Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 36, 6 September 1948, p. 4.
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The dispute between Tito and Stalin serves to popularize the fact that the Soviet Union has degenerated and that Stalinist policy represents a complete break with the Leninist tradition.
Lenin and Trotsky based their program on the international solidarity of the working class and depended upon the appeal of reason to unite the laboring people of all lands in the great task of building world Socialism. They went so far in upholding democratic rights as to insist on the right of all races or nationalities to secede from the Soviet Union if they so desired.
As Lenin himself underlined, while “trying to knit the nations closely together” the revolutionary socialist party “does not intend to bring about that consummation by the use of force, but through the free, fraternal union of the laboring masses of all nationalities.”
Stalinism, on the contrary, rests on fear of the advance of Socialism and maintains power through the lie, police terror, concentration camps, the firing squad and the assassin’s knife.
And like gangsters that are hard-pressed, they are discarding diplomatic pretenses and openly employing threats of murder to those who dare cross them. Thus the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party in a letter to Tito dated March 27, referred to the fate of Leon Trotsky, emphasizing for Tito’s benefit: “We believe Trotsky’s political career to be sufficiently instructive.”
The GPU, with its customary subtlety, is calling Tito’s attention to the pick-axe it had driven into Trotsky’s skull in 1940.
This was not all. The clincher came on August 23 at an extraordinary Congress of the Triestine Communist Party when Vittorio Vidali, the local Moscow representative, called on “every Communist to contribute to the fight against the Yugoslav leaders.” Another Stalinist official in Trieste “clarified” this directive: “Putting it bluntly this means that anyone among us, if he has the chance, should remove Tito.”
In rebuttal, Tito has demonstrated his ability to meet the Kremlin debaters on their own ground. Adherents of the Moscow faction in Yugoslavia have been removed from office and also from public view. One general who found the discussion too sharp .for comfort in Yugoslavia was brought up short at the border by the strongest argument in the arsenal of Stalinism – a rifle bullet. Tito has done his best to demonstrate his Stalinist orthodoxy.
Nevertheless, the rift between Stalin and Tito is of profound significance to the working class. It shows in the most emphatic way how little freedom Stalinism dares allow those under its domination. It throws a strong light on the instability of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its internal weakness. It can mark the beginning of a new upsurge of the peoples freed from Stalinist influence.
In other words far more is involved than the fight between a big dictator and a little dictator. The struggle initiated by Tito, involving the question of national sovereignty of Yugoslavia, may well become the starting point for new, large-scale regroupments and developments in the international working class movement.