Yugoslavia: When Revisionists Go Hunting

One of the youngest leaders in the Communist stable and the party’s oldest war horse met last week to create more worries for the Kremlin. Rumanian President Nicolae Ceauseşcu, 49, and Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, 75, first donned loden coats and tramped with shotguns through Tito’s slushy game reserve in Croatia, loaded for deer. Back for a talk at Tito’s hunting lodge near Osijek, they took more careful aim at a larger target: Moscow’s campaign for a grand conference of Communist states.

The meeting was a reconciliation as well as a chance to compare views on a bothersome issue. Though they both are striving to keep the Russians at a distance, the two biggest revisionists in the Communist bloc have not been getting along ever since Ceauseşcu declined to support the Arabs in their fight with the Israelis in June. At a gathering in the Kremlin, Tito took aside Rumanian Premier Ion Gheorghe Maurer in a corridor and upbraided him for his refusal to toe the pro-Arab line. He then went home in a fury and canceled an invitation to Ceauseşcu to visit him in Belgrade.

When it came to Moscow’s plans for a world conference to embarrass the Chinese, however, Tito and Ceauseşcu flew into each other’s arms. Both fear that any such Communist togetherness could result in resolutions that would hamper their independence or force them to take sides in the Sino-Soviet dispute. In an effort to reassure them, the Russians have pledged that the conference would not be “a meeting designed to excommunicate the Chinese.” But Ceauseşcu has turned down the Russians’ invitation to a preliminary meeting next month in Budapest that will lay plans for such a conference in the autumn. Tito was not even invited; the Russians know that he favors not a Communist summit but a mammoth socialist jamboree that would include some of his non-Communist cronies, such as Egypt’s Gamal Nasser.

Tito and Ceauseşcu may have decided on a common strategy to discourage the conference, but it was not disclosed in the final communiqué, which spoke only of “the comradely atmosphere of the talks.” The communiqué was also discreet enough not to mention the number of deer that each man had bagged in the hunt. Ceauseşcu, whatever his gifts as a statesman, is known to be a much poorer shot than his more experienced revisionist colleague.