High Wire

For one accustomed to walking the political tightrope, Marshal Tito's nerve has been severely tested by the netless high wire separating the national Communism of Poland from that of Hungary. In Poland the Soviet Union tolerates Wladyslaw Gomulka's "pure" national Communism; in Hungary it cracked down mercilessly when Imre Nagy tried to dilute national Communism with social democracy. Since the Hungarian crackdown, Tito has gone to elaborate lengths to prove to the Russians the "purity" in Moscow terms of his own brand of national Communism. Last week he did his best to show that his regime was not guilty of democracy.

The one man in Yugoslavia who openly calls himself a Social Democrat is ex-Vice President Milovan Djilas, onetime Tito favorite and World War II partisan fighter. Last month, deeply moved by what was happening to Hungary, Djilas wrote to New York's leftist but anti-Communist New Leader that the Hungarian revolution is the beginning of the end of Communism (TIME, Dec. 3).

Off to Sing Sing. A few days later Djilas was seized in his Belgrade home and sent to the prison Belgraders call Sing Sing. Early one morning last week granite-hard Djilas, flanked by two tall guards, was brought into Belgrade's Circuit Court, an austerely timbered room resembling a southern Baptist Church, where a panel of three judges sat under a large portrait of Tito. Smiling confidently, and nodding to his wife in the public benches, Djilas listened to the prosecutor read the indictment: "Milovan Djilas ... a Montenegrin . . ." Djilas interrupted: "Not a Montenegrin, a Yugoslav." Then the court was cleared and 32 foreign correspondents were ordered out.

Djilas' secret trial lasted twelve hours. At its end the public was readmitted to see a weary, unsmiling Djilas sentenced to three years of hard labor for having written articles "purposely to help certain hostile foreign elements [to] intervene in the internal affairs of Yugoslavia." Djilas' last words, before being led back to Sing Sing: "I am a Social Democrat who has nothing in common with Communism."

Back to Hungary. Also by way of proving the reliability of Yugoslavia's national Communism, Tito last week i) returned to Hungary ("of their own free will") 141 refugees who had crossed into Yugoslavia; 2) sent a message to Soviet President Kliment Voroshilov expressing hope for a stronger friendship and cooperation between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

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