In openly opposing Stalin in 1948, not only did the Yugoslav leaders save the revolution in their country for a period, but they also brought to light the crisis of Stalinism, which from then on would continually deepen. In challenging Stalin they pushed forward the world working class, allowing it to more forcefully question the Stalinist stranglehold on the workers movement.
At the time, the Fourth International was the only workers organization that understood the importance of this rift. All its forces-however weak they were thenwere thrown into organizing support for the Yugoslav revolution and into the fight to defend the workers state there.
Where our forces permitted, as in France, we initiated committees for defense of the Yugoslav revolution. These committees brought together members of the socialist left, Communist Party members who could not accept the sudden transformation of "Tito the hero" into "Tito the traitor," anarchists, and especially unaffiliated youth for whom the measures taken by the Yugoslav CP gave hope for a socialism that had rid itself forever of the sinister image of the Moscow trials.
It was within this framework that the idea to form "international brigades" was born, brigades that would go to Yugoslavia to aid in the reconstruction and view first hand the realities of Yugoslav society.
Despite the old anti-Trotskyist prejudices that had to be overcome (and a corresponding sectarian reflex within our own ranks about the internal struggle "among Stalinist bureaucrats"), the Yugoslav representatives immediately gauged the importance of our active support in the face of a CP-dominated workers movement whose violent hatred against the Yugoslav workers state far surpassed its hatred for its own bourgeoisie.
In the summer of 1950, 3,000 brigade members from France and several hundred from other capitalist countries went to Yugoslavia to work and make contact with Yugoslav workers. Their slogan, borrowed tendencies to restore capitalism).
Yugoslavia in 1950
from the pre-World War I French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, was: "Courage means seeking the truth and speaking it." Other groups followed this first "Jean Jaurès Brigade." There was a "Rosa Luxemburg Brigade," a "Renault Brigade" totally made up of autoworkers from Billancourt, etc.
In spite of the difficulties resulting from Yugoslavia's extreme poverty and the thick-headed bureaucratic behavior that some of the Yugoslav leaders delighted in, the majority of brigade members returned with strengthened convictions. They saw the necessity of aiding this state where the workers were enthusiastically constructing the future, formulating plans, and establishing workers councils. They were ready to continue the experience, but with larger, and more seasoned contingents.
This hope collapsed, however, at the end of the year when the "cold war" heightened, following the start of the Korean War. Yugoslavia capitulated to the imperialist pressures and lined up with those who denounced "North Korean aggression." There was never any question about the position revolutionists should take: North Korea had to be supported.
In Yugoslavia, the "return to Lenin" was stopped. The logic of the state's international policies (conceived in a narrow nationalist fashion) was extended to its domestic policies, permitting a return of strong, ossified bureaucracy and closing any open channels.
Several years later, Tito would repress Djilas, who with a theoretical confusion characteristic of the inarticulate opposition, criticized the bureaucratism of the Yugoslav party and state.
Later we saw the reconciliation with Stalin's heirs (with Khrushchev being called the "authentic representative of the return to Lenin" in the Soviet Union); the admittedly embarrased support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary; and the denunciation of the Polish proletariat's strikes in 1956, in terms worthy of Prauda.