Quiet, Please

The wheels of government turned ponderously to silence a critic in Yugoslavia last week. The victim was Mihajlo Mihajlov, 30, professor of literature at the university at Zadar on the Adriatic Sea, who, after a visit to Russia, wrote a frankly anti-Soviet piece for the Yugoslav monthly Delo (TIME, Feb. 19). Grabbed by police under pressure from President Tito himself, Mihajlov was charged with "deriding" a foreign government--a criminal charge in Yugoslavia.

At his trial, Mihajlov proved a difficult man to cow. Appearing in a courtroom whose only ornament was a large portrait of Tito, he pleaded not guilty before a three-judge tribunal. He even scored a pre-trial victory when the Croatian Supreme Court sustained his petition to have one of the judges originally assigned to the case removed for prejudice--the judge had led the drive to get Mihajlov fired from his university post. When signing the court register, Mihajlov neatly added after his name, "from the town of Zadar, which in the last issue of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is called 'an American military base on the Mediterranean.' "*

On the witness stand, Mihajlov was just as defiant as he had been in a bitter letter he sent newspaper editors defending himself. He insisted that his article had only mentioned historical facts about Stalin's purges and labor camps. When he offered to present proof, the court refused to hear his evidence on the grounds that "no fresh slanders against the Soviet Union will be permitted." In his final statement, Mihajlov said he would not recant what he had written and added that if the court condemned his writings, "then it means that it condemns history and would define what can and cannot be said in history."

Predictably, the court found Mihajlov guilty but, in place of the maximum sentence of three years, sentenced him to ten months in prison, less the one month he had already spent in pre-trial custody. It was a much milder penalty than that meted out to Milovan Djilas (The New Class), who is still serving a nine-year term for criticizing Yugoslav Communism. To cynics, that was just the point: a Yugoslav gets only months for criticizing Stalin but gets years for criticizing Tito.

* Perhaps harking back to the last months of World War II, when Zadar was used as a base by British and U.S. ships landing supplies for Tito's Partisans. Since the war, U.S. naval vessels have only occasionally made Zadar a port of call.

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