Communism in Southeast Europe

Albania.
by Stavro Skendi.
Praeger. 389 pp. $7.50.

Bulgaria.
by L. A. D. Dellin.
Praeger. 457 pp. $8.50.

Rumania.
by Stephen Fischer-Galati.
Praeger. 399 pp. $8.50.

Yugoslavia. With an introduction
by Robert F. Byrnes.
Praeger. 488 pp. $8.50.

As this review is being written relations between Tito’s Yugoslavia and her Soviet-controlled neighbors are entering upon a new phase. 1945-1948 were the years during which the Yugoslav Communist party, and its leader, exercised a remarkably strong attraction upon the other “Balkan” parties, which led to the Dimitrov-Tito project of a Southeast European Federation, quickly stifled by the Russians. 1948-1953 were the years of the Soviet-led choir of vituperation against the heretics, of the cruel anti-Tito purges in each party, and of the saber-rattling measures evoked by the Cominform’s special rapporteur on the problem, the Rumanian Gheorghiu-Dej. There followed the years of reconciliation and the policy of “different paths of socialism.” This fallacious slogan survived the Polish and especially the Hungarian crisis but it came to a foreseeable end once the Yugoslavs had drafted their own comprehensive “path to socialism” plan in the spring of 1958. Once more the Soviet ideologists cracked down on the heretics, with the Albanian, Rumanian, and especially the Bulgarian parties publishing their own long and involved anti-Dühring-like texts.

It is therefore doubly useful at this moment for any reader in this country to be able to consult four separate monographs on the Southeast European “popular democracies,” including one on the black sheep of the entire Communist family. The series, edited under the arduous supervision of Professor Robert F. Byrnes for the Mid-European Studies Center (now dissolved), comprises all the Communist-controlled countries of East Central Europe. Each volume is cast in the same mold, with identical sections: background, geography and demography, government and party, education and culture, economy, a chronology, a list of leading personalities, and a bibliography, more or less raisonnée; and each has practically the same size, a fact which enables Mr. Skendi, the sole and enthusiastic editor of the Albanian handbook, to fill almost as many pages as the Yugoslav survey, despite the disparity in size and importance between the two countries.

The decision of the Mid-European Studies Center to publish separate but stereotyped handbooks was made in 1953, when American research on these countries was suffocating under the “regional” or “pattern-finding” type of work published since 1945. The Stalinist “Gleichschaltung” seemingly undergone by all those countries, the lack of first-hand information and of properly trained experts on the subjects, as well as the “operative” purpose of the research sponsored during these years, were chiefly responsible for the continued appearance of “East Europe” omnibus volumes or periodicals which sliced a particular subject into seven parts and, for the convenience of both authors and readers, tried to establish similarities in all seven countries. Since then, however, the manifestly different destinies of Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania have, or should have, undermined this superficial approach. Under the irresistible pressure of events, newspapers, publishers, research institutes, and even the United Nations, have discovered that books on Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Poland can be best-sellers. For their early and disinterested decision, however, the Mid-European Studies Center and Professor Byrnes deserve a belated tribute.

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In the present circumstances, when Yugoslavia once again comes forward as the “revisionist” alternative to Soviet ideology, it is relevant to inquire what the country has in common with Albania, Bulgaria, and Rumania, and what differences there are between her and them. The four countries share the cultural heritage of the Roman and Byzantine empires; for centuries they were in subjection to the Turks; their peoples are predominantly Orthodox in faith; Bulgaria, Rumania, and Yugoslavia control the lower course of the Danube; all four have an indirect link with the Mediterranean—Yugoslavia and Bulgaria through the Adriatic, and Rumania and Bulgaria through the Black Sea and the Straits; and they were, and remain, the countries with the highest percentage of agricultural population and over-population. Finally, the peoples of present-day Albania, Rumania, and Yugoslavia espoused the cause of the Allies during the First World War, and reached the climax of their national and political independence during the years of the League of Nations.

The fierce resistance opposed by the Yugoslav people, first led by Mihailovitch and his Chetniks, and then by Tito and the Partisans, to the Germans in 1941-45; the strategic position of Yugoslavia (50 per cent in the Soviet zone of operations and 50 per cent in the Allied Mediterranean zone at the end of the war); and the strength of her Communist party, enabled her, although under a Communist regime, to be the only “popular democracy” which did not acknowledge Soviet Russia as the source of her “liberation” and resisted the transformation into a Soviet-type satellite. This, after the break between the Yugoslavs and the Cominform, in 1948, was one more reason for the three “Balkan” Communist regimes to stiffen their attitude toward the heretics. In Albania and Bulgaria (countries with territorial disputes with Yugoslavia) the Communist parties were able to blend their ideological reproaches with old national rancors; but in Rumania—which had been traditionally united to Yugoslavia in a common defense against Germany and her revisionist friends in East Europe, Hungary, and Bulgaria—the denunciation was kept by necessity on the doctrinal level alone.

When in the summer of 1953 the Stalinist façade showed signs of cracking in all East European countries, and in the autumn of 1956 collapsed completely in Poland and Hungary, Yugoslavia’s policy of compromise in regard to collectivization and industrialization was shown to be not only theoretically but also practically more germane to the small East European countries than the solution offered by Russia. Indeed, historians have found in the vastness of Russia’s virgin agricultural land, in the wealth of her raw materials, and in the political passivity of her peoples, a sound explanation for Stalin’s success with the forcible collectivization and industrialization of the 30’s. Yugoslavia, with her decentralized economy, workers’ councils, cooperative farming, and rational industrialization, could have become a model for the other East European Communist parties which were asked to govern small countries with limited resources and with a restive population, especially among the peasant class.

The reader of the four volumes should therefore be able to understand why and how the three Soviet-controlled Southeast European Communist parties, while maintaining their vocal loyalty to Soviet ideology, fall again and again into situations which they would find easier to solve through “Titoist” solutions; and why and how the maintenance of this Soviet control over the parties and countries keeps them in power as well as in a pretense of ideological purity.

However, the reader is not equally lucky with each of these four guides. Mr. Skendi’s Albania is by far the clearest, most complete, and self-explanatory of the volumes here reviewed. Mr. Dellin’s Bulgaria ranks second in providing a somewhat colorless but complete survey of the country and of her pro-German and pro-Russian policies between 1914 and 1956.

The volumes on Yugoslavia and Rumania come in a dead heat for final mention. The anonymous editor of Yugoslavia shows interest in and knowledge of the subject. But the book is incomplete: it has no chapters on religion, literature and the arts, labor, or even a chronology. Mr. Fischer Galati’s Rumania has all the required chapter headings. But the studies themselves (with the notable exception of that on national security by Mr. Serge Aronovici) suffer from a dearth of information, immaturity in interpretation, and a slapdash approach to the subject. Even the Jewish problem, which played a much more important part in the political and economic life of Rumania than in that of Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, is hardly studied. The few perfunctory remarks on the subject cannot substitute for genuine research and documentation.

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