Soviet Rehearsal in Yugoslavia? Contradictions of the Socialist Liberal Strategy

Abstract

For a generation of East Europeans, party stalwarts, and Balkanologists raised to view the Yugoslav path as heresy, the current changes in the Soviet Union must present one of those great ironies of history. A liberal communist programme once labelled Revisionist is now viewed as the guiding hope of a post-Cold War world and Soviet prosperity. A conflict that went public in June 1948 within days of the currency reform in Germany that finalized its division is now forgotten in the congratulations over Soviet acceptance of German reunion. In places where anti-Titoist purges paved the way to Stalinist rearmament in eastern Europe, there now comes criticism of Yugoslavs for their slow pace of anti-communist purge. And 41 years after Yugoslavia's path to reform - its "sell-out to Wall Street'' - was assured in the fall of 1949 with US commitment of military aid and then food, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Edward Shevardnadze, presented Washington with a request for food to protect Soviet reforms. Despite their substantial difference in international significance, power, and wealth, the similarity between the Yugoslav path since the late 1940s and the one chosen by the Soviets in the 1980s is unavoidable. So, too, is the relation between their introduction and international conditions. The parallels are neither chance events nor limited to their common multinational federalism. The Yugoslav experience provides direct lessons for analysis of the roots, possibilities, and contradictions of the Soviet reforms. These parallels originate in two fundamental characteristics of communist party governance: first, the crucial importance of the strategy of accumulation that its leaders choose for the whole pattern of institutional development and domestic conflict; and second, the importance that international conditions play in that choice of strategy.