Yugoslavia: Resilient Critics

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Adversity only seems to make stouter the hearts of President Tito's critics in Communist Yugoslavia. Tito's most stubborn foe, Milovan Djilas, 56, who has been freed after a total of almost nine years in prison, vows to go on writing. "If I cannot speak," he says, "what good is it to be out of prison?" The editors of the Yugoslav magazine Praxis, which stopped publishing eight months ago when Tito angrily denounced its cries for reform, have just come out with a new issue that is no less defiant than before. About the least penitent of all the authors punished by Tito is Mihajlo Mihajlov, 33, who last week was led from Sremska Mitrovica prison to face his third trial in two years for "spreading hostile propaganda against the regime." Mihajlov presented a defense that was pure heresy—and for his pains was found guilty and sent back to prison for another four years.

The Mihajlov case came at a time when Tito is waging a strong campaign against liberals and is trying to reinforce party discipline after the Serbo-Croat dispute over language (TIME, April 7). In a speech last week in Belgrade, he singled out the press and radio as particularly plagued by "rotten liberalism," and went on to say: "The Communist Party is not a liberal organization in which everybody does what he wants. It is a Marxist organization that is not surpassed. The party continues to have the decisive role in our entire life."

Brazen Charge. That is just the trouble, insists Mihajlov, who charged in court that Yugoslavia is a totalitarian state. When challenged, he said: "In a society in which only one party exists, where a single man is head of state and at the same time head of the army and the party, then look in the encyclopaedia and you will find that that is totalitarianism." In fact, he added brazenly, the one-party monopoly of government, which is nowhere mentioned in the Yugoslav constitution, is far more illegal than his own writings. "My ideas are socialist and democratic," he said, "but a small handful of people, some 6%, are outside the law and monopolize society. The paradoxical fact is that Marxist ideas are far more alive today in the West than here in the East be cause of lack of discussion."

Mihajlov, who has been ousted from his post as a lecturer in Russian literature at the Zadar branch of Zagreb University, represents a younger generation of intellectuals. Unlike Djilas, they have never had strong ties to the party and believe that it is too flabby to carry out reforms pledged by Tito. Mihajlov was convicted twice before, once for an anti-Soviet article, "Moscow Summer 1964," which was published in both Yugoslavia and the U.S. The reason for his latest trial is the publication abroad of two of his articles and a letter in which he outlined a plan for an opposition magazine. The letter spoke of uniting such diverse groups as discontented technocrats and Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Mihajlov was accused of having made contact with dissident emigre nationalists. Because of the historical threat of Balkanization in Yugoslavia, such activities worry Tito as much as Mihajlov's antiparty activities.