YUGOSLAVIA: Freedom Is a Dangerous Word

Tito, in his efforts to appear before the world as a liberal Communist, has allowed several of his more conspicuous critics to remain at large. But one day during the Hungarian revolt, he said: “We must not allow any obscure people, any elements, to spread all sorts of rumors . . . The people must prevent them from sowing dissension.”

Last week six of Tito’s secret police, accompanied by a judge, descended on the humble apartment of Milovan Djilas, no obscure person, but the former Vice President of Yugoslavia and onetime partisan comrade of Tito. The police seized all Djilas’ recent writings and marched him off to jail. No charge was laid against Djilas. His presumed crime: he had written an article for New York’s New Leader hailing the Hungarian revolution as a “new chapter in the history of humanity,” in effect, the beginning of the end of Communism.

Djilas had also written: “The experience of Yugoslavia appears to testify that national Communism is incapable of [instituting] the kind of reforms that would gradually transform and lead Communism to freedom.”

Freedom is still a dangerous word to bandy about Belgrade, for anyone who wants to keep his own.