Tito in C-Major

THE SILENT PEOPLE SPEAK (397 pp.)--Robert St. John--Doubleday ($4).

In 1942, A.P. Correspondent Robert St. John wrote From the Land of Silent People, a first-rate reporter's account of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece. He followed up his success by becoming a novelist (It's Always Tomorrow'), popular lecturer and radio commentator, received the accolade of the Left when he was dropped by NBC last year because, in pinko PM's opinion at least, he was "too liberal." Now, St. John has written one of the longest (210,000 words) studies of Yugoslavia since Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

The Silent People Speak ridicules the idea that Yugoslavia lies behind an iron curtain, and fervently portrays Tito's ruthless satrapy as a democratic government which differs from the U.S. merely in form, not in essence. It is a faithful echo of books which appeared in the '20s and '30s praising the new-type "democracy" of the Soviet Union.

Let Me Call You Sweetheart. Author St. John traveled through Titoland with a "change of clothes ... a Boy Scout knife, six cans of DDT, a pencil sharpener, and a considerable quantity of paper." He also took along an interpreter--a Russian-born American girl whose "small, vibrant figure" quivered with eagerness "to answer . . . the riddles of the New Yugoslavia."

Yugoslavia, according to St. John, was loaded down with physical burdens but miraculously buoyed up by love for Marshal Tito. Volunteers laboring on "the 1946 Youth Railroad" sang joyous songs declaring that "America and Britain will be proletarian lands some day too." "Brigades" of sun-bronzed youths, encamped in "pleasing" barracks, assured the visitors that they toiled "in harmony [without any] need for discipline." Author St. John gave one of the girl workers an American lipstick, asking her "when she looked at it ... to remember that in our country there are young people who also have freshness and ideals and vision."

Gospodin Wallace. In schoolrooms, happy moppets chalked up such spontaneous slogans as: "Let's Be Shock Brigadiers in Education and in Work." "Now there is no more persecution, or hatred, or exploitation," said a "typical" Serb; "[but] why is it that your country and mine can't get along?" "What we cannot understand," said another, "is why your Gospodin Wallace . . . does not have the big majority of the American public with him."

Friendly helpers were always at hand to clear up awkward points. Example: Tito's habit of taxing a citizen not according to how much he earns but according to how he earns it and "what contributions he's making to the society in which he lives." Author St. John was assured that this rather personal form of taxation was necessary because New Yugoslavia is "trying to feel her way slowly," and just hasn't got around to framing tax laws. In fact, says St. John, Tito is being so conscientiously slow that Yugoslavia "is actually operating without any laws" whatever, civil or criminal.

Almost everyone had bloodcurdling anecdotes about Mihailovich and his Chetniks, whom they considered no better than Hitler and his Nazis. Author St. John scanned the horizon for opponents of New Yugoslavia, but they were as scarce as Tories in the Kremlin. The few he did find turned out to be selfish little rascals whose only aim was to get their confiscated property or obtain a U.S. passport.

Great Mystic Purpose. Many readers are likely to resent Author St. John's fervent acceptance of New Yugoslavia. They will also resent his stunning platitudes (e.g., "In European countries where there is wild inflation the value of the native currency is constantly dropping") and his soap-opera similes ("When the sun came up, the Vardar Valley looked like a young woman in a transparent white negligee standing in the morning light rubbing the sleep out of her eyes"). But criticism should not perturb bearded Bob St. John, whose faith in Tito is matched by faith in his own powers as a philosopher. "The moon," he muses, his travels over, "moved in her slow, inscrutable way across the heavens. . . . Nature has a great mystic purpose. But man founders. . . . Man, the one discordant note in the Symphony of Life . . . playing E-minor when the score calls for C-major." As an effort to prove that Tito is playing in a major key, The Silent People Speak is an atonal failure.

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