"Normalization"

In Belgrade one morning last week, Yugoslav officials dedicated a cemetery containing the graves of some 700 Russians and more than 1,300 Yugoslavs. All had died just ten years before, in a battle to liberate Yugoslavia's capital from the Nazis. A string was pulled and a sheet fell away to unveil a large bas-relief showing Red army soldiers and Yugoslav partisans driving at German troops.

In Moscow on the same day, the three leading Soviet newspapers burst out with long stories memorializing Belgrade's liberation, "the glorious Yugoslav army" and its "serious contribution" to the common victory over the Nazis.

Though their affair could hardly be the same ever again, Communism's celebrated divorcees, Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia, were beginning to speak nicely of one another. Marshal Tito's word for it is "normalization," a process which has been going on since Stalin died. Less than three months after Stalin's death, full diplomatic relations were resumed. The Danube Commission, the Communist-run agency which regulates all that floats through central and southern Europe, relaxed its stranglehold on Yugoslav commerce. On the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution last November, Tito cabled Moscow his best wishes, got back Moscow's thanks. Last month the "Free Yugoslav" radio, which has been beaming anti-Tito propaganda into Yugoslavia from behind the Iron Curtain, stopped broadcasting. Early this month, the Russians and Yugoslavs signed a barter trade treaty.

These increasing signs of "normalization" make Western diplomats in Belgrade a little nervous; after all, the U.S. is pouring half a billion dollars in aid into Yugoslavia. But they are only nervous, not alarmed. They don't trust Comrade Tito, but depend on his cold-blooded assessment of his own cold-blooded interest. Necessity made him join with Greece and Turkey in a military pact, which indirectly binds him with the West's NATO alliance.

Western diplomats think that Tito is too shrewd ever to allow himself to get so close again to the Russian bear that he might be hugged to death.

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