[The following article appeared in the June 8 issue of Rouge, weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The May 31 Le Monde reported the opening of a trial against another Yugoslav communist, Danilo Udovichi, who is accused of "having ties with the Fourth International." Based on earlier trials on the same chargethe proceedings a year ago against Milan Nikolic, Pavel Imsirovic, and Jelka Klajcic, for example— it can be assumed that behind the formal charge there lies but one reality: the accused is a communist who opposes the regime.
All the trials that have come down during the past two years, whether they be around charges of Trotskyism, anarcho-liberalism, pro-Westism, or nationalism, have been marked by the same neo-Stalinist features: amalgams are made by the prosecution; there is no real possibility for defense; June 25, 1973
there is imprisonment without trial.
This massive repression (there have been dozens of trials) has occurred as part of a political turn in Yugoslavia. The turn is the bureaucratic response of a section of the Yugoslav leadership around Tito to the social tensions that their own policies have produced. And the aim of the turn is to take the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in hand in order to make it play a role that it has gradually abdicated since the break with Stalin in the early 1950s: the role of bureaucratic centralizer of all social, political, economic, and cultural life.
This was the orientation laid down in the "Tito letter" at the end of 1972 that was sent to the rank-and-file organs of the party and was combined with a call to the laboring masses to bring under control and denounce the "corrupt billionaires." This was followed by a small-scale "cultural revolution" (that's what the May issue of the French business magazine l'Expansion called it), in the course of which dozens and dozens of cases of corruption piled up in the courts, a fair number of factory managers were deposed (in Zagreb there are about thirty factories that still have no managers), and many small-time operators shut down their operations throughout the country -they could make more money in the West.
Despite official proclamations to the contrary, this new policy represents a counterblow to the previous decentralization and is in contradiction with the measures for protection of private property that were part of the logic of the 1965 reform. This new policy goes hand in hand with a return to criticizing all theories about the withering away of the state (Kardelj's self-criticism, general critiques of Djilas, the scapegoat for all deviations) that were put forward when decentralized self-management was first instituted after the break with Stalin.
But the "dictatorship of the proletariat" that the Titoists want to revive is conditioned by the history of Yugoslavia. It will be a pervasive bureaucratic dictatorship that will try to make it look as though the workers are being given a bigger role in the organs of decentralized power (at least at first, while at the same time, the League of Communists will again become the monolithic transmission belt of real power.
It is for this very reason that the main repression of various opponents of this line is going on among communists. The main leaders of the Slovenian, Serbian, and Macedonian parties, who are hostile to the centralization line, have gotten the ax, as did the Croatian leaders during the December 1971 purge. The "Tito letter" unleashing the hardening up was issued and publicized in the name of
TITO: Reacts to the problems his own policies created.
the Supreme Presidium, even though the advocates of a liberal policy were still in a majority there. But the letter was not ratified by this body until after the major opponents were purged.
At the same time, there was the ascendancy of the "veterans," old-line centralist Communists, especially officers in the army (which had remained strongly centralized).
The ideological repression has been exacting. The magazine Praxis has just had its subsidies lifted. Its main contributors, among them L. Tadie and S. Stoyanovic, Communist members of the faculty at the University of Belgrade, have been repressed. As if by accident, at the same time, journalists who previously had been promoted to their posts for their anti- Soviet positions (like Marovic, Moscow correspondent for Politika), have today been demoted —for the same reason. Soviet aid, also as if by ac- 774
cident, suddenly dropped by millions of dollars worth of equipment.
Formally, none of the main orientations adopted in the 1965 reform have been challenged. And the Yugoslav leaders will continue to balance the aid received from the East with aid from the West in order to keep up a certain diplomatic balance. But the ideological concessions already made to the Soviet Union (in particular, the silencing of any criticism of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, which, it has been officially declared, raises no problems) are the inevitable corollary of the bureaucratic impasse. Police repression is an expression of this. But it will resolve nothing.
We add our name to the appeal for international socialist solidarity that is now circulating against the repression that is hitting Yugoslav communists.
Long live socialist Yugoslavia!
Free the imprisoned Yugoslav communists!