracy back to capitalism, the Titoites inevitably needed a strong repressive state apparatus of a dictatorial fascist type. Before Tito, his predecessor Trotsky had already seen this. It was such a regime that Trotsky dreamed of imposing on the Soviet peoples if he could seize power by a secret counter-revolutionary putsch. Radek, speaking of Trotsky’s letter of December 1935, the existence of which was confirmed by Pyatakov and Serebriakov, explained in his evidence at the trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite centre:

In the sphere of politics, a new note in this letter was the way it posed the question of power. In this letter Trotsky said: there can be no talk of any democracy. The working class have lived through eighteen years of revolution, and it has vast appetites; and this working class will have to be sent back partly to privately-owned factories and partly to state-owned factories which will have to compete with foreign capital under most difficult conditions. That means that the living standards of the working class will be drastically lowered. In the countryside the struggle of the poor and middle peasants against the kulaks will be renewed. And then, in order to hold power, we shall need a strong government, irrespective of what forms are employed to veil it. (Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre: Verbatim Report, p 114, my italics – JK)

It is the plan which Trotsky failed to accomplish, that Tito, his successor, is endeavouring to carry out in Yugoslavia today. Tito has carried out a coup d'état of a Bonapartist type, of the type that Stalin was describing when he wrote in 1927:

Bonapartism is an attempt to impose the will of the minority on the majority by force. Bonapartism is the forcible seizure of power in the party or in the country by the minority against the majority. (Stalin, Collected Works, Russian edition, Volume 10, p 164)

Power was seized by a secret coup d'état by the secret Titoite group inside the party. But the Titoites, in order to maintain power, and to ‘impose the will of the minority on the majority’, are working to restore capitalism in Yugoslavia. Though this is not a single act that takes place overnight, and though the Titoites are trying every conceivable trick to disguise their restoration of capitalism, every day the developing class basis of Titoism is emerging more clearly.

In the countryside, as we have seen, they base themselves on the rich peasants, the kulaks, who are exploiting the mass of the working peasantry and reducing them to a state of penury. Today 72,000 kulak farms possess two and a half times the land held by 629,000 small farms.

The nationalised sector of Yugoslav industry does not operate in the interests of the working people. Nationalisation, as we know from British experience, does not in itself mean Socialism, even if the government in office cares to describe it as such. Whether state control of industry is socialised or not depends, in the last analysis, on the character of the state that is controlling industry, and the Yugoslav state has been transformed by the Titoites into a reactionary machine, operated by a bureaucracy, a caste, and working to subordinate the country to foreign, mainly US imperialism, and to restore capitalism. The nationalised industries in Yugoslavia have become essentially a means for exploiting the people in the interests of Western capitalism. Just as Tito’s phoney collective farms cover up kulak exploitation of the working peasantry, so the Titoite nationalised industries cover up caste rule and the exploitation of foreign imperialism.

The most recent demagogic measure of the Titoites, the so-called decentralisation measures, cover up, in fact, a partial return to private capitalist ownership in industry. Tito himself declared in mid-December 1950 that a number of industrial concerns would be ‘denationalised’ and handed back to their former private owners. Very significant is the disbandment of a whole series of state agricultural machine stations and the handing over of the machines to the phoney collectives, that is, to the kulaks. The process of placing the management of certain industrial enterprises in the hands of what the Titoites call ‘labour collectives’, while final control remains in the hands of the Titoite state, was most nearly paralleled in Mussolini’s ‘labour (fascist) corporations’.

The much-vaunted ‘decentralisation’, or abolition of ministries and central state organs which formerly acted as forms of state regulation of the national economy (five economic ministries and the Central Planning Commission), simply covers, in a typically demagogic way, the handing over of control of Yugoslav economy to foreign imperialism. This is what is proclaimed by the Titoite ‘theoreticians’ as the ‘withering away of the state’.

The class basis of the Tito state consists of the kulaks in the countryside and the reviving capitalist class in the towns. Trade has now returned almost entirely into the hands of private traders. The state monopoly of foreign trade has been abolished and facilities granted to separate organisations, enterprises and individuals to trade with foreign firms. Over 100 export-import firms and nine export agencies are now functioning.

Western imperialism openly boasts how, as a result of ‘persuasion’, the Titoites have returned to capitalism. The American business organ, US News and World Report, carried an article in its issue of 3 August 1951, headed ‘Tito Finds Communism Doesn’t Pay – Nation Facing Bankruptcy, Turns to West’. It boasted of the connection between Western aid and the renunciation of Socialism:

... a switch away from rigid planning and control is being installed now that Tito is looking more and more to the West for the help he needs. A measure of free economy is to be restored, replacing the Communist method of doing business. As one small example, the men who have been responsible for distributing manufactured goods to the stores have been on straight salaries. Now they are going to be put on sales commissions... Bankers are coming in as accountants to get some order into industrial book-keeping... Trained specialists in business and production are to be put above the party bosses... Central distribution of raw materials is to be limited. Companies will be allowed to retain 70 per cent of net profits for reinvestment, with the idea of encouraging improvements and free competition. Changes in the wage system to pattern it after the US rather than Russia are under study... Critics say it is high time, because the country is just about broke.

This business organ of US monopoly, which regularly inveighs against the development of ‘Socialism’ in Labour Britain, finds the ‘free economy’, ‘profits’, ‘free competition’ and ‘US wage pattern’ of Tito Yugoslavia very satisfying.

In London, the Economist (1 September 1951) echoed the enthusiasm of its US colleague. It wrote of ‘a spectacular statement from Belgrade heralding new internal reforms’ that were to come into effect not later than 1 January 1952 – reforms ‘which would touch the heart of the Yugoslav economy much more nearly than any of the previous steps towards administrative decentralisation and the reduction of political privilege’. The proposals, announced the Economist, had been published under the arresting title ‘Preparations for the Institution of a New System of Economic Planning and Finance’.

What were these reforms that, according to the Economist, deserve the respectful attention of the West? In the first place, ‘the federal government... proposes to relinquish detailed economic planning to the separate republics, and they in turn will delegate to the local authorities and the individual “economic enterprises"’. Secondly, ‘the enterprises themselves are to be allowed to retain their net profits’. Thirdly, ‘the workers are to share in this freeing of profits through bonus payments, and conversely, if the enterprise does not make enough to cover the basic wage bill, the workers will have to go short’. Fourthly (and how ‘new’, how ‘revolutionary’, what a new ‘development of Marxism'!), ‘prices are to be determined by the market, that is, by supply and demand’.

These latest proposals fill the Economist with joy. They ‘can only be welcomed by the West’, it declares delightedly. The Daily Mail correspondent, Alexander Clifford, is even more ecstatic at the prospect of Tito’s new economic reform. ‘If it comes off’, he writes (31 August 1951), ‘Yugoslavia looks like ending up a good deal less socialised than Britain.’ He reviews with satisfaction Tito’s promised economic measures: ‘price of goods... determined by the market – that is, by, supply and demand’ – ‘wages and salaries... fixed on the basis of the income or profits of the enterprise’ – economic enterprises that ‘decide independently what to produce and in what quantities’.

And he concludes – and how correctly – ‘there isn’t much classical Marxism in all of that’.

The business journals of the USA and Britain welcome Tito’s ‘new kind of Communism’ – ‘liberal Communism’ the Daily Mail correspondent calls it. For what it has become is – a rather old sort of capitalism.

The whole country is being brought under the rule of foreign and mainly American imperialism.

Under the rule of the Titoites Yugoslavia has returned to capitalism, but not to capitalist democracy. Yugoslavia today is a semi-colonial country ruled over by a reactionary caste operating a police state of a fascist type in the interests of foreign imperialism abroad and the kulaks and reviving capitalists at home.

A report on Tito’s Yugoslavia given in December 1950 by an Austrian Carinthian, Andrej Haderlap, is of special interest, since Haderlap was one of the officials of the Freedom Front (organisation of the Slovene minority) in Carinthia, who, after the publication of the Information Bureau resolution in mid-1948, supported Tito, and was expelled from the Austrian Communist Party. He therefore became persona grata with the Titoites. After visiting Slovenia, where he knew the language and was able to move about as he pleased, he wrote in April 1950:

In 1949, I visited Yugoslavia three times, and, in the course of those visits, I was able to see the justice of the Communist Information Bureau criticism that Yugoslavia was following a wrong road. I was able to see that the position in regard to the Soviet Union of the Yugoslav leadership had completely changed, that in Yugoslavia only a part of the population, those who hold leading positions, live comfortably and luxuriously, whilst the working people go hungry.

It is an incontrovertible fact that in Yugoslavia old-established Communists are imprisoned. The prisons are full of them, and in their places are members of the Tito clique or even former supporters of Mihailović, the White Guard or collaborators with the Nazis and Gestapo...

I am of the opinion, now, that a Yugoslav clique has got hold of the leading positions, a clique which has nothing in common with Communist ideology or the working class.

The political line of the Democratic Front has also changed. Its Central Committee in Slovenia has only one aim: struggle against the Communist Party of Austria, against the People’s Democracies and, above all, against the Soviet Union. The betrayal of the Tito clique has definitely shown that those who separate themselves from the progressive camp, inevitably, sooner or later, go over to the side of imperialism and fascism.

VI: Resistance of the Yugoslav People

The Titoite gang has led the Yugoslav people to disaster. Once again they face famine. Once again a rich country pours out its wealth into the hands of foreign capitalists and of a tiny minority at home, whilst the mass of the people go hungry. Once again those who labour are those who suffer and are poor. Once again police and army arrest those who struggle for better conditions and condemn them, often without trial, to the sufferings of jail and concentration camp. Once again a reactionary government is trying to maintain itself in power by inciting national hatred, trying to rule by division. Once again a reactionary clique in power is endeavouring to turn the people against their real friends and allies abroad and to deliver them to the mercy of their real enemies and exploiters. All that the Yugoslav peoples knew and suffered between the wars and even worse – they know and suffer today.

But with ever-greater organisation and in ever-greater strength, the people are moving into resistance against the Titoites.

At first the people were confused and disarmed by the treachery of the Tito group. Opposition was of an unorganised character and found expression in individual acts of resistance, mainly by the workers. Individual workers did not turn up to the unpaid ('voluntary’) labour brigades. They did not fulfil norms and targets set by the factory managements. They were punished by deprivation of ration cards, reduction of wages, curtailment of holidays, loss of free medical attention, sacking and imprisonment.

This phase of individual resistance turned into more collective forms of opposition. Absenteeism developed, as we have seen, on a mass scale, particularly in mining and other important industries. The Titoite rulers replied by trying to force the workers to sign long-term labour contracts. But it has been estimated that not more than 30 per cent of the workers have signed such contracts, and never more than half the workers at any large enterprise. Besides, once signed the contracts were often broken.

Punished with forced labour, the workers turned to more advanced forms of action – strikes, sabotage. In 1949, of 11,000 workers sent to the Trepča mines in Serbia, 10,500 left again. Faced with heavy punishment and arrest, the workers turned to sabotage. A funicular was blown up and a tunnel on the nearby railway was mined to prevent the despatch of the metal ore to the imperialists. A strike for the return of ration cards assumed big proportions, and when the UDB put 3000 prisoners into the mines in their efforts to break the strike, the miners replied by destroying one of the principal dynamos. In the first half of 1950, and this is admitted even by the Titoite ‘trade-union’ paper Rad, 22 per cent of the workers sent to work in Serbia left the mines and enterprises to which they had been despatched, 30 per cent in Croatia, and 28 per cent in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

In the second phase of developing resistance to the Titoites, the poor and middle peasants, the working peasantry, began to join with the workers. The area of land cultivated fell enormously in 1949, and still further in 1950. The character of the peasant resistance began to develop from passive to more and more active and militant forms.

Organised refusal to pay taxes in kind began to arise in the villages, developing into armed conflict with the authorities. The New York Herald Tribune correspondent touring the Yugoslav countryside reported (1 August 1950) acute discontent amongst the working peasants:

Marshal Tito is having serious trouble with the peasant population in this part [Croatia and Bosnia] of Yugoslavia. Twelve peasants were condemned to death within the last month in a village near here after a riot against local Communist [read Titoite – JK] authorities. Mutinous demonstrations have occurred in three other nearby districts...

In the village of Glina alone, peasants say that 150 men were jailed in May and that they are still being held. The towns that are involved are in Croatia and in an adjacent sector of Bosnia; from thirty to sixty miles south of Zagreb, Yugoslavia’s second largest city...

The atmosphere in the countryside is still one of extreme bitterness. There is outspoken exasperation with local Communist committees, and with the Communists’ economic policies.

It is interesting that the New York Herald Tribune correspondent had to admit that the resistance came not from the kulaks, but, in every case, from the poor peasantry:

Many of the peasants are clearly living in depressing poverty. None of those with whom this reporter talked has more than two acres of land. (New York Herald Tribune, 1 August 1950)

In August 1950, peasant ‘riots’ and anti-Titoite demonstrations began to spread widely in Serbia. On 26 August, 118 poor peasants were arrested in Serbia on a single day for handing in their grain quotas too late or not at all, and 68 were sentenced to hard labour. A few days later 342 working peasants were arrested and sentenced. Resistance of the working peasants to the phoney collectives has reached higher levels. In August, too, Serb peasants set fire to the granary and mill of the Borina ‘collective’ and to the granary of the Blagoje Nešković ‘collective’. In July 1950, 103 Macedonian peasants were sentenced for ‘unjustifiably’ leaving their ‘collectives’.

Passive refusal to cultivate the land is developing into more active militant refusal to pay taxes, into sabotage and even armed resistance.

The Manchester Guardian diplomatic correspondent, writing on ‘Yugoslavia in Transition’ on 14 June 1951, commented on the growth of peasant opposition to the Tito regime:

Several observers, both Western and Yugoslav, expressed the view that pro-Cominformism was still fairly strong among the lower ranks of the party officials in the countryside... It was believed that the local Communist officials feared that the peasants would take the opportunity to cut their throats if Yugoslavia took part in a war at the side of the Western powers.

The New York Herald Tribune correspondent, Gaston Coblentz, touring Yugoslav Macedonia at the end of August and beginning of September 1951, reported:

A tour of parts of Yugoslav Macedonia provides a striking spectacle of unthreshed wheat still lying on many fields as the result of the peasants’ slowdown in grain deliveries to the government... hundreds of neglected wheat piles covered intermittent fields as far as the eye could see... Threshing processes are a month behind normal schedule in some districts. As has become common throughout Yugoslavia in the last few weeks, peasants in the plateau said farm machinery had broken down. (New York Herald Tribune, from Salonica, dateline 3 September 1951)

By 1950, the purely economic and semi-spontaneous opposition of the people to the Titoites began to turn into political opposition. This was reflected in the high vote against the regime in many areas, despite the terror, during the March ‘elections’ to the Federal Parliament. It was reflected in increasing arrests of well-known Communist and Partisan leaders. In the first half of September 1950, three members of the Croatian government, who were also members of the Central Committee of the Croatian Communist Party, were arrested – Dušan Brkić, Croatian Deputy Prime Minister; Rade Žigić, member of the Economic Council and Opačić, Minister of Forestry:

... they were charged... with spreading the following subversive information among the lower ranks of the Yugoslav party: that Tito and his associates were ‘squandering’ the nation’s wealth and were ‘robbing the people'; that ‘any rural tradesman would direct the economy better’ than the Marshal; and that ‘we have constantly been moving backward for three years [since the split with Moscow]. (New York Herald Tribune, from correspondent in Belgrade, 13 September 1950)

The Belgrade correspondent of The Times reported on 22 May 1951 that Lazar Plavšić, President of the Yugoslav Metalworkers’ Union, had been expelled from his union and arrested on charges of ‘conspiracy on behalf of the Cominform’. At the end of June 1951, the New York Herald Tribune reported the arrests of a whole number of highly-placed Communist officials for ‘pro-Cominform activities’. Among those reported arrested were Vojislav Srzentić, Assistant Minister of Finance; his brother Nikola, a major in the UDB (secret police); his wife, who had occupied a high post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Maxim Goranović, Assistant Minister of Agriculture, and his wife Marija, who had been the director of a large commercial establishment in Belgrade.

Both Srzentić and Goranović were of old Communist and progressive families; the former a Partisan, whose brother was killed by the police in a student anti-fascist demonstration in the prewar period; the latter a leading Partisan officer. Srzentić, who had been earlier the Assistant Minister of Foreign Trade, went over to the Ministry of Finance when his predecessor, Dr Obren Blagojević, was himself arrested for opposition to the Tito regime.

It is clear that opposition to the Tito clique has steadily grown in the circles of the older Communist generation. History is exposing the role of the Titoites even to those who were at first deceived.

Today, whilst the broad masses of the people, faced with ever-lowering living standards and with ever more open attacks and slanders by the Titoites against the Soviet Union and People’s Democracies, are shedding what illusions remain to them about the leaders of the state, there is developing within this broad but not yet fully organised movement of anti-Tito opposition a smaller but compact illegal Communist Party – a real Communist Party, based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism and loyal to the principles of proletarian internationalism.

The old Yugoslav Communist Party, headed by Tito and his associates, has been transformed into its opposite. Of the 12,000 illegal members of the Yugoslav Communist Party before the outbreak of the Second World War, 8000 lost their lives during the war. Many were deliberately sent to their deaths by the Titoites. Of the 4000 that remain, many are in jail. The old ‘party’ has been transformed into an appendage of Tito’s police state.

The new party, loyal to Marxism-Leninism, is arising, despite the terror directed against it. Illegal party groups are distributing illegal anti-Titoite journals and leaflets. Anti-Titoite slogans are painted on the roads and walls. A new leadership is developing which will stand at the head of the broad mass people’s opposition to the Tito regime of betrayal.

The Yugoslav people will not be content to let their country return to the semi-colonial status it occupied between the wars. They will not be led into war against their best friends and closest allies, the Soviet and other Slav peoples and the neighbouring People’s Democratic states. They will not patiently and passively watch the restoration of capitalist dictatorship.

With the long traditions of heroic struggle for independence, against imperialism, against domestic and foreign reaction they will develop the struggle against Tito’s clique, remove it from power, punish the traitors, and set forward again along the path of People’s Democracy and Socialism.