YUGOSLAVIA
Hints of trouble had been rumbling through Belgrade for months. Last January the Serbian Central Committee darkly warned of "chauvinistic, nationalistic, localist interferences" with Yugo slavian economic reforms. In February, President Tito himself struck out against unnamed party members who were "sabotaging" the nation's future. Who were the villains obstructing the dramatic social and economic changes that have swept Yugoslavia over the past decade? Last week they were revealed.
The news came from the sunny Adri atic island of Brioni, 340 miles from Belgrade, where the 75-year-old Tito called together a 155-man plenum of the Yugoslav Central Committee to name names and prefer charges. The leading plotter turned out to be Tito's erstwhile heir apparent, Vice President Aleksandar Ranković, 56. Tito accused his former guerrilla lieutenant of "conspiracy" to undermine Yugoslavia's economic reforms, of encouraging "damaging activity" by the state security police, and—most shocking—of bugging Tito's own home. Within eight hours Ranković had resigned, and—while denying the eavesdropping charge—had admitted that he was "morally and politically" at fault. With Ranković went Secret Police Boss Svetislav Stefanović, 55, whose ubiquitous UDBA spy network had kept a tough, unrelenting grip on Yugoslavia since 1946. In one stroke, Tito had dismantled the entire upper echelon of his secret police—a move unparalleled in the Communist world since Khrushchev destroyed Soviet Top Cop Lavrenty Beria in 1953.
The scope of the "conspiracy" against Tito was reflected in his choice of Brioni as the site of the purge. Both Ranković and Stefanović are Serbians—the dominant race in Yugoslavia's six-nation mix*—and Belgrade itself is the old Serb capital. Tito may well have feared that by denouncing Ranković on his home ground, he might trigger a Serb uprising.
Deviations & Anomalies. That the crisis had been long abuilding was reflected in Tito's speech to the plenum. He harked back to a three-day meeting in 1962 where secret-police powers had been harshly criticized. "On that occasion," Tito recalled last week, "we established more or less what these various deviations and anomalies were. It seems to me that we made a mistake at that time not to have gone to the end. We stopped halfway owing to certain tendencies toward compromise." By purging Ranković, Tito finally moved beyond the halfway house in reforming Yugoslav Communism.