MIA > Archive > Draper > Titoism
From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 50, 12 December 1949, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
We emphasized two ideas last week:
that Titoism is spreading as a disintegrative force in the Russian empire not because it is ceasing to be a form of Stalinism, but precisely because it is a form of Stalinism;
Titoism arises within this social system. More than that, Titoism arises and spreads as a disease of this social system.
This disease is national-Stalinism. We shall see both the similarities and differences between this disease of the Russian empire and the anti-imperialist nationalism which arises under capitalist colonialism.
In the Eastern European satellites this phenomenon has been highlighted from the beginning; this is its home ground. This is also where Titoism has its sharpest impact, though muffled by the totalitarian shroud surrounding these countries.
In the Balkan satellites – in Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary – the impact of Titoism has been marked by purges at the very top. In Albania, there has been the execution of the former general secretary of the CP, Koci Xoxe, and the purge of a good section of the party leadership. (The Yugoslavs now have a Koci Xoxe “labor brigade” working on Albania’s border, to the increasing nervousness of Prime Minister Enver Hoxha.) In Hungary, there has been the Rajk trial. In Bulgaria, there is the trial of Traicho Kostov for Titoism.
With the death of Dimitrov – whether naturally or not is anybody’s guess – Tito’s right-hand man Djilas revealed that Dimitrov himself, at the time of Russia’s first threatening note, had told the Yugoslavs to “stand firm.”. Dimitrov himself had been the first, in January 1948, to publicly launch the demand for a Balkan federation, only to be slapped down hard, equally publicly, by Pravda. Dimitrov had not “stood firm,” but had shut his mouth, looking with hope to his neighbor Tito to carry the ball. Outside of Tito himself, Dimitrov is the only No. 1 man among the Stalinist subfuehrers who has stepped out of line in public even for a moment.
It is in this area of the Balkans that even the specific drive behind national-Stalinism is closest to that in Yugoslavia. Bulgaria, for example, of all the countries is nearest to Yugoslavia in its economic conditions. If Yugoslavia is the most backward and agrarian country of the region, Bulgaria is a close, second.
This specific drive behind Titoism is the contradiction between Russian domination and the overweening need of industrialisation in these lands, the contradiction between the Russification of their economies and the national economic drives of the subfuehrers.
I have written in detail about this economic motivation elsewhere (in the New International, September-October 1948) and only put it in its context here. In January 1949 Tito himself stated baldly that his break with the Russians arose from this specific dispute. The Russians’ plan called for keeping Yugoslavia as predominantly a producer of certain raw materials and food, a bread basket, agrarian, backward economically; the Yugolsavs had higher ambitions for their satrapy, the desire to give it a modern industrialized economy, without which they (the Yugoslav bureaucrats) were fated to remain second-rate proconsuls of Russian imperialism.
Since Tito’s statement, the Cominform has also obliquely referred to this same cause of the break. In the October 14, 1949 issue of the Cominform organ, For a Lasting Peace, For a People’s Democracy, a long blast against Titoism begins: “In 1947, Tito pompously declared that the Yugoslav Five-Year Plan would be completed in 1951. But none of the conditions necessary for the fulfillment of the plan had been created in the country. The plan contained unreal, astronomical figures and, in general, was framed in such a way as to break economic relations with the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies ...
But Titoisnj in Yugoslavia was only triggered off by this economic motivation; it is only the Balkan specific form of the drive behind Titoism in the Russian empire. The basic drive, common to all the satellites – and, as we shall see, in a different form, even outside the countries behind the Iron Curtain – is a galloping disease that is not at all peculiar to Russian imperialism alone.
For the new Russian imperialism runs into the same contradiction as the capitalist imperialism which preceded it: the irrepressible conflict between the foreign masters’ national interests and those of the native rulers (let alone the people of the subject country).
Under capitalist imperialism, the native bourgeoisie (which is created by imperialism itself) is not and can never be satisfied merely to be the broker in the exploitation of its own people, getting only a cut of the fruits of exploitation. “Why share at all with the foreigners – let alone hand over the major share? This is our country – why can’t we exploit our own people ourselves, since they have to be exploited by someone?”
This is the nationalism of the native ruling class. This is what national independence 'means to them, at bottom. The mass of colonial people press for freedom from below, and the native bourgeoisie seizes its opportunities above.
So also with the native Stalinist subfuehrers. The basic drive behind their Titdisf tendencies can be given in six words, which also constitute the title of a book recently published by Professor George S. Counts. It is a translation of a Russian textbook for the education of children in the glorification of Stalin, and its title is: I Want to Be Like Stalin.
That is all that Tito wants in the last analysis: “I Want to Be Like Stalin” – that is, I want to be in my country what Stalin is in his; I want to do here just what he did there; I want to be the Genial Boss, not merely the local gauleiter of a foreign Genial Boss.
Therefore the “honest” indignation, even naively honest indignation, that one finds spread over the speeches and articles of the aggrieved Yugoslavs Especially in the first months of the break: “Why are we bad Stalinists just because we too Want to Be Like Stalin, because we want to do in Yugoslavia exactly what he did in Russia?” Therefore the element of perfectly: “honest” protestation that filled their writings, and a lingering amount of belief that Moscow could not but eventually understand and sympathize with their point of view.
Today the Yugoslavs’ standard formulation for their grievance against the Kremlin is the demand for “equality of all socialist countries.” The term equality adequately represents for them what is actually at stake – equality among dictators, rather than national subordination.
The Kremlin, of course, does not choose its denunciatory epithets with any scruples about truth, but when it denounces the Titoists as “Trotskyist” it is under no illusion that it can thereby impress them with the character of their heresy. It is with the same kernel of honesty as was mentioned above that the Titoists protest to the heavens that they are better Stalinists than Stalin. (For one thing, they insist that they can build “socialism in one country” even without Russian aid, whereas the Cominform tells them the socialism-in-one-country is impossible – except for Russia.)
While in the Balkans the economic drive behind Titoism is the urgent need for industrialization, in the northern satellites it necessarily takes a modified form. Poland and Czechoslovakia are already the most industrialized- countries east of Germany.
But the Russian plan for Eastern Europe calls for the integration of all East European economy in subordination to the Russian war machine. The economies of these countries have been forcibly distorted in line with Russian national interests, not Czech or Polish: forcibly oriented east, with widespread dislocations in their traditional grooves of industry and trade; limited to production which would not be vital in case of their being overrun in the third world war, while basic industry is concentrated toward the east of Russia itself; in a word, forcibly Russified, in addition to being pillaged,
The Titos, Ana Paukers, Kolarovs, et al. dreamed in their time of being the Stalins of their countries, came the (Stalinist) revolution. Instead they have the same kind of power as a party unit secretary in a town of Uzbekistan.
It is in this context that Titoism arises as national-Stalinism.
(Next week: the drive behind Titoism outside the Russian empire)
Last updated on 11 December 2022