COMMUNISTS: More Equal

Without exception, Communist countries uphold the principle laid down by Satirist George Orwell in the Animal Farm: all are created equal, but some are more equal than others. This means in practice that Communist Party members get more and better food, housing, clothing and recreation than the mass of the people, who live in darkness because they know not Marx. Anyone who suggests that Communists live like ordinary people is guilty of a heresy called egalitarianism, upon which the great Lenin himself pronounced anathema.

Last week Tito’s Yugoslavia went egalitarian. A government decree, effective Nov. 1, closes all special food stores that serve party members and officials. Urban Yugoslav Communists will have to carry ration cards like other city dwellers. Special rest homes and resorts for the elect will be closed. Government agencies are forbidden to buy carpets, curtains, pictures and other items of interior decoration. After Nov. 1, nobody will be able to get free gasoline.

Reason for the Spartan decree is Yugoslavia’s present food shortage (TIME, Oct. 16) caused by a severe summer drought. Housewives standing in long lines for meager bread rations grumbled when they saw the colonels’ and the commissars’ ladies breezing into well-stocked special food stores. Tito could have applied the new equality only to food, but he apparently considered it politically expedient to extend the measure over the whole field of amenities available to Communist party members. It all went to show how rapidly a vice such as egalitarianism could eat into an otherwise uncorrupted Communist society once it got a foothold.