Notes From A Yugoslavian Journey

Crossing from Austria into Yugoslavia differs little from crossing any other Western European boundary. True, there is a double border, one for passport inspection, one for customs; and the customs official, a ruddy man with an immense fur overcoat and Russian style hat, is even more humorless than his American counterpart. This particular one showed no response whatsoever to one tourist's pathetic attempts to cope with a Serbo-Croatian customs form, though his stoniness did finally soften when another tourist requested extra stamps for her passport. For a moment, he relaxed his suspicious glare, smiled, and stamped her passport three more times.

A visa is required but one can obtain it in Vienna within two hours of application (a visa for Czechoslovakia takes at least four days to obtain while a Hungarian visa takes a minimum of eleven). And at the border itself there is little unpleasantness besides the somewhat distrustful air of the guards--no luggage inspection, few questions. In order to accommodate its foreign tourists, the government even furnishes certain national groups noted for their extraordinary capacity to find everything "just a little bit nicer at home in France" with the equipage necessary for their greatest comfort. French visitors, for example, will be pleased to find that Tito has embellished the bathroom at the Loibl Pass station not with France-Soir--of which there is a shortage--but with the next best thing: copies of an obsolete customs declaration form.

Czech and Hungarian Tactics

This border contrasts far more radically with those of Czechoslovakia and Hungary and in matters far more significant than the time it takes to get a visa. Here, the only peculiarity in the alpine scenery is a sort of stone-henge monument celebrating the liberation from the Nazis in 1945. A road to Czechoslovakia or Hungary, on the other hand, will be heavily guarded by soldiers with dogs and by high sentry towers on the other side of the line.

For some hundreds of feet behind the border, the fields are ploughed and raked to increase visibility over them and mines are laid throughout. In other cases, rather than waste a field, the regime will lay barbed wire in forests farther back and will allow peasants to work the border land--but only under the supervision of a guard who stands, loaded rifle in hand, right next to the peasant.

Austrians living near these borders are in the habit of entertaining themselves Sunday afternoons by looking across a river or a narrow no-man's-land at the Communist guards as each paces out his five hundred feet or so along the edge. From both sides they regard each other through binoculars and, occasionally, when an Eastern guard has become unnerved because of some tourist with a camera, e fires a pot shot across the line.

Outside Soviet Bloc

The relative freedom at the Yugoslavian border just irritates the wound caused by Yugoslavia's cutting itself from the Soviet bloc soon after the Revolution of 1941-5. For, unlike in China, were the amount of independence from Moscow and the effects of this independence cannot be ascertained, in Yugoslavia Western tourists can see for themselves the development of an independent communist system, a phenomenon that runs strictly counter to Marxist theory.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes that "united action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat." The current Soviet government expands upon the same thesis in one of its many tirades against Yugoslavia contained in its draft of the new Com-Party Program.

"Yugoslavia likewise took the Socialits path. But the Yugoslav leaders by by their revisionist policy contraposed Yugoslavia to the Socialist camp and the international Communist movement, thus threatening the loss of the revolutionary gains of the Yugoslav people . . . The line of Socialist construction in isolation, detached from the world community of Socialist countries, . . . is reactionary and politically dangerous because it does not unite, but divides the peoples in face of the united front of imperialist forces, because it nourishes bourgeois-nationalist tendencies and may ultimately lead to the loss of Socialist gains." And to the Communist mind, this is entirely logical: the way of achieving the the only force standing in the Communist Valhalla, the "withering away of the state," is the foreign bourgeoisie and its agents, and the only way to eradicate that enemy through the united efforts of the international proletariat.

Repression Not Apparent

The tension that exists among the people in Soviet satellites does not manifest itself strongly in Yugoslavia. People on the streets show no signs of repression or nervousness despite the danger of discussing such matters as politics on the street (I am told that public places abound with trench-coated slouch-hatted secret police types though I never noticed any myself), Propriety must be observed and the Croats and Slovenes (who inhabit the North) are probably fully accustomed to its necessity after several hundred years under Austian domination. It certainly does not effect their day to day behavior as similar restrictions might in either Italy or France.

I have the impression, however, that there is far more apathy and disinterest than propriety in their failure to notice restrictions upon their freedom--an apathy bred, more likely than not, by a considerable increase in wealth since the Communists took over. True, politics seem to be discussed to some extent in private circles as the daughter of an important Zagreb factory manager assured me in Vienna. But, in the same discussion, she mentioned in a nonchalant (sort of "well, of course, Ike is a bit senile") tone, that she is not in the least a Communist but rather a socialist. Opposing the Communists is like opposing the Republicans or the Democrats.

Building Socialism

According to an American friend of mine, however, who spend this summer working on a road in Macedonia in southern Yugoslavia, there is another sector of the youth which is passionately concerned with politics--the members of the youth movement. These students and ex-students spend all of their summers in work camps "helping to build Socialism."

The southern portion of the country I understand suffers the poverty of southern Italy or Greece--perhaps worse. Not so the North which appears to be at about the same economic level as most of Austria. Buildings are in good repair, people are reasonably well dressed, and cities are quite crowded with automobiles. Strangely enough, the only poverty I noticed was in one of Ljubljana's best visited tourist attractions, the large castle on a bluff in the middle of town from which the city was defended against Turkish invasions from the 13th to the 17th century.

Nazis Ousted

A Museum of the National Liberation apparently graces every major town in Yugoslavia with vast 'You are there' exhibits of political cartoons, marionettes used in cabarets, tanks, rifles, grenades, and other memorabilia celebrating the victory of Tito's Partisans over the Nazis in 1945. Neither tourists nor citizens seem to visit these and the one in Ljubljana was no exception in this respect. Within the long marbled corridors and the impressive exhibit rooms were two people besides myself--the director and his secretary.

"Yes, it was between 1941 and 1945 that the loyal proletariat fought the Revolution," or, "No, we did not fight internal forces so much as the imperialistic Nazi invaders," he replied to my questions, all the time looking not at me but around me at the secretary who had stationed herself at the door and seemed to be giving him signals of some sort. When I asked him whether there hadn't been forces other than the Partisans fighting the Nazis, he appeared rather nervous and hurried off.

Render Unto Caesar ...

One other time I received an equally evasive treatment--from a Catholic priest in Zagreb who allowed me to ask a couple of questions after having shown me his church. After he had explained that the great majority of Crotions embrace the Catholic religion, I remarked, "And you have no trouble with the state?" "That is a subject on which we do not speak," he said rather good naturedly and hustled back to his sacristy.

But, if the Catholic Church is not particularly well treated by the government, other churches (Greek Orthodox and Moslem) are probably far less harassed since they are subject to the control of no external secular power and therefore offer far less competition to the power of the state. Tito himself attends Orthodox services. A museum in Lubjlana carried an exhibit of lithography with work representing most countries. A very large proportion of the prints where non-objective, something that would never be tolerated in Russia expect for purposes of deadnoting foreign artists. One of the major triumphs of the exhibit, however, was its unintended demonstration that the merits of non-objective art are equally elusive in its manifestations throughout the world.

The Russian exemplars were socialist realism and bad. Interestingly enough, the Mexican exhibit consisted mostly of work done in the same style. Prints by artists of the satellite nations were considerably freer in style and some-what more down to earth by subject matter-many were very moving. And in the objective work of all countries there was considerable special comment, much of it favorable to the United States.

Young Doctors Threw Party

In Zagreb, while searching up and down the dingy narrow stairway of one of the better apartment buildings for the girl who had assured me in Vienna that she was a socialist and not a Communist, a young man of about twenty-four of five years stopped me and asked me in fairly good English if he could assist. Having ascertained that the girl was away in the country, I asked the man if he would like to join me that afternoon for coffee and tell me something about Zagreb. After a moment of nervousness he said, "I think maybe it would be better when you will join my friends and me at a little party we are having here."

The little party had been going since ten o'clock the morning before and no small quantity of Hquor had already been consumed. One could see little (all the drapes were pulled); nevertheless, it was quite apparent that the apartment was extremely large and well-appointed--about on the same level as a professional's apartment in New York. And it appeared that one member of the group, a young surgeon owned it himself. He was the product of a French Lycee which in itself would indicate that his family had been quite wealthy before the war. Yet there was no doubt that he too was earning a very adequate income. Another young doctor later explained that professionals were so badly needed now that the state not only paid good salaries but had dropped the tacit requirement of earlier days that professionals be good Communists.

Oppose Communism

These people, all of them in medical profession and all of them recently graduated from Yugoslavian Universities, were anything but good Communists. On the other hand, they were by no means revolutionaries. The political and economic conditions of the state seemed merely to present a subject for jokes--made funnier perhaps by a quantity of alivevitz, the Yugoslavia blum brandy.

a very earnest and quite uninebriated fellow, and engaged him in a discussion on doctors incomes that on the reception given to President Nkrumah Ghana when he paid Tito a visit before the Belgrade Conference. Exercising uncanny ability to sniff out a political discussion--even from the other side a pitch-black room that fairly tremble from the blasts of Satchmo's horn--the others shouted at the host to "cut this Communist propaganda."

What I had seen of Nkrumah's reception looked something like the return of Charles Lindbergh after his Atlantic.

What I had seen of Nkrumah's reception looked something like the return of Charles Lindbergh after his Atlantic.