Et Tu, Tito?

It has been known for years that both Lenin and Stalin operated concentration camps long before Hitler, but the fact has been strictly taboo in the Communist press. Only Westerners have "distorted" the Soviet image by bringing the matter up. Last week, however, the skeleton in Moscow's closet was being loudly rattled not by any Western capitalist, but by a comrade in a supposedly fraternal country.

In an article in the Belgrade literary monthly Delo, Dr. Mihajlo Mihajlov, a Yugoslav professor and translator of Russian literature, boldly reported that the first Russian camp was set up in 1921 near the Arctic port of Archangel, and sent "to death thousands of members of different revolutionary parties opposing the Soviets." Estimating that possibly 12 million Russians passed through Stalin's concentration camps, Mihajlov recalled: "Stalin's genocide is much older than that of Hitler."

Mihajlov, who gleaned his facts from documents and interviews during a two-month stay in the Soviet Union last summer, was surprised to find Russians reminiscing openly about the camps. He reported that "concentration camp songs" have become a kind of Russian folk music, and are recklessly sung by Soviet youth despite the regime's obvious disapproval.

The Yugoslav's article, called "Moscow Summer," contained other acid observations of the Russian scene. The waiters in restaurants were surly, Mihajlov complained, adding that crime is so prevalent that it is dangerous to walk alone on out-of-the-way streets. At a hotel he was "rudely" told that there were no rooms--until he showed his passport. Then he received an instant apology: "We did not know you were a foreigner. We thought you were a Russian."

Was Tito tweaking the bear's nose by allowing such facts to be published? He probably had no advance knowledge of the article. The Russian embassy carried its indignant reaction to the government anyway. With that, Tito's regime, anxious that cold water not be dashed on its currently warmer relations with Moscow, banned the offending issue. And Yugoslavia's party organ, Kommunist, blossomed with appropriate expressions of shock, denouncing Author Mihajlov for "misuse" of Russian hospitality and Delo's editors for lack of "good taste."

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