In 1978 I left Yugoslavia for the West with every intention of returning after a few months. My trip through Western Europe and the United States, which included lectures in dozens of universities and appearances at various congresses and conferences, stretched on for an entire year. In 1979, when I finally decided to return to Belgrade, the newspapers reported that a press conference was held at the Belgrade Circuit Court at which the authorities announced that a new proceeding had been initiated against me and that an order had been issued for my arrest. I was accused under the same article of the Criminal Code that I had been tried on previously: "hostile propaganda."
From the day in 1965 when I was first arrested in my office at the university where I taught Russian literature (after the publication of President Josip Tito's speech that criticized me for my book Moscow Summer) until 1978, when I left for the West, I spent a total of seven years in prison, always for "hostile propaganda," that is, for my articles and books, which, of course, from the day of my first arrest, I could publish only in the West.
To return to Yugoslavia meant to go straight to prison - and perhaps to be cut off for many long years from my work and readers. I decided to postpone my return for a while, hoping for a favorable change. Thus, I have already lived eight years in the West, and although much has changed in Yugoslavia in eight years, today they jail people for "hostile propaganda" even more actively than ever. Still, I have not lost hope that things will change, and, along with many other Yugoslavians who keep close track of events within the country, I am deeply certain that after the model of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980 - 1981, it is now Yugoslavia's turn. Furthermore, I am just as certain that only in Yugoslavia can there take place, for the first time in history, a successful transition from a single-party structure to a pluralistic one. For Yugoslavia is not a member of the Warsaw Pact, and Soviet forces would probably not intervene, even if Yugoslavian Party dogmatists invited them to do so. Of course, the liquidation of the party monopoly seems inconceivable to many, although the destruction of the unity of the communist bloc seemed just as inconceivable in 1948, and still Yugoslavia accomplished it.
Changes After Eight Years
In 1980 Tito - president of the Republic, head of the Communist League, leader of the victorious Marxist revolution - died. He was a man whose "cult of personality" rivaled Stalin's. It was it to who dealt Stalin his first serious blow and who essentially began the process of "de-Stalinization" on a worldwide scale. So with the death of the "Father of the People" began the new transitional era, which is now clearly coming to an end. Tito's death precipitated a crisis on all levels: political, national, and economic. The gravest problem is the political one, a crisis in the functioning of the system. The possibility of resolving the crises in other spheres depends upon the resolution of this crisis.
Despite the country's independence in matters of foreign policy, her virtual market economy - which does not include private ownership of the means of production - and worker self-management instead of an administrative plan in the industrial process, Yugoslavia is still a typical communist country. One finds there a party monopoly on political information and organization, a version
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