Socialism of Sorts

Identify the country or countries which recently: a) sentenced a poet to two weeks in prison for penning "a mockery of the Holy Family and Jesus Christ"; b) promoted Pepsi-Cola in full-page newspaper ads; c) gave away choice seashore plots of land to Sophia Loren, Gene Kelly, Kirk Douglas, Doris Day and Frank Sinatra.

The answer is that paradoxical land of six republics, five nationalities, four faiths, three languages and two alphabets--Yugoslavia. For 18 years, Marshal Josip Broz Tito has led his Adriatic nation of 20 million people down the path of a socialism of sorts. Today, as the rest of Eastern Europe begins to catch on, Yugoslavia remains the most autonomous, open, idiosyncratic and unCommunist Communist country anywhere on earth.

The Silver Baton. Symbolic were two holidays last month. One was Tito's 75th birthday, when shopwindows blossomed with red-draped pictures of him, nestling among West German cameras and British textiles, and when 60,000 people gathered at twilight in Belgrade for a fete climaxed by the presentation to Tito of a silver-plated baton that had been relayed for a month through hundreds of Yugoslav towns and villages. The other holiday was May 1, Communism's traditional red-letter day, when there were no military marches in the Yugoslav capital, and Tito wasn't even in town.

On May Day, in fact, most of Belgrade was off on a pleasant bourgeois weekend in the woods or on the beaches.

Many went on wheels, for Yugoslavs have gone car crazy as the number of privately owned autos has tripled in five years. A mounting tide of wheeled Westerners is adding to the crush. They flow in to sample Yugoslavia's sylvan beaches and well-preserved medieval towns. Some 3,000,000 Western cars carrying tourists are expected this year. "I stamp passports in my sleep these days," says one Yugoslav border guard at a Trieste checkpoint. "One day last summer we had 45,000 people come through here."

Pelvis Communism. In pursuit of the tourist's hard currency (9,000,000 foreigners spent $105 million in Yugoslavia last year), the government has abolished visa requirements for 18 nations ranging from Mongolia to such NATO members as Italy, Denmark and Norway. Old hotels are being refurbished to suit Western tastes, and new ones built. Eight new state catering schools offer a four-year course for waiters, cooks and hostelers. Families are being encouraged by the Communist government to indulge in such capitalist practices as investing in restaurants, inns, shoe-repair shops and motels.

Eight casinos, all but one operated by foreigners, who give the state 63% of the profits, are now available to foreign visitors--to the disgust of some orthodox party types. "Yugoslavia's flag should be two crossed croupier rakes on a green baize field," grumbled one in print recently. Tourists also like girls, and the Yugoslavs have obliged with unaccustomed socialist thoroughness: striptease acts so exciting and uninhibited that one goggle-eyed Italian journalist reported that "the Yugoslavs have traded Goulash Communism for Pelvis Communism."

That gift of choice villa sites on the Adriatic to a handful of movie stars also raised some orthodox eyebrows. "Is it possible that deputies in a commune donate land free to a certain diva when peasants must pay for their water and electricity?" asked Ekonomska Politika. "When the town of Budva gives Sophia Loren a piece of land," it replied, "Loren will shed on Budva part of her world fame, which has an astronomical price. Hotels around her villa will overnight rocket in value, as will the whole town."

Such hardheaded business-before-dogma characterizes Tito's attitude toward nearly all the problems of the Yugoslav economy. Alone among Red peoples, Yugoslavs may freely travel to the West. Many do, and stay to work, but they send $60 million back home each year. Nearly 87% of the land in Yugoslavia is still privately farmed. "We exported grain last year," shrugs a Belgrade official. "How many other socialist countries export grain?" The government is in the process of handing over more and more independence to local factory management. "Within five years," says a Belgrade economist, "our factory managers will control, without state interference, the spending of 75% of their gross."

Party & a Half. There are a good many old-line Marxists who resent Yugoslavia's freewheeling new look and try to sabotage it whenever they can. Not long ago, Tito called a plenum and delivered a blistering rebuke to those "who have worked in a way contrary to the implementation of reform." The old-liners are under pressure from a different direction: Tito is encouraging the 8,000,000-member Socialist Alliance, once a rubber-stamp popular front, to stand in local elections against his ruling League of Yugoslav Communists Party. Though still under the League's wing, the Alliance will force League candidates to "openly debate issues," make it more difficult for the old-liners to hide in the woodwork of the bureaucracy. Tito's move has led some Belgrade wags to suggest that Yugoslavia is now a one-and-a-half party state.

Even in the realm of religion, the Yugoslavs are breaking fresh Communist ground. Hard on the heels of the conviction and sentencing of Poet Vladimir Gajsek for "provoking religious intolerance," Belgrade and the Vatican announced that this month they will sign an agreement according new freedom to the Yugoslav Roman Catholic Church, particularly to teach the catechism and open seminaries.

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