We have nurtured our sovereignty with the blood of our people, and no one is going to take it away from us.
—Marshal Josip Broz Tito
WITH those defiant words, Yugoslavia's President recently reiterated his country's determination to remain free and independent. As the East bloc's original heretic, who broke with Moscow in 1948, Tito is concerned that the Soviets, having acted to quash a much more recent heresy in Czechoslovakia, may also move against him.
The Russians have given him some reason to worry in the form of bitter propaganda attacks by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact press and furtive attempts to subvert Tito's control over the rival ethnic groups in his country. As a result, Tito has tightened his internal-security system and reactivated his World War II partisan system, which fought the Nazis to a standstill. In addition, he has ordered war supplies to be stashed away in the country's formidable mountains, and has massed his army along the likely invasion routes.
Suspicious Miniskirts. The Soviets are applying to Tito the same kind of propaganda and diplomatic pressure that they exerted on Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubček in the months before Warsaw Pact forces started maneuvers along that country's borders. The Russians are also engaging in considerable espionage and agitation among Yugoslavia's small bands of dissident nationalists. According to some reports, a suspicious number of pretty, miniskirted hitchhikers have blossomed on Yugoslav highways; in foreign accents, they ask drivers who give them lifts all sorts of unfeminine questions about Yugoslav troop deployments. Journalists from Warsaw Pact countries are more inquisitive than ever. Hungarian truck drivers carrying loads of tomatoes and paprika to Yugoslav markets wander off the main road and somehow blunder into Yugoslav troops in border regions. Tito fears that Soviet agents, working with die-hard ethnic groups, will make an attempt on his life. But both sides can play that game. Last week three leaders of an exile group of anti-Tito Croatians were found shot to death in their Munich office, and other Croatian exiles put the blame on Tito's secret service.
Prudent Exercise. There is, of course, some suspicion that Tito is overdramatizing the Soviet threat in the hope of obtaining more Western economic aid to offset his increased defense expenditures. Most Western military men regard the possibility of an attack on Yugoslavia as unlikely for two reasons: 1) Yugoslavia is not geographically vital, as is Czechoslovakia, to the Soviets' defense system, and 2) the Yugoslavs, unlike the Czechoslovaks, are obviously determined to go down shooting. At present, there are no signs of Soviet preparations for an invasion, and winter snows will soon give Tito at least a few months of safety.
Even so, the possibility of a Russian attack cannot be entirely ruled out, especially if the Soviets intend to carry to an extreme their so-called Brezhnev