Tito and the Soviets

Report Outline
New Communist Attacks on Yugoslavia
Tito's Postwar Relations with Kremlin
Significance of Tito's Independent Role

New Communist Attacks on Yugoslavia

A threat by President Tito of Yugoslavia to make public secret documents alleged to prove Soviet responsibility for the execution of Imre Nagy of Hungary has brought relations of Belgrade with the Kremlin almost to the breaking point. Soviet Premier Khrushchev, addressing an East German Socialist Unity [Communist] Party congress on July 11, sharply assailed Tito and defended Stalin's rupture with Yugoslavia in 1948. At the same congress the day before, Walter Ulbricht, East German party leader, condemned Yugoslavia's “revisionism” as an “open attack on the Socialist [Communist] bloc” and warned the Yugoslavs that “the fate of the Nagy government shows where revisionism leads.” Red China's delegate called, July 12, for an “extreme fight” against Titoism.

The current Soviet offensive against the Yugoslav brand of Communism and its backers, under way since spring, assumed ominous overtones with the announcement in mid-June that Nagy and three other leaders of the Hungarian revolt of November 1956 had been put to death. Nagy was declared a traitor for supporting nationalism and revisionism—the same ideological sins for which the Yugoslavs have been assailed. At the same time, the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, which had sheltered Nagy, was accused of conniving with him in counter-revolutionary activities. However, seizure of Nagy by the Russians when he left the embassy, after the uprising had been suppressed, breached the safe-conduct negotiated for him by the Yugoslavs with the Hungarian government of Janos Kadar. And the death sentence violated subsequent promises to Tito that Nagy would not be harmed.

Western observers have viewed the execution and the renewed attacks on Tito as part of a plan to tighten Russian control over other Communist countries. Secretary of State Dulles characterized the Soviet moves, June 17, as “another step in the reversion toward brutal terrorist methods which prevailed for a time under Stalin.” Dulles surmised that the execution of Nagy “might be a suggestion to President Tito that if he is not more compliant, he may sooner or later suffer a like fate.” Tito, for his part, has refused to be intimidated. He told veterans of his wartime partisan forces, July 4, that “We will never be broken” and that Yugoslavia “will build her life as she finds it suitable.”