Heresy in Titolcmd

In the living room of his unheated home, burly Vladimir Dedijer paced the floor like an angry but befuddled bear. "I won't even tell you what they've been doing--it's bad taste to go into it," he said. "But I can tell you I've learned to use my feet since the car was taken away.

I can ride buses and streetcars too. We don't care about going to clubs . . . We have our own friends." But 40-year-old Vladimir Dedijer (pronounced Dayd-yer), devoted Communist, had no friends who could, or would, help him out of the trouble he was in. The only man in Yugoslavia to speak up for him at all--ex-Vice President Milovan Djilas--was himself in just as much trouble. The two men fought alone last week in a suspenseful but losing battle against Yugoslavia's Communist hierarchy. It was a rare sight: a deep and significant squabble deep inside a Communist family circle, but carried out in almost full view of the outside world. Charged with heresy, Djilas, the ousted party philosopher, and Dedijer, the fearless partisan comrade and biographer of Tito, had been offered the opportunity of swallowing their views and fading away without harsher punishment.

But both refused to fade away.

Return to Sender. "They accuse me of using the capitalist press," Dedijer complained to TIME'S Belgrade Correspondent Ed Clark last week. "It's my right to speak to the press . . . After all I was one of the writers of the Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations." The appeal he had tried to cable to Marshal Tito in India, said Dedijer, came back with a message written on the reverse side: "The very fact that you should try to cable Tito shows that you need discipline and should be punished." It was signed by one of Dedijer's fellow members of the Central Committee.

"It's obvious now that Tito knows all about this and I am not asking for anything," said Dedijer. "They know I have five children. They will take everything from me and expect me to starve." Dedijer had earned $500,000 in royalties from his adulatory biography, Tito,* but he gave it all to a hospital built as a memorial to his first wife, a partisan fighter killed by the Germans.

His only sin, said Dedijer, had been to keep associating with "my old friend" Djilas, though he never had entirely agreed with Djilas' criticisms of the party hierarchy. "There is a struggle on the lower echelon," said Dedijer, "but there is no fight on the top level for control. It would be nonsense to say that anything can challenge Tito's position. However, a man like Kardelj, whom I've always regarded as a true democrat, is being maneuvered by party discipline into a position that will put my blood on his hands."

Spit in the Face. A few hours later, Edvard Kardelj, the No. 2 man in Yugoslavia, the man who prosecuted Djilas and is now running the country while Titc is away, spoke up. "Every honest man would spit in the face of 'politicians' of this type," he told a party gathering at Sarajevo. That Djilas and Dedijer should air their grievances abroad, he said, represents "a filthy blackmail of our democracy."

Now that the dispute was for the first time publicly acknowledged inside Yugoslavia, things moved fast. Parliament met and without a dissent stripped Absent Member Vlado Dedijer of his parliamentary immunity. A recall movement was already under way in his constituency. His seat on the Central Committee was taken away. The government announced that Vladimir Dedijer would soon be put on trial.

Dedijer summoned foreign correspondents to a press conference at his home, but when they got there, they found the house dark and guarded by nine plainclothesmen, who said that Dedijer had canceled the conference. Vlado Dedijer was no longer a free man.

That's the Way. Tito's other rebel last week amiably sat back waiting for the disciplinarians to come after him. Milovan Djilas had been stripped of all his offices a year ago, and seemed readier than his friend to accept the consequences of his heresy. "If it had been Kardelj under attack, I would no doubt have been forced to lead the fight against him," he said. "That's the way Communist parties work."

Unlike Dedijer, Djilas is frankly, in opposition to Marshal Tito himself. "Tito did good for the country during the war and for a short time after the war," Partisan Hero Djilas told TIME. "But Tito is an old, hard-line Marxist, and Marxism as he practices it is only for backward countries in Asia and on the fringe of Russia. Yugoslavia has evolved to a position where it needs greater political freedom." Djilas calmly cited his own situation: "Even as recently as 1949, Tito would have had to order me jailed or executed. But in 1954, with it publicly known that I stand in opposition to Tito, the worst that can happen is that I will be banished from Belgrade. Yugoslav public opinion would not permit anything more stringent today."

He was surer of his safety than he had a right to be in a Communist country. Before the week was out, Djilas and Dedijer were haled into the district court of Belgrade for four hours' questioning. The hearing, announced the government, is the opening of a "criminal investigation against Djilas and Dedijer, because of slanderous and hostile propaganda directed at damaging abroad the most vital interests of our country, a criminal act. . ."

* Which Tito was handing out in large numbers in India last week.

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