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From Fourth International, vol.5 No.3, March 1944, p.95.
Transcribed, marked up & formatted by Ted Crawford & David Walters in 2008 for ETOL.
In 1936, A. Ciliga, former member of the Political Bureau of the Yugoslav Communist Party, most intimately acquainted with the figures in this movement, wrote that in 1928 the Comintern had “recruited some sort of a crew that had never had anything in common with the Yugoslav movement, some adventurists from all the five continents, and sent them as fully empowered ‘mandatories’ (plenipotentiaries) into the country.”
Then according to Ciliga here is what happened:
“In order to complete this mockery of the Yugoslav party, this gang was entitled a ‘workers’ leadership’ ... To facilitate the conquest of the Yugoslav flock by these Magi from the East none of the party activists in Moscow was permitted to leave for Yugoslavia. They did more than that. Anybody who was in the least ‘suspect’ in Yugoslavia itself was shipped to Moscow under various pretexts.
“In short, the ‘mandatories’ functioned. They already envisaged themselves as complete victors and – what is more important – within a month or so, or a half-year, or a year they, who were people without any standing in any sort of movement, would be in possession of a record so necessary for underground activity. And a career, a world career in the Comintern would be open to them. Everything would have gone smoothly had their fate depended upon Moscow alone. But, sad to relate, Belgrade also has a word or two to say in Yugoslavia.
“And in Belgrade a military-fascist overturn took place on January 6, 1929, and there ensued a bloody Balkan extirpation of every type of opposition. A genuine underground activity now became indispensable and the need was for men capable of going to their doom without the flicker of an eye. The ‘mandatories’ were panic-stricken, terrified. Like all adventurers, they had estimated much too lightly their chances of success and of a career. Now what was in question was not their careers but their heads.
“And then there occurred an unheard-of, infamous catastrophe. At this critical moment the ‘best section’ of the ‘mandatories’ left the party, the YCL and the workers’ movement in general to their fate and fled as fast as legs, railways and airplanes could carry them from Yugoslavia to Moscow. ... That is the way the ‘best of them’ behaved. Those who were a little worse remained in Yugoslavia and passed into the service of the police. And the worst ones, it turned out, had been provocateurs all the time; they had insured themselves from both sides at the very outset.
Among them was the chief mandatory – one Brezovich. It is worthwhile to dwell a little on him because Brezovich is not an accidental figure in the present day Comintern. Brezovich, as is well known, had also been a member of the Political Bureaus of the Chinese, Japanese, French, and many other parties. At a given moment, the bureaucratic degeneration facilitates the passage to provocateurs. The spirit of bureaucratic Byzantism reigning throughout the entire Comintern makes it easy for the provocateurs to worm their way to the top. Brezovich never took part in the Yugoslav workers’ movement. During the world war he was captured by the Russian troops. During the NEP he turned up in the Communist party, and after the annihilation of the Zinoviev opposition he made a career in Leningrad, becoming a district agitprop (in charge of agitation and propaganda). From there Gorkich-Bukharin-Manuilsky [the then leadership of the Comintern – Ed.] shipped him to Yugoslavia, placing in his hands the entire organizational and technical apparatus of the party. And in 1928 at the Sixth World Congress he was promoted to the Senioren Convent (the ranking members) of the congress despite the fact that in accordance with the decision of the plenum of the Central Executive Committee of the Yugoslav CP an old worker had been slated for the post ... Gorkich-Bukharin-Manuilsky organized the matter in such a way as to delay the arrival of this worker to the Congress (he spent days waiting in one of the border cities for permission to depart) while the scoundrel Brezovich appeared in Moscow even prior to the Congress, and in this way, as if of necessity, he was elected. As we see, Brezovich’s progress indicates a very characteristic lawfulness ...”
The above account appeared in the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, No.48, February 1936; it was also published in The Militant, February 8, 1936.
The biography of Brezovich as outlined by Ciliga parallels in so many respects data released in the press concerning the mysterious “Tito”-Broz-Brozhovichch that the question naturally arises: Is “Tito” perhaps – Brezovich?
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