Le fédéralisme yougoslave: Etudes coordonnées par l'Institute de Droit comparé de Belgrade.Review by: Cyril A. ZebotSlavic Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Mar., 1968), pp. 158-159Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2493943 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 07:20

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.54 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 07:20:38 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

I58 SLAVIC REVIEW

cution, possessed by the idea that all literature is propaganda, either pro-Soviet or anti-Soviet, was talking about "slanderous, blasphemous, and sacrilegious fabrications which defame the USSR, its social and political system, and its people"; the defend- ants, alienated from the hypocritical and superficial reality of their social milieu, viewed themselves as hostile witnesses to their environment and referred to their works as literature containing a human message written in an unorthodox style about subjects which were, but which should not be, taboo. The prosecution ac- cused the defendants of a crime against the Soviet state; the defendants admitted to the breaking of literary taboos. As Siniavskii maintained, "the political character- ization of a literary work is a tricky business" (page 126). Tricky, perhaps, but the Soviet court mastered the trick. "Now," as Svetlana Alliluyeva has noted, "you can be tried for a metaphor, sent to a camp for figures of speech!"

The Soviet statute which was used to send Siniavskii and Daniel off to a labor colony would be declared unconstitutional in the United States as a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which requires that vague laws must be declared invalid and ambiguous ones narrowly construed. Substantive First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press protect our writers from criminal prosecution for what they have written, provided the literature is not obscene, libelous, seditious, or in some way unduly obstructive of the administration of justice. Even if other- wise valid, the conviction of Siniavskii might well be reversed by a United States appellate court because of the state's refusal to permit him to obtain evidence which he believed necessary in order to present his defense.

But such comparative comments are of small solace to Siniavskii and Daniel, who have paid the price for nonconformity. Their conviction will have a chilling effect on other Soviet writers. As Hayward concludes (page 36): "The literary vocation is still considerably more hazardous in Russia under the Soviet regime than it was under the Czarist regime."

University of San Diego JOSEPH J. DARBY

School of Law

Le feddralisme yougoslave: Etudes coordonnees par l'Institut de Droit com- pard de Belgrade. Paris: Librairie Dalloz, 1966 [1967 on spine]. Pages 245. Paper. "Travaux du Centre de Recherches sur l'U.S.S.R. et les Pays de l'Est" ("Annales de la Facult6 de Droit et des Sciences politiques et &conomiques de Strasbourg," XVIII).

This collection of essays on the subject of Yugoslav federalism prepared by a group of Yugoslav professors, politicians, and assorted writers was to have been prefaced by a substantial and substantive introduction to the subject by Michael Muskhely of the Strasbourg Research Center on the Soviet Union and the Countries of the East. Unfortunately, Mr. Muskhely died before he could write his piece. As a result we have a purely Yugoslav book under French auspices, a monologue instead of a dialogue, a one-sided, even propagandistic presentation of the ideology and law concerning the federal aspects of Yugoslavia's political system. There is virtually no empirical-analytical treatment of the subject.

By its constitutional provisions the Communist regime of postwar Yugoslavia was a federal union of six republics patterned after the Soviet Union. Federalism was a legalistic concession to the multinational reality of Yugoslavia, while totalitarian centralism was the reality of the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.54 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 07:20:38 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

REVIEWS 159

Two important developments have since changed this familiar Stalinist pattern. After its expulsion from the Cominform in 1948 the Communist party of Yugo- slavia, in order to differentiate itself ideologically from Soviet Stalinism, proclaimed the concept of social self-management as the core principle for a new social, economic, and political system which was gradually to replace the totalitarian rule of the party. But this ideological decentralization was slow in being implemented. There was powerful intraparty resistance to such transformation even after the an- nouncement of the 1965 economic reform. In July 1966 Alexander Rankovic, the heir apparent to Tito, was suddenly removed both from the government and the party. It is only since then that the fifteen-year concept of self-management is coming to life in enterprises and other basic social units.

The removal of Rankovic originated yet another major change in the Yugoslav system. The federal government is not only reducing its control over the economy and society; it is also itself being restructured into what is beginning to shape up as an emergent confederacy of six autonomous republics. The federal Council of Nationalities, composed of an equal number of delegates from each republic, is to hold an effective veto power over all federal legislation, which, in its turn, is to be limited to general guidelines. Effective legislation and public administration are to be effectively decentralized by individual republics.

Such, in brief, is the story and outlook of federalism in postwar Yugoslavia. But this is not what we read in the book under review. The book is not only ideological, legalistic, and propagandistic rather than empirical and analytical; it is also badly out of date, for it stops with the constitution of 1963. But the truly important changes began with the economic reform of 1965 and the fall of Rankovic in 1966. These changes have little to do with the ideological Marxian dialectics which char- acterizes the book. They have been dictated and generated by the pluralistic dynamics of the economic, cultural, and national elements of Yugoslavia's multi- national and pluricultural reality as well as its great differences in economic develop- ment.

It should be kept in mind, however, that the League of Communists still holds the political monopoly. Its interference is less sweeping, but there is no other independ- ent political organization in the country. Therefore the process of liberalization and decentralization is not politically safeguarded in a framework of democratic alter- natives. This is one reform that is not yet in sight.

Georgetown University CYRIL A. ZEBOT

FREDERICK C. BARGHOORN, Politics in the USSR. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1966. Pages xii, 418. $2.95, paper.

LEONARD ScHAPiRo, The Government and Politics of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House [1965]. Pages 192. $3.95.

ABDURAKHMAN AVTORKHANOV, The Communist Party Apparatus. Chicago: Regnery, 1966. Pages xiv, 422. $10.00.

Frederick Barghoorn, who in his Soviet Image of the United States and The Soviet Cultural Offense pursued trails left largely unexplored by Western Sovietologists, now ventures onto busier streets. His latest study, a text, is, however, no run-of- the-mill effort but a pioneering attempt to apply Gabriel Almond's structural-func- tional schema of comparative politics to the Soviet polity. (Almond currently wields great influence among American political scientists in area studies.) Barghoorn's at-

This content downloaded from 62.122.76.54 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 07:20:38 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions