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Sorry States. While there is abundant evidence of Soviet pressure, there is no immediate sign that Moscow is planning an invasion. Moreover, while the Czechoslovaks declared in advance that they would not resist a Warsaw Pact invasion, the Yugoslavs have made it clear that they would fight. They have scheduled autumn maneuvers of their own in the rugged mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war games, the biggest since 1945, will stress cooperation between newly organized guerrilla bands and the regular army. The Yugoslavs are especially anxious about the possibility of a new outbreak of fighting in the Middle East. They fear that the Soviets might seize on such a situation and, in the name of Socialist solidarity, demand bases for their Mediterranean fleet on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast.
The Yugoslavs also fear that Moscow will exploit their internal quarrels, chiefly the one between the Catholic Croats and the more numerous Orthodox Serbs. The Croatians, whose territory includes the lucrative Dalmatian coast, have been complaining that the Serbs used their influence in the federal government to siphon off Croatia's tourism riches for use in other republics.
When Tito first proposed his constitutional changes in September 1970, bitter debate erupted among the republics, and old hatreds were fanned to white heat. Unwisely, Croatia's Communist leaders allowed nationalist fervor to build up, in hopes of exerting greater pressure on Belgrade for economic concessions. The agitation quickly got out of control. LONG LIVE FREE CROATIA signs began to appear in the republic. Autos that belonged to Serbs, 800,000 of whom live in Croatia, were tipped over. In an ironic turnabout, the big Croatian exile organization in West Germany, which historically had been strongly anti-Communist and anti-Russian, suddenly began to advocate an alliance with the Soviets as the only way to guarantee Croatia's rights.
By early last spring, the Kremlin evidently believed that Yugoslavia might be ripped asunder over its regional problems. So too did many Western observers. Tito summoned the country's leaders to his retreat at Brioni Island in the Adriatic and ordered them to stop playing on old hatreds. He stumped the country, at one point told a crowd: "The papers write that as long as Tito is there, he will somehow manage to hold it together, but if he should go, everything will fall apart. What a sorry affair if all this depends on only one man!" Thanks largely to the efforts of that one man, the situation has measurably improved.