MILOVAN DJILAS

Conversations with Stalin

1962

ONE OF JOHN ANSTEY’S editorial suggestions was that I should write about the Balkans for the Telegraph Colour Magazine. So in the spring of 1967, I found myself in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, which at the time was just one of the seven different entities of the Yugoslav federation. I had an introduction to Vlado Gotovac, a Croatian nationalist and open advocate of reform, all of which the Communist regime would find intolerably provocative. The look on his face made it immediately obvious that he believed my visit was bound to be recorded and held against him. Leading me to the window, he pointed out numerous policemen in plain clothes standing by shiny black cars, evidently a team keeping him under surveillance. In due course he was arrested, tried and sentenced to four years in prison.

In Belgrade, the poet Miodrag Pavlovi´c took me to a bookshop. The man I glimpsed browsing before we hastily backed out was Alexander Rankovic, until lately chief of the secret police that had maintained Josip Broz, alias Marshal Tito, in power as head of the Yugoslav Communist Party and President of the country. Tito had lived in Moscow for five years, astute enough to survive Stalin’s Great Terror. “Tito is a smart fellow!” Stalin said approvingly, “He has no problems with enemies–he has got rid of them all.”

During the war, Tito had two equally important but incompatible objectives, to drive the German army of occupation out of the country and to prepare for the post-war Communist take-over of power. Milovan Djilas, his deputy and a hard-line Communist with the blood of so-called class enemies on his hands, had accompanied him on missions to Moscow. Tito then broke with Stalin in the first assertion of the very same nationalism that eventually would destroy the Yugoslav federation. Stalin famously boasted that he had only to shake his little finger and Tito would fall. Tito’s immediate transformation from Party hero to Party villain was the manipulation of opinion that George Orwell unforgettably defined as a Two Minutes Hate. James Klugmann, for instance, a member of the Central Committee of the British Communist Party, had worked clandestinely through British Intelligence to put Tito in power, but now wrote to order From Trotsky to Tito, a polemic designed to trace a straight line of treason between the two.

In a similar transformation from Party hero into villain, Djilas became Tito’s arch-critic, as Ian Kershaw expressed it in the second volume of his comprehensive history of twentieth century Europe. For Djilas, Communism in practice was a social system that enriched and privileged the unscrupulous few and impoverished everyone else. To the world at large, Soviet Communism was evidently a cover for Russian imperialism. Tito had him sent to prison for nine years. While serving the sentence, Djilas wrote Conversations with Stalin. Posterity will always have to take into consideration this unique and frankly devastating memoir of Stalin in the crisis of war.

Out of the blue, I telephoned him. He invited me to his house. Only a few months earlier, he had served out his sentence, and still had what he called “the look of a convict.” A Montenegrin, he had grown up amid banditry, feuding and rebellion. First and foremost he was a dissident, willing and able to tell the truth as he saw it, no matter what the cost. “I know nothing about you,” Djilas said to me, “you may be a spy or provocateur. But if you have any influence, use it to tell the Americans that they must win the war in Vietnam.” The United States alone had the strength to stand between the Soviet Union and China. If it were to withdraw, he feared, countries including his and mine would be compelled to take sides in a merciless battle of the great powers for supremacy.

Hearing this point of view, Mark Schorer, an eminent biographer and chairman of the English literature faculty at Berkeley, arranged for me to speak about Djilas on the university campus. There were even promotional posters. Djilas had credentials. Nevertheless, those who came to listen to the talk were in favor of withdrawing in order to lose the war, and they were noisy about it too. In common with dissidents, I failed to convince.