History Summery

C H A P T E R 8

PRISONS OF HISTORY

Communism and militarism, 1949–89

The Cazin rebellion: Yugoslavia

In March 1950, a Serb farmer, Milan Božić, set out from his hamlet in north-western Bosnia to visit his friend, Ale Čović, a Muslim who lived in a village 5 kilometres away. The two had met during the war, fighting in the same Partisan unit around Bihać. After the war, their friendship helped build bridges between the Serbs and the Muslims of Cazin District, where relations between the two com- munities were strained. Fratricidal conflict among Serbs, Croats and Muslims had been intense in north-western Bosnia and the neigh- bouring Croatian districts, Kordun and Banija. Božić and Čović, however, used their influence to encourage reconciliation. Both were respected by their peers as successful farmers, and Božić even joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička Partija Jugoslavije – KPJ). But the optimism which the two men shared had dissipated when the spirit of Partisan resistance made way for com- munist reconstruction. Six years after Tito had taken power in Yugoslavia, Božić called on his old comrade, Čović, to persuade him to take up arms once more.

Both men belonged to the peasant farmer class which made up three-quarters of Yugoslavia’s population. The countryside had contributed the majority of recruits to Partisans, Ustaše and

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Chetniks alike. They suffered much more than their cousins in the cities. After liberation, however, the orthodox Marxists of the KPJ proved no better at accommodating the peasantry than the liberals of nineteenth-century Serbia or the Yugoslav autocrats of the 1930s. Instead, the new communist leadership diverted political and eco- nomic resources into ambitious industrial projects while neglecting rural investment. The aim was to strengthen the country’s small working class at the expense of the peasantry, the symbol of back- wardness in communist eyes. Rural labourers were expected to embrace their subordinate position in the socialist order. Their job was to produce enough food to satisfy the needs of a growing pro- letariat.

This rule applied throughout the communist Balkans, and party leaders were quick to curb independent political activity in the countryside. First they ordered the destruction of the peninsula’s influential peasant movements, the most serious threat to the com- munists’ monopoly on power.* They then turned their attention to the peasants’ economic interests. Collectivization promised an eventual end to private holdings, large or small. The scheme would leave control of the production and distribution of food in com- munist hands. Yet the leaderships faltered. They were so apprehensive about the peasant’s reaction to collectivization that even in Albania, Europe’s most ruthless police state, the commu- nists hesitated to implement the policy. Only Yugoslavia defied the trend and began collectivization immediately.

There were several reasons for this. Until the summer of 1948, Yugoslavia was considered the Soviets’ most faithful East European satellite. It announced the start of collectivization as early as 1947 to underline its Stalinist credentials. Then, in June 1948, the country was expelled from the Cominform (the Communist Information Bureau). Stalin accused Tito of deviating from socialism in the dir- ection of both Trotskyism and capitalism. Central to its betrayal was Yugoslavia’s alleged soft treatment of the peasants. Soviet com- munists denounced the KPJ as a ‘Party of kulaks’, a transparent nonsense as the Yugoslav Party’s behaviour towards its peasantry was worse than that of most of its counterparts. To disprove the claim of revisionism, the leadership in Belgrade decided instead to

* See chapter 7. S N

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speed up collectivization, demonstrating that it was not Yugoslavia but the Soviet Union and its allies that had strayed from the path of Stalinist orthodoxy.

The Yugoslavs were able to justify the temporary imposition of strict state controls over agriculture on economic grounds. The Soviet Union and its East European allies imposed a comprehensive trade ban on Yugoslavia after the split while ties with the West were still non-existent. There was a genuine threat of invasion from Eastern Europe and tension with the West over the Trieste dispute remained high.* After years of devastation caused by occupation and civil war, agricultural production was down by more than half over pre-war figures. In Cazin District, for example, ‘56% of the agricultural inventory had been destroyed, 20.7% of all houses . . . the number of horses had fallen by 60%, sheep by 63.2%, cattle by 55.6%, swine by 58.7%. The herds were exhausted, undernour- ished, ill.’1 Despite its significant potential, Yugoslavia was unable to feed itself in the immediate postwar period. The state had to intervene to provide the necessary investment and incentives to stimulate production. It forced peasants to hand over their holdings to unwieldy agricultural conglomerates, the collective farms. Those who refused to join were subject to a harsh régime of requisition.

The number of collective farms rose in 1949 from 1,318 to almost 7,000. The Party increased the requisitions to unrealistic levels, often demanding more from peasants than they could produce in a year. Some farmers had to use their savings in order to buy produce on the black market which they would then hand over to the requi- sitioning agent. The consequences of this policy were dramatic. Peasants unable to fulfil their quotas risked losing everything (the so-called ‘total confiscation’ régime). Failure could also result in a spell at a work camp, where they would join political prisoners and students on construction or mining projects. Some resorted to the age-old resistance tactics of hoarding their produce and slaughter- ing their livestock rather than hand it over to inspectors. Instead of stimulating agricultural production, the policy led to a drop in output. In the countryside, some communities began to go hungry. Protest assumed ingenious forms. A farmer in the Bijeljina region of eastern Bosnia led his cow to the steps of his local government

* See chapter 7. S

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office. At the top of his voice, he then invited the bureaucrats to impregnate his animal themselves as this was the only way he could meet his quota. By 1950, however, others, like Milan Božić and Ale Čović, were considering more radical forms of resistance.

The gentle green hills of north-western Bosnia are reminiscent of England’s South Downs, in contrast to the forbidding rocks of the nearby Dinaric mountains. Cazin District, or the Bihać Pocket as it is also known, is unique not just for its verdant landscape. For most of the Ottoman period, the area was the Empire’s furthest European outpost. It was a restricted military zone similar to the Habsburg Vojna Krajina, or Military District, which lay at the other side of the narrow Korane river. Because of its strategic importance, the sultans secured Cazin District’s loyalty by encouraging the settlement of Muslims and the conversion of the local population to Islam. As a result, Cazin still boasts the highest concentration of Muslims in Europe. Like their counterparts in the Military District, the menfolk of Cazin were trained to take up arms in defence of the Empire whenever so ordered. This helped develop an identity distinct from the Muslims of Sarajevo, not to mention Istanbul. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Muslims of north-western Bosnia resisted by force the imposition of reforms by the imperial centre. During the Bosnian uprising of 1850–2, they offered the most stubborn chal- lenge to the military dictator sent by the Sultan, Omer Paša Latas.*

Cazin’s independent traditions re-emerged during the Second World War when a local guerrilla commander, Huska Miljković, formed an army that at its peak numbered 3,000 fighters. Miljković was a remarkable opportunist who cooperated alternately with the fascist Ustaše and communist Partisans in order to protect the inhabitants of Huskina država (Huska’s state). Relations between Miljković and the Serbs were generally good but some Muslims joined the Croat Ustaše and joined in atrocities against the local Serb population. Some Muslim fascists formed small groups, the Green Cadres, who took to the forests at the end of the war. In the six years following the communist takeover in 1944, they killed sev- eral dozen people in Cazin, and the last group of outlaws evaded capture until 1950. The communists found Cazin more difficult to control than most parts of the country.

* See chapter 2. S N

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The Cazin Muslims were conservative and devout. Polygamy survived well into the Titoist period, and the patriarchal social system was underlined by the highest rate of female illiteracy among Bosnia’s Muslims. The communist authorities were deeply suspi- cious of Cazin’s autonomist tendencies. After the war, they cracked down on all religious hierarchies, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic, provoking much ill-feeling. Tensions were exacerbated by the requisition policy. The inspectors who demanded that peasants hand over their produce bore an unmistakable resemblance to the tax farmers of the Ottoman Empire,* except that in the 1940s and 1950s they had the authority of a repressive communist state behind them.

A drought in 1949 had led to a sharp drop in production and by January 1950 the Cazin District inspectors had collected 800,000 kilos less than their annual quota. The figures were worse for cattle and swine. In response, the communists mounted a renewed confis- cation drive. This was too much for Milan Božić and his friend, Mile Devrnja, a Serb who lived over the Korane river in the Slunj district of Croatia. They met secretly at Božić’s home in mid-March to lay the groundwork for an armed rebellion against the Yugoslav state. For this to have any prospect of success in Cazin, the Serbs would have to persuade the Muslim peasantry to join in: hence Božić’s visit to his old comrade, Ale Čović.

The Muslim did not hesitate. ‘Popular dissatisfaction with the requisitions was rising everywhere and more and more were going hungry’, Bejza Čović, Ale’s wife, remembered later. ‘My husband couldn’t sleep at night for worry and he became ever more with- drawn . . . There had been a terrible drought that year and the shortages meant the cattle were weak and scrawny.’2

The economic conditions were sufficient to overcome resent- ments which had lingered since the war between Muslim and Serb peasants. Both communities were keen to make common cause. Over the next six weeks, the peasant army attracted hundreds of recruits from their friends and extended families in both Cazin and the neighbouring Croat districts. Some of the leaders were so-called prvoborci (founding fighters) of the Partisans who recognized the need to instil discipline and organization. However, in three critical

* See chapter 2. S

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respects the men of the Cazin rebellion belonged to a long tradition of Balkan jacqueries: they were gullible; they were poorly armed; and their tactical ability was restricted to a single manoeuvre – the panicked retreat.

Their naivety manifested itself in wild exaggerations about the movement’s strength. At the first planning meeting, Božić’s son, Nikola, announced that an influential sympathizer ‘somewhere in the district’, was in radio contact with exiled royalist forces. With the backing of Great Britain, monarchist troops were massing on Greece’s border with Yugoslavia, Nikola reported, ready for inva- sion. Meanwhile, others claimed that peasants in Vojvodina were also preparing to rise. As the date set for the uprising approached, many peasants believed they were the vanguard of a great rebellion which would engulf all Bosnia, if not Yugoslavia. In this unreal atmosphere, unit leaders vied for primacy by overestimating the numbers of their units and the quality of their weaponry.

Despite these boasts, the local UDBa (secret police) failed to notice that plans for an uprising were afoot. This was an astonishing indictment of a ruthless secret police force, which can be explained by the fact that all UDBa officers in Cazin were Serbs while almost 90 per cent of the rebels were Muslims. UDBa’s network simply did not penetrate the closed society of local Muslims. The day before the uprising, a rumour of trouble finally reached UDBa’s regional headquarters in Banja Luka, where it was dismissed as nonsense – the police simply could not believe that the peasantry would be so bold, or stupid, as to rebel.

The uprising itself was a disaster. The rebels succeeded in cutting most of the telephone lines between the major towns in the district but news of the disturbances soon reached Banja Luka. Aleksandar Ranković, the Interior Minister in Belgrade, immediately ordered an overwhelming counter-attack. After a few skirmishes with the army and special police, the peasants retreated while some of the leaders fled into the forests. Over a hundred held out for several weeks and it was not until the army was sent in that they were even- tually rounded up. The leaders were executed and a reign of terror imposed on the district.

Despite the ignominious outcome, the rising was significant. Over 1,000 peasants heeded the call to arms, prepared to risk every- thing in order to make their protest known. For fifteen hours, they

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took their revenge against the most important symbol of the new order – the collective farm. They trawled through farms and agri- cultural warehouses, looting everything they found before distributing the foodstuffs and tobacco among their families and villages.

What they could not have known is that during 1949 and 1950, several other attempted uprisings took place, mainly in Bosnia and Hercegovina but also in Croatia and Macedonia, all detailed in UDBa’s archives. Some of these were provoked by Chetnik and Ustaše outlaws but there was usually a high incidence of prvoborci and active Party members in their ranks.

Overnight, it was forgotten that all of us leaders were from villages, no further removed than the second generation, if not the first. It was forgotten that without the peasant – who lived in poverty and backwardness, suffering and sacrifice – we Communists could not have overthrown the old order and seized power. All of a sudden, interest in the peasants was reduced to herding them together for meetings; pressuring them into selling to the state at set prices and donating their ‘voluntary’ labour; or, at best, sympathizing with individual cases of hardship and talking with peasant relatives and former village neighbours on holiday visits home.3

In the long term, the rash of armed peasant resistance forced the leadership to rethink its agricultural policy, slowing and eventually reversing collectivization.

Western interest in the Balkans subsided soon after the impos- ition of communist rule. It was not long before the heroic stands of East Germans and Czechs in 1953 and of Poles and Hungarians in 1956 overshadowed the fate of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. Having asserted for decades that the Balkans were inher- ently violent, journalists and writers now dismissed the nations of the region as docile people who lacked the initiative and courage of their north-eastern neighbours. Yet the resistance to Stalinism in the Balkans went largely unnoticed because it lacked coordination and was centred on the countryside and not in cities like Berlin and Budapest. Furthermore, since the collapse of communism in 1989, the archives have revealed that Stalinism in the Balkans was applied

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with much greater brutality than even western scholars have previ- ously assumed.

The iron fist: Romania and Bulgaria

The notoriety of Romania’s last communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauµescu, has obscured the role of his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in constructing a state based on fear and coercion. Among the ‘little Stalins’, Dej was the worst thug of all. Even before the Soviets had installed communism in Romania, Dej was murder- ing his party comrades to clear a path to power. Born in the Moldavian town of Bîrlad on 8 November 1901, Gheorghe Gheorghiu (as he was born – he added the Dej later) was already working at Galaøi docks as an eleven-year-old. He completed an apprenticeship as an electrician and became a working-class party activist, a genuine rarity in Romania. In the 1930s and 1940s he experienced strikes, prison and internecine warfare in the Party. The leadership was divided between the ‘home communists’, of whom Dej was the most prominent and the ‘Muscovites’, whose leading representative was Romania’s first communist Foreign Minister, Ana Pauker.

In the wake of the Soviet–Yugoslav split, bitter struggles broke out in the leaderships of the East European parties as Stalin ordered a witch hunt to root out potential Titos, so-called ‘national com- munists’ like Władysław Gomułka who spoke of a ‘Polish road’ to socialism. Dej was victorious in the Romanian Party over the coun- try’s best-known communists, Lucreøiu Pătrăµcanu, Ana Pauker and Vasile Luca. For a long time, most western scholars interpreted this as an exceptional case. They argued that in Romania it was the home communists (cadres like Dej who had spent the war in Romania) who had won at the expense of people like Ana Pauker who had spent many years exiled in the Soviet Union and were regarded as Stalin’s agents. The apparent success of Dej and the home communists was seen as the beginning of Romania’s defiance of Soviet dictates, which matured two decades later when Dej’s suc- cessor, Nicolae Ceauµescu, was courted by both China and the West while implementing the most repressive domestic policy in the Warsaw Pact.

In fact, Dej sought to flatter Stalin with as much zeal as his S N

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counterparts like the Bulgarian dictator, Vŭlko Chervenkov. His immediate entourage was full of NKVD agents or communists with close links to the Ukrainian and Russian parties. His opponent in the early years, Pătrăµcanu, was not a Moscow communist. Indeed, Pătrăµcanu had long since condemned himself in Soviet eyes by his attempts to establish better relations with the British and French. By the time Dej engaged Ana Pauker in a second round of the power struggle, she was already isolated in the party. The attack on Pauker, who was Jewish, coincided with Stalin’s manufacture of Jewish conspiracies. Far from distancing Romania from the Soviet Union, Dej flattered the Soviet leadership by the most meticulous imitation. The process of separation between the Romanian and Soviet parties did not begin until the late 1950s when Khrushchev finally crushed Stalinist opposition in the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Khrushchev’s revisionism implicitly threat- ened Romania’s economic interests and Dej’s political position. The new leader wanted Balkan communists to concentrate their efforts on developing the agriculture sector to help feed the Soviet Union. Dej wanted the prestige and wealth that a strong industry promised. The Romanian leader exploited the Sino-Soviet split to carve out an autonomous niche for Romania while remaining inside Comecon (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance – the communist trading block) and the Warsaw Pact.

Dej’s fanatical Stalinism entailed harsh consequences for one class above all, the peasantry, many of which made up the largest subset of a miserable social group, the political prisoners. But the countless victims of Romanian Stalinism hailed from all back- grounds and professions. The prison and camp system in Romania had no rivals in the people’s democracies. The first inmates were pre-war politicians and businessmen. Then came the religious lead- ers. From 1949 to 1952, ‘in the name of the struggle against the kulaks’, Dej reported to the Central Committee in late 1961, ‘more than 80,000 peasants, most of them working peasants, were sent for trial; more than 30,000 of these peasants were tried in public which provoked great concern among the peasant masses brought to attend these infamous frame-ups’.4 Dej used the opportunity of the Central Committee meeting in 1961 to shift his own responsibility for the assault on the peasantry from his shoulders on to Ana Pauker’s. In fact, she had tried to slow down collectivization and, in

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January 1951, she had demanded that the Central Committee arrest the Party members who had forced peasants into collectives, declaring that ‘those who acted in this fashion are not humans’.5

As in Yugoslavia, there was resistance in the countryside. Spontaneous unarmed uprisings were reported from all over Romania. The militia responded by shooting rebels, burning vil- lages and confiscating livestock and grain. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, armed resistance groups took to the forests and mountains in northern and central Romania. Many evaded capture for years, engaging in occasional shoot-outs with special Securitate units and, in one case, escaping arrest until 1976. No single protest reached the scale of the Cazin uprising in Yugoslavia, but the resist- ance lasted much longer.

These fugitives were heroic exceptions to the rule. For most Romanian citizens, the 1950s were bleak years of state terror. At the apex of this régime stood the Danube–Black Sea Canal, the cutting of a huge channel south of the Danube delta from Constanøa on the Black Sea coast 56 kilometres inland to Cernavodă on the river. This would have spared boats from the final 290 kilometres and allowed larger vessels on to the Danube. The scheme was reminiscent of the vast construction programmes of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Decreed in May 1949, it was one of the first projects backed by Comecon. Romania’s communists proclaimed it the dawn of modern industry; western commentators believed it was inspired by the Red Army’s strategic requirements; Soviet diplomats praised it as the embodiment of socialist internationalism and cooperation. In fact, its most significant role was to create a giant camp for forced labour. During the most intense phase of construction in 1952, the fourteen camps scattered around the marshlands of Dobrudja housed 19,000 political prisoners (or ‘Labour Resources of the Ministry of the Interior’ as they were officially known), 20,000 ‘vol- untary’ civilian workers and 18,000 conscripts from the army. ‘The inmates had to work 12 hours daily, seven days a week’, one Transylvanian Hungarian writer recorded. ‘The work they per- formed was heavy manual labour digging ditches, carting soil by wheelbarrow, loading trucks. The scene was similar to the Egyptian or Roman Empires of the past, when slaves were used to build pyr- amids or roads.’6 Underfed, maltreated and working in appalling conditions, men died at a rate that reached a hundred a month.

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In 1951, the Interior Ministry extended the ‘Re-education Programme’ to the Danube–Black Sea Canal labour camps. This complicated form of institutionalized torture was the Romanian Communist Party’s unique contribution to Stalinist terror. Devised by the Deputy Interior Minister, Alexandru Nicolski, ‘re-educa- tion’ involved prisoners agreeing to betray their friends and then to torture them on behalf of the Securitate:

It progressed in four stages. The first was known as ‘external unmasking’ by which the prisoner had to show his loyalty . . . by revealing everything he had hidden from the Securitate interrogators . . . In the second phase, called ‘internal unmask- ing’, the tortured student had to reveal the names of those who had behaved more kindly or leniently towards him in prison, be it a fellow inmate or a member of staff. The third and fourth stages had another purpose: the destruction of the prisoner’s personality and moral fibre . . . Only when his moral collapse seemed . . . complete . . . was the student subjected to the final stage, the one which guaranteed no return: the re-educated figure was forced to conduct the process of re-education on his best friend, torturing him with his own hands.7

Each ‘re-educated’ prisoner was allotted a number of prisoners to ‘re-educate’, using the techniques of extreme physical and psycho- logical violence which he had acquired during his own ordeal. In this way, the Interior Ministry was able to impose a reign of terror throughout the prison and labour camp network, using minimal resources. The imprisoned were victims and perpetrators simulta- neously. In 1951, a former medical student from Cluj was administering ‘re-education’ to a prominent doctor at the Danube– Black Sea Canal network, provoking the victim to hurl himself on to the barbed-wire perimeter fence where he was shot by camp guards. The incident was reported by the BBC and other foreign stations. ‘Their reports prompted a Ministry of Interior inquiry at the peninsular camp. Here is a vivid illustration of the iniquity of the communist régime’s machinery of repression: the very body which, in the person of Nicolski, implemented the programme, on realising that its details could no longer be kept secret, set up an enquiry to absolve itself of responsibility.’8

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Stalin’s death in March 1953 unnerved both Dej and his counter- part in Bulgaria, Vŭlko Chervenkov. The latter was another slavish imitator of the Soviet Union; Stalin had been the only source of his political legitimacy. Having spent over twenty years of exile in the Soviet Union following his involvement in the Sveta Nedelya bomb plot of 1925,* he enjoyed a narrow band of support inside Bulgaria itself. Chervenkov did more damage to the agrarian sector than any other East European dictator. In a matter of three years, he destroyed the system of smallholdings that had fed Bulgarian towns and villages without serious interruption since Ottoman times: ‘The greatest paradox was the lack of popular Bulgarian produce on the market’, remembered the journalist, Georgy Markov, from his exile in London (where he was eventually killed by a poison-tipped umbrella). ‘Bulgaria was a country famous for its vegetables and fruit, but in the markets there was a constant shortage of them . . . Chervenkov’s régime reduced the villages to penury. Those years [1950–6] will be remembered as the most wretched in the existence of our peasants. The enforced collectivization, which caused the disappearance of male labour from the fields, plus the abolition of personal smallholdings, inevitably brought famine to the country . . . Thus we townspeople no longer had the reserves of the countryside behind us.’9

Industrialization went hand in hand with collectivization. Without sufficient resources of their own, Romania and Bulgaria became highly dependent on the Soviet Union for raw materials and plant machinery. Stalin’s demise and the emergence of the collective leadership in the Soviet Union posed serious problems for Bucharest and Sofia. Faced with an economic crisis of its own, the Soviet Union slowed down or ceased deliveries of vital supplies to her Balkan allies. The most spectacular victim of Soviet belt-tightening was the Danube–Black Sea Canal. Tired of pouring resources into this white elephant, the Soviet leadership withdrew its engineers after Stalin’s death, leaving an unusable basin left empty for over a decade, until Nicolae Ceauµescu resurrected the idea both as a symbol of Romania’s industrial prowess and as a forced labour camp.

The Bulgarian and Romanian leaderships responded differently

* See chapter 6. S N

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to the reformist wind blowing from Moscow and to the East European economic crisis. Dej played tough. He offered lip service to the criticism of Stalinist practice that culminated in Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin in the Secret Speech given to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956. But he refused to relinquish any power to a collective leader- ship, as happened everywhere else. Chervenkov, by contrast, went quietly, handing over the post of First Secretary to a young war hero, Todor Zhivkov, who for a short while threatened to breathe some life into Bulgaria’s moribund Communist Party. The limits of Zhivkov’s liberalism were demonstrated in 1956 when the BCP joined the Romanian Party as the only communist organization in Eastern Europe not to publish the Secret Speech. The Bulgarian leadership did at least release a large number of political prisoners. The Romanians stalled on the issue.

On the economic front, Dej pushed successfully for the dissol- ution of the Sovroms, the joint stock companies used by Moscow as an instrument of colonialist control over the Romanian economy. The two most important joint enterprises – responsible for oil and uranium extraction – were finally dissolved by November 1956. Here lay the beginnings of Bucharest’s dispute with Moscow in the late 1950s and early 1960s, concerning Romania’s role in the inter- national ‘socialist division of labour’. When the Hungarian Revolution exploded in October 1956, Dej discovered he could exchange unswerving support for the Soviet Union’s broad strategic interests in Eastern Europe for a certain flexibility in domestic policy. He gave the Soviet Politburo ideological and practical sup- port in its crushing of the Hungarian uprising. In return, he was exempted from introducing reformist practices – Stalinism remained the Romanian norm. Neither Khrushchev nor Dej could tolerate the spread of the Hungarian revolution into Romania via the Hungarians of Transylvania. Nonetheless, students throughout Romania, and not just the Hungarian minority, added their voices to the protests and resistance which had engulfed Poland and Hungary in the autumn of 1956. This was an unwelcome develop- ment for Dej, and the Securitate responded zealously, breaking up demonstrations in towns as far apart as Iaµi and Timiµoara. The Romanian leadership did, however, make one concession to the stu- dents – Russian was abolished as a compulsory subject in Romanian

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universities and was replaced by the more traditional languages, French and German. This was a small but significant step towards a more independent policy.

Although the Bulgarian Party leadership considered it unwise to publish the Secret Speech, it did respond to Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin with a Central Committee Plenum in April 1956 that prom- ised all manner of reform and liberalization. The April Plenum was in fact a prophylactic, designed to dissipate the rising pressure of popular and intellectual discontent in Bulgaria. But it did finally bury Chervenkov. Associates of Traicho Kostov, the main victim of the Stalinist show trials of 1949, were rehabilitated and the Bulgarians had a genuinely collective leadership for a short period with Zhivkov as primus inter pares. The thaw lasted less than two years but writers and journalists exploited the atmosphere of toler- ance to the full. Nikola Lankov, a hitherto uninspiring communist writer, shocked Sofia by composing an indictment of Chervenkov which summed up the contempt in which most Bulgarians held their ‘Little Stalin’:

Did I live through this night of cult oppression? Did I live? Oh, no!

I dare not admit that a certain person, who some called ‘9,’ in a disgusting epoch shot Communists to clear his own path to a throne and personal power . . .

The door opens the investigator enters and begins to rail:

– What are you talking to?

My head shakes My sleep is broken

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and on this late evening I hear again:

– To interrogation, to interrogation!10

In July 1957, Khrushchev succeeded in ousting the ‘anti-Party group’, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Molotov and Shepilov. The period of collective leadership came to an abrupt end. Both Dej and Zhivkov used this opportunity to carry through purges in the Romanian and Bulgarian parties to shore up their positions. While Khrushchev still intended to pursue a reform programme in the Soviet Union, Zhivkov now decided to put an end to Bulgaria’s lit- erary thaw. Journalists were expelled, controversial writers no longer published and tedium descended once again on Bulgarian society. Khrushchev was too distracted to care unduly about Bulgaria’s return to neo-Stalinist orthodoxy while Dej remained confident of his power in Romania. One small group of Balkan communists, however, were becoming ever more unhappy about Khrushchev’s apparent deviation from the path of righteousness.

A world of his own: Albania I first heard those five dear letters at the dawn of my life. Ever since, your name became as dear to me as my paternal

home, As precious as socialism, As lofty as the mountains, As vital as light . . . We shout ENVER! And the sky seems to us loftier than ever, The space around us vaster, The sun bigger, And our perspectives ever more magnificent. We shout ENVER! And our days take on colour and meaning As they fall in like soldiers Into the great ranks of the revolution.

From Sulejman Mato’s poem ‘Enver’, published in the literary monthly, Nëndori, September 197911

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Communism, like nationalism, came belatedly to Albania. When the Communist Party (ACP) was finally established on 8 November 1941, it was under the guidance of two Yugoslav agents, Miladin Popović and Dušan Mugoša, who united three small groups – one pro-Italian from Shkoder, one pro-Soviet from Tirana, and the third pro-Greek from Korçe. This vanguard of Albania’s phantom work- ing class boasted seventy members and a few hundred sympathizers at most. Yet within a decade the tiny organization had transformed the country into one of the most inflexible totalitarian edifices of the century. Until the communist-led Partisan victory in November 1944, Albania’s modern history had been one of chaos and instabil- ity. Although King Zog had forged a semblance of order for a decade, this crumbled quickly under the pressure of Italian expan- sionism. The legacy of the fascists and the Nazis meant that the communists were obliged to draw on indigenous traditions much more powerful than the alien ideology of Marxism-Leninism to attract sympathizers. Enver Hoxha, the strongest of communist strongmen, admitted this freely, quoting the nineteenth-century Albanian poet, Pashko Vase Shkodrani: ‘The religion of the Albanian is Albanianism.’ With the exception of Stalin and Hoxha himself, the icons of socialism in the country were drawn almost exclusively from Albania’s national struggle – the medieval king Skënderbeu, the brothers Frashëri and Ismail Qemal.

Hoxha underpinned his vision of Albanian unity with a formid- able xenophobia. The warmth with which he embraced foreign powers was outdone only by the ferocity with which he subse- quently rejected them. Hoxha wooed, then spurned the British, the Americans, the Yugoslavs, the Russians and the Chinese, turning the full force of a defensive nationalism on the perceived heretic. Fear of invasion inspired outlandish policies that became a focus of fascinated disbelief outside the country. Here was a Balkan régime that seemed stranger than the fiction of Bram Stoker. Its very iso- lation gave rise to a kind of cultish logging of craziness: the construction of pill-boxes every few yards along the entire length of its borders; the ban on private car ownership; the compulsory shav- ing of beards; and, above all, the deification of two men – Josef Stalin and Enver Hoxha – whose memory remained sacred until 1990 when Albania was torn apart by half a century of pent-up popular anger.

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Hoxha’s xenophobia had a sound historical footing – the Ottoman Empire, the European great powers and Albania’s neigh- bours, Serbia and Greece, had sought to deny the country its independence ever since the League of Prizren first raised the idea in 1878.* And after Hoxha came to power, foreign states did indeed try to bring him down. In 1948, Stalin had told Milovan Djilas that Yugoslavia should swallow up Albania. A year later, the British and American intelligence services concocted a plan to destabilize Albania by infiltrating supporters of King Zog into the country. This preposterous scheme failed in part because Kim Philby leaked the details to Soviet agents. When the Soviets themselves were spurned by Hoxha in the 1960s, the Khrushchevites (Hoxha’s great- est bêtes noires) tried to topple the Albanian dictator.

The foreign threat was genuine but exaggerated. The embellish- ment of external foes had an additional purpose – to expose the internal enemy. No ruling communist party thrived on a diet of purges like the Albanian Party of Labour. Rising to a position of influence under the scrutiny of Hoxha brought great risks. Official sources concede that after the first great purge, which followed the break with Yugoslavia, a quarter of Party members were expelled or arrested. Politburo and Central Committee members were periodi- cally arrested or shot. Nikita Khrushchev claimed that one Politburo member, Liri Gega, was pregnant when executed as a Titoist agent in 1956. During Hoxha’s forty-one years in power, the seven interior ministers directly responsible for the carrying out of purges were all themselves purged. Founded in 1941, the ACP’s first major purge was instigated in 1942, a year after its founding, establishing a pattern which continued unbroken for over four dec- ades, a self-perpetuating mechanism fed by Hoxha’s intense paranoia.

The dictator never relaxed his fear that frustrated ambition in the Party must lead to conspiracy. In 1981, his most trusted comrade, Mehmet Shehu, the man who built the Albanian People’s Army and made the Sigurimi into the most feared secret police in Eastern Europe, ‘committed suicide’. For forty years, Shehu and Hoxha had been blood brothers in the struggle against revisionism. Then,

* See chapter 3. S

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quite unexpectedly, Hoxha exposed Shehu’s plan to marry his son to the daughter of a family of ‘war criminals’. Unable to bear his own treachery, the world was told, the perfidious Shehu took his own life. Once his old comrade was buried, Hoxha was at liberty to reveal the terrible truth – Shehu had been working for the CIA, the KGB and KOS (Yugoslav military intelligence) throughout his career. Marrying his son into a family of ‘war criminals’ was the signal to begin the destabilization of Albania, a plan that had matured over almost half a century. ‘[I]t was done precisely with the aim of attracting public attention and causing a sensation’, Hoxha later wrote. ‘The Yugoslavs could use this to . . . discredit the lead- ership of the Party of Labour of Albania and especially Enver Hoxha.’12

The blood-letting inside the Party was often akin to a deadly family feud. After Hoxha had sided with Beijing in the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, Khrushchev’s propagandists hit back in a Moscow radio broadcast:

Half, or more, of the 53 members of the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labour are related. First, we have four couples: Enver Hoxha and his wife Nexhmije Hoxha; Mehmet Shehu and his wife Fiqrete Shehu; Hysni Kapo and his wife Vito Kapo; and Josif Pashko with his wife Eleni Terezi. The wives of Manush Myftiu, Politburo member, and of Pilo Peristeri, candidate-member of the Politburo, are sisters. Kadri Hasbiu, candidate-member of the Politburo and Minister of Internal Affairs, is the husband of Mehmet Shehu’s sister.13

Notwithtstanding Radio Moscow’s factual errors (Hasbiu, for example, was not married to Mehmet Shehu’s sister), the incestuous make-up of the communist elite in Albania was significant. Enver was a Tosk, born in October 1908 into a family of civil servants and Muslim clerics in the southern town of Gjirokastër. In the interwar years, this handsome young man went to study in France where, according to official communist histories, he wrote articles for the French Party newspaper L’Humanité (despite assiduous research, nobody has ever succeeded in tracking down any examples of his youthful journalism). Hoxha then returned to Albania to teach French at the Lycée in Korçë, also in the south. After its formation,

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the ACP drew virtually all its support from the down-trodden Tosk peasantry in the south and centre of the country. Almost all leading cadres were southerners, a pattern which sustained itself through- out the communist period. Ironically, the only Gheg who reached the Politburo and survived was Ramiz Alia, who assumed control of the Party of Labour following Hoxha’s death in 1985. Hoxha made a concerted effort to include northerners in the Central Committee and Politburo. He also made clear gestures by sending teachers and doctors to the deprived areas of the north, and inte- grating the region into his industrialization programme. He went some way to overcoming suspicions between north and south by stressing his commitment to Albanianism.

Nonetheless, in some regions the Party still had difficulty in extending its influence. The strength of Catholicism is the Shkoder region and the exceptional courage of many Catholic clerics in the face of Hoxhaist repression meant that Tirana considered this an unreliable area throughout the communist period. Further, Ghegs in the north had supported the struggle of their brethren in Kosovo during the Second World War. The ACP was regarded as a creation of the Yugoslavs and therefore hostile to the interests of Kosovo Albanians. In addition, communist ideology made no secret of its contempt for the traditional social structure of the north. The atom- ized clan system; the blood feuds and the Canon of Lek; the miserable position of women in Gheg society; the greater religiosity in the north – these were all targets for the modernizing zeal of Hoxha and his comrades.

Once the borders with Yugoslavia were closed in 1948, Hoxha used the country’s geographical isolation to implement a pro- gramme of unprecedented social engineering. The radical ambition of Albanian communism reflected ‘the crushing poverty, the over- whelming illiteracy, rampant superstition, blood feuds, and ravaging epidemics, above all malaria and syphilis’14 which Hoxha’s régime inherited. In a population of just over a million in 1944, only 15,000 could be described as working-class in the Marxist sense. By 1976 the official figure stood at 370,000, a 24-fold increase. Male life expectancy in the late 1930s was forty-two. Thirty years later it had risen to sixty-seven. The programme of transformation had begun with the reclamation of large tracts of malaria-infested swamps. Arshi Pipa has written that ‘the drainage of the Maliq marsh, from

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which Albania’s sugar now comes, has been carried out mainly by political prisoners. “Our sugar smells of blood,” they say in Albania’.15 Then came Albania’s electrification. The last village was attached to the national grid in the early 1970s although one experi- enced observer of Albania has pointed out that ‘the system has been on the blink ever since’.16 By 1955, textile factories and processing combines were working in several major towns and cities. With the assistance of Soviet technicians, Albania soon became one of the world’s largest producers of chrome. Within less than two decades almost all children were attending secondary schools and illiteracy rates dropped to as low as 10 per cent.

The industrialization of Albania was astonishing but, like every- where else in the Balkans, it was achieved at a heavy cost to agriculture and the peasantry. Unlike its neighbours, Albania was not self-sufficient in food production even though almost 90 per cent of the population made their living off the land in the late 1940s. With mountains covering almost three-quarters of the coun- try, ‘Albania has from 50 to 100 per cent less arable land per capita’,17 compared to other Balkan countries. In the 1950s, Albania was importing 50–60,000 tonnes of grain annually from the Soviet Union and other East European countries to meet its needs. Collectivization was postponed until the mid-1950s but it was then introduced mercilessly and without regard to the consequences. Intimidation of the kulaks surpassed even the ferocity of the Romanian campaign.

The combination of agricultural neglect and the ideological con- flict with the Soviet Union almost proved fatal to Albania’s fragile economy in the early 1960s. There was both an economic and a political aspect to its steady alienation from the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. Politically, Khrushchev’s revisionism was anathema to Hoxha. The Albanian leader was especially offended by Khrushchev’s denigration of Stalin, Hoxha’s great hero, in the Secret Speech in 1956. More pragmatically, Khrushchev’s policy implied an end to absolutist rule in Tirana which Hoxha would not contem- plate. Mehmet Shehu best summed up Albania’s attitude to the Soviet Union’s collective leadership when he told Mikoyan with alarming candour: ‘Stalin made two mistakes. First, he died too early and second, he failed to liquidate the entire present Soviet leadership.’18

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On the economic front, Khrushchev’s programme of a ‘socialist division of labour’, devised in the late 1950s, required Albania to concentrate on agricultural production. The Albanian leadership saw this as an attempt to roll back its industrial achievements. Hoxha later remembered one of his economic summits with Khrushchev:

‘Fish,’ he [Khrushchev] said, ‘is another great asset for you. In the Scandinavian countries, in Norway, for example, they have created great wealth with fish . . . The question of citrus fruit is important for you,’ he said. ‘They, too, should become a great asset for you, because lemons, grapefruit, oranges, etc., are in great demand.’ These were his instructions for the ‘construction of socialism’ in Albania . . . Now everything was becoming more clear. The Council of Mutual Economic Aid [Comecon] recommends that we solve the economic problems with Khrushchev. Khrushchev recom- mends that we solve them with cotton, sheep and with . . . the miracle of fish!’19

Insulted by these suggestions and fearful of what Soviet revisionism might do to his domestic omnipotence, Hoxha was quick to side with the resolute leadership of the Chinese. Every time Albania broke with a communist partner, however, severe consequences soon followed. The Soviet Union cut all economic cooperation with Albania. By the early 1960s, Tirana was importing almost 100,000 tonnes of grain annually from the Soviet Union. Much of Albania’s industry, especially its only foreign-currency earner, mineral extrac- tion, was dependent on Soviet engineers and technology. The Chinese provided ideological consolation for the Albanians but the technological and economic assistance they offered could not com- pensate for the stagnation and then decline of the Albanian infrastructure. As the standard of living fell in Albania during the 1960s, Hoxha began to feel unsure of his position. To restore confi- dence, he resorted to repression and, taking his lead from the Chinese, announced Albania’s ‘cultural revolution’ in 1966. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the reduction in tension between the United States and the Soviet Union that followed the Cuban crisis

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led to a modest liberalization. But for Albanians, the mid-1960s heralded a period of grim ideological rectitude.

In 1967, Hoxha seized on a so-called ‘popular demand’, first made by school students in Durrës, to transform Albania into the world’s ‘first atheistic state’. This resulted in the closure of all churches and religious institutions and the arrest of clerics. A decade later, the Albanian leadership took this philosophy to an absurd conclusion:

A decree, dated September 23, 1975, and published in Gazeta zyrtare in Tirana on November 11, 1975, stated: ‘Citizens who have inappropriate names and offensive surnames from a pol- itical, ideological, and moral viewpoint are obliged to change them.’ The decree added that persons affected by the edict were expected to comply with it voluntarily and that those who did not would be given ‘appropriate names’ by social organizations in their locality.20

No amount of state-organized repression, however, could resist the independent vigour of youth. The 1960s saw the maturation of a generation with no direct experience of the war. The Partisan strug- gle had been a key source of political legitimation for the communists, but its ubiquitous glorification meant little to young Albanians in the 1960s. Their rebellion was modest even by East European standards. By 1970, hair was growing a little longer; Beatles’ records were played at parties, particularly those thrown by the children of the ‘red bourgeoisie’:

It was . . . a sort of dissent and it started mainly among these communists’ children. We wanted to hear foreign music. I started to write and to read foreign authors who were not allowed here like Sartre and Camus . . . Then I went to work in a factory among the working class. It was the first time that I have seen them with my own eyes. You must remember that at the time we assumed that the best people were the proletariat. Intellectuals, students, on the other hand, they were people with defects! And when I saw the workers – poor people, ignorant people, frightened people – I began to be in touch with Albania’s reality and my first reaction was, ‘I have been cheated!’21

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There was no organized opposition in Albania, but the circles of café intellectuals and students quietly raising forbidden issues grew wider. At the same time, Hoxha had launched an attack on ‘conser- vatism and bureaucratism’ in the Party and among intellectuals. One consequence was a half-baked Maoist programme whereby writers and artists ‘volunteered’ to leave Tirana for the countryside in order to learn from the masses. But some dramatists, novelists and even Party members took it as a signal to experiment with progressive ideas. The ensuing liberalization in the arts, which lasted from 1969 to 1972, would have been imperceptible to all but the keenest obser- ver of Stalinist systems. But it did appear that Hoxha was distracted temporarily, probably by illness, thereby allowing a gentle ferment of ideas. By 1972, he believed that matters were running out of con- trol. In January 1973, he unexpectedly attacked the head of Albanian Radio and Television, Todi Lubonja, a Central Committee member and former President of Albania’s Union of Labour Youth. Lubonja’s crime had been to organize a music festival in Tirana which Hoxha labelled ‘degenerate’. A campaign against liberalism was launched in the press, and in June, Lubonja and Fadil Paçrami, a highly respected dramatist and former Minister of Culture, were stripped of their Party membership and expelled from Tirana.

At 5 o’clock in the morning on 25 July 1974, a year after the expulsions, three men knocked at the door of the Lubonja house- hold in Lezhë, 65 kilometres north of Tirana on the road to Shkodër. Instead of asking for Todi Lubonja, they asked for his twenty- three-year-old son, Fatos, a student of theoretical physics at Tirana university. ‘They assured me nothing was wrong, that I was only required for some discussions in Tirana and that then they would bring me back’,22 Fatos recalled. They drove him in a Chinese-built jeep to a charmless modern building in Myslim Shyri street in cen- tral Tirana. Fatos had already begun to suspect that it was a serious matter because his minders would not even allow him to urinate on his own. When he met his two interrogators in the police station, it dawned on him how grave his situation was – they refused to shake his hand, a striking breach of custom. It emerged that in the Sigurimi’s zeal to destroy his father, its agents had searched the attic of Fatos’s uncle and found the young man’s personal diaries. Here he detailed his clandestine thoughts and the books he had read. From this interrogation, he was taken to a solitary confinement cell

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where he was kept for five months before being sentenced to seven years for ‘agitation and propaganda’.

Fatos, however, did not see outside the walls of a prison or labour camp for seventeen years, and had it not been for the collapse of communism he would have remained inside for even longer. With just over two years of his original sentence left to serve, Lubonja was embroiled as a ‘defendant’ in a bizarre trial. In 1978, at the labour camp where he worked in a coalmine, he heard how two inmates had sent a letter to Hoxha demanding a change in Party policy. He heard nothing more of the incident until six months later when he was taken without explanation from his prison camp to Tirana and again placed in solitary confinement. Within weeks, and with little idea what was happening, Lubonja found himself in the dock alongside the two letter writers, Fadil Kokomani and Vangjel Lezho, and accused of belonging to their ‘counter-revolutionary organization’. In May 1979, two years before his release date, he was sentenced to another twenty years of forced labour in appalling conditions merely for being in the wrong labour camp at the wrong time. Hoxha had long since decided the fate of Lubonja’s co- defendants, Kokomani and Lezho. Nothing testifies to the surreal insanity of Hoxhaism more than the two men’s literal sentence: ‘to be sentenced to death by shooting and deprived of electoral rights for five years’.23

‘In Albania, dissidents did not exist’, Fatos Lubonja explained after the collapse of communism led to his release. ‘There is a differ- ence between a dissident and a victim of the régime. A dissident is someone who has the possibility to enlighten other people, to express his opinions, maybe to go to prison but to inspire others and to make a choice. While in Albania, we were just victims which means we did not inspire others but were instead people whose experiences instilled fear into others.’24 For those caught in the web of the Sigurimi, the experience was comparable with Stalin’s Great Terror of the 1930s. Yet this régime of labour camps, arbitrary arrests, beatings and shooting continued until 1990, over three dec- ades after Khrushchev’s secret speech, five years after the death of the last old-style Soviet leader – and the Berlin Wall already a memory!

As Lubonja learned to his cost, Hoxha’s fear of domestic enemies increased when relations with Albania’s ally began to deteriorate.

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The 1970s saw the end of the relationship with the Chinese. Just as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union had withdrawn all aid and techno- logical assistance overnight, the Chinese just disappeared in the late 1970s, leaving only bizarre traces of their once eternal friendship. In 1989, the language labs at Tirana University displayed row upon row of yellowing posters, each detailing the position of the mouth and tongue required to make a particular sound in Mandarin. These were by far the richest teaching aids available to the department for a language no longer taught there. Each time Hoxha rejected a father figure, he replaced him with one whose ideological creden- tials were more extreme but whose economy was even less well attuned to Albania’s requirements. When the Chinese went, there was nobody left to meet Hoxha’s esoteric ideological criteria.

Over a forty-year period, Albania’s infrastructure became neces- sarily autarkic. Its detachment from world or even regional commerce and technological developments became more stark – its heavy industrial bases produced material and goods for which there was no market, either externally or internally. Travelling through the countryside for the first time in 1989, foreign visitors were con- fronted with rusting, Dickensian monstrosities, vandalized and purposeless – great monuments to Hoxha’s twisted vision.

Albanians who lived either in the former Yugoslavia or in the United States were ambiguous in their attitudes to their homeland during the Hoxha period. The dictator had, after all, ‘succeeded in making Albania a truly independent country – no mean achieve- ment for a small state whose modern history was replete with examples of domination, perpetual insults, and repeated attempts at dismemberment by its more powerful neighbours’.25 Yet as the extent of the trauma inflicted on Albanians under Hoxha became clear, and as the disastrous impact of his policies of terror and iso- lation on Albania’s social psychology emerged during the 1990s, it became hard not to accept another Albanian’s assessment that ‘the chief mark of national sovereignty is the will to preserve and increase, within the framework of a truly independent state, those elements which make for the individuality of the nation. Communist Albania is the negation of that concept.’26

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Broz vs. Djilas: Yugoslavia

Geo-politics and nationalism created profound differences in the nature of the communist régimes in the Balkans. This was not always obvious: on the surface they shared the grey bleakness char- acteristic of one-party states; but Yugoslavia was genuinely distinct – here the government and Party enjoyed a level of popular support unimaginable in its three Balkan neighbours.

After the break with Stalin in 1948, Yugoslavia developed a unique set of policies that, within a decade, transformed it into one of the most respected international actors outside the two power blocs. In 1955, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia buried the hatchet by ‘normalizing’ their relations on the basis of full equality. After this, no communist country enjoyed such warm relations with the West while being acknowledged as a full, yet independent member of ‘the socialist camp’. Yugoslavia added to its prestige five years later by founding the non-aligned movement, which brought together many countries of the developing world, initially in pro- test at the manipulative practices of the two superpowers.

This peculiar status bestowed unexpected benefits on Yugoslavs. Their passports allowed them to cross more borders without visas than any other passports in the world. Yugoslav construction and engineering firms competed successfully for contracts in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the developing world. Westerners were welcomed along the Adriatic coast, where Croatia built up a lucrative tourist industry. In the 1960s, the gap in living standards between Yugoslavia and its Balkan neighbours, Romania and Bulgaria, grew ever wider – a fact that gave Yugoslavs enormous pleasure. The Americans and West Europeans looked favourably at Yugoslav applications for aid and loans. Yugoslav workers took jobs all over Western Europe, mainly in West Germany. The number of Yugoslavs using the freedom to travel to seek political asylum was negligible. The régime at home was liberal enough to prevent the mass alienation so obvious in Czechoslovakia or Romania. And when UDBa, the country’s powerful secret police, did crack down on dissent (as it often did), the government easily escaped western censure thanks to its liberal reputation. The West turned a blind eye to human- rights abuses because its strategic planners were confident that

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Yugoslavia would declare for NATO in the event of a war with the Soviet Union and its allies.

From afar, Yugoslavia appeared a remarkable success story – highly respected, stable and independent. All these qualities were embodied by the country’s leader, President Tito. No European communist leader after Stalin projected authority like he did. His wartime heroism as chief of the Partisans was trumpeted not just by official propaganda but by ordinary Yugoslavs, and by distin- guished British ex-SOE officers like Sir Fitzroy McLean. Alongside drab and inarticulate men like Zhivkov and Gheorghiu-Dej, Marshal Tito radiated self-confidence. Unlike them, he had not been installed by the Red Army. His forces had not only liberated Yugoslavia from the Germans, the new government had stood up to Stalin. Imre Nagy in Hungary and Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia enjoyed popularity as communist leaders for a few months. Tito boasted broad support among the Yugoslav peoples for almost four decades.

Tito was born Josip Broz on 7 May 1892 in Kumrovec, a Croatian village close to the Slovene border in Zagorje, Zagreb’s northern hinterland. Although his family lived in the village’s larg- est house, his father had difficulty making a living, like most Croatian peasants at the turn of the century. The endemic poverty of the region left a deep impression on Broz, which affected him for the rest of his life. His mother was from a wealthier peasant family over the border in Slovenia. During the long periods spent with his maternal family, Josip acquired fluent Slovene (a southern Slavonic language closely related to Croatian) and a taste for hunting and fishing. With only rudimentary education, Broz left Kumrovec in his mid-teens, and became an apprentice locksmith in Sisak, 40 kilo- metres south-east of Zagreb. He was seen as a skilled young worker, something of a dandy. He attempted to improve his social standing by buying a suit; later, in Vienna, he took dancing lessons. He was delighted by the variety of urban life and took great pride in his appearance.

Until the outbreak of war, Broz worked in many parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During this time, he came into contact with socialist ideas and union activities. He received his call-up papers in 1913 and was serving as an NCO when war was declared. Until his death, he erased all mention from his official biography of

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his first posting on the Serbian front.* But he was soon transferred to the Russian front, where his courage and concern for the men under his command indicated a gift for leadership. Badly wounded, Tito spent the next two years in prisoner-of-war camps before escaping to witness the revolution in St Petersburg.

Tito entered the new Yugoslav state for the first time in late 1920 accompanied by his young Russian wife, who was exceptionally beautiful by all accounts, and a baby son, Žarko. His return coin- cided with the new Serb-controlled government’s decision to ban the Communist Party and all its affiliate organizations. Tito drifted into cooperating with the illegal Party three years later. His quick thinking and his capacity for hard work made him an ideal conspir- ator. He contributed much to the survival of the Croatian Party before being tried for his illegal activity and sentenced to five years imprisonment in 1928. His carelessness in getting arrested probably saved his life, for after the imposition of King Aleksandar’s dicta- torship in January 1929 the authorities unleashed a brutal attack on the illegal Communist Party. Many of its leaders were killed while those who fled to Vienna or Moscow were swallowed up in destruc- tive factional struggles.

By the time Tito was released in 1934, there was little left of the communist movement in Yugoslavia. He was eventually sent by the Party to join the émigré leadership in Moscow, where he attended lectures at the Comintern school. His time in the Soviet capital in the mid-1930s was among the most terrifying of his life. Fear stalked the long corridors of the Hotel Lux, the build- ing which housed the members of fraternal parties attached to the Comintern. The NKVD watched and listened; nobody knew when they left the Lux in the morning whether they would be returning that evening. Stalin liquidated the leadership of the Polish Communist Party in its entirety. Apparently irritated by the incessant factional quarrels among the Yugoslavs, he also murdered most of their leadership. Tito was fortunately of peas- ant origin, free of the stigma associated with the intellectuals. In Moscow, he behaved with great caution and was diligent and modest in his opinions, all qualities which helped him escape the attention of the NKVD. By the time he returned to Yugoslavia in

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the late 1930s, he was among the few senior communist activists left alive by the Yugoslav and Soviet police.

In his mid-forties, on his arrival home, Tito gathered together a group of committed activists from several parts of Yugoslavia. The new leader soon came to depend on five comrades. The first was an exception in being Tito’s contemporary – the Jewish newspaper- man, Moša Pijade. But the others were all young and in awe of Tito, whom they nicknamed ‘Stari’, the Old Man. The paternal figure nurtured his brood and their particular skills – Edvard Kardelj, an energetic but meticulous lower middle-class achiever from Slovenia; Ivo Lola Ribar, a flamboyant free-spending upper-class Croat, pas- sionate about the cause (had he not died during the Second World War, he would probably have been anointed Tito’s successor); Aleksandar Ranković, whose round Serbian peasant face masked the organizational ability of a ruthless policeman; and Milovan Djilas, an enthusiastic young student and would-be man of letters from Montenegro.

Each acolyte made up for deficiencies that Tito perceived in him- self. Tito had never been an intellectual. He had taught himself the classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism sufficiently well to turn out propaganda brochures and inject socialist dogma into his speeches at Party meetings. But he relied on Kardelj and Djilas for the ideo- logical stiffening of the Yugoslav régime, especially after the break with Stalin in 1948. Lola Ribar had style and social grace, something to which Tito aspired all his life but never properly achieved. He could rely on Ranković to get things done and to anticipate prac- tical problems before they arose. For the duration of the war and immediately afterwards, these were Tito’s family. After the loss of Lola Ribar, the three younger men Djilas, Kardelj and Ranković – vied for his affection and favour.

In the immediate postwar period, Tito and his inner circle dili- gently advocated Stalin’s policies, assuring the Yugoslav people of the Soviet leader’s omniscience. The break with Stalin in 1948 trans- formed the Yugoslav dictator from being a ‘little Stalin’ into a figure of genuine historical significance.

By saying ‘No!’ to Stalin, Tito stood on his own two feet for the first time in the world of politics. And henceforth, his glit- tering political leadership was no longer a mere reflection of

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Stalin’s sun . . . From that moment on, Tito now represented the sun for most Yugoslavs . . . Serpens nisi serpentem come- derit non fit draco – a snake cannot become a dragon until it has eaten another snake.27

Standing up to the most powerful communist power in the world, however, did not turn Tito into a democrat. He was undeni- ably adored by many Yugoslavs, but he never considered putting his popularity to an electoral test. Had he done so, he probably would have won comfortably. The result might also have under- mined his self-image, which demanded unquestioning approval: the entire political structure in Yugoslavia was dependent on Tito’s belief in his own infallibility. And his achievements were real. In a short period after the war, he established a kind of harmony among communities emerging from the bloodiest imaginable civil conflict. He instilled pride in a small country that, even by European stand- ards, had suffered inordinately during the first half of the century. And for the first time in the region’s history, a majority of the popu- lation enjoyed economic prosperity under his rule.

Yet these advances were dearly bought. Yugoslavia’s fratricidal conflict had left the new régime a national question of unpreced- ented complexity. By 1948, the country was involved in serious disputes about territory and minorities with five neighbours – Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania. In addition, relations between Croats and Serbs and Albanian–Serb tensions in Kosovo posed a latent threat to domestic stability. National or regional con- flict did indeed erupt in different guises during Tito’s rule. But nationalism in Yugoslavia before his death in 1980 was not the blunt instrument seized on by Presidents Milošević and Tudjman of Serbia and Croatia to bludgeon their opponents in the late 1980s. Tito was, however, inclined to regard any form of national self- assertion as an inherent threat to the state. Instead of accommodating legitimate expressions of national identity, his pre- ferred solution to the problem was to suppress it, or, worse still, to neutralize one nationalism by pitting another against it.

But nationalism was just one aspect of a more complicated prob- lem. At its heart lay the impenetrable relationship between centrifugal and centripetal forces in the decision-making structures of the League of Communists and the Yugoslav state. After the

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break with the Soviet Union, two of Tito’s closest advisers, Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas, persuaded Tito that Yugoslav commun- ism had to develop an ideology distinct from Soviet socialism. If it failed to do so, Kardelj and Djilas argued, then it must follow logi- cally that the break with the Soviet Union was nothing more than an old nationalist or imperialist conflict. As such phenomena were foreign to socialism, the two men reasoned that the dispute must have been ideological in origin. They gave birth to ‘self-manage- ment’, Yugoslavia’s unique contribution to socialist theory.

‘Self-management’ proposed the devolution of economic deci- sion-making away from the political centre to the shop floor. Workers’ councils should be involved in decisions concerning the distribution of investments and profits in an enterprise. The idea was reasonable enough, yet the implications of self-management were far-reaching and potentially subversive, for it appeared to undermine democratic centralism – the Leninist core of every com- munist dictatorship. It did not take long for liberals inside the League of Communists (LCY)* to appreciate that this theory could become a powerful instrument in pressing for reform. Tito always reacted cautiously to the prospect of major change. But at times he did embrace reform and democratization, only to reject them when he sensed that they might undermine his political power. This made Yugoslav politics a hazardous business. ‘The people would just begin to adjust to the democratic euphoria of the leadership’, the Croat reformer, Miko Tripalo, has observed, ‘when the period of the “iron fist” would start. Then it would all get going again with utopian promises.’28

Devolution from the centre also raised the issue of the rights and powers of the six federated republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia) in relation to central government. The national question frequently became entangled in the struggle between liberals and conservatives within the LCY. Until his death in 1980, Tito was the final arbiter in the countless clashes on this battle-scarred field. He had a remarkable political acumen and cunning, but he lacked the vision needed to find a long-term solution to the country’s unique constitutional

* The Yugoslav Communist Party changed its name in 1952 to appear more open and to differentiate itself from Soviet-style parties.

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problems. Self-management and autonomy were not sacred. Tito’s power and prestige were.

Tito had already adopted some regal habits during and immedi- ately after the war. Following his successful defiance of Stalin and the Soviet Union, these became more pronounced. In nineteenth- century Serbia, the Karadjordjević dynasty had introduced the practice of the monarch’s becoming godfather to the ninth son of a family, in remembrance of the nine Jugović sons who died at the battle of Kosovo in 1389. Serbia at the time had less than three mil- lion inhabitants. Tito revived this in Yugoslavia, a country with almost twenty million inhabitants, still predominantly rural, and, in the spirit of emancipation, he accepted female children as well. He soon found he had more godchildren than he could count, all demanding special privileges and rewards. He became bored with this particular tradition after two decades and gave it up. But it illustrated how Tito’s presidency owed more to the paternalistic relationship of peasant and master in the Balkans than it did to modern republican and civic culture.

A new constitution, promulgated in 1963, stipulated that no elective office, including the presidency, could be held for longer than two terms. In the proposal drawn up by the Constitutional Commission, ‘there was one exception’, as its Chairman, Kardelj, admitted, ‘and that concerns comrade Tito whose period in office should not be limited by any electoral considerations. I must add that comrade Tito vigorously opposed this proposal but the Commission did not consider his objections. The Commission . . . was merely bestowing on comrade Tito in the name of the nation and the working people of Yugoslavia the deserved recognition . . . for the decisive importance which his work has had for our socialist society.’29 It was not enough for Tito to be granted absolute power for life. He had to pretend that he assumed the responsibility reluc- tantly – another sacrifice for his beloved people.

Above all, Tito’s megalomania manifested itself in his passion to acquire costly things. Tito accepted Rolls Royces, villas, paintings and jewellery and other gifts from the citizens of towns and regions throughout Yugoslavia; countless acres of choicest forest land were reserved for his hunting parties. At his magnificent villa on the Adriatic island of Brioni, Tito established his own zoo, where game was raised for his hunts. The more powerful he became, the more he

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withdrew into his castles and houses scattered in every republic – summer villas, winter residences, town houses, spa retreats. And walls were erected around all of them. As Tito became more convinced of his infallibility, he withdrew into a world of reclusive luxury.

Milovan Djilas and his new wife Štefica were watching Citizen Kane (of all films) at a Belgrade cinema on the evening of 5 January 1954. ‘Suddenly Security agents came up to me in the darkness’, Djilas wrote in his memoirs, ‘and said softly that I was to step out- side. Thinking my arrest imminent, Štefica came out, too. I was told to go and see Kardelj at once at his home on Užička Street.’30 When he arrived at Kardelj’s villa, Djilas found Ranković there too. The meeting turned into a perverse farewell from the two men with whom Djilas had made up Tito’s trusted triumvirate since the war. Making it plain to his old comrade, Djilas, that he was finished, Kardelj contemptuously brandished a copy of the speech he would deliver in a few days to the Central Committee denouncing Djilas’s supposed treachery.

Djilas’s crimes were contained in a series of theoretical articles which first appeared in November 1953 in the Party’s main news- paper, Borba (The Struggle). These had begun as the usual indigestible treatises on ideology, but after a month Djilas changed tack by raising the issue of self-management and what it implied for the Party. For self-management to work, Djilas concluded, the Party had to loosen its grip on the economy and society. Warming to his theme over the next few days, Djilas struck at the heart of commun- ist dogma. He demanded that UDBa, Ranković’s secret police, be held accountable for its actions. He even suggested the establishment of an opposition movement to the LCY. And he attacked the grow- ing influence of the bureaucracy in uncompromising terms. His conversion to democratic principles appeared to take place over a matter of days but, as he later insisted, his disgust at the hypocrisy of Yugoslav communism had accumulated over several years.

Inspired initially by the search for an ideological justification of the break with the Soviet Union, Djilas had uncovered an obvious truth (but one which was hard for Yugoslav communists to admit): that Tito had broken with Stalin but not with Stalinism. While the dictator could allow a modest pluralism of ideas within the Party, he could not tolerate any real moves towards democracy. When chal- lenged by Djilas, his brightest disciple, Tito had no choice but to

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destroy him. The warning to others was unambiguous. Tito humili- ated his old friend in public at a specially convened Central Committee Plenum in January 1954, broadcast on Yugoslav radio, at which many of Djilas’s friends and colleagues lined up to cast stones:

Tito probably sensed that the atmosphere was fast turning into the sort of badgering and provocation that had characterized the Moscow trials. That is why, before the afternoon session on the first day, he said to me, ‘We are going to behave humanely toward you, not vindictively.’ But the speeches strung out, each more frenzied and bloodthirsty than the last. Tito’s own brutal intransigence and Kardelj’s theoretical underpinning had burgeoned to a level of savagery that per- haps even they had not wanted.31

The treatment of Djilas made it clear for the first time since the split from Moscow that Tito would not countenance democratization either of the Party or of society. He had a further reason for punish- ing Djilas. After Stalin’s death in March 1953, both Belgrade and Moscow indicated a desire to ‘normalize’ relations between their two countries and restore some unity to the socialist world. Djilas ’s radical proposals strengthened the conservative forces in the Kremlin around Molotov, who was arguing against normalization. Tito’s tough reaction to Djilas bolstered Khrushchev and his sup- porters, who advocated the re-establishment of relations with Belgrade. Molotov conceded the point and later even suggested that each side name a scapegoat for the split of 1948. ‘We’ll blame Beria and you can blame Djilas!’32 In the hot-house atmosphere of Stalinist communism, single personalities could be made to bear the weight of countries.

Before Djilas’s expulsion, Kardelj had warned him that his arti- cles and his assault on the Yugoslav Party were ‘premature’. Other liberals in the Party attacked Djilas for putting back the cause of liberalism and democratization ‘ten years’ by alerting Tito too early to the growing momentum for change in the Party. Nonetheless, when the decade of political stagnation that followed Djilas’s arrest ended, the banner of liberalism was raised once again and this time it was not just one man engaged in a lone struggle – entire repub- lican leaderships had joined the fray.

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Broz vs. Ranković: Yugoslavia

By the time he reached his fiftieth birthday in November 1959, Aleksandar Ranković’s hair was two-tone in colour. It was dark black on the crown and silvery grey on the temples and sides. His posture was awkward and he had difficulty smiling. With his baleful features, his resemblance to Bela Lugosi in his most famous role as Dracula is striking. Ranković certainly had enough blood on his hands to qualify for the part. He had ordered the liquidation of thousands at the end of the war and had never flinched from wield- ing ‘the sword of the Party’, UDBa, in the service of communist orthodoxy. But, like Count Dracula, there was an element of tra- gedy to Ranković. Most who knew him well, including many he betrayed, were unable to hide a lingering affection for Comrade Marko, as he was known to his fellow Partisans. On occasions, it seemed as though he had taken on his role as Tito’s chief execu- tioner with a heavy heart, aware that as an uneducated tailor’s apprentice from central Serbia, he did not have the intellect needed to grapple with the complex theory that exercised the mind of his colleague, Kardelj. When Yugoslavia’s first strike broke out at the Trbovlje mine in Slovenia in 1957, Tito called Ranković and asked him to suppress the disgruntled workers by force. ‘Oh yes’, sighed Ranković after he had put the phone down, ‘if the old man needs to have some ideological problem explained, he calls in Kardelj. But whenever he needs someone to get his hands dirty, it’s always, “Go on, Marko! Off you go!”’33

Ranković may have had his private doubts but he carried out his tasks with exemplary diligence. By the mid-1960s, UDBa had files on the private and political lives of millions of Yugoslav citizens. Arbitrary arrest, torture and imprisonment were all part of UDBa’s arsenal in the battle against subversion. In traditionally unruly areas like Bosnia and above all Kosovo, its writ was unchallenged and brutal. In the mid-1950s, Ranković deduced that Albanians in Kosovo were planning an uprising so he ordered a province-wide search for weapons. Like Ranković, most of UDBa’s officers were Serbs. The confiscation of weapons soon turned into a violent Serb nationalist campaign which left a number of Albanians dead and many more in prison. Ranković’s régime of state terror in Kosovo was the opening and most important move in a postwar game,

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characterized by dramatic changes in the province’s political life. The relationship between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo has a longer history of violence than any other in the former Yugoslavia. Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks got on tolerably well during the Titoist period, but in Kosovo violence was never far from the surface.

UDBa’s Serbian nationalism was blatant in Kosovo. Elsewhere, there was an effort to disguise it by the employment of Croats, Slovenes and Muslims, but even so the percentage of Serbian offi- cers was overwhelming in every republic. Ranković himself was less a Serb nationalist than a fanatical ‘unitarist’. He believed that all power should remain in Belgrade (where possible, in his own hands) and that republican capitals, like Zagreb, Ljubljana or Sarajevo should act as cyphers charged with carrying out orders from the centre. ‘Unitarism’, or ‘conservatism’, therefore became readily associated with Serbian nationalism: both aimed to preserve a status quo that favoured the Serb elite. It is true that there was much cross- fertilization between Serb nationalists and conservatives in the Party, but the two were not synonymous. There was a strong band of conservatives in the LCY in both Slovenia and Croatia, and an important liberal faction in the Serbian party.

The presence of so many factions within the LCY showed how far the Yugoslav Party had moved compared to its counterparts elsewhere in Eastern Europe by the early 1960s. The modest eco- nomic liberalization of the late 1950s had bolstered pluralism in the Party. Soon, political change was moving faster than the economic reforms, which were in fact rather hesitant. The market was uncharted territory for a planned economy and Tito remained sus- picious of capitalism. In 1961, after several years of encouraging expansion, the economy went into reverse. The news spread panic through Yugoslavia’s elite, compounded by the emergence of such non-socialist phenomena as strikes, unemployment and inflation. Party leaders immediately asked the question, ‘Was the crisis a con- sequence of too much reform or too little? Do we liberalize the economy still further, or do we apply the brakes?’

These questions triggered a great debate in the LCY which lasted almost three years. Ultimately Tito would decide the outcome but not before hearing out his many colleagues. Vladimir Bakarić, the most senior Croat in the Party (aside from Tito himself), urged a radical overhaul of the economy and a thorough implementation of

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self-management, with full decentralization. Croatia and Slovenia were the most developed republics and had the most productive industries. By the mid-1960s, Croatia’s exports, its tourist industry and its migrant workers accounted for over 40 per cent of Yugoslavia’s foreign-currency earnings. But in the centralized econ- omy, foreign currency and revenue from taxes were collected and distributed by Belgrade. The banking system was dominated by three large Belgrade banks and foreign trade was regulated by import–export firms in the Serbian capital. The Croat liberals wanted individual republics to exercise greater control over earn- ings, and to wean Belgrade’s central planners off large-scale projects that consumed the bulk of the country’s investment resources. This was in effect a demand to impose local control over the transfer of wealth from the north-west of the country, Croatia, Slovenia, Vojvodina and northern Serbia, to the poorer regions – Bosnia, Montenegro, southern Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia. The Croat proposals triggered lively discussions throughout the country. Factions lined up in every republic to applaud or attack the sug- gested reforms, or to put forward novel ideas of their own. Surprisingly, the Croat communists received warmest support from the Macedonians, represented by two dynamic young leaders, Krste Crvenkovski and Kiro Gligorov. Coming from an extremely poor part of Yugoslavia, the Macedonians were not motivated by eco- nomic imperatives but by a desire to balance Serbia’s influence in the federation.

This policy debate in the Party and the republics challenged Yugoslavia’s totalitarian power structure, which was dominated by Ranković. He ran the mighty UDBa, but he was also Organizational Secretary of the LCY, a position equivalent to the inspectorship which Stalin used in the 1920s to gain control of the Soviet state and Party. So confident was Ranković of his position that he barely fol- lowed the details of the reform discussions. He simply used his network to block practical moves towards reform, resulting in the continued stagnation of the economy. The democratizing principles of self-management were thus at odds, if not in full collision, with the Stalinist mechanisms that had survived the Tito/Stalin split. (Ironically it was during the Party purges against Stalin’s supporters between 1948 and 1952 that UDBa and Ranković consolidated their grip on Yugoslav society.) Only Tito had the authority to break the logjam.

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After a two-year period of reflection, Tito decided to move against Ranković. His decision was apparently influenced by the extent of UDBa’s power. After receiving intelligence regarding UDBa abuses, Tito convened a commission, chaired by Crvenkovski, to investigate its activities. Most famously, it emerged that Ranković had been bugging the entire leadership of the LCY for years. From his home in the grand suburb of Dedinje, where the top Party hierarchy all lived, ‘Ranković could listen in on all the telephone calls in the houses with lower numbers, including Tito’s in number 15. With a switch in his bedroom, he could relax and simultaneously eavesdrop on his colleagues in the top leadership.’34 News soon spread that he had placed a listening device in Tito’s bedroom, a revelation which came to symbolize the whole affair. In fact, the investigating commission found no evidence that any device had been placed in Tito’s house.

It did, however, uncover a staggering abuse of power. Ranković had Yugoslavia’s entire foreign service under his control. Diplomats or businessmen who refused to cooperate with UDBa were recalled and sacked. Many of the smuggling rackets which channelled west- ern consumer goods on to the black market were UDBa operations. Its officers were responsible for the ‘misappropriation of public property for private uses, private gambling casinos and forced labour by prisoners in the construction of villas for UDBa officials’.35

A Central Committee meeting, still known in the former Yugoslavia as the Fourth Plenum, was convened on 1 July 1966. Here, the commission revealed Ranković’s secret kingdom. In one closed discussion with top leaders, Kardelj apparently remarked, ‘I had noted years ago that my telephone was being tapped.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ snapped Tito. ‘I thought you might have ordered it,’36 Kardelj replied quietly. His observation begged another question: how much did Tito actually know of Ranković’s activities? Although he feigned ignorance, the evidence suggests that Tito was better informed about UDBa than most. Before Tito con- vened the Party commission to investigate Ranković, he had already ordered another organization to gather all the relevant material. This organization was KOS, the military intelligence service, UDBa’s only serious rival, which happened to be run by Croats. As head of the Party commission investigating Ranković, Crvenkovski repeatedly requested that KOS be subject to investigation as well.

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The Macedonian leader suspected that the military intelligence ser- vice was also too powerful and was involved in similar rackets to UDBa’s. Tito categorically refused these requests. UDBa itself was purged, but Tito neither disbanded nor reorganized it, and after a few months, it was revived as the core of Yugoslavia’s repressive state apparatus. Tito’s purpose had never been to dismantle state security. His aim was to destroy Ranković, the second of his three ‘sons’ to betray him. No evidence suggests that Ranković was actu- ally trying to oust Tito, but the secret police chief’s accumulation of power was clearly designed to guarantee his position as Tito’s unchallenged successor. The succession was a prerogative which Tito guarded jealously; Ranković paid the price for daring to encroach on it.

The Fourth Plenum was also Tito’s final answer to the question of whether economic liberalization should be accelerated. The end of the arch unitarist, Ranković, was a clear signal in favour of eco- nomic reform – a decision of great moment. The next six years were the most crucial in the country’s postwar history, offering the pos- sibility of a historic compromise between Serbs and Croats and the other nationalities of Yugoslavia.

Broz vs. the liberals: Yugoslavia

On 2 June 1968, the Caravan of Friendship, a satirical review, rolled into Belgrade. Students at the city’s university were invited to view the comedy along with a group of workers from a voluntary labour brigade. At the hall of the Workers’ University in New Belgrade, however, there was insufficient room to accommodate both stu- dents and workers. A brawl broke out. Rocks were hurled, windows broken, there were injuries on both sides and general panic set in. Before long, forty riot police arrived and attacked the students:

The crowd gathered in front of Bloc 1 gets larger all the time. The police hem them in this area with batons and water cannon from the fire engines. Suddenly the news spreads that a stu- dent has been killed. The students, outraged at the behaviour of the forces of law and order, push back the riot police and commandeer a fire engine . . . By now, there are some three thousand students in the square. Speakers atop the fire engine

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say that they will formulate their demands and present them to the Federal Parliament that same night.37

The university was occupied within a matter of hours. After Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Prague, Belgrade raised the banner of stu- dent rebellion: ‘Bureaucrats: Hands Off Workers!’, ‘More Schools, Fewer Cars!’, ‘Workers – We Are With You!’, ‘Our Demands Are Your Demands!’ Some slogans were specific to the East European experience – ‘Down With the Red Bourgeoisie!’ or ‘There Is No Socialism Without Freedom, No Freedom Without Socialism!’38 – but with minor adjustments they might have been heard and read anywhere across Europe that year. It was the very similarity of these demands to those made elsewhere that made them so astonishing – for the first time in Yugoslav history, a political protest movement took to the streets making no reference to the national question.

The feverish atmosphere of 1968 and the heavy influence of the new Left on the faculty of Belgrade University contributed much to the movement, but there were pressing domestic reasons for the students to raise issues of economic and social injustice. Yugoslavia was three years into a programme of radical reform. The excep- tional discrepancy in development between the rich north and the poor south of the country meant that the economic liberalization unveiled in 1965 had to be accompanied by a devolution of political power from the centre to the republics. Devolution not only affected the state but the Party as well. The upshot was sheer chaos – nobody knew who was responsible for decision-making. Government virtually seized up. The only people benefiting from the reform were the Belgrade bankers and businessmen who retained a firm grip on the economic rudder. The government, by contrast, was hopelessly adrift, allowing this ‘Red Bourgeoisie’ con- siderable space for its money-making activities. In Belgrade’s fashionable city centre the clothes and cars were reminiscent more of Milan than of Bucharest or Sofia. The stark inequalities of the new economic policy offended the students’ idealism.

The workers resented them too. With government stagnating, the only person who understood the potential danger was Tito. He showed his charisma and political cunning to the full in a televised fireside chat – a ‘tour de force by an understanding but stern grand- father asking for help to build a better future for his family’, as the

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American scholar Dennison Rusinow described it.39 Tito disarmed the rebellious students by backing their main demands. He adopted their youthful rhetoric in articulating his irritation with ‘obstruc- tionists from the Party, who are violating socialist norms of behaviour’. Appealing to the egalitarian instincts of the protesters, he called for ‘immediate action to help the low income workers who had so far borne the heaviest burden of the economic reform. Such action would fulfil the students’ justified demands.’

Tito had no intention of carrying out his promises. But that was not the point – he had defused the crisis, resurrected his prestige in the eyes of ordinary people and reminded all squabbling factions in the LCY where ultimate authority in Yugoslavia rested. He was especially concerned to underline this last point, as the country was in a state of confused transition of which the student strike was just one manifestation.

In March 1967, the first serious dispute between Serbs and Croats in over twenty years had broken out. A broad spectrum of Croat intellectuals had published the Declaration concerning the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language. This rejected the Novi Sad Agreement of 1954 which had regulated the literary lan- guage of Serbo-Croat or Croato-Serb. The Croat intellectuals argued that by choosing the Serbian variant as the literary language, the Agreement had relegated Croatian to the status of a regional dialect, thus ignoring its rich literary history. Serb intellectuals responded by conceding some of the points made in the Declaration but demanding special rights for Serbs outside Serbia, especially in Croatia.

Particularly awkward for Tito was the signature of the Croatian writer, Miroslav Krleža, arguably south-eastern Europe’s greatest intellectual of the twentieth century. Tito invited Krleža to his villa in Belgrade and asked him to withdraw his support for the petition (Krleža was probably the only person in Yugoslavia whom Tito would feel uneasy ordering about). Refusing to change his mind, Krleža resigned instead from the Croatian Party’s Central Committee. ‘If I withdrew my signature’, he told the Croatian leader, Miko Tripalo, ‘they’ll all say: “Look at the old monkey. Now he’s making out that he didn’t realize what he was signing!”’40 Other leading intellectuals were purged or lost their jobs. The most prominent victim was the energetically abrasive

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director of Zagreb’s Institute for the History of the Workers’ Movement, Dr Franjo Tudjman.

The Declaration was a product of the euphoria that the fall of Ranković had occasioned in Croatia. It was a taste of things to come throughout Yugoslavia. In November 1968, it was the turn of the Kosovo Albanians. After years of humiliation and discrimination at the hands of Ranković and his UDBa operatives, Albanian students rioted and Priština, the provincial capital, rocked with violence. The security forces were ordered by the Serbian leadership (with Tito’s approval) to quell the disturbances, but some of the Albanians’ grievances were addressed. For the first time, Albanians were granted real representative powers on both Serbian and federal bodies. The Albanian language emerged from the ghetto and, before long, textbooks and other publications from Albania proper flooded the schools and libraries of the province. The assumption that Ranković’s dismissal would be gratefully received by submissive Albanians was mistaken. An articulate younger generation domi- nated the university in Priština and was hungry to assert Albanian national rights.

The most important consequence for Bosnia of the erratic polit- ics of the late 1960s was the opportunity it gave to a group of young Muslim scholars and communists to force the process which led to Muslims being granted the status of nationhood. Throughout Yugoslav history, the Muslims had been treated dismissively by both Serb and Croat ideologues as apostate members of the dominant Slav nations. The latest manifestation of this theory assumed that in a secular society like Yugoslavia, the Muslims would increasingly regard their religious identification as anachronistic and at last make the correct choice by joining either of the two larger nations. But like the Albanians in Kosovo, the Muslims were beginning to find a voice that corresponded to their growing maturity as a modern nation. The Yugoslav state first recognized the Muslims as a separate nation in the 1963 constitution, although the relevant clause was ambiguously formulated. It spoke of Bosnia as a republic inhabited by ‘Serbs, Moslems, and Croats allied in the past by a common life’.41 This definition excluded the Muslims of the Sanjak, the former Ottoman region divided between Serbia and Montenegro, but it was a start. It was not until 1968 that the Bosnian League of Communists finally recognized the Muslims as a constituent nation

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of Yugoslavia (as opposed to a minority), a move confirmed by the LCY a year later. At the time, the Muslims’ campaign for recogni- tion was ‘part of an attempt to avoid the historical competition between Serbs and Croats for the loyalties of Muslim cultural, intel- lectual, religious and, especially, political leaders’.42 Its authors could not have known that it would be turned around by Serb and Croat politicians two decades later as a way of trying to annihilate the Muslims.

In 1969, it was the turn of the Slovenes to take to the streets. The International Bank had given Yugoslavia a loan for a motorway net- work. The Slovene leadership had been led to expect that it would receive funds to build a motorway from Nova Gorica to Ljubljana, opening up the Italian market for Slovenia and for Yugoslavia as a whole. The Serbs and Croats instead diverted the funds for their own road-construction programmes. The entire reform programme seemed to be directed by the Serbs and Croats at the expense of all other republics. Above all, the fear that this was the case influenced the thinking of Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene and the last remaining member of Tito’s triumvirate still in power. A strong coalition between Serbs and Croats might jeopardize Kardelj’s position as successor to Tito. It might even jeopardize the position of Tito himself.

The sudden process of political fragmentation meant that eco- nomic problems, like the Slovene road-building crisis, also assumed a national dimension. Politicians soon discovered how easy it was to add to their popularity by appearing to defend national interests. As a consequence, those economic and social problems less readily associated with national grievances were neglected. Two of these, however, were to have a long-term negative influence on Yugoslavia’s stability, and ultimately a big impact on the national question when the country collapsed in the early 1990s.

The first was the perennially insoluble question of the peasants which, by the late 1960s, had assumed a new guise. The successful expansion of industry and of employment opportunities in towns and cities had encouraged large numbers of younger peasants to leave the countryside for higher wages and a more stimulating social life. Yugoslavia was developing a sophisticated and cosmopolitan culture, especially in centres like Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade. The films of the Belgrade director, Dušan Makavejev, were now

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appearing in European art houses while a new generation of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian film-makers were returning from Prague armed with the technical and narrative secrets of the Czech new wave. Sarajevo, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb all produced musicians and rock bands, like Bijelo Dugme (White Button) and Atomsko Sklonište (Nuclear Bunker), whose influence would stretch beyond Yugoslavia’s borders, attaining cult status in both Eastern and Western Europe. Yugoslavia became a key intellectual entrepôt between East and West, as the philosophers of the group around the journal Praxis invited their colleagues from Warsaw Pact and NATO countries to exchange critiques of Stalinism and capit- alism over meals on the sunny Adriatic island of Korčula. Large sections of Western Europe’s liberal intelligentsia took their holi- days in Yugoslavia or participated in educational exchange programmes. For liberal westerners, this was a balmy communism which most felt they could support with a good conscience.

While hundreds of thousands of peasants were drawn to the cities, the new urban sophistication also served to underline the growing social gap between town and country. Mutual antipathy between rural and urban communities in Yugoslavia grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not a well-documented phenomenon, attracting little comment, but its impact on the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s was enormous.

By 1967, over 2.5 million peasants had left the countryside but it was still home to 48 per cent of the Yugoslav population. With the emigration, productivity slumped and the peasant population began to age. Tax revenues in rural areas began to decline and with them locally financed social services. In the mid-1960s, the cities approached saturation point. Young peasants continued to stream towards them but the work began to dry up. ‘The country’s politi- cians, with the sociological ignorance or irresponsibility common in their profession, talked blithely of sending surplus labour back to the farms. Instead, as in many other Mediterranean countries, the surplus migrated to Western Europe in search of the urban employ- ment it could not find at home, partly relieving the pressure at the critical moment but not solving the problem.’43

That emigration to the labour markets of Western Europe was welcome in many respects. It provided substantial hard-currency remittances for a country which was rapidly expanding trade ties

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with the European Economic Community but which did not have a convertible currency of its own. And it brought cultural benefits for the Yugoslavs, exposing its peoples to western culture. It also, of course, soaked up the surplus labour which the Yugoslav economy could not absorb. But it brought great dangers too. According to official Yugoslav statistics, there were 800,000 migrant workers in Western Europe by 1969, ‘nearly 22 per cent of total domestic employment, both public and private’.44 In the event of a downturn in western economies, particularly in West Germany, a large number of those workers would inevitably be thrown back on the Yugoslav labour market. This is precisely what happened after 1973 and, like all other East European countries except Czechoslovakia and Albania, Yugoslavia borrowed huge sums from western banks to tackle the problem. The national debt proved an especially mis- chievous ingredient in the pressure cooker which Yugoslavia became in the 1980s.

Vladmir Bakarić, Tito’s most faithful and competent lieutenant in Croatia, bears more responsibility than any other politician for pla- cing economic reform and decentralization on the agenda before and after Ranković’s fall. Croatia’s role in the developments between 1966 and 1972 was paramount. Its intellectuals suffered a defeat when Tito refused to accept the central tenets of the Declaration concerning the Name and Position of the Croatian Literary Language, but this turned out to be a temporary setback. The fer- ment of intellectual and political activity could not be stopped. Tito still publicly identified ‘unitarism’ (for many non-Serbs a code word for Serbian nationalism) as the greatest threat to Yugoslavia’s harmonious development until the very end of 1971. Croatian cul- tural nationalism was ipso facto regarded as a valuable ally in the battle against ‘unitarism’.

This was confirmed at the Tenth Plenum of the Croatian League of Communists’ Central Committee held in January 1970. Miloš Žanko, a conservative, came under sustained attack from Party members for a series of articles he had written for the Belgrade- based Party newspaper, Borba, entitled ‘There is Method in this Nationalist Madness’. Žanko argued that the groundswell of Croatian national sentiment was the first stage in a plan to destabil- ize Yugoslavia and bring down socialism. The Croatian Party was now led by an energetic young woman, Savka Dabčević-Kučar,

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while its representative in the Executive Committee of the LCY (effectively its Politburo) was a former teenage partisan and head of the Yugoslav Youth Movement, Miko Tripalo. These two had embraced the growing freedom of the press in Croatia and wel- comed the participation of non-communist organizations in debates on economic and political reform. Chief amongst these groups was the Matica Hrvatska. This club had promoted Croatian culture since its creation in the 1840s, at roughly the same time as equivalents like the Serbian Matica Srpska and the Czech Matica Česká. Moribund for most of the communist period, the struggle over the Declaration imbued the Matica Hrvatska with a new sense of mission. At the Tenth Plenum, Žanko singled it out for particular criticism. But instead of being applauded, he was rounded on by fellow delegates, suggesting a historic victory for the liberals in the Party. Tito’s atti- tude was decisive. Monitoring the proceedings by telephone, he gave Dabčević-Kučar specific authority to lead the charge against Žanko. There could be no clearer signal for the Croatian Spring to begin.

In many respects, the cultural and political renaissance which swept across Croatia from 1969 until December 1971 was compar- able to the liberalization in Czechoslovakia that ended so dramatically with the Soviet-led invasion of August 1968. In Croatia, newspapers like Vjesnik u Srijedu (Vjesnik on Wednesday) were transformed from stodgy Party mouthpieces into vibrant investigative journals, full of critical articles about subjects con- sidered taboo for more than two decades. Hrvatski tjednik (Croatian Weekly), the weekly newspaper published by Matica Hrvatska, which was founded in early 1971, soon had a circulation of over 100,000. After the Tenth Plenum, membership of the Matica reached over 40,000 by the end of 1971 with new branches opening every week.

The idiocies of communist dogma were a favourite target of intellectuals, journalists and even some radical Party members in Croatia. But it became quickly obvious that the national question encroached on the discussion of almost any issue. ‘Unitarism’, as a political ideology, had a cultural twin, ‘Yugoslavism’. According to this, Yugoslavs’ primary cultural identity was defined by their common experience of statehood in the twentieth century. This implied that one’s narrow nationality – Croat, Serb or whatever – was secondary, an interesting regional adjunct to the Yugoslav

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identity. Croatian history which veered from Yugoslav ideology or the mythology of the Partisan struggle was simply not studied. This meant that the national question, the complex relations between Serbs and Croats in both Yugoslav states, had been systematically ignored.

Unmuzzled, newspapers like Hrvatski tjednik wanted to know why ‘even in Zagreb, the capital . . . there were 56.5 Serbs and 40.8 percent Croats on the city police force in 1971’,45 when Serbs made up but 15 per cent of the republic’s population. Awkward questions like these touched on the most delicate sensibilities. For the largely rural Serb population in Croatia, numerical supremacy in Croatia’s security forces was a guarantee against any resurgence of Ustaše ideology. For the Croats, it was a permanent reminder that Yugoslavia had never escaped its Greater Serbian origins. This con- undrum lay at the heart of Yugoslavia’s national question: the status of Croats as a minority in Yugoslavia, and of the Serbs as a minority in Croatia.

After the Tenth Plenum in January 1970, participation in politics suddenly broke the narrow bounds of Party and intelligentsia. ‘This development, the broad activation of all sections of the population in political life, took me and everyone else by surprise’, admitted the Croatian communist leader, Miko Tripalo. ‘It was particularly noticeable in 1970 when discussions on the changes to the constitu- tion began. Ordinary people were simply no longer prepared to sit and listen to the wise words and advice of the leadership – they wanted to take part themselves in some way, just as the programme of the League of Communists claimed they could.’46 It was a source of pride to the Croat leadership that they presided over and encour- aged this intellectual flowering. This was democratic ‘self-management’ in action, Tripalo insisted. It was not an expres- sion of struggle between Serbs and Croats. ‘The origins of the conflict were socio-economic and the national problems emerged as a consequence . . . This was a battle between etatism and self-man- agement, between dogmatism and democratic socialist ideas.’47

That was not, of course, how members of the Serbian League of Communists (LCS) viewed matters. Tito reprimanded the LCS leader, Marko Nikezić, for holding a closed meeting of the LCS leadership. This was not Tito defending openness – he simply assumed that he would be the subject of any closed meetings.

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Nikezić dismissed Tito’s concerns: ‘if we had published what was said at that meeting, the Croats and ourselves would never be able to work together again’.

It was an article of faith among the reformist Croats that all obstacles in the way of progress had been put in position by the ‘unitarists, Greater Serbs, or Rankovićites’ in Belgrade. But this oversimplification ignored one crucial fact. In November 1968, control of the LCS had passed into the hands of two liberal Serbs, Marko Nikezić, a former foreign minister, and Latinka Perović, erstwhile chair of the Association of Yugoslav Women. They had accepted the logic of anti-unitarism and explicitly supported the encouragement of market principles in the economy; ‘liberation from the ballast of Serbian Yugoslavism; the promotion of trained and competent Party cadres; and cooperation not confrontation with other republics’.48 Furthermore, on a visit to Bosnia, Nikezić told a meeting of Bosnian Serbs that they should not address their grievances to him but to the Bosnian leadership, ‘which is your leadership’. Certainly, Belgrade newspapers wrote disparagingly about the resurgence of Croatian nationalism but just as the Croatian communists had relinquished censorship so too had the liberal Serbian leadership. Nikezić and Perović could claim with justification that Serbia was not interfering in Croatia’s republican affairs.

Disquiet about the Croat nationalist movement came from else- where. First, it came from unitarist Croats, like Žanko, but more significantly it came from Kardelj and hardliners in the military establishment, most importantly the federal Defence Minister, General Nikola Ljubičić. But by the middle of 1971, the activities of the Maspok, a contraction of the Croatian phrase meaning Mass Movement, had alienated the key figure in the Croatian communist establishment, Vladmir Bakarić. These three had little difficulty in persuading Tito that Tripalo and Dabčević-Kučar had lost control of the situation: policy in Croatia was now being dictated by the ideologues of Matica Hrvatska and the Croatian Party was limping behind. The so-called ‘excesses’, demands being made by extreme nationalists on the fringes of the Maspok, began to frighten liberal supporters of the Croats in other republics like Macedonia. Tito decided to act in December 1971, summoning the Zagreb leadership to his favourite hunting-lodge, Karadjordjevo in Vojvodina,

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denouncing their work and demanding their resignations. This was then followed up with a swift show of force by the police and army in Zagreb which led to hundreds of arrests and the subsequent imprisonment of ‘ringleaders’. Tito had reverted to standard tech- niques of communist repression. The democratic experiment in Croatia was closed down but liberalism was still alive in other republics, though not for long. Tito applied his cherished principles of ‘brotherhood and unity’, elsewhere in Yugoslavia. The Serbian leaders, Nikezić and Perović, were forced out in October 1972.

The leadership’s response to the Croatian Spring and the Serb liberals was a disaster for Yugoslavia’s future. Free from external interference for the first time in twentieth-century history, the elites were presented with the possibility of resolving their national problems by a steady democratization of the entire system. The true villains of the period were Tito and Kardelj, neither of whom (the latter in particular) welcomed reconcili- ation between the Serbs and Croats. An examination of their tactics towards the Serb and Croat leaderships between 1966 and 1972 reveals that they were playing off Zagreb against Belgrade, stirring up animosities in order to consolidate their own author- ity. Less than two years after the crushing of the Serbian liberals, Tito introduced a new constitution, the longest such document in the world, baffling in its complexity. It further eroded Belgrade’s constitutional dominance by devolving greater power to Kosovo and Vojvodina. But Croats did not regard this as a particular victory, as they had been denied their voice by what they believed was a Serbian conspiracy. Tito had driven both Serbian and Croatian nationalisms underground. When they emerged from hibernation in the mid- and late 1980s, they had lost their modernizing and liberal characteristics. It is hard to disagree with the prediction made in 1971 by the Serb commun- ist, Dobrivoj Radosavljević, a Tito loyalist, who broke ranks on just one occasion: ‘Tito committed a historical error by encourag- ing Albanian–Serb and Croatian–Serb conflict. Yugoslavia will pay a heavy price for it.’49

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The Father, the sun and the demiurge: Romania An entire people, not yet born, but condemned to birth in columns before birth foetus beside foetus, an entire people which does not see, does not hear, does not understand, but moves forward. Through writhing bodies of women, through the blood of mothers unconsulted.

Ana Blandiana, ‘The Children’s Crusade’, 198450

On 21 August 1968, troops from five Warsaw Pact countries vio- lated Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty, turning the Prague Spring into winter. As the Soviet-led forces were consolidating their positions, the leader of a sixth Warsaw Pact country, Nicolae Ceauµescu, mounted the podium in the Palace Square in Bucharest. The gawky General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party was never a good speaker, even after he had overcome the heavy stutter of his childhood. His delivery was monotonous, except when his nerves led him to stress the wrong words. Self-conscious of his rustic accent, he attempted to disguise his dialect, producing a curious hybrid that made the sophisticated audiences of Romania’s capital laugh. But on that sweltering August day in 1968, the large crowd before him was listening attentively to his every word. Their admir- ation and pride grew as he denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia as ‘a grave danger to peace in Europe, to the fate of socialism in the world . . . a shameful moment in the history of the revolutionary movement’.51

In his short, passionate address, Ceauµescu announced the for- mation of ‘armed patriotic detachments of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, defenders of the independence of our socialist home- land . . . The entire Romanian people will not allow anybody to violate the territory of our homeland.’52 The performance was gen- uinely felt. He had recently returned from a successful bilateral visit to Prague where, despite some private misgivings about the extent of the liberalization, he had publicly backed the Czechoslovak

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Communist Party’s right to map out its own road to socialism. Over the next few days, Ceauµescu and his fellow Party and state

leaders fanned out across the country to spread their message of resistance to the threat of Soviet invasion. The First Secretary him- self went to Transylvania – first to Braµov, Romania’s second industrial city, and then to Cluj. Everywhere in the mixed Hungarian/Romanian region, he was greeted with spontaneous enthusiasm by both communities. In Bucharest a group of young authors, notorious for their criticism of the Communist Party lead- ership, signed a declaration, expressing their ‘complete agreement with the position of the Party and of the Romanian government, as defined by Comrade Ceauµescu’. They swore to do ‘all in our power to defend our fundamental values, our country and the peaceful construction of socialism in our country’.53 Three of them, including a gifted young novelist from Bessarabia, Paul Goma, joined the Party on the same day.

Thousands of Romanians volunteered for the Patriotic Guard, lending substance to Ceauµescu’s promise that – in contrast to the Czechs and Slovaks – the Romanian people must resist aggression with force. In retrospect, a Soviet invasion of either Romania or Yugoslavia (whose leadership also felt threatened) seems most unlikely. But at the time, Romanian fears that they were next on the list were understandable. Relations with the Soviet Union were tense. Moscow had excluded the Romanians from two emergency Warsaw Pact summits before the Czechoslovak invasion. In such an atmosphere, Ceauµescu’s call to arms and his defence of the Czechoslovaks’ sovereignty transformed him almost overnight into one of the most popular figures in modern Romanian history.

Excoriated by the press of its Warsaw Pact allies, Romania took heart instead from the warm support offered by other countries. The United States indicated unofficially that NATO would go to war if the Soviets moved against Romania. The Chinese congratu- lated Ceauµescu for his principled stand. Even Enver Hoxha, who rarely had a good word for anyone, encouraged Bucharest to remain firm. Ceauµescu was careful not to push the Russians too far. He did not wish to give Moscow the impression that he was behaving pro- vocatively by creating a pro-Chinese bloc in Eastern Europe. ‘Nothing can hinder the good cooperation and friendship between Romania and the Soviet Union’,54 he reassured his ally just five days

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after the invasion. The Soviet leadership heard the message clearly – Romania would remain a loyal member of the camp. Ceauµescu had covered all bases: the Russians would not invade; the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, President de Gaulle of France and President-to-be Richard Nixon, were so impressed with his feisty independence that they all made the pilgrimage to Bucharest. At the age of fifty, his position in Romania was unassailable.

It was hard for the ‘little Stalins’ (or indeed the less tyrannical ‘little Khrushchevs’ of the 1960s) to establish political legitimacy in the people’s democracies. Democracy itself was clearly out of the question and so, as dictators are wont to do, they expended much energy devising other schemes to justify their power – anything that would disguise the fact that these powers were in truth guaranteed by the Red Army and the local apparatuses of terror. Władysław Gomułka’s appeal rested in his reputation as a victim of Stalinist persecution and as the reforming patriot of 1956. But as the 1960s wore on, Poland’s crusty dictatorship became ever more visible underneath this veil of legitimacy. Todor Zhivkov played the tenu- ous card of Bulgarian wartime hero but such popularity as he enjoyed lay in the indisputable truth that he was less ghastly than his predecessor, Chervenkov. János Kádár was despised by his people for siding with the Russians to crush the Hungarian revolu- tion of 1956. When his New Economic Mechanism, introduced in 1968, brought a little luxury into people’s lives the hatred gradually dissolved into indifference. Only the soulless Antonín Novotný in Czechoslovakia had the honesty to behave openly as an unrepre- sentative dictator installed by the Russians. He was finally ousted in January 1968 by Alexander Dubček, the only East European leader prepared to submit his work to popular scrutiny.

The case of Ceauµescu was more complicated. He had inherited his post from Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. In the early 1960s, Dej saw an opportunity to loosen the bonds that tied Romania to the Soviet Union. He was quick to understand how far-reaching the implications of the Sino-Soviet split were for the communist world; his primary reason for distancing Bucharest from Moscow was eco- nomic. According to Khrushchev’s plan for establishing an ‘international division of socialist labour’, Romania, along with Bulgaria and Albania, was to produce food for the Soviet Union and the north-east European states, which would produce industrial

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goods. Romania would remain mired in peasant backwardness, or so Dej and his colleagues saw it; their dream was to modernize Romania through industrialization. The Prime Minister, Ion Gheorghe Maurer, is reported to have said ‘Why should we ship our corn to Poland so that the Poles can fatten their pigs in order to buy machinery in the West, when we can sell our corn to the West and buy machinery that we need?’55

The people’s democracies were dependent on the Soviet Union for most of their mineral resources, above all oil. But Romania had its own oil. It also had natural gas, timber, bauxite, coal, manganese, copper, lead, zinc and uranium. And, if managed correctly, it was a bread basket as well. As Khrushchev was not prepared to support Romania’s industrialization, Dej looked beyond Comecon for sup- port – to the socialist mavericks, China, Yugoslavia and Albania, and the imperialists in the EEC. The impact on Romania’s foreign trade was dramatic. In the three years from 1964, Romania’s trade with the Soviet Union dropped from 42 per cent of the total to 27 per cent while Comecon as a whole accounted for less than half of its trade by 1967.

To underline Romania’s alienation from the Soviet Union, Dej ordered a spree of name-changing in the capital and other cities. One journalist recorded that ‘the A. Popov movie theatre became the Dacia; the Maxim Gorky, the Union. A Russian language insti- tute in the capital was closed and a large Russian bookstore demolished; the Rumanian edition of the Soviet propaganda monthly New Times was discontinued; schools dropped compul- sory Russian-language studies; Rumanian orthography was “re-Latinized,” eradicating the previous “Slavification” of the alphabet and of culture in general.’56 More provocatively, a Bucharest publishing house brought out a collection of material by Marx, hitherto unpublished, under the title Notes on Rumanians in which the father of socialism denounced Russia’s claim to Bessarabia (which had been incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1941 as the Soviet Republic of Moldavia).

Dej’s flag-waving was popular with ordinary Romanians. They warmed to him still further in late 1964 when he ordered an amnesty for several thousand prisoners, including many political detainees. The jamming of the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America also came to a halt and Romanian writers addressed politically

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delicate subjects for the first time. Three days after Dej’s death on 19 March 1965, Ceauµescu was elected First Secretary at a time of rising expectations. While appreciating the delicacy of the country’s geo-political position, Romanians wanted the new leadership to continue the experiment with liberalization and independence. At forty-seven, Ceauµescu was the youngest Party leader in the social- ist world. He was energetic and apparently aware of the travails of the average citizen. He was not, however, entirely in control of the Party and still had powerful enemies, none more so than the Minister of Internal Affairs, Alexandru Drăghici – the man who controlled the Securitate.

Even three years after Dej’s death, Ceauµescu was not yet in com- mand of the Party. Coalitions of ambitious colleagues in the Politburo and Central Committee made him feel insecure. In uncer- tain times, the Party became an arena of political struggle, and included elements of indirect democracy by reflecting differences within the dominant bureaucracy. The rival factions appealed to various constituencies for support. Ceauµescu flattered writers, journalists and other intellectuals. He spoke of the need for ‘social- ist legality’, which implied an attack on corruption and cronyism, but also on the use of terror by the Securitate. He told the Youth Union that its meetings were too boring and it should make itself more appealing to young people. Above all, he seized the weapon of nationalism, and lavished praise on the military as the guardians of Romanian independence. The Party’s popularity rose steadily with a notable improvement in the standard of living. Ceauµescu placed his own people in key Party positions, eroding little by little the power of Dej’s contemporaries.

During seven months of intense political activity from October 1967, he succeeded in outwitting all his rivals. His victory was sealed at a Central Committee Plenum in April 1968 when he secured the rehabilitation of Party members purged by Dej, most notably Lucreøiu Pătrăµcanu. He used the ‘revelations’ about Stalinist distor- tions to force his most powerful enemy, Drăghici, from the Interior Ministry.

Before the showdown at the April Plenum, a special Party Conference was held in December 1967, and agreed on major eco- nomic changes, including the decentralization of decision-making. The discussions were peppered with references to self-management

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and other heresies such as incentive payments and profit maximiza- tion. But Ceauµescu himself pointedly refused to countenance any relaxation of central planning. This did not prevent a brief flower- ing of private enterprise at the end of the 1960s: some private shops and privately owned restaurants were allowed to open. From 1967 onwards, Romanians could even build their own houses. New reg- ulations made it easier for Romanians to travel abroad, and police repression was relaxed.

As Ceauµescu’s power increased, the focus of his vision sharp- ened. He saw a Romania transformed from supplicant peasant state into an independent industrial powerhouse dominating south-east- ern Europe, and that it was his mission to realize this transformation. To succeed he would require complete control over the economy. The more convinced Ceauµescu became of his vision, the more remote was the prospect of economic liberalization.

On grounds of alleged efficiency, Ceauµescu also forced through a massive reorganization of Party and state administration at the December 1967 Conference. In principle, the duplication of posts at every level of government was, as Ceauµescu argued, a waste of time and money. But Ceauµescu’s motivation for introducing the change was primarily a desire to consolidate his political monopoly. This was effectively a Gleichschaltung, stripping state organs of any modest autonomy they may have wielded. An outgrowth of the reorganization was the campaign to restore ‘socialist legality’, to restrict the abuse of power and rein in corruption. Ceauµescu had begun to raise disturbing questions about the Interior Ministry and the Securitate: ‘It is no secret that certain outrages have been com- mitted over the years’, he wrote in Scînteia (The Spark), the Party newspaper. ‘The Penal Code must ensure the strict observance of socialist legality, so that nobody may infringe upon it in any way or commit abuses.’57 This was the preface to the assault on Drăghici. By opening an investigation into the purges carried out by the lead- ership in the middle and late 1940s, Ceauµescu compromised all his leadership rivals, who were implicated in the execution of Pătrăµcanu. The General Secretary himself, however, was appointed a candidate member of the Politburo two days after the murder of Pătrăµcanu in April 1954. He could reasonably claim that he was not involved in conspiracy to murder. When the Party later considered putting Drăghici on trial, the former Interior Minister issued a veiled

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warning that he would release material implicating Ceauµescu in a different but equally unsavoury murder case. Preparations for his arraignment were quietly dropped, the official explanation being that it fell outside the statute of limitations. This was only a minor setback, however. Drăghici’s removal from office achieved two goals: there were no more serious challengers to Ceauµescu, and the Securitate was now in the General Secretary’s hands.

With the exception of Czechoslovakia, where the reform had less than five months left to run, Romania was by far the most liberal country in the Warsaw Pact in April 1968. But in the guise of pro- moting reform, Ceauµescu had cornered immense power. Not so well known as his much-vaunted declarations of national independ- ence were moves that hinted at the obsessive character of the Ceauµescu ‘vision’. Most significant were a series of laws passed in 1966 and 1967 which banned abortion and made divorce and con- traception extremely difficult to obtain. This legislation was prompted by a steadily falling birth rate that threatened to under- mine the ‘vision’ of industrial growth dependent on a burgeoning young workforce. In the first two years after the ban on termina- tions, the birthrate leapt back up but began to decline thereafter as a widespread network of illegal and hence much less safe abortion clinics sprang up around the country. Campaigns against smoking and against the creeping influence of western culture on young people were also introduced, suggesting that Ceauµescu might not be as liberal as many Romanians and western journalists believed.

As we have seen, 1971 was a bad year for reform in Yugoslavia and Albania. Matters were no better in Romania. In June, Ceauµescu, accompanied by his ambitious wife, Elena, spent a month on an official visit to North Vietnam, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China. For a man whose self-image was assuming mes- sianic proportions, these societies were a revelation. In Pyongyang, ‘he was impressed with the monumental buildings and the neat layout of the large boulevards with endlessly similar apartment blocs – all tied up with the deified name of Kim Il Sung. From that time, Ceauµescu dreamed not only of rebuilding Bucharest in his own image but also of erecting a single monumental edifice that would symbolize his glorious epoch and be his legacy.’58 In China, seas of flag-waving children dazzled the Romanian leader, who loved the obsequious adulation bestowed on him and his hosts. Two

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aspects of the Cultural Revolution impressed him most: obedience and uniformity. The Czechoslovak crisis of 1968 was the height of Ceauµescu’s popularity; his trip to the Far East in 1971 saw his des- cent into a form of political madness, an irrational belief in his ability to transform totally a rural Balkan society. A month after his return, he posted his seventeen ‘theses’ on the door of the Central Committee. This was the start of Romania’s ‘mini-cultural Revolution’. A decade later, this new programme culminated in a social-engineering experiment without parallel in postwar Europe.

The theses shocked the generation of Romanian writers and art- ists who had eagerly exploited the liberal atmosphere of the 1960s. They interpreted the new line, officially adopted by the Party in November 1971, as a return to the Zhdanovite principles of socialist realism. The theses were indubitably a call to place art in the service of the Party, but in them nationalism was emphasized over social- ism. The General Secretary denounced ‘cosmopolitanism’ in art. In Stalin’s day this had been a code word for anti-Semitism. In Ceauµescu’s Romania, it sounded an ominous note for all ethnic minorities. The anti-Russian nationalism that had won support at home and abroad in 1968 was sliding steadily towards jingoism. Many prominent writers raised their voices in protest against the tightening of Party control over their work. But within a year, Ceauµescu had marginalized this opposition. A few, including Paul Goma, continued to speak out, marking the beginning of an isolated dissident movement.

A few months after the seventeen theses were enshrined in Party lore, Ceauµescu introduced his master stroke of political control – job rotation. Rightly fearful that he was despised by large numbers inside and outside the Party, Ceauµescu made it compulsory for functionaries to move to new positions on a regular basis. This ensured that nobody could build a power base from which he or she could launch an assault on Ceauµescu’s leadership. Rotation had several side effects. Politicians were never in one job long enough to develop any specialist knowledge; rather the administration was plagued by inexperience and incompetence. Fear of demotion also played a bigger role in the Romanian Party than anywhere else in Eastern Europe; and the constant toing and froing turned the krem- linology of Bucharest politics into an esoteric art. Naturally, the Ceauµescu family was exempt from the principle of rotation.

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In March 1974, in front of Romania’s elite and with millions more watching on live television, Nicolae Ceauµescu, wearing a sash with the national colours and bearing a ceremonial mace, took the solemn oath of the newly created office of President of the Republic. The establishment of the presidential decree as Romania’s supreme legislative act confirmed suspicions that Ceauµescu aspired to roy- alty in all but name. In fact, the ruling couple (Elena’s influence had grown enormously) enjoyed powers which earlier Romanian mon- archs would not have thought possible. As the cult of personality developed, fawning courtiers composed poems and meditations that described Ceauµescu as, inter alia, ‘morning star’, ‘sun’, ‘omniscient father’ and ‘titan’. Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a ferocious anti-Semite and nationalist, anointed him both ‘demiurge’ and ‘god’.

The extravagance of this dictatorship was without precedent in European communist history. With the exception of Tito (and even he was modest in comparison with the Romanian dynasty), the material aspirations of most Party leaders were bland and petit- bourgeois.

As Ceauµescu and his appalling coterie indulged its passions, life for ordinary people became progressively more miserable through- out the 1970s and early 1980s. Ceauµescu’s determination to industrialize the country rapidly led to serious distortions in the economy. The programme was financed in three ways: by diverting investment from agriculture; by lowering consumption; and, when petro-dollars glutted the market from 1974 onwards, by borrowing heavily from western banks and governments. These policies vic- timized almost everyone – peasants, industrial workers and the intelligentsia.

In his novel Refuges, published in 1984 and which the censor’s net inexplicably missed, Augustin Buzura portrays Romania in the late 1970s as a society whose members are so profoundly alienated and frightened that it can never be redeemed. ‘I am afraid of run- ning away, but also of staying, of roaring, but also of keeping silent, of living, but of dying too’, the central character, Ioana, reflects as she attempts to come to terms with her collapsing life. ‘I’m afraid of lying, but am unable to tell the truth. I’m afraid of the night, of light, of people . . . I fear everything! I’d stay here if I knew nobody would come . . . I’d leave if nobody looked for me, if they didn’t rec- ognize me, if I didn’t have to answer questions. Fear! She heard her

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hoarse, turbid voice and at that moment she felt an urge to pray, to abandon herself to somebody’s mercy, but no formula occurred to her.’59

Cowed by authority, the men in Buzura’s Romania are chronic alcoholics and abusers of women. The women are engaged in a battle on two fronts. Obliged to find sufficient food and money to ensure their family’s survival, on the one hand, they have to avoid their menfolk’s anger on the other. Male ambition, frustrated by a submissive relationship to the state, is channelled into violence against women. The village, the mainstay of Romanian society, dis- integrates as the Party’s authoritarian hierarchy allows local bullies to tear apart the delicate network of social relations in the country- side. In the towns, the pressure from above to produce and expand turns the factory managers and their employees into lazy and cor- rupt cynics. Set mainly in the psychiatric ward of a regional hospital, the most insane patient, who insists on being addressed as ‘Your Excellency’, has developed a social theory which aims to overcome all human frailties:

The FINAL UNIVERSE will avoid violence, criminality, alcoholism, gratuitous eroticism, indifference, dry, non-pro- ductive day-dreaming, idle time, doubt, delay, hesitation, meta-scientific desires, cowardice, abuse, terror, anarchy and all the other defects that have led us to the present crisis. The reduction of people’s height (by genetic methods), physical equality – except for basketball players – which will allow the consumption of utilitarian goods to decrease; this will increase the chances of mankind’s survival far beyond the limits compelled upon it by the almost exhausted sources of energy and the ever increasing population. This, of course, until they get used to the chlorophyll I have synthesized in the past years.60

‘“Whenever I see this man,” Ioana said, showing him [His Excellency] to the doctor, “I feel a chill creep up my spine. How many dead and maimed must be hiding in the darkness of his mind! How many consciences destroyed . . . And how many distorted, blinded infants doomed to psychic death stand in the shade of his apparently well-meaning laws?”’61

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Apart from Ioana herself, Buzura includes one other redemptive character, Helgomar David, a loyal Party member since the war. An engineer, he rebels against the state on behalf of the workers in the mine where he is employed. His colleagues are the victims of regu- lar accidents and, after one particularly unpleasant incident which leaves several dead, he fights for their families to be compensated. This was an elliptical reference to an extraordinary act of defiance in Ceauµescu’s Romania, the Jiu Valley miners’ strike of 1977.

From the early 1970s onwards, Ceauµescu expanded the role of the Securitate. By 1989, it employed an estimated 24,000 active service officers. But its foot soldiers were the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of informers who reported on the activities of citizens in every nook and cranny of society. The prisons, psychiatric units and torture sessions represented the sharp end of the Securitate, but made up only a small part of its activity. For most people, the terror con- sisted in the certainty that one of your close friends or family was informing on you, contributing to the detailed files that the Securitate opened on every citizen. ‘The first great socialist industry was the production of personal files’, one Romanian writer reflected. ‘In the socialist world, people and things exist only in personal files. The owner of [these] files is the owner of all existence.’62

The information could be used at any moment to have people sacked, to blackmail them into working for the police or simply to remind others that they were under constant surveillance. The only organization comparable with the Securitate was the Sigurimi in Albania. By the early 1980s, anybody owning a typewriter was obliged to register it with the secret police. The most insignificant conversation with a foreigner had to be reported to the Securitate. Failure to do so could have dire consequences – the loss of one’s job, eviction from one’s flat, one’s children barred from higher edu- cation. The organization’s invasion of private life even began to affect the bodies of Romanian women when, in March 1984, Ceauµescu announced a new campaign to increase the birthrate at a meeting of the National Women’s Councils. He told the delegates that to ‘breed, comrade women, it is your patriotic duty’.63 Under the supervision of the Securitate, all women of child-bearing age were forced to undergo a gynaecological examination every month to establish whether they had conceived or not. If not, the Securitate wanted to know why.

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In such an atmosphere, mounting a campaign of dissent was an enormous problem. Inspired by the Czechoslovak petition, Charter 77, Paul Goma decided to alert the President to the need to resist the Securitate’s régime of fear. ‘Mr. Ceauµescu’, he wrote, inviting the President to add his name to a letter of protest, ‘I realize that your august signature will never accept a place alongside the signa- ture of a simple citizen . . . And even if this miracle occurred, what could be done with just two signatures? . . . But where are [the others] going to come from? I already told you: the Romanians are afraid of the Securitate. It emerges that in Romania, only two people are not afraid of the Securitate: you and me. But, as I already said, with only two signatures . . .’64 Seven people did sign Goma’s open letter to the Belgrade follow-up of the Helsinki Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. They paid a heavy price. Goma himself was beaten and imprisoned, and only released after a campaign that attracted the support of Eugene Ionescu, Arthur Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre. He was sent into French exile.

The Jiu Valley miners’ strike was unrelated to the dissidents’ lonely gesture, but it showed how deeply unpopular Ceauµescu’s austerity programme had become. In the summer of 1977, miners were told that the pensionable age for their profession was to be raised from fifty to fifty-five. Working conditions were already atrocious, so when the decree filtered through to them 35,000 angry coalface workers occupied the plant.* They wanted the law rescinded and a reduction in working hours. A Politburo member and the Minister for Mines were sent to calm the men down but were taken hostage by them. They would only be released, the miners warned, if Ceauµescu himself came to talk to them. For the only time in his career, Ceauµescu had no choice but to respond to his subjects’ wishes. On arrival in the Jiu Valley, one eye-witness recalled how ‘Ceauµescu was totally taken aback by the sight of so many protestors. His eyes darted from right to left and he was clearly shaken by the scene . . . In an attempt to distort the reason- ing behind the decision to extend [the working day], he claimed that it had in fact been the Party leadership which had resolved to

* The people of Bucharest can testify to just how angry Jiu Valley miners can become, as they stormed the capital almost fifteen years later in an inglorious repe- tition of their 1977 militancy.

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reduce working hours but that this decision had met opposition from the miners. This insult to the miners’ intelligence prompted the reply: “It is not us! Bandits, thieves!”’65 Faced with a crowd of hostile, violent workers, Ceauµescu promised them the earth. Unwisely, the miners believed him. As soon as the President returned to the capital, he ordered a Securitate clear-up operation at the mines. Arrests, prolonged spells in psychiatric wards and a stra- tegic ‘suicide’ soon brought the situation under control. Two years later, 200 people across the country joined SLOMR, a free trades union modelled loosely on Solidarność in Poland. It was a bold, short-lived attempt to coordinate opposition activities in Romania but it was not long before the ‘ringleaders’ suffered the same fate as the leaders of the Jiu Valley strike.

Romanians have debated long and hard why opposition to Ceauµescu was so weak. Many reasons account for it. First, the power of the ruling clique had a long lineage in modern Romania. The Phanariot princes of the Danubian Principalities* gave way to the powerful Brătianu dynasty and the Hohenzollern monarchs. Then, the overwhelming majority of the population were peasants or at most first-generation immigrants to the town, and had yet to shake off the submissive peasant attitudes to authority. Desperate though their lives were, they enjoyed a higher standard of living in the new urban environment than they had in their villages. In ideo- logical terms, nationalism lent Ceauµescu’s régime a certain legitimacy, tapping into the xenophobia that had always played an important role in Romanian intellectual life. There was depressingly little evidence of resistance among Romanian intellectuals to the open season declared in the late 1970s on the rights of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania.

Even granting all this, the role of the terror and the Securitate should not be underestimated. The Poles, the Hungarians and the Czechoslovaks never faced a police apparatus of such brutal effec- tiveness. Furthermore, Western Europe and the United States can rightfully be accused of appalling ambivalence towards Ceauµescu. Despite evidence to the contrary, the West was convinced that Ceauµescu would remain neutral in the event of conflict between

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NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This flirtation with one of the nasti- est dictators in Eastern Europe climaxed with a state visit to Britain in 1978 when Ceauµescu was allowed to ride in the royal carriage with Queen Elizabeth II. The Royal Institute for Chemistry held a lunch in honour of Elena, who had constructed the fiction that she was a world-class chemist. In fact, she was barely literate. The Ceauµescus were received around the world as though they were enlightened royalty, the realization of their wildest dreams. (As late as 1987, I was told by the political officer at the US Embassy in Bucharest that the Reagan administration was determined to extend Romania’s most-favoured-nation trading status as ‘in the event of war, we think we can turn him’.) This cynicism on the part of NATO members had a deeply demoralizing effect on Romania’s opposition.

In 1982, the International Monetary Fund demanded further aus- terity measures in Romania as a condition for rescheduling the debt, which had climbed by then to $13.2 billion. Western economic agencies were less convinced of Ceauµescu’s reliability than their political counterparts. Ceauµescu deeply resented having to concede to external pressure, and resolved not only to meet the interest repayments but to pay off the principal by the end of the decade (he succeeded in doing so by March 1989, six months before his demise). This meant an even more concerted assault on living stand- ards. With chronic food shortages plaguing the country, Ceauµescu introduced the ‘Rational Eating Programme’, which he justified by claiming that Romanians were eating too much. He ‘set limits on per capita consumption for the period 1982–85. The programme reduced calorie intake limits by 9–15 percent . . . Following these guidelines, the dietary programme for 1984 . . . set allowances even lower than the “scientific plan”.’66

In the winter of 1987, gas consumption in Bucharest was set at two hours a day. It was often not distributed at all. I recall visiting apartments where families were wrapped from morning till night in coats and blankets, teeth chattering in dark rooms. In the bleak city centre, the markets offered a few rotten potatoes and carrots while the largest showcase supermarket could supply only Portuguese anchovies and a processed cheese from France called ‘La vache qui rit’. As the population scavenged for essentials, an architectural monstrosity, the House of the Republic, was emerging from the

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ruins of three historic districts in the centre. Some 40,000 people were evicted from their homes to construct this hideous folly, sired by Stalin out of Metropolis. With disarming honesty, Bucharest’s chief architect explained to me in 1987 that ‘people just get in your way when you are building – it is so much easier without them’.67 Fourteen old Orthodox churches and a synagogue were among the structures razed to make way for the largest public building in the world after the Pentagon. ‘Only the sixteenth-century Mihai Vodă church and bell-tower survived, being moved 225 metres in 1985 to be hemmed in by new tall blocks of flats.’68

In March 1988, Ceauµescu announced his plans for ‘systematiza- tion’, his scheme to destroy up to 8,000 villages and herd the inhabitants into purpose-built ‘agro-industrial complexes’. Over 300 communities were uprooted – in some instances, villagers were given two days to demolish their own homes or wait for the bull- dozers. If they chose the latter course, they received no compensation. ‘Systematization’ provoked an outcry both in the West and inside Romania itself. By this time, Romania’s role in western strategy was diminishing rapidly because of the new influ- ence of Mikhail Gorbachev in East–West relations. Indeed, on a visit to Bucharest in May 1987, Gorbachev had made clear his dis- pleasure at Ceauµescu’s now archaic policies of repression. Ceauµescu had lost his ability to read the international situation. Instead of attempting to adapt to the new spirit of cooperation and openness, he resorted to ever more extreme forms of authoritarian- ism. He failed to understand that he could only sustain his maverick Stalinist nationalism as long as there existed a fundamental hostility between East and West. Gorbachev’s decision not to resist the revo- lutions in Hungary and Poland in the summer of 1989 ensured that Ceauµescu’s independence became irrelevant. This was the supreme irony: the policy that had set Romania apart from its allies in the bloc was entirely dependent on the continued existence of the bloc. By the autumn of 1989, it was clear that the entire system was dis- integrating throughout Eastern Europe.

Enosis – taksim: Greece and Turkey From the price of rice to roads and tourist sites, there is not a single problem in this country which is not related to national security. If

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you happen to be a very deep thinker, that too is a matter of national security.

Orhan Erkanl∂, fourteen years after he had taken part in the May 1960 coup d’état in Turkey69

Since the consolidation of Atatürk’s revolution in the 1930s, Turkish politics ceased to be involved in the Balkans and the peninsula’s regional concerns. Istanbul and Izmir remained the great commer- cial centres. But it was the swift growth in the size and importance of Ankara that emphasized the shift in Turkey’s political culture as its people strove to fashion a post-Ottoman identity. Kemal had placed the capital in the interior as a snub to Istanbul, but also for strategic reasons. Later, the government ordered the construction of key primary and secondary industrial complexes deep inside Anatolia, away from the coast. This further underlined the Kemalist determination both to reduce Turkey’s economic dependency on the great powers, and to stay aloof from armed conflict. The coun- try harboured no active territorial desires against its neighbours; its army had been exhausted by the First World War and the Greek- Turkish war; and conflict would have placed further unwanted strain on an already lopsided economy. In this light, Turkey’s neu- trality during the Second World War was the crowning achievement of Atatürk’s successor, ∑smet ∑nönü.

But wartime neutrality allowed many Turks to scrutinize the single-party or ‘mono-party’ régime, as the rule of Kemal’s Republican People’s Party, the RRP (Cumhuriyetçi Halk Partisi – CHP), became known. On inspection, they found the RRP wanting in almost every respect. Despite being at peace, Turkey suffered from the same disease that had afflicted it during the Great War – rampant speculation. A small group of businessmen and bureau- crats made tremendous profits while most people toiled hard for scant reward – Turkey had to adjust to an external environment in which trade was hampered and distorted by the global struggle. ∑nönü’s government made no attempt to tackle the chronic imbal- ance in the economy. Instead, he sustained this kleptocracy by expanding the police force and encouraging the widespread intimi- dation and repression of citizens, regardless of their ethnic origins. ‘Everybody had problems with the police’, remembered Yaµar Kemal, Turkey’s best-known novelist. ‘If one villager could not pay

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his road tax, or the taxes on his fields, the whole village would be punished. It had become a tradition.’70

It was as much the victory of the Allies as internal pressures that persuaded ∑nönü to announce a relaxation in the RPP’s monopoly after the Second World War. The New Order of European fascism had been discredited and ‘democracy’ was the word favoured by both East and West, even if interpretations differed in Washington and Moscow. Unnerved by the Soviet Union’s apparently aggres- sive attentions towards its territory, Turkey welcomed western aid; it became the main local recipient of such support together with Greece, under the Truman Doctrine of 1947.

Democracy was not included in the six principles of Kemalism – Republicanism, Nationalism, Populism, Statism, Secularism and Revolutionism/Reformism. These commandments had been added to the constitution in 1937 and were represented on the RPP’s emblem by six arrows. Of course, such broad categories were suf- ficiently amorphous for the National Leader, or ∑smet Paµa as ∑nönü was called colloquially, to accommodate democracy if need be. After the war, he followed Kemal’s example and allowed the forma- tion of a loyal opposition, the Democrat Party (DP), under the control of the RPP. In fact, the DP, originally designed to defend the country’s nascent bourgeoisie and its landowners against state inter- ference, proved much more popular than the régime expected. Within four years, it had gathered a huge following, including the impoverished peasantry and artisan classes. The DP’s dramatic suc- cess in the vote of May 1950, in which they won 408 seats to the RPP’s 39, can be ascribed in part to the winner-takes-all electoral system and in part to the political decrepitude of the RPP – people were simply fed up with it. After twenty-seven years of control during the crucial formative years of modern Turkey, Kemalism, not as an ideology but as an organized political force, was dead.

The first four years of DP rule were a celebration of this political death. Turkey revelled in its liberation from the shackles of the bureaucracy and the military. A dynamic young entrepreneurial class now joined forces with the big landowners to replace them as the two main pillars of the Turkish elite. The new philosophy of economic liberalism, promising to open Turkey to the outside world, was of course welcomed by the Americans. The new gov- ernment was rewarded in several ways for its unabashed

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pro-western policies. Substantial aid continued to flow into the country, prompting an unprecedented mechanization and expan- sion of agriculture. The first half of the 1950s saw living standards rise for most Turks. Mechanization in the countryside encouraged further emigration to the cities. In a matter of years, the gecekondu (literally ‘built-by-night’), sprawling shanty towns, altered an urban physiognomy that had remained stable for centuries. Along with American friendship came American influence. With the zeal of a convert, Adnan Menderes, Prime Minister for a decade from 1950, dispatched 25,000 Turkish troops to fight in Korea. Most Turks felt the sacrifice was justified. They had only to cast their eyes across the Black Sea to Romania and Bulgaria to observe that American influence was unquestionably preferable to the Soviet embrace. Given its strategic position in the Cold War, Turkey would have found continuing neutrality a difficult option in any case. Within a generation, the DP trumpeted, Turkey would be a ‘little America . . . with a millionaire in every district’.71

After sending its troops to Korea, Turkey was admitted to NATO in February 1952. This move had an enormous impact on the country, giving a psychological boost to the modernizers. As well as providing security from Russia, it was a recognition of Turkey as an equal partner with the West. From the beginning, Kemalism as an ideology embodied a tension about Turkey’s rela- tionship with the Occident. Atatürk had been an unashamed admirer of western civilization and progress, the road that promised to lead Turkey out of agrarian backwardness and primitivism. But he also valued economic autarky and isolation as a way of protect- ing Turkey from the marauding economic practices of the West. This ambivalence was embedded deep in Turkey’s cultural and pol- itical life. In the 1950s, however, the decision to join NATO and the early benefits of the DP’s economic reform gave a decisive lead to the westernizers.

Some things did not change. For all the free-market ideology of the DP, most Turkish entrepreneurs, like their counterparts in Greece, were reluctant to invest in large projects, preferring instead the small business that would produce reliable if modest profits year in, year out before being handed down to the next generation. Nor did western capitalists show much interest in investing in Turkey. ‘As a result, between 40 and 50 per cent of investment had

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to come from the state, all the liberal rhetoric notwithstanding.’72 The second stubborn legacy of RPP rule was political intoler-

ance. Despite its name, the DP would not brook organized opposition. It began by humiliating the RPP and then stripping it of its financial assets. The DP’s anti-state rhetoric, so important in winning electoral support, proved a fiction as the Party’s most influential member, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, passed legis- lation muzzling the press, placing severe restrictions on academic freedom and banning all political activity on the factory floor. These measures were introduced before the DP won its most spectacular election victory in 1954, reaping the rich harvest of the economic boom. With 56 per cent of the vote, the Party was allotted 503 seats in the Assembly to the RPP’s paltry 31.

Menderes interpreted the victory as a mandate to govern without restraint. As production fell in both agriculture and industry, he opted to print money to continue funding the rise in living stand- ards. He doggedly refused to tax his main backers, the landowners, ‘who together earned more than a fifth of the GDP, [but] paid only 2 per cent of the total tax revenue’.73 In order to offset the resulting inflation and the ever-widening trade deficit, Menderes visited the international money markets. By 1960 the debt was $1.5 billion, an enormous sum at the time. As Menderes lost control of the eco- nomic situation, the intelligentsia, the bureaucracy and, above all, the army began to lose patience. They had been politically sidelined by the DP, and their material circumstances had either stagnated or declined while the wealth of the country was growing so conspicu- ously.

It was Menderes’ neglect of the army that sealed his fate. The very existence of a modern Turkish state was intimately linked to the military. Both Kemal and ∑nönü had made their reputations as sol- diers, and during the war against Greece in 1922–23 the army had fashioned a clear image of modern Turkish identity. The army was the guardian of secularism, yet at the same time it was the one endur- ing and unquestioned link with Turkey’s glorious imperial past. A visit to Istanbul’s superb military museum (to judge by appearances, the best-funded in the city) makes clear that the Turkish army sees itself as the inheritor of the great Ottoman war machine. The young men who entered the army as a career in the 1930s and 1940s were sorely disappointed by the Menderes government. Not only did

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they earn comparatively little, they were treated with contempt. ‘Everywhere they were treated like second class human beings’, recalled Alparslan Türkeµ, a junior officer during the DP’s adminis- tration. ‘In Ankara, people had labelled basement flats “Staff-Officer flats.” In places of entertainment officers were nicknamed “lemon- aders” because they could not afford to order expensive drinks and compete with the black-marketeers and profiteers.’74

Menderes wooed the generals of the High Command, the pashas as they are known, but neglected the lower ranks. After joining NATO, junior officers were able to see at first hand how backward the Turkish army had become. They admired the technical capabil- ity and the modern strategic thinking of their NATO allies. These were affairs in which Menderes showed little interest. The rift between the junior officer corps, on the one hand, and the High Command and civilian politicians, on the other, grew ever wider.

‘Honourable fellow countrymen!’ Alparslan Türkeµ’s gravelly voice announced over the radio on the morning of 27 May 1960. ‘Owing to the crisis into which our democracy has fallen, in view of the recent sad incidents, and in order to avoid fratricide, the Turkish armed forces have taken over the administration of our country. Our armed forces . . . will hold just and free elections as soon as possible under the supervision and arbitration of a non-party administration.’75 As he was talking, junior officers commanding key garrisons throughout the country were arresting DP leaders, including the respected elderly President, Celâl Bayar. Menderes was in western Anatolia when he heard the news. He tried to flee, but he was captured in Kutahya. The government and 400 leading supporters were transported unceremoniously to the island prison on Yassada in the Sea of Marmara. The coup was greeted with joyful demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul. It received the vocal back- ing of intellectuals, students and businessmen, not to mention supporters of the RRP. But the countryside was sullen. The peas- ants revered Menderes as the first politician since the foundation of the Republic to have addressed their economic problems.

The coup had been long in gestation. The officers responsible knew that the High Command would disapprove as the plan under- mined the strict hierarchy of the Turkish army. And before they could carry it out, they had to ensure that their supporters com- manded all the key points in Istanbul and Ankara. In order to make

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the coup acceptable to the High Command, they persuaded a sym- pathetic general, Cemal Gürsel, to head it, rewarding him with the office of President. The putschists carried out the takeover meticu- lously, but once they had seized power, they discovered they had no idea what they wanted to do with it. In-fighting broke out among the thirty-eight members of the unwieldy National Unity Council, representing all the factions among the officer corps. By the end of the year, the hardliners who wished to rule the country for an extended spell had been forced out of the Council. The remainder, with the approval of the High Command, moved to re-establish civilian rule and in October 1961 new elections were called.

The 1960 coup was significant for two reasons. The first was the gruesome treatment of the DP government and the execution of Menderes on 17 September 1961, and his Finance and Foreign min- isters a day earlier. To avoid the dishonour of hanging, the ousted Prime Minister tried to take his own life by swallowing the sleeping pills he had been carefully storing. He survived the attempt, giving the military the vindictive satisfaction of killing him. No Turkish politician could fail to register this warning. Despite his patchy record, Menderes became a martyr to many and his memory would be invoked on many occasions in the future.

Of even greater moment than this individual tragedy was the pol- itical arrangement that led to the re-establishment of civilian power. The army commissioned a group of academics to write a new con- stitution. The draft had some positive elements, including a new voting system that made the domination of a single party extremely difficult to achieve, thus preventing a repeat of the monopolies abused by the RPP and the DP. It also created a number of institu- tions designed to curb the power of the executive. The most successful of these was the Constitutional Court. But under the influence of the High Command, the academics also found a place for the National Security Council. This body institutionalized mili- tary interference in Turkish politics, effectively granting the coup d’état the status of a legitimate constitutional instrument, to be used as and when the High Command saw fit:

The army had become an autonomous institution recognized by Turkey’s ruling circles as the guardian and partner of the new order it had just helped to create. The High Command

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had become an integral part of the political and socio-eco- nomic life of the country. The new Assembly passed laws increasing pay scales and pensions and as a result the status and image of the officer improved sharply. Luxury homes were specially built for the pashas in the compound close to the presidential palace in the most exclusive part of the capital.76

But the army’s involvement went even further than this. Using con- tributions from some 80,000 officers, the military established a fund in 1961 called the Army Mutual Assistance Association (better known by its Turkish acronym OYAK). This developed into an enormous holding company, acquiring interests in domestic and joint-stock enterprises all over Turkey. Run by civilian employees, OYAK became one of the most influential players in Turkish busi- ness. By 1972, its assets were estimated at roughly $300 million. Included in OYAK’s portfolio were:

controlling interests in the Turkish Automotive Industry, a company that assembles International Harvester trucks and tractors; MAT, a truck and tractor sales firm; the OYAK Insurance Company; Tukaµ, a food canning firm and a $3,000,000 cement plant. OYAK also holds 20 per cent of the $50 million Petkim Petroleum plant . . . 8 per cent of the state owned Turkish Petroleum, and 7 per cent of the $5.6 million tire factory owned mostly by Goodyear.77

Its largest single investment was in OYAK-Renault, the joint ven- ture with the French vehicle manufacturer, in which it retains a 42 per cent stake. By becoming one of the most dynamic capitalists in Turkey, the military’s corporate interest in maintaining the status quo intensified. The burgeoning success of OYAK and industry in general during the 1960s was naturally accompanied by a rapid growth in Turkey’s working class and the development of a labour movement. The military’s involvement in the economy provided a further incentive to restrict the Left. During the 1960s and the 1970s, another crisis enabled the Turkish army to remain the ultimate arbi- ter of domestic politics – the situation on the island of Cyprus.

A few hours before dawn on 1 April 1955, units from a hitherto S

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unknown organization attacked three installations in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital. One group inflicted extensive damage on the Cyprus Broadcasting Station. But elsewhere on the island the novice commandos enjoyed only limited success. In Famagusta, the bombs failed to detonate and one saboteur electrocuted himself when he lassoed a high-tension power cable with a damp rope. ‘Dighenis’, the self-styled leader of the guerrilla outfit, EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston – National Organization of Cypriot Fighters), was disappointed with the indiscipline and incompetence of his foot soldiers. An inauspicious beginning perhaps but the surprise raids marked a turning point in relations between Greece and Turkey. Until then, the United States and Britain were reasonably confident that the two neighbours would act in harmony as the bulwark of NATO’s southern flank. Ankara and Athens were indeed engaged in stuttering cooperation as NATO’s two youngest recruits. But the fanatical commitment of Dighenis to enosis, the union of Cyprus with the Kingdom of Greece, would draw Britain, the United States, Greece, Turkey and the two Cypriot communities into one of the most intractable conflicts of the late twentieth century.

Dighenis’s real name was Colonel Giorgios Grivas, a man with an unedifying past. As the Germans retreated from Greece in 1944, he founded the extreme right-wing paramilitary organization (khi), notorious for its brutality.* After the defeat of the Greek communists, EAM/ELAS, Grivas turned into a political party but failed in his bid to enter the Greek parliament. Even the right-wing cliques who ruled Greece with American backing after the Civil War treated Grivas as a pariah. Embittered, he looked for another outlet for his extremism and found it in his birthplace, Cyprus. Grivas was the Greek equivalent of Alparslan Türkeµ, who was also from Cyprus. ‘In the figures of these two febrile and narrow- minded men, one can discern the fanatical and violent mentalities which, apparently diametrically opposed to one another, . . . actually colluded in maiming Cyprus and in destabilizing democratic life and institutions in Greece and Turkey.’78

On the surface, Grivas’s choice of Cyprus was a strange one. Cypriot society was not fertile territory for intolerant nationalist

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agitation – the Greeks and Turks on the island had a history neither of mixing nor of fighting. But in Makarios III, who had been elected Archbishop of Cyprus at the age of thirty-seven in 1950, the move- ment for independence from the British had found an able and energetic advocate. Independence implied self-determination which in turn implied enosis, as 80 per cent of Cyprus’s population was Greek. Most of the remainder were Turks for whom enosis was completely unacceptable. Although Britain was conceding inde- pendence to its colonies elsewhere, it was determined to keep Cyprus for strategic reasons. Under pressure of these irreconcilable differences, political strains on the island multiplied after the Second World War. Makarios’s most powerful weapon was the emotive appeals he made to mainland Greeks. Naturally, these appeals had an impact on the government in Greece – the more troubled the situation in Cyprus, the greater the temptation for politicians in Athens to play the nationalist card.

In 1952, the Greek Rally Party founded by Alexander Papagos, the hero of the Greco-Italian war of 1940–1, had won a comfortable electoral victory, leading to eleven years of stable, right-wing gov- ernment in Greece. Like most members of the Greek establishment, Papagos was more concerned with establishing stable security arrangements with Turkey and NATO than with advancing the cause of enosis. He preferred to seek a solution to the Cyprus ques- tion through discreet discussions with the British. At his first bilateral meeting with Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary dismissed the topic. Eden’s counterpart, Stephan Stephanopoulos was outraged, ‘Papagos came back and said to me in an outraged voice: “He told me never – not even we shall see!”’79

By refusing to enter into a diplomatic dialogue, Britain guaran- teed that Cyprus’s status would assume greater importance in Greek politics. Makarios understood this too. He wasted no time in lob- bying not only Greek politicians, but also sympathetic opposition MPs in Britain, law-makers in Congress and the Greek community in the United States. Britain in turn quietly encouraged the Turkish government, hitherto little engaged in Cyprus affairs, to take a more active interest in the question. London’s clumsy attempts to localize the problem succeeded only in internationalizing it.

After EOKA’s first bombing campaign, the British government called a Tripartite Conference, with the Prime Minister, Harold

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Macmillan, and the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers in attend- ance. While the conference was under way in London, a bomb exploded next to the house where Atatürk was born in Salonika (many observers believed it was a Turkish provocation). On hearing this news, a Turkish mob went on the rampage in Istanbul and Izmir. Businesses belonging to the 100,000 strong Greek commu- nity were plundered; Orthodox churches were set on fire; Greeks, Armenians and Jews were beaten up and killed on the street. The riots coincided with a World Bank meeting and a conference of Byzantine studies. As the historian, Nancy Crawshaw, has pointed out, nothing ‘could have done more to harm Turkey’s image in the mid-twentieth century than this spectacle of mass destruction and mob rule against an innocent Christian minority’.80 The combin- ation of EOKA and the riots ensured that Cyprus from then on exerted great influence on the governments of Greece and Turkey, offering a powerful lever to destructive nationalists in both coun- tries. At the Tripartite Conference, Macmillan believed he could see common interests that ran ‘like a vein of gold beneath the great overburden of misunderstanding and confusion’.81 He had, alas, found only fool’s gold.

One month after the Istanbul riots, General Papagos died, opening the way for Constantin Karamanlis to establish himself as one of the dominant political figures in postwar Greece. Surrounded by jealous rivals in the Greek Rally, Karamanlis created a new party, the National Radical Union (ERE), in order to strengthen his per- sonal authority on the Right. The fusing of a single powerful individual with the fate of an entire political party had become a striking peculiarity of Greek politics. As liberals attempted to dent the apparently unbreakable monopoly enjoyed by the Right under Papagos and Karamanlis, their most combative representative, Giorgios Papandreou, fielded candidates belonging to the George Papandreou Party. There were profound ideological differences in Greek politics, but these were invariably reduced to the question of the charisma of the party leader.

Of course, the main reason for the electoral successes of the Right in the 1950s was the economy. Greece enjoyed the fruits of the worldwide upturn just as Turkey did. The drachma was stabilized for the first time in living memory, and in the thirteen years from

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1951 the per capita income rose in Greece from $112 to over $500. The most spectacular success was the rationalization of agriculture and an increase in productivity so steep that in 1957 Greece became self-sufficient in food production. Given the paucity of arable land compared to all other Balkan countries except Albania, this was an impressive feat. The country remained heavily dependent on agri- culture for its foreign-currency earnings. In the mid-1960s, tobacco, cotton, and fresh and dried fruits accounted for 51 per cent of all exports. Like the Turks, the Greeks were reluctant to invest in large- scale industries. As a consequence, employment prospects for the hundreds of thousands who swelled the slums of Athens were erratic. As in the past, many Greeks preferred to earn their money abroad although the favoured destination was no longer Australia or America but Germany.

The other significant source of remittances from abroad was Washington. From the start of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 until the coup d’état of the colonels in 1967, America donated almost $3.5 billion to a country with a population of just 8 million. Just under half of this was in the form of military aid.

Unfortunately, American interference was often blatant. In addition, whereas the Soviet government was usually able to cover its activities in Eastern Europe with a veil of secrecy through the strict censorship enforced, American actions received full publicity, not only in the Greek opposition press, but throughout Europe and in the United States . . . Once the American embassy in Athens became involved in the making or breaking of cabinets, it could expect to carry the blame for the failures and weaknesses of the régimes it sup- ported.82

The economic boom of the 1950s sustained the right-wing administrations but the scars of the Civil War were still visible and raw. The government retained undemocratic emergency powers from the late 1940s. These included the notorious Certificates of Social Beliefs – a document testifying to political reliability that each citizen had to produce in order to obtain a driving licence or passport, not to mention a job with Greece’s largest employer, the civil service.

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The end of stability in Greece was brought about by a mixture of anti-American sentiment, the Cyprus situation and Karamanlis’s rigging of elections. In October 1961, he called premature elections to cash in on the rising temperature of the Cold War. The East Germans had built the Berlin Wall in August that year and a little later Khrushchev had threatened to ‘blast the Acropolis out of existence’ when it became known that nuclear weapons were being stored at US bases in Greece. But for Greeks, the most significant foreign-policy issue concerned the 1959 agreement that Karamanlis had negotiated with Adnan Menderes under British pressure over the heads of Archbishop Makarios and Dr Fazil Küçük, the leader of the Turkish Cypriots. Outmanoeuvred, Makarios reluctantly agreed to endorse the deal that seemed to exclude the possibility of enosis and also gave the Turkish community a constitutional role disproportionate to its size.

Karamanlis’s resolutely pro-western policy was undermined by the Cyprus Agreement, and on the eve of the 1961 elections his popular support appeared to be dwindling. The results, however, gave his party, the ERE, an overall majority and 51 per cent of the vote. Papandreou, who had successfully forged a coherent centrist coalition, refused to accept the result, announcing he would wage ‘a relentless struggle’ against the government. Increasingly, Karamanlis’s authority was brought into question by pro-enosis officers in the army and by the meddling of King Constantine. The Prime Minister was spending ever more time shoring up his pos- ition, and ever less time governing. He decided to resign and was finally defeated by Papandreou in February 1967. The new Prime Minister’s Centre Union promised a new start for Greece’s postwar politics, offering the possibility of healing the scars of civil war. Unfortunately, not all Greeks were ready for reconciliation. More regrettable still, most of those were in the army.

On Thursday morning, 21 April 1967, Greeks woke up to learn that a group of colonels had seized power in their country. King Constantine was particularly infuriated by the news as he had been planning a coup of his own with more senior officers. The coup was remarkably successful and no blood was shed during it. According to Constantine Kollias, the stooge civilian Prime Minister, ‘the shameless and wretched horse-trading of the parties, the decay of a great part of the press, the methodical onslaught against all

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institutions . . . the paralysis of the state machine . . . more decline, confusions and uncertainty . . . and finally the ceaseless inflamma- tory declarations of conscienceless demagogues’,83 were a few in a long list of reasons that had provoked the military into taking power.

The real reason can be found in the jealousy of a large part of the officer corps that had seen its material and political circumstances decline steadily during the 1960s. The ideological inspiration behind the coup came from IDEA, the nationalist conspiracy formed at the end of the Second World War. This organization had been revital- ized by Colonel Giorgios Papadopoulos, who saw in the rise of Papandreou (and in particular in the growing influence of his leftist son, Andreas) a threat to the dominance of nationalist and anti- communist ideas in the army.

The colonels’ régime, which lasted seven years, was a shabby, vicious administration that subjected its opponents to persecution and torture. After the internment of several thousand suspect civil- ians, the new rulers purged their own ranks, dismissing several hundred officers and replacing them with less competent but polit- ically reliable men from the lower orders. Their rhetoric of ‘social justice’ and a renewal of Greek society revealed itself as a hollow sham, as ‘officers not forcibly retired benefited from higher salaries, loans for cars and houses, improved promotion prospects, and dis- counts in shops. They therefore had little incentive to return power to the civilians.’84

Greece became a pariah in Europe and the focus of a sustained human-rights campaign demanding the restoration of civilian rule. In Washington, Congress voted to halt military aid to the colonels, but the régime received persistent covert and overt support from Presidents Johnson and then Nixon, whose concern for the ‘big picture’ of security in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East overrode any concern about the democratic credentials of its ally.

The degeneracy of the colonels’ régime was reflected in its demise. Its second strongman, Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannides, who had ousted Papadopoulos in a coup within the coup, used Grivas and EOKA to overthrow Archbishop Makarios and proclaim enosis in 1974. The immediate Turkish invasion of Cyprus, the prelude to par- tition, revealed the colonels’ utter military and political bankruptcy.

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They had subjected Greece to seven years of grim dictatorship, and had ensured an end to several centuries of co-existence between the Greeks and Turks of Cyprus.

The débâcle of the colonels’ régime did bequeath one valuable gift to Greece: the military had so discredited itself that its capacity to interfere in Greek politics was henceforth negligible. The same was not true in Turkey where the invasion of Cyprus opened the door to taksim, partition, a phrase which by 1974 had become as much an article of faith in Turkish politics as enosis had been for the Greeks. By the 1950s, Greece and Turkey had succeeded in over- coming the legacy of enmity from the war of the early 1920s, but the confrontation of the Greek colonels and the Turkish generals in Cyprus in the 1970s plunged the eastern Mediterranean into a crisis from which it had not recovered thirty years later.

The hot house: Yugoslavia, 1981–9

After a long spell in hospital, Tito finally died in the Slovene capital, Ljubljana on 4 May 1980, at the age of eighty-seven. Yugoslavs of all nationalities went into demonstrative mourning, barely able to con- ceive how the country could govern itself without their stern grandfather at the helm. His funeral attracted government leaders from 122 states, the only absentee being the new American President, Ronald Reagan. The assembled dignitaries used the occasion for intense negotiations. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the previous December, the world had been in the grip of a Second Cold War. After the purges in Serbia and Croatia in the early 1970s, Tito and Kardelj had reimposed conservative policies at home and abroad. The Soviet intervention, however, led to an improvement in Yugoslavia’s relations with the West. ‘If Soviet troops could move across their border without international consultation or sanction,’ an American historian has noted, ‘what would protect Yugoslavia if relations [with the Soviets] soured again some day?’85

Warmer relations with western Europe and the United States were also important given Yugoslavia’s parlous economic situation. In 1972, Tito and Kardelj had brought the economic reforms begun in 1966 to a halt. The small private industries encouraged during the reform were cut back in favour of the large, loss-making industrial enterprises characteristic of planned economies. But the earlier

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rationalization programme had increased unemployment levels throughout the country. This was now compounded by the return of hundreds of thousands of guest workers, victims of the recession of the early 1970s in western Europe. In the less developed parts of Yugoslavia – Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia and southern Serbia – the number of those without jobs made up 20 per cent of the work- force. To combat this problem and in order to meet the material expectations provoked by the reform, Yugoslavia followed the same path as Poland, Hungary and Romania – it borrowed heavily on the international money markets. By 1982, Yugoslavia’s debt stood at $18.5 billion. Each year, the government had to find new loans merely to finance the interest repayments.

A third talking point at Tito’s funeral was Yugoslavia’s own pol- itical stability. Articles in the western press predicted the imminent demise of Yugoslavia and even a civil war between its constituent nations. Such alarmist views overlooked Yugoslavia’s geo-strategic position in the early 1980s; they also assumed that Tito was the sole support of Yugoslavia’s multi-ethnic unity. Neither NATO nor the Soviet Union were interested in the destabilization of Yugoslavia, and the most powerful domestic institution holding the country together was the Federal Army which, although dominated by Serbs in the officer corps, had not yet been infected by Serbian nationalism. In the absence of overt nationalist agitation, the major- ity of Slovenes, Serbs and Croats had no reason to bring down the federation.

They did, however, face enormous problems in interpreting Tito’s confused political legacy. While he and Kardelj (who died in 1979) were still alive, the mechanisms of the 1974 Constitution were little more than window dressing. Policy was made by the two elderly leaders. Nobody felt they needed to establish in detail how the new system was supposed to work. It was based on a system of political musical chairs – senior positions would be rotated every year to prevent any single republic or politician from accumulating too much power. It succeeded in doing so for little more than five years and even then it was at the expense of proper continuity in govern- ment. The constitution in principle devolved powers to the federal units but the exact relationship between the centre of the republics was opaque – leading eventually to terrible confusion and corrup- tion. Initially this problem was not so significant as the leadership of

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the eight communist parties (from the six republics and Serbia’s two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina) were dominated by conservatives, united in the fight against liberalism. They also lacked the imagination required to deal with a number of crises which rocked the country in the early 1980s.

The first shock to the system came in March 1981 when Albanian students in Priština rioted over poor food at their university can- teen. This disturbance spread through many parts of Kosovo and assumed an openly political character. The explosion in Kosovo was not caused by Serbian repression: under the 1974 Constitution Kosovo had gained an unprecedented measure of self-government. For the first time since the war, the Yugoslav authorities granted Kosovo’s Albanians the right to travel to Albania proper. Newspapers, academic texts and schoolbooks printed in Tirana also became available in Kosovo. What the Kosovars wanted was equal- ity with the other nationalities in Yugoslavia, and their movement was, in effect, a late-flowering national revival. They did not demand self-determination for the province, but they did call for the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo to become a repub- lic. The disturbances were put down by the army and the police, but this was a problem which could not be swept under the carpet using strong arm tactics alone.

The federal authorities were now faced with a very delicate situ- ation. The call for a Kosovo republic set alarm bells ringing, particularly in Serbia and in Macedonia, where there was also a large Albanian minority. Granting Kosovo republican status would mean detaching it from Serbia and conceding that it had the right to secede from the federation. The special position that Kosovo held in Serbian mythology meant that any move towards a republican status for Kosovo might trigger a backlash of Serbian nationalism. The federal authorities decided to block contacts between the Kosovo Albanians and Albania proper, but they also ruled out the reimposition of central control from Belgrade, which some Serb communists were demanding. Instead, the Kosovo party (led after 1986 by a young Albanian communist, Azem Vllasi) agreed to stifle any manifestation of Albanian nationalism in the province.

The atmosphere in Kosovo in the early eighties was heavy with tension; secret policemen were ubiquitous. Nonetheless, the local state apparatus, including the police force, was staffed mainly by

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Albanians, and they had no interest in provoking the Kosovars. Life was not easy, but it was free from nationalist violence. A minority of communists in Serbia, aided at times by the Belgrade media, claimed that the Serb and Montenegrin minority in Kosovo (roughly 10 per cent of the population) were subjected to system- atic terrorism at the hands of Albanian ‘irredentists’. They based these claims on the numbers of Serbs moving from the province to Serbia proper. There was indeed an exodus of Serbs in the early eighties, but they were economic migrants, not refugees. The stories of rape, murder and intimidation were without foundation.

The political problem of Kosovo coincided with deepening eco- nomic problems in the country as a whole. Slovenia and Croatia renewed their criticism of a system which saw a disproportionate amount of their foreign earnings directed into a Solidarity Fund for the development of the poorer, southern regions. The debt crisis was exacerbated by Yugoslavia’s impenetrable banking system. Foreign loans were contracted not only by the Yugoslav National Bank but by the republican banks as well so that Yugoslavia’s indebtedness was invariably higher than official figures admitted. In formulating macroeconomic policy, the federal government had to negotiate both with the western banks and with the banks of the six republics. The devolved banking system also encouraged corruption within the republics, on a huge scale. Any attempt by the federal authorities to interfere with republican financial arrangements was fiercely resisted. Popular mistrust of the federal and republican authorities began to grow by 1986; unemployment and strikes had become endemic. For different political and economic reasons, then, Yugoslavia’s government was under siege in the mid-1980s from its constituent parts. Supported by the West, the military and, with growing reluctance, by public opinion, it continued its precarious existence, based on Tito’s formula of ‘brotherhood and unity’.

On 24 September 1986, a Belgrade newspaper published a docu- ment written by an anonymous team from the Serbian Academy of Sciences (SANU). The Memorandum, as it became known, was an inflammatory manifesto of Serbian nationalism. Its central claim was that the Serbs of Kosovo faced extermination at the hands of aggressive Albanians. But it also insisted that ‘except during the period of the Independent State of Croatia, Serbs in Croatia have never been as endangered as they are today. The resolution of their

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national status must be a top priority.’86 The communist authorities condemned the Memorandum in uncompromising terms. Ivan Stambolić, the head of the Serbian Party, called it ‘Yugoslavia’s obituary’, warning the academicians that they were not just pro- voking other nationalities in Yugoslavia, but acting against the interests of Serbs, ‘for Yugoslavia is the only solution to the Serbian question. Without Yugoslavia, the Serb nation is condemned to dis- memberment.’87

Stambolić himself had requested SANU a year earlier to contrib- ute to the process of reform. He had been expecting a series of ideas on political and economic reform. According to his memoirs, the secret police claimed to know nothing about the document, not even the identity of the main authors. It took the leadership by complete surprise. Only one leading Serbian communist, hitherto a resolute critic of nationalism, declined to condemn the document in public, restricting his criticism to a brief denunciation at a meeting of the secret police leadership. This was Stambolić’s protégé and closest ally, Slobodan Milošević, who had been elected President of the Serbian League of Communists (on Stambolić’s urging) in May 1986.

Parlour games: Yugoslavia

I spent much of 1989 as the BBC’s Central Europe Correspondent, reporting events from Gdansk to Tirana. I was moved to tears when standing ten yards behind Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček as they walked onto a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square to accept the adulation of almost a million Czechs and Slovaks. On Christmas Day, I watched Romanian television as it repeatedly broadcast the image of Nicolae Ceauµescu and his wife Elena lying prostrate on the ground after their summary execution. I have always opposed the death penalty, but on this occasion felt no compulsion to regret the severity of the sentence.

But my most vivid memory is of a warm early spring evening in Vučitrn, a small town north of Priština, the capital of Kosovo. The neat, oblong town square was bathed in dark yellow sunlight. In front of the town hall, a Serbian communist was emphatically denouncing Albanian ‘separatists and terrorists’, while praising the resolve of Slobodan Milošević. Before the speaker stood a few

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hundred Serbs. The majority were young men, most of them bussed in from Niš and Kragujevac in Serbia proper. Over and again, they chanted the phrase ‘Srbija je ustala’ (Serbia has arisen). Watching the proceedings in bemused silence were thousands of Albanians (at the time 95 per cent of Vučitrn’s population). They were hanging off walls, leaning out of windows, playing backgammon in the cafés and sipping viscous coffee from small cups. Cocooned in a self-referential world, the Serb demonstrators were oblivious to the quiet mass of Albanian spectators. Names and acronyms stirred in my mind – VMRO, Ustaše, Chetniks, the Iron Guard. Briefly I was transported back to the 1930s. Although it was a chaotic nationalist display, the demonstrators had a bullish, confident look that came with the full approval of a powerful state.

Almost two years later I found myself in a Zagreb housing estate on a miserable April afternoon, surrounded by what seemed to be the same people wearing the same denim jackets. As Franjo Tudjman, the newly elected President of Croatia, mounted a make- shift podium, I saw the same look on the faces in the crowd that I had seen in Vučitrn. Only one thing was different, the chant: ‘Hrvatska je ustala’ (Croatia has arisen).

By this time, the spring of 1991, war between Serbs and Croats was all but inevitable. Two years earlier, the Serbian President, Slobodan Milošević, had stripped Kosovo of the autonomy that Tito had conferred on the province in 1974. Milošević’s sudden con- version to the plight of the Serbian and Montenegrin minority of Kosovo in 1987 was cynical. When the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences was published in 1986, Milošević formally distanced himself from its intemperate nationalism. Within less than a year, he had adopted its rhetoric as a coercive instrument within the Serbian Communist Party and had destroyed the political career of his mentor and longstanding friend, Ivan Stambolić.

Milošević’s real aim was not to end Kosovo’s autonomy. Before he unleashed his self-proclaimed ‘anti-bureaucratic’ revolutions in Kosovo, Vojvodina and in the Republic of Montenegro, Serbian representatives were a minority in Yugoslavia’s collective leader- ship. The Federal Presidency had eight members, one from each republic, and one from the two autonomous provinces. Until the ‘anti-bureaucratic’ revolution, Serbia could be outvoted on any issue. ‘By abolishing the autonomy of both provinces of Vojvodina

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and Kosovo,’ Milan Kučan, the Slovene president, remarked, ‘Serbia would control three out of eight votes in the Federal Presidency – in comparison with the other republics that had one vote each. That meant turning Yugoslavia into Serbo-slavia.’88 Once Serbia also controlled Montenegro’s vote, giving it four out of eight, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia had to maintain an informal alliance to prevent Milošević from bulldozing through any constitutional change he desired. Maintaining such an alliance was no easy matter.

For two years from 1987, Milošević had conducted a carefully orchestrated campaign of nationalist hysteria, focused on Kosovo but widening gradually to conjure up for Serb audiences an unholy alliance of Albanians, Slovenes and Croats. But once the Serbian president had won the extra votes in the presidency, he lost interest in Kosovo. This was the first example of Milošević’s boundless opportunism. Kosovo ceased to be a problem, unless you were a Kosovo Albanian. With four members of the presidency in his pocket, Milošević felt able to attend to more important affairs than Kosovo. Overnight the conflict had mutated into something quite different – a struggle between the three most powerful republics, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia over the nature of the Yugoslav state. The battle for Kosovo prefaced a revival of the problem that had beset the first Yugoslavia in the 1920s and the 1930s* which had led in 1966 to Aleksandar Ranković’s downfall in the Second Yugoslavia; and which Tito had mistakenly attempted to solve by repression in 1971 and 1972. In essence, this was the question of Yugoslavia’s identity – was it a unitarist state or a genuine federation?

But it was a variation of the old problem, not a mere repetition. Yugoslavia had not been in a historical deep-freeze under commun- ism – on the contrary, it developed more rapidly than many European countries. There were decisive new elements present in the early 1990s: the political maturity and confidence of the Slovenes, in particular, but also of the Bosnian Muslims, the Kosovo Albanians and the Macedonians. In addition, Yugoslavia’s exposure to western Europe had accentuated the cultural divisions between rural and urban life as nowhere else in the communist Balkans. This had unexpected consequences for another element in the equation, the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). According to Ivan Stambolić,

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who was once the political superior of these men, the senior leader- ship and the officer corps were dominated by men from ‘impoverished peasant families’, who moved ‘from city to city throughout their career, spending most of their time in barracks. They lived in cities but were never part of them, feeling isolated, rejected. They grew to hate cities and the people who lived in them.’89

The leaderships of the big three republics were united in their hostility to the federal government, albeit for different reasons. Faced with this hostility and the sudden dramatization of the national question, it is no surprise that the federal prime minister, Ante Marković, a commendably reformist Croat from Bosnia, stood little chance of rallying the dispersed forces of democratically minded citizens.

The conflict between the republics manifested itself in countless ways – a trade war between Serbia and Slovenia; an avalanche of nationalist and racist propaganda; battles over the control of tax revenues. Together these and other disputes suffocated rational pol- itical debate, opening the way for the propaganda of extremist organizations. They swamped the public arena with instrumental- ized historical memories. In Serbia, most of these symbols, myths and martyrdoms recalled the Second World War, quite the most violent period of Yugoslav history. The identification of ‘Croat’ and ‘Ustaše’ was too often taken for granted in them. The Croats sought recognition for the victims of the Bleiburg massacre* but also began a process of rehabilitating the Ustaše state. The parties and move- ments that indulged in reviving the darker moments of Yugoslavia’s recent past sought to instil fear less in ‘enemy’ ranks than in their own community. If ordinary Serbs believed that the Ustaše were about to return, or if Croats in the mixed areas of Croatia could be convinced that their neighbours were preparing for a Chetnik onslaught, then it would be much easier to mobilize them for war, according to the principle ‘Kill before you are killed’.

Television played a seminal role in preparing people not just for war but for the spiral of massacre that was to come. Day after day, RTV Belgrade and Croatian Television (HTV) emitted images of atrocity, while historical documentaries and movies about the

* See chapter 7. S

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Second World War romanticized each nation’s soldiery. Propaganda has always played an essential role in mobilizing for war, of course, and television can influence people quickly and effectively. But in Yugoslavia in 1991 it reached such a pitch that one friend from Belgrade described RTV Serbia and HTV as ‘the two greatest war criminals of them all’.

On a political level, the constitutional battle was regulated through a series of meetings between the six republican presidents. Complex shifting alliances, communicated to the public in a bizarre hybrid language, obscured the intentions of Milošević and Tudjman, whose antagonism in turn obscured a more sinister mutual respect. Stipe Šuvar, the Croatian communist leader, recalled a lunch held after one round of discussions immediately before the outbreak of war:

Around the lunch table sat Milošević, Ante Marković, and Tudjman. And they were all fooling around. Milošević said to Marković, ‘Don’t worry if Tudjman puts the screws on you in Croatia, we’ll make sure you get elected as an MP there.’ He was supposedly joking. I said to him, ‘Slobo, are you sure that you still have that sort of influence in Croatia.’ At this point Marković shouted at Tudjman, ‘Franjo, how long are you lot going to keep this Šuvar in the Presidency?’ Everyone joined in just making fun of everything and laughing and laughing. Who amongst us realized that the most bloody war was just about to start? I do not know for certain that Milošević and Tudjman were such monsters that they were planning for war but just keeping it to themselves. But maybe there exists a rule among these people that they can joke and laugh together before happily killing each other.’90

Inside Serbia and Croatia, the two presidents were playing the same game – consolidating control over the machinery of state through purges and intimidation. This posed few problems for Milošević, as he had inherited the communist bureaucracy. Most functionaries remained loyal after he transformed the party into the Socialist Party of Serbia. He did this by merging the communist Party with the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Serbia, the Communist front that included satellite organisations like the trade unions, the

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women’s and youth movements. The fusion gave him copious financial resources and put the new Serbian opposition parties at an enormous disadvantage, with no money and no access to the media.

Tudjman faced a different situation. A disproportionately high number of Serbs were in positions of authority in Croatia. This was a consequence of the purge carried out by Tito after the suppression of the Croatian Spring in December 1971. Serbs replaced Croats as a way of insuring against a recrudescence of autonomist sentiment inside the Croatian Communist Party. So when Tudjman began sacking communists in the media, in the legal system, in factory management, and in the civil service, these included many hitherto influential Serbs. The transition from a one-party dictatorship to a democratically elected government in Croatia led to an immediate rise in tension between Croats and one of the most volatile Yugoslav minorities, the Serbs of the Krajina. This was greatly assisted by the overt racism of Tudjman’s party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and Milošević’s policy of encouraging armed rebellion among Croatia’s Serbs, especially in that old Chetnik heartland, Knin, the majority of the Krajina.

March 1991 was the point of no return. On Saturday the 9th, the Serbs finally found their voice when demonstrators took to the streets in protest against Milošević’s manipulation of state televi- sion. Running battles broke out in the centre of town – one civilian and one policeman were killed. The next day hundreds of thou- sands converged on the centre of Belgrade to participate in a demonstration against the Serbian president that lasted a week and went on twenty-four hours a day. For the military, this was the last straw. Two months earlier, they had threatened a military coup in Croatia unless Tudjman disarmed his police force. The Croat gov- ernment agreed but had not implemented the order, nor had the Slovenes obeyed a similar demand. As far as the JNA leadership was concerned, Tudjman was an Ustaša, bent on destroying Yugoslavia and exterminating the Croatian Serbs. In the Serb demonstrators of March, the crusty Stalinists of the JNA believed they saw the other side of the coin – Chetniks, right-wing nationalists hostile to the Partisan tradition of the Yugoslav People’s Army. With Milošević’s support, they decided to mount a coup. This would have liquidated the opposition in Serbia as well as the secessionists in Slovenia and

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Croatia in one fell swoop. But the Federal Presidency was still func- tioning and it refused to sanction the coup. The army decided to seize power without the Presidency’s approval, but at the last moment stepped back from the brink. Milošević’s plans had been thwarted. In a conversation with the Serbian leader on 17 March, the joint chiefs-of-staff justified their change of mind. If they had mounted a coup, the generals solemnly explained, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia

would have refused to carry out the orders of the General Staff . . . inciting citizens to resist and undermining the JNA by labelling it an occupying force. The four republics would finally secede, offering armed resistance and appealing for foreign military assistance . . . In Kosovo there would be an uprising of Albanians and a declaration of unification with Albania. In Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Croats would join the armed resistance movement of Croatia and probably the Muslims would too. The outbreak of extensive intercommunal fighting could not be excluded. In Serbia, the opposition would attempt to exploit the situ- ation by bringing down the legitimate authorities . . . Abroad – one may expect condemnation from foreign powers, resolutions – condemnation at the UN and in European institutions . . . the imposition of sanctions. In the event of a civil war, an arms embargo is likely. The country would be bankrupted with a severe danger of hyperinflation . . . the democratic rights of citizens would be suspended. The international community would denounce us as a dic- tatorial régime.91

The only disaster the generals failed to predict was the NATO bombing campaign of 1999.

The presidency’s refusal to sanction a military takeover marked the moment when Milošević ditched Yugoslavia as a vehicle for his ambition – he could not reliably control it. He appeared on televi- sion to announce that ‘Yugoslavia has entered into the final phase of

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its agony . . . The Republic of Serbia will no longer recognize a single decision of the Presidency under the existing circumstances because it would be illegal.’92 This meant war, but there were still some loose ends that the Serbian president needed to tie up before it could begin. Milošević and Tudjman had both decided to draw the boundaries of the new Serbia and the new Croatia by force. Before hostilities commenced, the two men met in secret to see whether there were areas of agreement between them. On 24 March, they convened at Karadjordjevo, Tito’s hunting lodge in Vojvodina.* Bosnia-Hercegovina, they concurred, could be split along the lines envisaged in the Cvetković–Maček sporazum of 1939 – half going to Croatia, half to Serbia.

To the outside world, the two men seemed poles apart. They had succeeded in dividing the sympathy of other European countries along lines that were reminiscent of the alliances of the early twen- tieth century – Austria and later Germany were sympathetic to the secessionist goals of Slovenia and Croatia while Britain, France and Russia were firm supporters of the Yugoslav state and were more sympathetic to the Serbs.

Clearly, the Serbs and the Croats were in competition during the Croatian war that broke out in May 1991 and lasted until January 1992. But it is impossible to find examples of either President pub- licly criticizing the other. As events in Bosnia-Hercegovina were to confirm, Milošević and Tudjman were acting in harmony at the expense of both Yugoslavia and Bosnia.

* The location was replete with irony. Almost two decades earlier, Tito had called the top leadership there to denounce the liberal Croatian Party leaders and launch the crushing of the Croatian Spring, the move that ended hopes for a democratic solution to the national question.

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