Point and Counterpoint

Dissident Yugoslav Writer Mihajlo Mihajlov, who is well known for his anti-Soviet views, was arrested last week for the fourth time in ten years. Ever since the 1965 publication of his scathingly critical travelogue, Moscow Summer, he has become used to playing a Kafkaesque role in his country's foreign policy. Whenever President Tito feels the need to placate the Kremlin publicly, he usually orders the arrest of Russia's least favorite Yugoslav.

Mihajlov's arrest was the most recent episode in a bizarre series of events that began last June when a car crashed in a small town 150 miles south of Belgrade. Local police, arriving on the scene to fill out a routine accident report, inadvertently uncovered what has been hailed as the largest, most efficiently organized conspiracy against Tito since his 1948 rift with the Soviet Union.

Carrying a carload of pro-Moscow propaganda, the driver was apparently on his way to a clandestine meeting of an underground group that had been plotting to overthrow Tito and realign Yugoslavia more closely with the Soviet Union. Within weeks, 32 conspirators --most of them former secret-police agents and hard-line Communist war veterans--were arrested and convicted.

Bourgeois Press. The movement would probably have been dismissed as just another anti-Tito cadre had there not been evidence of complicity by the Soviet Union and two other Warsaw Pact countries--Hungary and Czechoslovakia. According to Yugoslav Communist sources, the reams of anti-Tito propaganda had reportedly been printed in Hungary and smuggled into Yugoslavia. Official notes of protest were sent to the three governments, and all three issued predictable denials of any involvement in the affair.

When Western newsmen first picked up on the story, Soviet newspapers angrily dismissed the reports as "threadbare inventions" of the "bourgeois press." A Tass commentary also contained a thinly veiled reprimand to Tito for lending credence to the rumors that the Soviet Union had been interfering in Yugoslavia's domestic affairs. In a characteristic display of the point-and-counterpoint diplomacy that keeps Yugoslavia straddled between East and West, Tito began backtracking.

Party officials explained that the notes had been sent to Prague, Budapest and Moscow not to protest but to inform the governments of the conspiracy trials. The Soviet deputy chief of mission in Belgrade, Dimitri Sevian, whom Tito had sent packing when he was still too piqued to be prudent, suddenly reappeared at his post. Finally, in what has become almost a ritual of pacification, the order went out to arrest Mihajlov.

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