The New Yalta Conference

At Batajnica military airfield near Belgrade early one morning last week occurred one of the strangest and least expected departures in recent political history. Like twins, in grey suits, trench coats and snap-brim hats, Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito and Russia's Communist Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev stepped smartly into a Russian Il-14. The plane took off without even any warm-up of its two engines. The destination was Yalta, the resort on Russia's Black Sea coast where the Allied leaders held their momentous war conference in 1945.

For four hours the departure was kept secret, then a brief bulletin issued by the Tanjug agency broke the news to a startled Yugoslavia and a wondering world. Eight days earlier Khrushchev had flown just as suddenly into Belgrade, under the thin pretense of taking a vacation (TIME, Oct. 1), and had remained in close conclave with Tito. The flight to Yalta provoked wide and wild speculation in the world's capitals. Western diplomats, normally an "I told you so" lot, frankly confessed bafflement. None offered a better guess as to its cause than that of one Belgrader: "Something serious is about to happen in the Communist world."

A Dual Hint. There were clues, however, as to the nature, if not the substance, of the surprise party in Yalta. In Tito's party was his handsome wife Jovanka and his burly, iron-jawed Police Boss Alexander Rankovic, a dual hint that Tito had full confidence in his personal safety. No member of the Yugoslav government or foreign office went along, a fact which underlined the significance of the fourth member of the party: mild-mannered, tough-cored Djuro Pucar, a Serbian and longtime Communist who was active in Tito's World War II partisan movement, and is now one of the Yugoslav dictator's closest advisers on Communist party and ideological matters.

Meanwhile Radio Moscow reported the presence at Yalta of Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Soviet Security Boss Ivan Serov. Another satellite visitor was Hun garian Communist Erno Gero, the man who recently replaced Tito's archenemy

Matyas Rakosi as boss of the Hungarian party. The cast of characters pointed to an urgent top-level conference on Communist Party affairs, an ideological communion at Yalta. The inclusion of ex-Heretic Tito suggested that he was being treated not as an outsider, but an insider in dealing with serious matters of Communist politics and dogma.

Just what was exercising the Communists? Without answering this question, Belgrade officials appeared certain of one thing: whatever happened at Yalta, Tito went expecting to come out of it looking better, tougher and more powerful than ever--otherwise he would not have gone. They also seemed sure that Tito was not going to toss away blithely the position he had won for himself as a neutral, a broker and/or profiteer between East and West. Awaiting President Eisenhower's approval this month is an offer of U.S. aid which will give Yugoslavia much-needed surplus U.S. wheat and military supplies, including scores of jet planes. If Tito expected this deal to go through after the spectacle of his urgent flight into the innermost councils of Communism, he certainly had to expect the trip to produce something that would not jeopardize his position with the U.S. Interestingly enough, Belgrade Communists talked as if this would indeed be the outcome and the U.S. President would feel inclined to go through with the aid.

Something to Swallow. In a cryptic aside to one of his top aides a few weeks ago Tito said: "The Russians are getting difficult again. This time we've got to swallow it." Western observers, to whom the remark leaked, guessed what Tito was talking about: a few carping lines in Moscow's Pravda drawing attention to the fact that trials are still being held for repatriated pro-Stalin Yugoslavs, hundreds of whom Tito is said to have jailed. A later report that cropped up in Warsaw--that the Soviet Central Committee was circulating a letter describing Tito as no Marxist-Leninist, but one of those hated leftist Social Democrats*--seemed to confirm a growing rift between Yugoslav and Soviet Communists.

It was not difficult for observers to trace the anti-Yugoslav cracks to their source: a group of old-line Stalinists, including ex-Foreign Minister Molotov and ex-Premier Malenkov (both pushed out of power by Khrushchev) and powerful, steely-eyed Presidium Member Mikhail Suslov; these three apparently control one or more of the many secretariats or collegia of the Central Committee, and are in a position to plug their own line.

This line is that Stalin was fundamentally right in keeping the satellite and foreign parties completely subservient to Moscow's will, and that any relaxation of this attitude, as happened in Poland, means big trouble and may mean final disintegration of the Soviet empire. In opposition to this view stands First Party Secretary Khrushchev, backed by Presidium Member Mikoyan and other top anti-Stalinists, who believe that a certain autonomy must be given the satellite and foreign parties--and have been giving it. .Khrushchev's spectacular destalinization program launched last February gave him a dramatic lead over the old-line Stalin ists, but since then the Poznan riots (see box) and Soviet army leaders' nervousness about losing grip in the satellites are reckoned to have set him back.

Tito's remark that Yugoslavia would have "to swallow" attacks from the Soviet right wing was interpreted as meaning that any show of aggressive independence at this point would merely help the rightists. After the surprise departure last week, a Belgrade spokesman said that Tito had gone to Yalta to "strengthen Khrushchev's hand." But if Khrushchev is in trouble with his own party, how does Tito's presence at Yalta help him? There were no firm answers to this question last week, but hints dropped through Communist channels over the past few months indicated how Tito might be of value to the Khrushchev faction, at considerable help to himself. It is known that during his visit to the Soviet Union last June Tito stubbornly resisted tentative suggestions that he join some kind of new Communist International, for the reason that it would put him in an inferior position, beneath the bulk of the mighty Soviet and Chinese members, and ruin his relations with the West. But a new Communist International in which all the satellite countries were autonomous would give Tito a powerful seniority, perhaps even tab him as political and ideological straw boss of some of the European satellites, and at the same time provide an excuse for Khrushchev to crush the opposition faction. Properly done to emphasize Tito's strength and independence, this might conceivably even please the West.

Such a development, admittedly speculative but known to have been considered by the Khrushchev faction, still seemed a distant objective. Another suggestion, coming from Paris and Vienna, had it that Khrushchev, far from checking or reversing the destalinization program in deference to the Stalinist group, might be planning to accelerate it with the posthumous trial of Joseph Stalin. No newcomer to the ranks of rumor, this suggestion springs from a careful study of Khrushchev's Feb. 25 speech denouncing Stalin, much of which is couched in legalistic language.

In that document Khrushchev charges Stalin with "the most brutal violation of Socialist legality" and treason during

World War II for having "ordered that the German fire be not returned." Some observers have conjectured that the party commission set up by Khrushchev to "investigate what made possible the mass repressions" has actually been preparing a legal case against Stalin. Huge public trials have long been used by the Communists to dramatize their message to the Russian people. They have also served as a means by which those who control them can, by involving oppositionists, destroy them. A leading witness for the prosecution in a posthumous trial of Joseph Stalin would, of choice and necessity, be Josip Broz Tito.

Watching Yalta from afar last week the West could not avoid the automatic twinge of uneasiness that comes whenever Communists get together. It would be a jar, indeed, to have strong, rambunctious Marshal Tito and his husky army march back at full flag to the service of Communist expansion. But in almost every clue to the Yalta meeting and in every conjecture, however farfetched, there was a basic cause for composure: the primary reason for the conclave seemed to be a schism in world Communism.

*Lenin once said of them: "We shall support the Social Democrats like a rope supports a hanging man."

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