AN IMPORTANT SPEECH BY TITO
It is to be hoped that the Jugoslav leaders will not fail to take position publicly concerning the Trotskyist movement, recognizing it as a legitimate tendency of the international communist movement, rehabilitating the memory of its innumerable victims in the struggle against Stalinism, and making known to the Jugoslav public the writings of Leon Trotsky and of the Fourth International.
Un the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Jugoslav Communist Party, Tito made an important speech, from which we think it of interest to publish the excerpts
During this period (the '30s) the working methods omintern tended to make Communists living in emigration less revolutionaries than functionaries of that apparatus. I do not wish to diminish, by saying this, the importance of the activity displayed by the Communist International, in the first place during the first years and in particular when Lenin was still
At the moment of the big trials which took place in the Soviet Union, Stalin followed, with regard to the other parties and through the intermediary of the Comintern, a policy which destroyed the revolutionary personality of the Communists and created a type of Communist devoid of character. It is then that the principles and the spirit introduced into the work of the Comintern began to become seriously depraved. This policy caused great damage to numerous parties, which was clearly manifested at the moment of the fascist aggression, during the days when the fate of their country was at stake, when they should have manifested their political independence, bonds with the masses, and their ideological maturity, when they should have organized the people for the struggle against the occupier and put themselves at the head of that struggle. (This policy of Stalin also animated the creation and the activity of the Cominafter 1947) It is because of this policy practised by Stalin that our party lost a large part of its cadres, whether because of political demoralization, or because of physical extermination during the great "purges" carried hundreds of tested Communists who had been educated for years by our party and by he international revolutionary struggle. Among then vere dozens of old-time leaders of the party, of whon
I shall cite only a few, such as for instance Filip
Filipovitch, Stjepan Tsvijitch "Chtéfek," Vladimir Tchopitch, Voviavitch, K Hervatina, et al, who together with a hundred other Communist leaders of our country found death in the Stalin prisons and camps. Today when we are celebrating forty years of existence of our party and have become aware of the atrocious events of those times, it is our duty to remember these comrades and to acquit ourselves tonotwithstanding all the mistakes and weaknesses which some of them might have shown in relation with their work in the party, for they were victims of a hard fate, the hardest that can come down upon a revolutionary: that is, to perish innocently under the bullets of men like himself as a traitor to the idea for which he has struggled and to which he has devoted his life. We Jugoslav Communists severely condemn such methods of extermination of men and we have energically rejected such methods from our practice in the life of our party and our present socialist state (methods that remained in force also after 1948 in the other countries of people's demoIn an interview given to the Komunist, organ of the Jugoslay Communist Party, Tito completed his memories of the '30s and of his own stay in Moscow, thus:
I only read. I avoided discussions because the NK VD tapped all telephone conversations. Perhaps this attitude kept me from coming under Stalin's
Because so many things were cooked up in Moscow, I can say that the period there was the grimmest time of my life.
Even in the war it was easier, because in war one at least knows where his enemy is
As you know, Stalin and the Comintern were not at all pleased to see us form proletarian brigades and take the red star as the symbol of our struggle.
At the beginning of 1942 we received a despatch stating that our policy was sectarianism. [...] We our own conditions and possibilities.
I...]. The struggle for national liberation gradu- character of a socialist revolution. ally took on the because it was simultaneously settling the question in how speech on the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Jugoslay Communist Party, Tito continued:
It is to our party and to our socialist construction that fell the difficult mission of being a vanguard detachment and of carrying on a pioneer struggle to smash the negative elements accumulated in the development of socialism and reflected in the phenomena so well known from Stalinist heory as well as from the practice and theory of the ment who copied docilely and without critical spirit practical application of Stalin, including the organization of against numerous integrity and the murder of their former
These phenomena and this development have caused ment and sooner or later they had to come into conflict with the reality and the imperative needs of the reënforcement of socialism and of socialist developdifferent forms. The 1948 conflict between the USS R and Jugoslavia is only one maniextensive conflict and of the more general need to eliminate from the road of socialist development the obstacles which have arisen the period of the ripening and application of Stalinist conceptions. We have had different manifestations of that conflict in the famous events of Poland condemnation of the "personality at the XXth Congress of the CP of the US SR, in the new aggravation of the conflict with Jugoslavia which appeared last year.
All those events show that the 1948 conflict was not a fortuitous phenomenon. This conflict is, in reality, an integral part of a much larger and more general process in the development of socialism. It is the exterior manifestation of the unceasing struggle caried on by the progressive forces and the reactionary torces in the course of the progress and develop. ment of socialist thought and of society in general.
One may ask why this conflict has burst out especially in the relations between the USSR and Jugoslavia. That is because we had prepared our revolution during a long process of revolutionary struggie, carried on in our country with our own It Is because in the course of that struggle we hau distinguished numerous specific elements with which we had to reckon in the phase of the armed struggle and in the phase of the building of socialism. It is
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL because our revolution had adopted all those positive achievements of Lenin and the October Revolution in order to apply them in a creative way under the conditions of our struggle to accomplish our tasks under
It is because our revolution had begun to reject all that was negative in Stalinist theory and pratice. Those negative elements showed themselves in distrust toward the masses and above ill toward the toiling peasantry, distrust toward the revolutionary force of the working class of other monopolism, ment of unequal relations between states which have undertaken the building of socialism, and finally the development of erroneous relations among the Communist Parties which materialized particularly in the policy and practice of the Cominform.
All negative elements which had accumulated during a long period of difficult struggles for socialism began to yield and our conflict with the Cominform, after 1948, permitted discerning them and separating them out more clearly. There was seen in that fact the consolidation of the forces which, at the end of a long process of struggle, will be capable of gradually eliminating those errors of socialist practice.
Socialist Jugoslavia is an integral part of those of socialism and therein lie also the historical justification and the progressive character of our struggle.
for it is impossible to conceive the development of socialism without the elimination of all that is negative, without the increase of the positive forces of socialism. Granted, this process will be neither short nor easy, but it is historically inevitable...
In the reply that Borba made in its 30 January issue to Khrushchev's report to the XXIst Congress of. of the US SR, we may read:
There are no longer any political prisoners in the
US SR [Khrushchev declared].
We take this statement just as we have heard it. If it is true, we have here a immense progress in the development of the USS R, for in Stalin's time there were too many political prisoners, especially communists of integrity, who left their bones in the jails of Yagoda, Yezhou, and Beria. [Our italics.]
The latest number (January-March 1959) of Questions actuelles du Socialisme, the Jugoslav theoretical magazine contains an important article by Veljko Vlahovich entitled "The Programme of the J CL and the Intensification of the Ideological Struggle," which we shall later have occasion to return.
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