Tito's Taint

Symbols of resistance to the dictatorship are rare in Russia. Thus Marshal Tito, who broke with Stalin in 1948 and is now celebrating his rehabilitation in the Kremlin hierarchy by junketing around the Soviet Union with Stalin's old cronies, gets a big hand at most places. In Stalingrad last week he was mobbed.

A crowd of 200,000, cheering and screaming, broke through MVD guard lines, tumbled Tito and his wife, newsmen and photographers in a heap against the official automobiles while First Party Secretary Khrushchev, wearing a Ukrainian shirt under his jacket, fought his way to safety. Later the Stalingradians-trampled over the graves of World War II defenders to get near the Yugoslav leader during a memorial ceremony while Khrushchev angrily admonished them: "Keep quiet, Comrades!"

The only quiet for the two comrades that day occurred during a trip on the Volga when the boat passed the huge Stalin statue (33 tons of bronze) which Khrushchev in his famous speech had cited as an example of Stalin's egocentricity. Neither party leader looked in that direction. But at the big Volga hydroelectric project, Khrushchev gave the workers the old Stalin business: though the U.S. was a mighty power, it would soon be challenged by the Soviet Union. Said Khrushchev: "We shall be richer."

At the Black Sea port of Novorossisk, Tito got a more orderly reception from a crowd clapping rhythmically and crying, "Tito, Tito!" and later singing the Internationale. Khrushchev waved him off on the Soviet cruiser Frunze, which, with destroyer escort, took Tito to Sochi, Russia's Miami, a seaside city of hotels, villas and sanatoria. There Tito, in sports shirt and slacks, and' the shapely Jovanka in cashmere sweater, spent a morning wandering among lemon gardens and palm groves. Tito joked about the number of heroic statues, all discreetly arrayed in bathing costumes and played his favorite parlor trick, which consists of picking a leaf from a shrub or tree, holding it flat in his left fist, then giving it a resounding smack with his right hand, producing a sound like the bursting of a blown-up paper bag.

Sochi was the favorite resort of Late Dictator Stalin. Resting there, Tito could happily reflect that the principal thing which separated him from Khrushchev and other compromised oldtime Communists was the fact that Stalin, five years before his death, had read Tito out of the Kremlin family. At no time prior to that accident was Tito on record as rejecting Stalin's reign of terror. On all the great issues condemned by Khrushchev (with a documentation of which Tito must have had considerable knowledge at the time)--from Kirov's murder onward to the vast purges, in which 70% of the Central Committee was wiped out--Tito had been silent. For 20 years Tito, like Khrushchev, had been a staunch Stalinist.

One of Tito's former aides once pointed this out. The year Stalin died, the then Yugoslav Vice President Milovan Djilas wrote that, while Tito had broken with Stalin, he still treated Leninism as "a set of inherited and patented rules." Tito's sensitiveness to this kind of criticism took a fresh turn last week. While Tito sunned near Sochi, in Belgrade his party newspapers Borba and Politika renewed their attack on Djilas. In the interviews with Western newsmen, including TIME'S James Bell (TIME, June 4), Djilas had drawn attention, at this pertinent moment in Yugoslav-Russian relations, to Tito's rigid orthodoxy. Borba saw Djilas' statements as "a carefully orchestrated campaign against the peaceful, independent policy of Yugoslavia precisely at a time when Tito is carrying out ... his great mission of peace. It is obvious that reactionary and non-peace-loving circles do not like such development. Once again Djilas has served these sinister aims . . . Djilas is only the blind, obedient weapon, servile with his tail between his legs."

This Titoist outburst proved Djilas' point: inevitably the Titoist rejoinder was in the language and thinking of Stalin--a poor man's Stalin.

-The Communist press has now taken to referring to Stalingrad by its old name, Tsaritsyn.

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