Beyond the Halfway House

YUGOSLAVIA

Hints of trouble had been rumbling through Belgrade for months. Last January the Serbian Central Committee darkly warned of "chauvinistic, nationalistic, localist interferences" with Yugo slavian economic reforms. In February, President Tito himself struck out against unnamed party members who were "sabotaging" the nation's future. Who were the villains obstructing the dramatic social and economic changes that have swept Yugoslavia over the past decade? Last week they were revealed.

The news came from the sunny Adri atic island of Brioni, 340 miles from Belgrade, where the 75-year-old Tito called together a 155-man plenum of the Yugoslav Central Committee to name names and prefer charges. The leading plotter turned out to be Tito's erstwhile heir apparent, Vice President Aleksandar Rankovic, 56. Tito accused his former guerrilla lieutenant of "conspiracy" to undermine Yugoslavia's economic reforms, of encouraging "damaging activity" by the state security police, and--most shocking--of bugging Tito's own home. Within eight hours Rankovic had resigned, and--while denying the eavesdropping charge--had admitted that he was "morally and politically" at fault. With Rankovic went Secret Police Boss Svetislav Stefanovic, 55, whose ubiquitous UDBA spy network had kept a tough, unrelenting grip on Yugoslavia since 1946. In one stroke, Tito had dismantled the entire upper echelon of his secret police--a move unparalleled in the Communist world since Khrushchev destroyed Soviet Top Cop Lavrenty Beria in 1953.

The scope of the "conspiracy" against Tito was reflected in his choice of Brioni as the site of the purge. Both Rankovic and Stefanovic are Serbians--the dominant race in Yugoslavia's six-nation mix*--and Belgrade itself is the old Serb capital. Tito may well have feared that by denouncing Rankovic on his home ground, he might trigger a Serb uprising.

Deviations & Anomalies. That the crisis had been long abuilding was reflected in Tito's speech to the plenum. He harked back to a three-day meeting in 1962 where secret-police powers had been harshly criticized. "On that occasion," Tito recalled last week, "we established more or less what these various deviations and anomalies were. It seems to me that we made a mistake at that time not to have gone to the end. We stopped halfway owing to certain tendencies toward compromise." By purging Rankovic, Tito finally moved beyond the halfway house in reforming Yugoslav Communism.

A dapper, stocky Serb who--like Tito --had served as a tailor's apprentice before becoming a revolutionary, Rankovic was known during World War II as "Marko," and survived Nazi torture to become Tito's left-hand man when the war ended. As Interior Minister from 1946 to 1953 and as boss of party cadres thereafter, he was clearly Yugoslavia's second most powerful man, and kept a close eye--and ear--on every person and activity in the nation. Always a close personal friend of Tito's, he was the obvious successor to the presidency. Tito himself has always been slow to adopt reforms, and Rankovic--never very perceptive--may well have held to the more conservative, hard-line Communist position out of loyalty to his leader. But pressures for reform and relaxation within Yugoslavia are far stronger than those in any other Red-ruled nation.

Though Tito called Western reporters to Brioni to deny any sellout toward Western-style "liberalism," it was clear that Yugoslavia's bellwether reformers had been given a big boost by the purge. Best served by the ouster were Slovenian Edvard Kardelj, 56, president of the Federal Assembly, and Croat Party Boss Vladimir Bakaric, 54--both reformers and both longtime rivals of Rankovic for Tito's affection. The purge also made things easier for Yugoslavia's outspoken "Democratic Socialists," who, under the urging of Writer Mihajlo ("Moscow Summer") Mihajlov, have been pressing for an end to the one-party state. Mihajlov has felt confident enough to talk openly of plans to publish an "opposition" journal, and has been noisily pressing for the release from prison of the man who started the whole re form wave, Milovan (The New Class) Djilas. If last week's purge of the reactionaries is to bear fruit. Mihajlov and Djilas would be the obvious beneficiaries.

* Other former states: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Slovenia.

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