Tito's Country
BARBARA CASTLE, M.P.
Y first and abiding impression of Tito's Yugoslavia is of my luggage being trundled through the streets on The foreign visitor gets used, therefore, to spending a good deal of his time in Putnik offices, arranging and re-arranging his holiday affairs. Patience is needed, as when one discovers that the promised phone call has never been put through, or that the only person who speaks English is being mysteriously wanted in the domestic Putnik office next door and has to be borrowed to sort out the problems of the foreigner. Yet always, just as one is giving up in despair, the confusion rights itself by means of a piece of quite unbureaucratic help from somebody, or one is touched to find that on one's departure the Putnik officials with whom there have been such long arguments turn up in force to see one off in great friendliness.
Who are the foreigners who brave this unorthodoxy for their holiday ? The regime itself anticipated some 900 foreign visitors in this, the first year of revived tourism ; in the event over 2,000 came. Mainly Austrians, French, a few English and the odd American official exploring from Belgrade or Trieste, they were drawn not so much by political curiosity as by the world-famous beauty of the Dalmatian coast or by sheer adventurousness, like the middle-aged English lady who had " done " Spain last year and this year wanted something equally " different " and who was relishing every moment of her energetic voyaging. The regime, Marshal Tito told me when I had the privilege of an interview with him in Zagreb, does not want too many visitors a cart while I followed behind feeling for all the world like a displaced person. It happened on my first arrival in the country at Rijeka, it happened at my last port of call, Bled-; it was liable to happen any time, even to the wealthiest of tourists. For taxis are almost non-existent in Yugoslavia ; motor-cars of any kind are a rarity. Transport is primitive. If you are a peasant- you ride on a donkey or in a bullock-cart ; if an urban worker, you crowd the bone-shaker trams. If you have to do a long- distance journey from, say, Dubrovnik to Ljubljava, heaven help you. It will take you two days and a night by a railway which most of the way is only single-track, and you will probably -have to stand most of the time. If you are one of the fortunate few who are able to travel by air, as I was, you must be prepared to take off and land on an airfield innocent of tarmac, a mere mountain-ringed stretch of pasture where the sheep• nibble the autumn crocuses and from Which the straying peasant has to be frantically shooed as the plane comes in to land.
It is against this background that Yugoslavia is trying to revive its once dominant tourist industry, and to do it in the context of a Communist State. Here we come to the second phenomenon that makes its most vivid impact on the traveller: Putnik, the nationalised tourist agency which handles all travelling arrange- ments for both nationals and foreign visitors. On arrival at any new place, whatever the time of night, it is advisable to contact Putnik just in case the hotel in which you have reserved a room has never heard-of you. Putnik is the supreme example of the new Yugoslavia's powers of improvisation. In a country where it may easily take a day to put through a long-distance telephone call, where a thunderstorm can put the airfield (field being the operative word) out of action for 24 hours, where there are always more people wanting to move than the strained transport facilities can possibly accommodate, hitckes are bound to occur. Then, again, the hotels-, from the simplest guest-house to the five-star pre-war "Grand Imperial," are all nationalised, and the hotel managements have the almost impossible job of fitting a fluctuating tourist population into a regular clientele of Yugoslav holiday-makers, financed by their trade unions. And to crown the complications, currency for everyone is only partly in cash, the balance being in the forin of bonds ": tourist vouchers for the visitor, industrial vouchers for the Yugoslay. until it is ready to welcome them properly, but clearly it is not going to be able to Stop a growing stream of inveterate travellers who are_not to be put off by a few difficulties. For where else in Europe can one experience the stimulating mixture of con- ventional holiday delights—perfect scenery, brilliant sunshine, sailing and swimming in translucent sea, with the fascination of political experiment ? 'What if the steam-boats which serve the Dalmatian coast and islands are slow, dirty and almost intoler- ably overcrowded ? One remembers that the entire coastal passenger fleet was sunk during the war, and that the boat on which one travels has probably been fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic. "Next year new boats will be in service" one is told and so one settles down on the deck amidst the• mounds of luggage in a ship in which class distinction has been effectively abolished, watching the rocky coast slip by hour after hour.
The foreign visitor is privileged in Yugoslavia, but not all that privileged. He has priority of accommodation in the best hotels, but the rest of the rooms are snapped up by the " syndicates " of workers for free holidays for their members or by students holidaying on special vouchers. The food the foreigner eats is too expensive for the Yugoslav to buy in the ordinary way, but while the latter is on holiday he gets it too. "En pension" conditions are the same for both ; the Yugoslav shares the abun- dance of meat and the foreigner must put up with the coarse bread. They mingle together on the same little dance-floor out on the terrace under the trees, where the band plays a highly cosmopolitan range of tunes. Tito's revolution has a big advantage over Moscow's ; its women are beautiful, and even the minority of confirmed Communists see no illogicality in displaying that beauty in gay American dresses supplied by friends and relatives overseas through the agency of Care parcels.
The foreign visitor this summer has found Yugoslavia poised between the old system and the new—between the rigidities of a Moscow-style Communist economy and a growing reliance on the free market. Already the peasant is back again in the market-place selling his grapes and figs and eggs privately for what they will fetch ; small-scale businesses like carpenters, barbers, the little pubs and the small retail shops, are being denationalised ; the grip of Belgrade on the Republics and of the Republics on the towns is being relaxed. Special shops at which a privileged minority has been able to buy scarce goods and to buy at cheaper prices are doomed. It is all part of the war on bureaucracy, part of the revulsion against Moscow Communism which Tito described to me as "the worst bureaucracy in the world." The ordinary citizen is torn between his relief at seeing the back of the Russians (the break with Moscow has restored all Tito's popularity as a national leader) and his fear of what the promised economic changes may bring. The currency reforms of October 1st, under which all vouchers of any kind are to be abolished in return for an adjustment in the monetary value of wages, may mean that skilled workers will lose some of their advantages. Marshal Tito frankly admitted to me that, in the first rush of revolution, the regime went too far in debasing the standards of the professional worker and the specialist: these classes are, likely to do better under the changes of October 1st. But prices are likely to rise, too, and Yugoslays of all persuasions, even those who got the fewer vouchers under the old system, are wondering whether they will be better off with no vouchers at all.
Marshal Tito believes that all these relaxations can be made without surrendering any of the 'realities of Socialism. Coercion of the peasant ? It is far better to entice him into the co-operative farms voluntarily ; only 22 per cent. of the peasants are yet in co-operatives, but they will soon learn to appreciate the advantages of mechanisation which the co-operatives can bring, and there will always be some holdings scattered here and there among the bare mountains, on which co-operative farming would be quite unworkable." Nationalisation ? We went too far ; the State couldn't run some of these small businesses, and our people didn't like it when they found they couldn't get a drink in a café or buy a packet of needles in a shop." Neglect of the specialist ? "Yes, we made a mistake and we must do more to encourage him."
To meet Tito himself is to gain a clue to the unexpected flexibility of the new Yugoslavia. Impressively modest, boyish almost, quick to laugh, spontaneous in reply, this is the Marshal whom one had been told by his critics never moved without the most elaborate precautions. When I talked with him he was protected only by his Alsatian dog, a note-taker and an inter- preter; there was only one sentry at the gate of his modest villa in Zagreb, and any armed guards that might be patrolling the grounds did so unobtrusively. The Marshal spoke freely, on the record and without any preparation of questions or replies. The charm of his good looks was enhanced by an informality of manner which, before he warmed to his replies, might almost be described as shyness. • Inevitably, perhaps, he seemed to underestimate some of the difficulties—the difficulty of giving more freedom to the peasant while protecting the industrial worker against peasant rapacious- ness ; the difficulty of preventing the fight against " bureaucracy" from developing into the abandonment of essential controls ; the difficulty of expanding the tourist industry without, in the interim period of hotel shortage, sacrificing the fine new system of cheap workers' holidays. But one felt that, though costly mistakes would often be made, the situation would be saved time and again by that mixture of courage and brilliant impro- visation which distinguished the Partisans. There may be no tarmac runway on most Yugoslav airfields, but the pilot's touch- down is all the smoother to make up for it.
Perhaps my most abiding impression of Yugoslavia, after all, is not.a memory of primitive transport or of long hours spent in Putnik offices, but a memory of two middle-aged ladies I visited in Zagreb. I found my way to their large suburban house only with difficulty, for the road was ill-lit and the taximan spoke only Serbo-Croat. But they welcomed me with warmth, and showed me into a room which had once been magnificent. On the walls hung portraits of distinguished ancestors, and through the dim light of the only partly illuminated chandelier (" electric bulbs are almost unobtainable ") one caught glimpses of the artistic heirlooms of what had clearly once been a wealthy family. At an antique table in one corner of the vast room the ladies poured libations of traditional hospitality—Turkish coffee, plum brandy and Yugoslav cigarettes, all of which, one knew, would cost them dear. Here, one thought, will certainly be two more critics-of this freely criticised regime. Then one realised that one of them was talking about her work on the street committee. "So you support the regime ? " one asked. Of course, they chorused with upraised hands, how could they possibly think of doing anything else, they who had risked their lives during the war in underground work organised from that very house, who had hidden the funds so laboriously collected to help the Partisans, who had maintained such perilous contact with the men in the mountains " ? • "But isn't life very difficult nowadays ? one asked. Then eyebrows lifted again: " Och, how difficult ! " But how could one expect anything else after such a ruinous war ? And life had not been all that rosy in pre-war Yugoslavia. Then, today, • there was, so much doing artistically and culturally: one of them helped to run a puppet theatre for children in the schools ; the other supervised their little museum of art treasures which they always threw-open to visitors on Sundays. "It isn't true that the State has taken away all private property ; the museum people take a great interest in our little collection," No, they said, they were hot Communist Party.members • Socialists rather. Mistakes had been made, they agreed: the chief one was to have put any faith in the Russians. But already things were gelling better ; there was more freedom, less hunger, fewer shortages. Their eyes shone with memory of old battles and unquenchable faith in future victories. • It will be a long time before Yugoslavia can restore the comforts of her pre-war tourist hidustry. None the less she is likely, almost in spite of herself, to attract gt•owing numbers of foreign visitors—those who are tired of the well-worn routes, and who will be drawn to her not only for her dramatic beauty' but for the excitement of her great adventure.
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