... As for the Communists in the Skup[vs]tina, it may be argued that
though this party of over fifty members has ceased to exist we should
have said not simply that they are innocuous but that they have been
rendered so. They were in principle against any State which violated
their somewhat hazy ideas on the subject of Capital: while professing to
aim at the holding of wealth in common they secured a great deal of
their success at the polls through the bait of more land for the
individual, which they dangled before the eyes of the most ignorant
classes. Some of the electors who supported them were prosperous farmers
unable to resist the idea of a still larger farm; but the majority of
their adherents were as ignorant as they were gullible. Yet one should
remember that for most of them this was practically their first
experience of an election: the constituencies which had formerly been in
Austria-Hungary had always seen the booths under the supervision of the
police, while the Macedonian voter (three Communists were returned for
Skoplje) had only known the institutions of the Turkish Empire. Being
told by the Communists that their box at the polling-station was really
the box for the poor, the Fukara, all the gypsies and so forth of
Skoplje, who had never voted in their lives, hastened to claim the
privilege, under the impression that a Communist Government would
liberate them from taxes and military service. Other reasons for the
success of the Communists in Yugoslavia, an essentially non-industrial
State, were the general discontent with post-war conditions, and the
virus which so many of the voters had acquired in Russia or on the
Dobrudja front during the War. The activity in the Skup[vs]tina of this
very indigestible party--largely composed of Turks, Magyars, Albanians,
Germans and others--their activity in and out of Parliament was not
confined to words. In June 1920 they only refrained from throwing bombs
in the Skup[vs]tina because one of their own members would have been in
peril, and in December a plot against the Prince-Regent and some of the
Ministers was foiled. Thereupon the Emergency Act of December 27, the
so-called Obznana, came into existence. It suspended all Communist
associations. This Act was issued for the good of the country, but was
not previously presented to the Constituent Assembly or provided with
the royal signature. How justified were the authorities in thus putting
a stop to this party could be seen when some of the Communist deputies
were interrogated, for either they were dangerous fanatics or else very
ignorant individuals, who knew no more about any other question than
about Communism, and had only been elected because they professed
dissatisfaction with things in general. A few months later Mr.
Dra[vs]kovi['c], the very able Minister of the Interior, who had drawn
up the Obznana, but who by that time had laid down the seals of office,
was murdered by Communists at a seaside resort in the presence of his
wife and little children. The object of this particular outrage was to
persuade the authorities in panic to withdraw the hated Obznana, whereas
the previous attempts on various personages seem to have been greatly
due to the desire to show some positive result in return for the cash
which came to them from Moscow. (One of the leaders of the party, the
ex-professor of mathematics, was arrested last summer in Vienna on his
return from Moscow, with a large and very miscellaneous collection of
English, French, American, Russian and other money.) After the murder of
Mr. Dra[vs]kovi['c] the mandates of the Communist deputies were
suppressed; seven or eight of them were detained, for speedy trial, and
the rest were told to go to their homes. The Communist parliamentary
party was at an end--it was established that their Committee room in the
Skup[vs]tina had been used for highly improper purposes--but there was
nothing to prevent these ex-deputies from being elected as members of
any other party, and it was rather beside the mark for an English
review, the _Labour Monthly_,[51] to talk of the "White Terror in
Jugo-Slavia," as if there prevailed in that country anything comparable
with Admiral Horthy's regime in Hungary.