Rebuke from Khrushchev

One of Nikita Khrushchev's first acts on the death of Stalin was to rush to Belgrade to bear-hug the heretic Tito, and to endorse his thesis of "different roads to Socialism." But now that Khrushchev holds both of Stalin's positions (party secretary and Premier), and now that he has Poland and Hungary more or less under control, he obviously feels less need to placate heretics. Sounding like his old master, Khrushchev last week publicly rebuked Tito for the very deviations that aroused Stalin's ire.

The occasion was the Seventh Congress of the Yugoslav Communist Party, held at Ljubljana, the bustling, Austrian-flavored capital of Slovenia. What got the Soviet back up was the draft program proposed by the Yugoslavs, which contained 1) the suggestion that the military blocs of both East and West are responsible for current world tensions, and 2) the hint that the Soviet Union, rather than "international capitalism," represents a threat to the Independence of the smaller Communist nations. In Moscow the Soviet magazine Kommunist angrily demanded extensive changes.

At considerable cost to their own self-respect, the Yugoslavs--whose Party Congress is already being cold-shouldered by Western Socialist Parties because Tito has two prewar Socialist leaders behind bars--humbly worded their program in a more pro-Soviet manner. Khrushchev decided that the change was not enough, and Red China and all the Communist satellites followed suit in boycotting the Ljubljana meeting. In isolation but still firmly in control of his own show, Tito last week allowed himself to be unanimously re-elected President of Yugoslavia for a third term of four years. In a speech before Parliament, the 65-year-old Tito tried hard to stay on his tightrope between East and West; he followed the Soviet line on ending nuclear bomb tests, and, in the next breath, praised the U.S. for the economic and military aid it has sent to Yugoslavia.

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