There was no precise month or even year when Yugoslavia changed from a Stalinist police state into a virtually open society. When I visited Zagreb in August 1951 I was horrified by the wretchedness of the shops, the cafés, the clothes people wore, and above all by the atmosphere of suspicion and menace. Just over two years later, when I began an eight-month stay in Belgrade and Sarajevo, I found the country far better off materially, and the people no longer frightened of talking to a foreigner. Even in 1953, Yugoslavia was far more liberal than the Soviet Union or any other country in eastern Europe until the collapse of the Communist system. Although there were countries such as Poland, and to a lesser extent Hungary, where people were able to voice their opposition to Communism, they looked on their governments as foreign occupations, as indeed they were. In Yugoslavia a great many people, if not the majority, came to accept and even admire Tito, and many now look back on his rule as a golden age.
It used to be said that Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union represented the triumph of nationalism over a universal ideal, in much the same way that the French Revolution changed into Napoleonic imperialism. Yugoslavia was seen as the first in a line of national Communist states such as Mao Zedong’s China, Hoxha’s Albania and Ceauşescu’s Romania, all of them more or less hostile to the Soviet Union. Quite recently we have seen the rival Communist states of Vietnam, China and Cambodia actually making war on each other, in unashamedly racial hatred. Yet as we know, Yugoslavia under Tito was not the single, united nation it seemed to foreigners at the time, but a federation trying to heal the wounds of a terrible civil war. The breach with the Soviet Union had the effect, for a time, of uniting Serbs and Croats against an outside danger; but there was never a real Yugoslav nationalism or patriotism.
Moreover, nationalism cannot explain why Yugoslavia developed its liberal and tolerant form of Communism. There was no such thing in the other national Communist states such as China, Romania, Albania or North Korea, all of which were at times as ghastly as Stalin’s Soviet Union. A few other Communist governments tried to make their regimes more acceptable to the populace, notably Poland and Hungary, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and more recently Vietnam; but none came near to achieving the freedom enjoyed by Yugoslavs.
It is sometimes said that economic necessity forced Tito to make his regime more tolerant, that he introduced reforms in return for help from the West. But Ceauşescu got arms and financial aid from the West without relaxing his tyranny. Fidel Castro is still, at the time of writing, letting his people starve in defence of his principle ‘Socialism or Death’. Historians under the Marxist influence believe that because something happened, then it was bound to happen, that Yugoslavia was bound to develop as it did. But why did the same thing not happen in other Communist countries? The answer to that lies partly at least in Tito’s will and leadership.
At about the time when the Cominform crisis started to come off the boil, Tito decided to marry the faithful Jovanka. In 1951 he had suffered a gall-bladder attack and was nursed by her before and after the operation. When Djilas arrived to see Tito in hospital, a tearful Jovanka asked him: ‘What will happen, Comrade Djido?’ Djilas adds that this was the first time Jovanka had ever addressed a member of the Politburo. After Tito recovered, he married Jovanka privately at the beginning of 1952. According to Djilas, Tito’s illness had also strengthened his friendship with the triumvirate. ‘Not since the war had we felt our bond with him to be so close and warm, and I for one felt it to be permanent and unbreakable,’ he later wrote. As for Jovanka, ‘We leaders accepted her warmly and trustfully.’1
In the lower ranks of the Communist hierarchy, women especially were envious of Jovanka. She was at first nervous and shy, then veered in the other direction, and was accused of overdressing, loudness and vulgarity. Djilas says that Tito’s sons resented their stepmother. The eldest, Žarko, who had lost an arm during the war, had turned out wild. The younger boy, Miša, was growing into a sullen adolescent. Again according to Djilas, Jovanka wanted a child of her own but Tito would not oblige her. Instead Jovanka started a busy social life among artists, movie people and journalists. The gossips accused her of plotting with pro-Soviet generals, and liked to say that ‘the Serb blood came out in her’.2 In spite of his marriage, Tito maintained and surely enjoyed his fame as a lady’s man.
Tito’s domestic happiness may have contributed to the genial mood in which he presided over the liberalisation of the economy, the law, the press and foreign relations. The collectivisation of land, which had begun in earnest in 1949, was put in reverse, so that decollectivisation was almost complete by 1953. The peasants were not allowed to own large farms, or to employ labour outside their families, but they started to get reasonable prices for their goods, so that food became plentiful in the cities.
The economic overlord Boris Kidrić started to unravel his own plan for centralisation and state control, allowing the introduction of small private businesses. In the Belgrade street where I lived in 1953–4, there were rows of private restaurants, cafés and shops, selling everything from cakes to clocks, from cloche hats to religious medallions. As early as 1950, Kardelj and Djilas argued for the creation of workers’ self-management in the state-run companies. At first Tito opposed this, saying the workers were immature, but later agreed to the concept, saying: ‘But this is Marxist – factories to the workers.’ Having accepted it, Tito himself advanced the Workers’ Council plan that same year.3
Although Western economists sneered at the Workers’ Councils, calling them window-dressing, some proved very effective. Since wages depended on high production, the councils would not accept inefficient management staff, especially Communist Party hacks. The ex-Partisans and the Party stalwarts moved out of industry into the civil service, the army and the police. Once I spent a whole day talking to management staff and workers at a Sarajevo clothing factory, and thought it was much better run than those I had visited in Lancashire.
The reform of the legal system and the police was begun by Ranković in 1951 with a startling paper entitled ‘Towards the Further Strengthening of the Judiciary and the Rule of Law’. Ranković showed that the whole system was shot through with abuse and lawlessness. Different courts meted out utterly different punishments for the same offence. He gave instances of ‘rash deprivation of civil rights by certain agencies’. Criminal charges unjustly pursued amounted to 40 per cent in Serbia, 47 per cent in Montenegro. In Bosnia-Hercegovina, 110 out of 184 judges had no legal training, while three district-court judges had only elementary education. As Djilas so rightly says: ‘The weight and credibility of this shattering criticism were greatly enhanced by the fact that they came from the chief of the entire police force, who was simultaneously organisation secretary of the Party.’4 In what other country would the Minister of the Interior try to diminish rather than add to his power?
Milovan Djilas, as propaganda chief, led the way in the liberalisation of literature and the press, in particular in providing a fair and extensive coverage of events in the West. As early as 1951, Yugoslavia started to publish books and articles on the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, without of course mentioning Naked Island. Oddly enough the Russians, in their attacks on Yugoslavia, also failed to mention the cruel punishment of Cominformists.
Prominent Yugoslavs, especially journalists like Djilas and Dedijer, were sent on missions abroad to meet non-Communist politicians and write about their experiences. When in London, Djilas went to see Churchill who asked after ‘my old friend Tito’; and Djilas came to know and admire the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan. He made a long tour of the East, getting on especially well with the Indian Socialists, not forgetting to stop at Damascus on his way back, to buy Tito the fabric for a camel-hair coat. Another old comrade, Moša Pijade, when asked by Tito to bring him some gift from a foreign visit, is said to have answered grumpily that he did not fight through the Second World World in order to end his days as an errand boy.
In March 1953 Tito himself went on a state visit to Britain, much to the rage of his old antagonist Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to Nancy Mitford:
I am becoming a Russian imperialist, a reaction to the politicians. What is wrong is not Russia but Communism. Our policy is to bribe all the small states to remain Communist but quarrel with Russia. If they’re going to be Communist, it’s much better that Russia should rule them. Great Empires never seek war; all their energies are taken up by administration. Our troubles now come from Clemenceau destroying the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The one certain way to start a Third World War is to establish half a dozen atheist police states, full of fatuous nationalism and power hunger.5
Tito was not put out by Tory attacks, nor by the Roman Catholic protests against the continued house arrest of Stepinac, who was now a cardinal. The year 1953 had begun with Tito’s appointment as Yugoslav President over the three Vice-Presidents Kardelj, Ranković and Djilas. On 6 March 1953, a few days before he began his visit to London, Tito heard of the death of Stalin, the former idol whom he had come to despise. Seven or eight months later, Tito remarked about Stalin: ‘It is incredible how quickly a man like that was forgotten.’6
That same year saw the worldwide publication and triumph of Vladimir Dedijer’s Tito Speaks, his sympathetic but not hagiographie biography, much of it told in the first person singular. Although Dedijer’s book glosses over, omits and sometimes distorts many aspects of Tito’s career, it is now astonishing more for what it reveals than for what it hides. In particular one is astonished by Tito’s denunciation of Stalin, more than three years before Khrushchev’s revelations, and twenty years before Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. In 1953 there was still enormous credulity in the West about the nature of ‘Uncle Joe’ and the ‘Socialist Sixth of the Earth’. Those like the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who knew the Soviet Union and told some of the truth about it were still generally written off as at best ‘cold warriors’ and at worst ‘McCarthyites’, after the US Senator Joseph McCarthy who led an anti-Communist witch-hunt.
Towards the end of Tito Speaks, Dedijer gives an account of the great man’s daily life at his home in 15 Rumunska Street – not in the former royal palace as sometimes alleged in the foreign press. He awoke at 5.30 a.m. in summer and 7 a.m. in winter, did Swedish exercises and took walks in the park, regardless of the weather. He breakfasted on coffee, rolls and occasionally an omelet, followed at lunch and dinner by ordinary Central European food, sometimes varied by Zagorje dishes, such as his mother once cooked. Of these his favourites were chicken čorba, a thick broth laced with sour cream, and štruklje, a home-made pastry with cottage cheese. He drank little at meals except for a glass of beer or Yugoslav wine.
Each morning Tito studied the Yugoslav papers, especially the correspondence columns, ‘which often show the feelings of the people’, then scanned the bulletins of the international news agencies, British, American, French, German and Russian. He also received the London Times, Economist, New Statesman and Nation, Aneurin Bevan’s Tribune, the European edition of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Moscow Pravda. He smoked while going through the papers – some of his twenty cigarettes a day – and had to use reading glasses ever since an accident years before when a pin had got into his eye.
After the newspapers, Tito would study his correspondence and his official papers, then receive visitors: ‘A special category of visitors consists of Tito’s old friends and kinsmen. Usually once a year Tito’s schoolmates and acquaintances from villages round Bjelovar, where Tito lived after the First World War [at Veliko Trojstvo, the Holy Trinity, which rather surprisingly kept its name under the Communists], and from factories in Zagreb, come to visit Tito, stay a day or so, receive gifts and then take their leave.’
He travelled widely around the country, visiting farms and factories, joining in celebrations and anniversaries. Dedijer described going to Užice in western Serbia late in 1951, for the tenth anniversary of the short-lived ‘Red Republic’: ‘We arrived by car and we were met near Užice by a group of more than 500 Partisans … Fires had been built on a hill outside the town and lamb roasted whole on the spit. The old Partisans took Tito there, sat around the fire, ate and then sang old Partisan songs.’
Dedijer discussed security measures taken for Tito’s protection:
The Kremlin would like above all to see Tito assassinated … In summer 1952, they sent a terrorist group into Yugoslavia from Bulgaria. This group killed a lieutenant-colonel who had the medal of National Hero. The Russians have many means of smuggling terrorists over the Yugoslav border, which is more than 1,250 miles long on the satellite side. The Danube, too, flows through Yugoslavia and Russian, Hungarian and Rumanian vessels can easily bring in groups of terrorists. In spite of the constant danger, no extraordinary security measures are taken for the protection of Tito when he goes to meetings. The measures are about the same as those taken to protect an American President when he goes to New York to address the United Nations.
Tito received many foreign visitors. He usually had an interpreter present when meeting with the Americans and British, for although he understood almost every word of English, he always had difficulties in speaking the language. Besides Russian, Czech and Slovene, Tito spoke German well with a Viennese accent, and Kirghiz, which he learned in Siberia, and he could also read French and Italian.
After lunch, he would go to his library to read books recently published in Yugoslavia, among which he enjoyed Milovan Djilas’s study of Petar Njegoš, the Montenegrin poet.7 Tito’s favourite foreign authors were Balzac and Stendhal, Goethe, Dreiser, Mark Twain, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and Kipling. It is worth pointing out that five of the nine are Americans, none are Slavs. Tito’s literary tastes were formed in his youth, when he dreamed of emigration to the United States.
After lunch, Tito occasionally played chess but not very well, since Dedijer once beat him six games to two: ‘Tito is usually very jovial when he plays chess. He always comments on the move of his opponent, but when he is in difficulties, he cogitates a long time before he makes his move.’ Sometimes he would ride or play tennis during the afternoon. Sometimes he would shut himself in his room and play the accordion sent to him for his sixtieth birthday. He preferred light Viennese music and, among the classics, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. Jazz he regarded as pandemonium, and when it was pointed out that the young people loved it, he answered: ‘True, but I belong to the old generation.’ He liked Renaissance art and, among the later painters, Delacroix and the early impressionists. He despised the Russian socialist realist school: ‘You have the impression that the paintings are done by people without a soul, as if they were wielding spades instead of brushes.’
In the evenings, Tito often watched films, preferring above all Laurel and Hardy. He would play billiards and talk with his friends, especially Kardelj, Djilas and Ranković: ‘These are fair discussions, in which of course everyone reacts according to his temperament, but there is one thing which is particularly characteristic, and that is that all four of them endeavour to understand one another, see eye to eye with one another, although they need not necessarily reach the same conclusion.’8 A few months after the publication of Tito Speaks, this friendly quartet was broken up by the fall from grace of Milovan Djilas.
The year 1953, which had opened for Tito so hopefully, was to end with two unexpected and bitter disputes. One was the decision by the United States and Britain to hand ‘Zone A’ of Trieste to the Italians. The other was the publication of articles by Djilas that were to lead to his fall from office and later imprisonment. Although both these crises were seen at the time as setbacks to liberalisation, I now believe that they furthered this process, while the Djilas affair was a major event in the slow decline of international Communism, comparable to Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress, or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Both the Trieste crisis and the Djilas affair took place while I was living in Yugoslavia, and greatly excited the people around me. Although I have here attempted to put these events within the context of Tito’s career and Yugoslav history, I have also included some personal recollection and observation.
The Anglo-American statement on Trieste came on the afternoon of 8 October 1953. Early that morning I had arrived in Belgrade after standing all night on the train from Slovenia, so I was tired when I arrived at the Student House Ivo Lola Ribar on Boulevard Revolution (formerly Boulevard King Alexander, later Boulevard Red Army). Having exchanged friendly greetings with the Yugoslav students who shared the room, I got into bed and went to sleep. A few hours later I was woken up by shouting both inside and outside the student house. The students who had been so friendly a few hours earlier now told me grimly about the Trieste decision and argued among themselves whether to give me a batina, or beating as I discovered from my dictionary.
That day a crowd went on the rampage through Belgrade, roughing up British and American citizens, and smashing the offices of the respective reading rooms, as a mob on 27 March 1941 had attacked the German tourist office and torn up the swastika flag. Although the government at first approved the demonstrations, they got out of hand, so that Ranković had to send a troop of cavalry into Knez Mihailova Street. Banners appeared repeating the chanted slogans ‘Trst je naš’ (‘Trieste is ours’) and ‘Život damo, Trst ne damo!’ (‘We will give up our lives but not Trieste!’).
On Sunday 11 October, a meeting began at the Slavija Hotel, then moved to Republic Square for a mass demonstration, the leaders carrying Djilas on their shoulders. With friends from the Student House Ivo Lola Ribar, I went to Republic Square to hear Moša Pijade, Belgrade’s favourite orator. As we waited in the enormous crowd, the students told me some of the many stories and legends concerning Pijade, for instance his answer to Stalin in 1948: ‘Moscow has asked us for a reply to the Cominform resolution. This is our answer to Moscow: “Up your mother’s ****!”’ On this occasion Pijade concentrated his witty, obscene attacks on Clare Boothe Luce, the US ambassadress in Rome whom the Yugoslavs blamed for the loss of Trieste.
Although the Belgrade mob talked of marching on Rome, it did not occur to me at the time that this was a real possibility. Even when Tito said in a speech at Leskovac that if the Italian army entered ‘Zone A’ his troops would follow, I thought this was bluff. Many years later Djilas revealed that Tito was ready for action: ‘I asked him, “How are we going to fire at the Italians, when they are protected by the Americans and the English? Are we going to fire on them as well?” He answered, “We’ll go in if the Italians go in … Then we’ll see.”’9 In another account of this meeting, Djilas says:
Tito’s demeanour on this occasion was that of a general at his command post. From the ‘front’ outside Trieste they were transmitting reports and requesting instructions. I think it was to General Kosta Nadj that Tito gave orders to send in Soviet, not American, tanks, ‘otherwise it will be awkward’. I asked questions, unable to picture the entry of our troops into Zone A with British and American troops present. ‘We will go in!’ Tito declared. ‘But what if they open fire?’ ‘They won’t. And if the Italians start firing, we’ll fire back.’ I approved of our troops entering Zone A, though I thought then and still think that the whole campaign was too abrupt, too violent. Once the British and Americans backed down from their position and the atmosphere had relaxed, I had the impression that Tito saw how sudden and drastic our action had been.10
Tito said he was taking a hard position on ‘Zone A’, to stop the Italians making a bid for ‘Zone B’. Djilas believes his decision was ‘also part of a carefully devised plan to stress Yugoslavia’s independence of the West at the very moment when there were indications of change in the Soviet Union in the wake of Stalin’s death’.11 This probably credits Tito with too much foresight. He was not a good chess player, as Dedijer reveals, leaping rashly into attack without having considered alternative moves, then cogitating on how to get out of trouble. In May 1945 Tito had risked a Third World War by laying claim to Trieste, only to find that the Soviet Union would not support him. Now, eight years later, he once more threatened and ranted from a position of weakness. Nobody outside Yugoslavia backed Tito’s claim to the overwhelmingly pro-Italian, anti-Communist city. At the London talks that followed in 1954, Tito quietly agreed to Italy taking Trieste. However, to Tito’s credit, once he had lost Trieste he took his defeat with grace and even nonchalance. He was not the man to brood over disappointment, let alone yearn for revenge. Queen Mary of England, after the loss of her last Continental possession, claimed that when she was dead they would find the word ‘Calais’ written upon her heart. The French, in the late ninteenth century, could not forget the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. But Tito forgot the city to which he had no proper claim.
The excitement over Trieste at first distracted attention from the development of the Djilas affair. On the very day that Djilas was carried shoulder-high by the crowd in Republic Square, the first of his controversial essays appeared in the Party newspaper Borba. The gist of it was as follows:
Revolution cannot be saved by its past. Revolution has to find new ideas, new forms, new challenges, different from its everyday self; a new style and language. The bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy have already found new forms and slogans. Democracy seeks them, too, and it will find them – in order for Yugoslavia and that spark of opposition in today’s world to move ahead.12
Such phrases, in Borba and in the turgid ideological journal Nova Misao (New Thought), would not have attracted attention anywhere in the West, but were studied excitedly in the Student House Ivo Lola Ribar. Although Djilas was forty-two, Vice-President of the country and leader of the National Assembly, he still affected the air and trappings of student bohemianism. He went about in an open-necked shirt and a cloth cap; he occasionally rode the Belgrade trams; he sometimes took his coffee at the Moskva Hotel, and he was known to despise the wealth and privilege of his office. His following of the simple, socialist life added weight to the Borba and Nova Misao articles. Perceptive readers noticed that some of the strictures aimed at the Soviet Union could just as well be applied to the Yugoslav Communist Party, with its ‘intrigues, mutual scheming and trap-laying, pursuit of power, careerism, favouritism, the advancement of one’s own followers, relatives, “old fighters” (stari borci – ex-Partisans) – all of it under the mask of high morality and ideology’.13
We know from Djilas’s later memoirs that he was growing uneasy during the summer of 1953, suspecting that Tito was using the death of Stalin as an excuse for putting the brakes on democratisation, or, in Marxist jargon, for the ‘return to Leninist norms and dictatorship of the proletariat’. Such things were on the agenda of the Second Plenum held at the end of June at Tito’s residence on the island of Brioni, a former holiday home of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As Djilas recalls in his memoirs:
The very fact that we were meeting on Brioni provoked my disapproval – something I neither could nor would conceal. It had always been our custom to hold plenums of the Central Committee in Belgrade, seat of that committee and of the government. I felt that to convene the plenum on Brioni, Tito’s best known residence, was to subordinate the Central Committee to Tito, instead of subordinating Tito to the leading body.14
Djilas expressed these feelings to Kardelj and Ranković, and also complained of the armed security in the hotel and even in Tito’s villa, although the island was guarded both by the army and the navy. Djilas was clearly in an obstreperous mood. During a break on the terrace of Tito’s villa, a senior comrade asked Djilas’s opinion of an Augustinčić sculpture of a swimming maiden. ‘Charming,’ said Djilas, ‘and there are five thousand others in the world just like it.’ ‘Tito likes it,’ the colleague replied. ‘That’s his taste,’ Djilas retorted. On the way back to Belgrade by car, Djilas told Kardelj he could not support the new ‘Brioni’ line. They stopped to go trout fishing, and once more Djilas became aware of his privileged status: ‘Kardelj loved the fishing. Our luck was superb, perhaps because we were in a reserved stretch of the river, not the open stream.’15
Djilas’s opposition to the ‘Brioni’ line expressed itself in the autumn series of articles in Borba and Nova Misao. While these were appearing, Djilas had to take part in the National Assembly elections in which he stood as a candidate in Montenegro. Although for the first time electors were given voting papers, separate booths in which to record their mark, and a choice of candidates from the Party’s front organisation, the Socialist Alliance, the results were as usual a foregone conclusion. Djilas describes an impulse that many of us have known in a church or solemn assembly:
In Titograd I felt the malicious, childish urge to shout out that, being the only candidate, I would be elected no matter what. Out of respect for my listeners I squelched that urge – were they to blame for participating in such ‘elections’? I did insist that there be no official dinner in Pozaravac, and so we dined in the apartment of a local Party official, without fanfare or state expense.16
Although, as usual, official candidates all got 95 per cent of the vote, Djilas won 98.8 per cent, even exceeding Tito’s majority.
Djilas recalls his last frank conversation with Kardelj and Ranković, which took place as they were walking down Užička Street, where both they and Tito had villas:
In recent years thick walls had gone up around Tito’s residence, and as we passed them I remarked that these walls symbolised the bureaucratic way of looking at things, or words to that effect. Kardelj said: ‘Everything has changed or is changing, except for the Old Man and all that relates to him.’ I then observed that Tito should somehow be brought to realise the impropriety of his style and all this pomp. But Ranković interrupted: ‘Let’s not talk about it here.’ Kardelj and I took that to mean that even the street was bugged.17
On 29 November 1953 the leaders gathered at Jajce for the tenth anniversary of the AVNOJ assembly and Tito’s appointment as Marshal. On the eve of the celebration Djilas and Koča Popović looked at some photographs taken ten years earlier. When Djilas made the somewhat banal comment that all of them had put on weight, Popović pointed out a photo of Djilas, shrewdly remarking of his appearance: ‘A religious fanatic.’ At Jajce fortress the following day, Tito, Kardelj, Ranković and Djilas were photographed together for the last time.18
On 29 November, the day of the celebrations in Užice, Borba started to publish a second and far more sensational series of articles by Djilas. After the second of these, entitled ‘Is there a Goal?’ – to which the reply was ‘Yes! A continuing struggle for democracy’ – Djilas went through a psychological crisis, strangely similar to a religious experience:
It was the night of 7–8 December 1953. Although I had as usual, fallen asleep about midnight, I woke up suddenly smitten within by some unfaltering, fateful realisation that I would not be able to abandon my views … I tried to thrust away my forebodings, obstinate in their insistence that something final had come to pass, something within me, or something affecting me, which meant that I would have to subordinate my way of life, my hopes – and, what is worse, subordinate my family or even sacrifice it altogether. I knew that I had no prospect of winning. I recalled Trotsky’s fate and said to myself: better Trotsky’s fate than Stalin’s, better to be defeated and destroyed than to betray one’s ideal, one’s conscience.19
After this night of resolution, the Borba articles grew more intense: ‘No one party, not even a single class, can be the exclusive expression of the objective imperatives of contemporary society.’20 ‘Every limitation of thought, even in the name of the most beautiful ideal, only degrades those who perpetuate it.’ The greatest crimes and horrors in history – the fires of the Inquisition, Hitler’s concentration camps, Stalin’s labour camps – stemmed ultimately from a denial of free thought, from the exclusive claims of ‘reactionary fanatics who have a political monopoly’.21
The articles were becoming a national and international sensation, attracting more interest in the foreign press than any event in Yugoslavia since the quarrel with the Cominform, as Tito later sourly remarked. In the Student House Ivo Lola Ribar, each new Borba article was read aloud in a hubbub of excitement. Although Tito at this stage made no comment, Ranković told Djilas flatly: ‘I hope I’ll never have to bother with philosophical ruminations, but let me tell you that what you’ve written is hurting the Party.’ While Ranković was concerned with power, Kardelj was more concerned with theory, and told Djilas: ‘I don’t agree with you at all. You want to destroy the whole system!’22
In his next Borba article, Djilas replied to those unnamed critics who called him a ‘philosopher divorced from reality’ and accused him of writing for a foreign audience, bringing grist to the mill of the reactionaries, and departing from Marxism-Leninism. It was the leadership of the Party that had divorced itself from the masses. If foreigners and reactionaries took comfort from his words, he was sorry but not to be blamed; it was the fault of the bureaucrats in power. He believed that truth emerged from the cumulative thought and initiative of the common people.23
In his next article, Djilas passed from defence to attack. The Communists, he declared, had divorced themselves from the masses, claimed privileged positions and turned themselves into ‘priests and policemen of socialism’ who ‘centralised and regularised everything from ethics to stamp-collecting’. Most Party meetings, he wrote, were a waste of time and ‘in my opinion should convene very rarely’. Most political workers had no real function any more: ‘Once men gave up everything, even life itself, to become professional revolutionaries. They were indispensable to progress. But today they are obstacles to it.’24
These Borba articles, which continued to appear until 7 January 1954, delighted the rank and file of the Party but worried and angered the leadership. In the end, however, it was not his theories that brought about Djilas’s downfall, but a Nova Misao article called ‘Anatomy of a Moral’, criticising and mocking the private lives of the Party élite. In the previous summer, Djilas had been best man when his close friend and wartime comrade Peko Dapčević married Milena Versajković, a young and beautiful actress with no Partisan or Party background. She had been cold-shouldered and virtually ostracised by dowdier wives of the Party leaders, notably Milica, wife of Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, who like Djilas and Dapčević was a Montenegrin. The article in Nova Misao mentioned no names but described in detail how Milica had snubbed and humbled Milena in the VIP stand at a football match.
From there, Djilas went on to lash out at ‘all those exalted women [who] came from semi-peasant backgrounds and were semi-educated’, and seemed to think that their wartime services entitled them to ‘grab and hoard de luxe furniture and works of art, tasteless of course, but by means of which they satisfied their primitive instincts of greed and imagined and puffed-up notions of their social class’.25 The general public, the Ivo Lola Ribar students and even the lower echelons of the Party, loved all this, but the wives of the leadership wanted Djilas’s head on a platter.
On 10 January 1954 Borba formally disavowed the views expressed by Djilas in his recent articles, adding that the affair would be taken up at the Central Committee’s forthcoming Plenum. Meanwhile Djilas wrote to Tito, requesting a personal interview. He still hoped that if he withdrew from the Executive Committee (the former Politburo and in effect the Cabinet) he might remain on the Central Committee and put forward his views in an unofficial and moderate way. He still clung to belief in Tito himself: ‘I attributed to Tito democratic traits and initiatives which, in my heart of hearts, it was my hope, rather than my conviction, that he possessed.’
In the seventeen years of their comradeship, Djilas had never challenged Tito’s authority and regarded him with almost filial devotion: ‘If someone had asked me five or six months before the rift opened between us, whether I could conceive of any force that could separate me from Tito, Kardelj and Ranković, I would have said “No – not even death could separate us.”’26 Djilas seems to have been unaware of the anger caused in the Party by his Nova Misao article ‘Anatomy of a Moral’. Nor did he seem to appreciate that his fiercely anti-Soviet Borba articles were embarrassing Tito in his attempts to improve relations with Stalin’s successors.
This last meeting of Djilas with Tito, Kardelj and Ranković took place in the White Palace a few days before the Plenum. Tito began by saying that Djilas was a ‘changed man’, though he himself was obviously out of sorts. When Djilas asked for coffee because he had not been able to sleep at night, Tito said pointedly: ‘Others are not sleeping either.’ Tito repeated more harshly what he had told Djilas two months before, that one could not bring in democracy while the ‘bourgeoisie’ was so strong. Kardelj chipped in with an accusation of ‘Bernsteinism’, while Ranković, who was closest of all to Djilas, sat glumly silent. Tito asked for Djilas’s resignation as President of the National Assembly, adding, ‘What must be, must be.’ ‘As we said good-bye,’ Djilas recalls, Tito ‘held out his hand but with a look of hatred and vindictiveness’.27
The proceedings of the Plenum, which started on 16 January 1954, were broadcast live, and I heard them among an anxious gathering of students at Sarajevo University. Most of the 105 Central Committee members came by car but Djilas arrived on foot with his friend Dedijer. Tito spoke first, more in sorrow than in anger, referring to Djilas as ‘Djido’ (his nickname in the Party). Tito said that he himself was partly to blame for not having acted earlier to curb the tone of the articles. Only towards the end of December, when he had been able to read them more closely, had Tito realised just what poison they were spreading. The Nova Misao article proved that Djilas wanted a showdown. Tito said that Djilas’s trips abroad had ‘counteracted the influence of our reality, our revolutionary past and of all revolutionary experience’. He himself, Tito proclaimed, had been the first to speak of the withering away of the Party, ‘but I did not say it should happen within six months or one or two years’. It could not happen ‘before the last class enemy had been neutralised’. Tito accused Djilas of ‘advocating democracy at any price, which is exactly the position of Bernstein’.28
In Sarajevo, where we were listening, one of the students turned to me almost in tears and said: ‘I can’t believe it. I was sure the Old Man, at least, would stand by him.’ Djilas’s feelings were angrier: ‘Tito’s speech was a piece of bitingly intolerant demagoguery … As Tito was speaking, the respect and fondness I had once felt for him turned to alienation and repulsion. That corpulent, carefully uniformed body with its shaven, pudgy neck filled me with disgust … But I hated no-one …’29
After Kardelj had found fault with his Marxist theory, Djilas rose to reply in a manner that was conciliatory but not apologetic. He admitted to being ‘revisionist’ about Leninist theory, but claimed to be loyal to Tito and to the League of Communists, as the Party was now called: ‘On questions of foreign policy and on the fundamental issue of the brotherhood and unity of our people, I have always been completely at one with the Party leadership.’ This was a coded way of saying that Djilas was neither a Cominformist nor a Serbian nationalist. As Stephen Clissold comments: ‘Djilas had wanted to be conciliatory; but it was not through conciliation that the Partisans had fought their way to power and were now resolved to keep the fruits of victory. He wanted to reconcile the irreconcilable; to be a free man, as he put it, whilst remaining a Communist.’30
When the debate was thrown open, Moša Pijade grabbed at the chance to revenge the real or imagined wrongs that Djilas had done to him in Montenegro in 1941. He dismissed the Nova Misao article as ‘political pornography’. What else could one expect from such a hypocrite?
Now he has a villa and two cars and so forth; he has far more than those he describes as a repulsive caste. He has retained all his posts and privileges while renouncing only the hard work connected with them. While his closest comrades are sweating under the heavy burden of administrative work for state and society, he sits in comfort and writes and writes, and then, as a recreation, shows himself as a good democrat and drinks in cafés … His articles in Borba alone netted him 220,000 dinars … At forty a man should mature and enter middle age, but Comrade Djilas evidently has not made this progress, he has rather reverted to the preceeding stage of adolescence – to the early days before the war when he wrote his poem: ‘I wander whistling through the streets …’31
Only Djilas’s first wife, Mitra, and Vladimir Dedijer spoke up for him. In fact Dedijer made two telling points. At the end of December, when most of the Borba articles had already appeared, Djilas was unanimously elected President of the National Assembly. The charge of ‘revisionism’ now levelled at Djilas was just the one that the Cominform had levelled against the Yugoslav Party in general.
After the first session, Djilas felt crushed and during the night decided to make a recantation. The next day he said he had been wrong and his ideas were mistaken. The Central Committee had not neglected the struggle against bureaucracy. After taking part in the propaganda campaign against the Cominform, he had wrongly come to imagine that these criticisms of Soviet Russia also applied to Yugoslavia. He had indulged in abstract theory, which meant the ‘mobilisation of the petty bourgeoisie, of social democracy, of the West’.
After this recantation, Djilas was expelled from the Central Committee but allowed to remain in the Party after a ‘final warning’. In a conference with foreign journalists, Tito said that the affair was over and that Djilas was now politically dead. ‘When I heard and read about this,’ Djilas wrote later, ‘something strong and instinctive came over me – something which had nothing to do with Communism but welled up from the ancient springs of my Montenegrin blood. “No it won’t be quite like that!” I said to myself, “I will never give in; never – as long as I live!”’32
Very soon Djilas started to write the books and articles in the foreign press that would lead at the end of 1956 to the first of two stretches in prison, totalling seven years in all. He at one time feared that he might be sent to a camp resembling Naked Island. In one book he claims to know that elements in the secret police had recommended a ‘physical resolution’ to the Djilas case, in other words murdering him, but thinks that Ranković had protected him, ‘probably because of our long-standing friendship’.33 Ranković also knew that the death of Djilas would catastrophically damage Yugoslavia’s foreign relations. Tito was clearly reluctant even to put him in prison because of the adverse publicity.
Inside the country, Djilas had few political friends and supporters. The young Communists, such as the students I knew in Belgrade and Sarajevo, were thunderstruck by the fall of their hero, but their response was disillusion rather than rage. To them, Djilas had been the incarnation of pride in the revolution and hope of building socialism. After the Djilas affair, they started to lose their ideals. From that time on, I cannot remember meeting a Communist true believer. Most of my friends in the 1950s and 1960s were Party members, but only so as to hold their jobs as doctors, lawyers, journalists, teachers or policemen. In private, none was a Marxist or even left wing. None of these people supported Milovan Djilas.
The Belgrade ‘reactionaries’, as the royalists liked to call themselves, were amused by Djilas’s article ‘Anatomy of a Moral’, but they did not like the man. Often they called him the ‘worst of the bunch’, and recalled how, after some black marketeers were sentenced to prison, Djilas had written in Borba demanding that they should be executed.34 The fact that Djilas was Montenegrin endeared him neither to other Yugoslavs nor to his fellow-countrymen. What Dr Johnson said of another nation could well be applied to the Montenegrins: ‘The Irish are a fair people – they never speak well of one another.’
Even Djilas’s closest friends in the Communist Party turned against him. For example Peko Dapčević, whose wife was the subject of ‘Anatomy of a Moral’, denounced the article as without foundation. Even more painful was the behaviour of Vladimir Dedijer, Tito’s biographer and a journalist on the staff of Borba. Dedijer was a passionate and rather unstable man, a champion boxer and a heroic soldier during the war. He had joined the Communist Party late, and was never a serious Marxist. During the Plenum he stood by Djilas, and afterwards went to see Tito, shouted at him and seemed to be on the point of using physical violence, for all of a sudden the bodyguard leapt into the room. Dedijer stood trial with Djilas in 1955 and like him was given a suspended sentence.
For a long time afterwards, Dedijer and his family were subjected to psychological persecution by the police, which led to a suicide. It seems that Dedijer had never recovered physically and emotionally from the Battle of Sutjeska, when he received a head wound and witnessed the death of his first wife. In the 1960s, Dedijer went into semi-exile in England, becoming involved with the Bertrand Russell campaign against the American action in Vietnam.
In the 1970s Dedijer returned to Yugoslavia and seems to have made his peace with Tito, but by now he had developed a strange and obsessive dislike of Djilas, perhaps motivated by envy. In a series of ever more wild and rambling studies of recent Yugoslav history, including a new version of Tito Speaks, Dedijer attacked the reputation of Milovan Djilas and even that of his son Aleksa, who now was also a writer. Like so many Yugoslavs, Dedijer was riled by Djilas’s puritanism, especially his strictures on sexual morals among the comrades before the war:
In several of his memoirs Milovan Djilas, carried away by his own vanity, tries to insinuate that he was the main subjective factor influencing Yugoslav Communists to take up revolutionary asceticism … I should like to add too, in the interests of historic truth, that, lacking the courage to be straight with himself, Djilas is applying a double standard. It is true that on more than one occasion he preached a ban on free love; he even hounded to his death the young Bosnian militant Paternoster, who had loved two girls at once. But as his closest friend of that period, who never left his side, I must tell the truth: that was the time when Djilas himself was having several so-called ‘healthy’ love affairs.35
Djilas has patiently answered these and other attacks on himself and his family in his own memoirs, such as Rise and Fall. At one point Djilas wearily asks: ‘What is the matter with Dedijer? Slovenly research? Malice? Madness? Or all three at once?’36
Djilas had realised all along that there would be no Djilasites. The friends who stood by him were people outside politics, above all his devoted second wife, Stefica, a Croat who, after her husband’s long imprisonment and ostracism, had to endure the further anguish of exile by civil war. Their son Aleksa, who went on to write an excellent book on the Yugoslav nationalities problem, has always been firmly loyal. Milovan Djilas came to see that his quarrel with Tito was not simply a matter of politics. He was trying to find his identity as a human being, to find peace in his conscience and freedom of mind.
Although an atheist, Djilas has a profoundly religious view of life. His biographer Stephen Clissold offers the brilliant perception that Djilas sees the world as a Manichaean struggle in which the Devil rather than God appears to be gaining the upper hand:
The Bogomils of Bosnia had held this doctrine, which won many converts among the medieval Slavs and gave their land its national religion. Djilas felt the appeal of the Manichaean concept … It accounted for the legacy of rival fanaticisms disputing possession of that troubled borderland, the militancy of the normally meek Franciscans striving there as missionaries, the avidity with which the heretics embraced Islam rather than submit. The Bogomils … held that the Devil had been given dominion over all material things; only a tiny elite, the ‘Perfect’, denied him earthly allegiance by embracing a life of extreme abstinence and austerity … a hyper-puritanism which appealed to a spiritual minority as strongly as did the sect’s uninhibited sensuality to the majority. The idealistic revolutionaries of his youth seemed to Djilas the heirs of the Bogomil ‘Perfect’.37
Throughout the Second World War, Djilas had carried with him a copy of Bishop Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath. During his second term of imprisonment under Tito, Djilas set himself the task of translating into Serbo-Croat Milton’s Paradise Lost, a work that is often accused of exalting Satan over God. Perhaps Djilas, as he sat in his prison cell recalling the days of power with Tito, consoled himself with the words of Lucifer: ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.’
There were some outsiders, myself included, who, although they admired and honoured Djilas, unhappily found themselves on the side of Tito. When Tito said that Yugoslavia was not ready for democracy, he justified this by the strength of the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘class enemy’. He was in fact referring to the Serb and Croat nationalists, the followers of the Chetniks and the Ustasha. This is also what Djilas meant when he spoke at the Plenum, avowing support for ‘brotherhood and unity’. In 1954, when Djilas quarrelled with Tito, the wartime hatreds were still uncomfortably fresh in everyone’s mind, although little was said about it openly. In my first published article, written from Sarajevo in 1954, I argued that only Tito could hold Yugoslavia together. This conviction coloured my view of the Djilas affair.
Djilas regarded democracy and freedom of speech as absolute principles, to which he adhered with the same fanatical devotion he had once given to Communism. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps if the Yugoslavs in 1954 had been given the chance to vote in fair elections, they would have chosen national leaders willing to hold the federation together. Supporters of Tito felt that it needed many more years of his strong and paternal rule to heal the wounds of the war. Such people valued the concept of Yugoslavia more than abstract isms and ocracies. The choice between Djilas and Tito was like that described by Bertolt Brecht in his play Galileo: Is it worth killing the oyster to get a pearl? Humankind will always be divided on Brecht’s answer: ‘To hell with the pearl! Give me the healthy oyster!’
Notes
Milovan Djilas’s quarrel with Tito is really the leitmotiv of all his remarkable volumes of memoir. It is told in most detail in Rise and Fall. Stephen Clissold’s excellent Djilas: The Progress of a Revolutionary offers us many additional insights. Clissold was an assistant lecturer at Zagreb University in the late 1930s, joining the staff of the Consulate, and later Maclean’s military mission. After the war he served in the British Embassy in Belgrade. He was remarkably free from the querulous spirit that characterised the British, as well as the Serbs and Croats, involved in Yugoslavia during and after the war.
1 Milovan Djilas, Tito: The Story from Inside (London, 1981), pp. 145–8; idem, Rise and Fall (London, 1985), p. 278.
2 Milovan Djilas, Tito, pp. 148–9.
3 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, pp. 268–9.
4 Ibid. pp. 278–80.
5 The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (London, 1980), p. 395. Evelyn Waugh wrote letters protesting about the Tito visit to the New Statesman, the Spectator and The Times.
6 Quoted by Milovan Djilas in an obituary in the Sunday Times, 11 May 1980.
7 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, p. 286.
8 Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks: His Self-Portrait and Struggle with Stalin (London, 1953), PP. 418–33.
9 Milovan Djilas, Tito, pp. 65–6.
10 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, pp. 335–6.
11 Milovan Djilas, Tito, pp. 65–6.
12 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, p. 334.
13 Stephen Clissold, Djilas: The Progress of a Revolutionary (London, 1983), p. 232.
14 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, p. 323.
15 Ibid. pp. 324–5.
16 Ibid. p. 337.
17 Ibid. p. 340.
18 Ibid. p. 341.
19 Milovan Djilas, The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class (London, 1969), PP. 17–18.
20 Borba, 20 December 1953; quoted in Clissold, Djilas, p. 236.
21 Borba, 22 December 1953; quoted in Clissold, Djilas, p. 237.
22 Quoted in Clissold, Djilas, pp. 238–9.
23 Borba, 24 December 1953; quoted in Clissold, Djilas, p. 239.
24 Borba, 27 December 1953; quoted in Clissold, Djilas, pp. 239–40.
25 Clissold, Djilas, p. 244.
26 Ibid. pp. 245–6.
27 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, pp. 354–5.
28 Clissold, Djilas, 247–8.
29 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, p. 360.
30 Clissold, Djilas, pp. 249–51.
31 Ibid. p. 231.
32 Ibid. p. 256.
33 Milovan Djilas, Tito, p. 133.
34 When I sprang this story on Djilas, rather unfairly, during a TV interview in 1968, he said that he could not remember the incident, but that though he had been stern he had never been cruel. In his book Rise and Fall, Djilas returned to this incident: ‘Meanwhile in Borba – was it in 1945 or 1946? – I attacked the courts for delivering too lenient a verdict against some small-time swindler … The wretched swindler was given a death sentence; fortunately, he was not executed, I heard. From the standpoint of ideology and revolutionary morality, I was right, but the consequences for order and legality were catastrophic.’ (Rise and Fall, pp. 17–18.)
35 Vladimir Dedijer, Novi prilozi za biografiju druga Tita (Rijeka, 1981), p. 627.
36 Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, p. 382.
37 Clissold, Djilas, p. 290.