A History of Communism's Self-Destruction By MILOVAN DJILAS

CHAPTER ONE
Fall of the New Class
A History of Communism's Self-Destruction

By MILOVAN DJILAS
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF MY POLITICAL THINKING

I decided to trace the course of my political thinking to its final outcome only out of a conviction that this would help the reader better understand the book to come. For me, thought and reflection have always closely accompanied active participation in the political events through which I have lived, and it is this intimate relationship that mainly drives my discussion. However, I will try not to discuss events as such except as they accompany or encompass speculative thought. This is a book about the effort exerted by a certain way of thinking to first grasp a given reality and then to reject it. Originally that reality was the "bourgeois," non-Communist one, which I thought of as evil and wicked simply because it had given birth to me, even if through no fault of my own. Then I tried to comprehend the Communist reality. For its sake I fought like a zealot, never suspecting that this Communist reality would turn out quite the opposite of all I ever wanted or believed in.

Whether one accepts such realities as given or exchanges them for others, it is hopeless to expect that they will conform to one's own desires and efforts. Man once born becomes what he will become, striving to make reality adapt to him or himself to it. I chose communism because reality, not suiting my temper, was not Communist. I may not have been born a Communist but I was predestined to become one by my own nature: impatient of wrong, mindful of the poor, undeterred by violence, believing in the natural equality of all persons--in short, I craved absolute freedom and believed that the path to this final goal was realistic.

The reader may find it hard to credit, but I felt myself to be a Communist even at the age of seven or eight. This was perhaps because my poor, downtrodden fellow villagers and renegades would tease me or (the main reason) because I aspired to be outstanding. That sense of being a Communist stayed with me through all ebbs and flows up to the moment I matriculated as a university student in Belgrade in 1929.

For I was not driven to communism by material circumstance, nor by some intellectual family birthright, nor especially by national tradition. All else remaining equal, if the times had been other than they were, so too would I have been different. It was not I who found communism but communism me, as a convenient medium. I was pliant material for its purposes.

Add to personal inclination the sturdy, martial legacy of Montenegro and our national tradition of heroic song and the epic, and the path pointing to revolutionary answers, if not smooth and straight, nevertheless could be regarded as an honorable path for me personally and one that also offered hope for the needy and disenfranchised.

There is in each of us a Communist spirit: hunger for fair dealing and social equality. This is a hunger that is felt more or less strongly, as the case may be. Such a spirit need only encounter ideas and movements worthy of it. After passing through the crucible of actual politics, the hopes of its true believers, and the battle for political power, the spirit is transformed. Something of the sort happens with other elementary feelings and political movements. Man is a social animal (Aristotle's zoon politikon) and so at the mercy of his own, idealized victories, whatever their moral outcome.

This spirit of communism (if such it can be called) I discovered within myself. I found it in literary classics (especially the Russian ones); I found it in good friendships; and I found it in the repudiation of political conditions. From puberty onward I had cherished a dawning impulse to create literature. Little by little this impulse became engaged by my thirst for a better world, a more righteous world. Art and politics, while not identical, are each creative in their effects: The one turns the horizon into something magic, the other brings about bliss through pain. For this reason I was not drawn to socialist realism. (True, at one time I had to defend it as a part of doctrine.) A work of art as I saw it was either a work of art or not, regardless of its theme or the writer's political stance.

As a student I was not industrious. I did write, however, and so far as the short story form was concerned, I wrote copiously. At the same time I was a social malcontent. I was a Communist who had nothing to do with Communists. The existing regime in Yugoslavia, a dictatorship, had in any event put the Communists to rout and demoralized them. Besides, I knew nothing of Communist teaching save what I had heard about martyrdom and an idealistic movement. It was like some new religion, all the more attractive for being brutally persecuted.

The existing government itself set up the conditions for revolt by students when single-party elections were held in the autumn of 1931. The most rebellious flocked together in kindred groups. As one of the instigators, I found myself among the leftists. Supporters of the proscribed urban parties included educated, cultivated young people; those who were the most militant joined the rural parties. We leftists, though, Communists judging from all we had heard about communism, were by definition the most active in preparing and leading demonstrations on the eve of these elections. To our surprise, the regime was relatively gracious toward "its own" young people and I too, after going into hiding followed by a short prison term, was set free under the presumed surveillance of an informer.

Our groups purged themselves of the unreliable and the wavering and gradually consolidated their strength. We ran across brochures explaining the Marxist viewpoint, brochures that intoxicated us for all their superficial, popularizing tone. We thirsted for the narcotic of truth, new and final truth, truth that had been blocked at one blow by the dictatorship. True, government censorship provided some respite to leftist periodicals. In their Aesopian language these propagated such themes as a "scientific outlook on the world" and "the modern scientific perspective."

There can be no disputing the fact that a consistently revolutionary, Communist organization at the University of Belgrade dates from this time. It was never successfully broken up by the police and it spread its influence over the majority of the students. It was the strongest organization in Yugoslavia and contributed to the revolution a significant number of leaders.

The Party's so-called rightist faction was the first to get wind of us, slipping us illicit brochures that were hard to find and trying to make us, who were already organized, organize. Only in the autumn of 1932 did we establish contact with the actual, official Party, though in Belgrade, as elsewhere, there existed hardly more than some kind of agency for the Communist Party.

It was we who carried out the first demonstrations against the dictatorship. It was we who rallied and defined who we were without benefit of Party affiliation: Communists without a Party, Communists without theory. Prior to the royal dictatorship a semilegal Communist Party had idly slumbered. Now, a shattered political life was giving rise to young forces prepared to suffer and ready for relentless struggle. These were ready to hand, ideal material for that victorious and insistent variant of communism called Stalinism.

From the very start I found myself caught in a dilemma: Was I a writer, or was I a revolutionary? The first drew me with compelling power. To the second I surrendered myself as one surrenders to duty and (I think) to pride and the special vanity of wanting not to lag behind one's flock. I was responsible for toughening them. If I were to back off now, could they read it otherwise than as the coward's way out? The path of literature was simply more comfortable and less dangerous. To this very day the dilemma remains: I would be happier writing stories on themes long dreamed about than to be composing this book. But that would mean to cut and run from the critique of Communist ideology and practice that I myself set in motion many years ago, when I first put aside my beloved literary dreams and often exposed myself and those nearest me to unforeseen difficulties.

In thrall to literature, only half-baked ideologically, bonded to my girl by an unconsummated love, I was arrested in the spring of 1933, tortured, and sentenced to three years at hard labor. That experience brought about my early, half-conscious disappointment in the workers. Workers under torture proved to be more spineless than intellectuals! Both theory and my own way of thinking had held, to the contrary, that laborers were paragons of toughness and consistency, especially by comparison with "confused little intellectual types."

When the prison gates closed for good behind anyone sentenced for political reasons, when Siberia opened its arms, there would ensue much weeping and wailing. You were parting company forever with everything and everybody--except, of course, your own miserable, not to say bitter, life in the flesh. But there was no choice, no turning back. Only the poor in spirit tried to turn back. Only traitors to an idea and to themselves. Either you endured in pride or you lost your identity in shame. Obsessed with masochist heroism as I was, I had no second thoughts about choosing to endure. Even so, I cherished the hope that time and circumstance would favor my writing fiction, prison or no prison. Such wishful thinking had to be choked off and smothered from the very first. In a Communist collective any free time was taken up by studying Marxism and by Party debates. We possessed the basic Marxist texts, we had literate, well-drilled teachers. In such surroundings, lacking any newspapers, relying on mere scraps of whispered information gleaned from the monthly visits of family and friends, my understanding of Marxist theory grew purified and refined. This process of purification went on without interruption. It became part of my dream life. Only the topics changed.

The Stalinist brand of Leninism had now come to dominate the Yugoslav Party. And it was here at hard labor that Stalinism could be seen at its most rigid, most uncompromising. It would be oversimplified and somehow off the mark to think that personality got lost in that seething, ideological cauldron of revolutionaries. To remain obdurate before authority, to display one's loyalty to the collective, to be a zealous student wholeheartedly eager to deepen one's grasp of doctrine--these were qualities that bore witness precisely to the personal, to the individual. Stalin's authority was beyond question, but it was the authority of a political leader, not that of the incarnation of an idea and a movement. Yugoslav Stalinists were such only by political orientation, something that could most clearly be seen under hard-labor conditions. They were not Stalinists by nature or because they had been intellectually emasculated. Leninism, and Stalinism in particular, were chiefly understood in their revolutionary aspect; their power-grasping, tyrannical side was not perceived. Theory was a living, spiritual weapon of revolution, not gelded or petrified dogma. Debates were very often fiery but they were free, although they took place, of course, within the framework of the Party line and the general assumptions of Marx and Lenin. For though Stalinism is indivisible, it is not uniform. National variations exist. As theory, Stalinism is neither original nor homogeneous. It is a only a gathering of theories. That, plus a well-defined and consistently totalitarian practice.

Prison put the finishing touches on my Marxist education. What with the prison authorities on the one hand and my demands on my own self on the other, my nerves were in a constant jangle. I was overwrought. Preoccupied with group study, sharing everything with my collective, from little lumps of sugar and thin slices of bacon or soap to the occasional, smuggled cigarette, I became tempered as a Communist. I learned quickly and easily and became a teacher in my turn. Communist "science" (as it was called) was simple and involved little of the mystery that ordinarily veiled its crude outlines behind Hegel's complex style and explication. Marxist teaching and Leninist doctrine merged with the legacy of epic poetry and my personal devotion to the ideals of brotherhood and equality. Moreover, I conceived of communism as absolute freedom. The Communist movement and the daily work of a Communist may not have been to everyone's liking, and under certain circumstances they were unavoidably harsh, but I understood them to be the "scientifically revealed" path to freedom. Nor were the sparks of my fantasy life in literature quite extinguished there, either. More than once, dreams sadly flickered to life as I first composed, then memorized, literary motifs. Even in prison I tried to impart a literary touch whenever I argued and to whatever I said, to add a dash of my personal style and language as it existed off the podium.

True, true believer in communism! Endlessly fretting over your failures! Ever in the throes of adapting practice to an ideal!

After emerging from hard labor in 1936 I thought I would be returning to literature, for I was to edit an illegal journal for the Party and so would have made my influence felt on its cultural and political work in the legal domain. But Satan sleepeth not! Hardly had I taken up my duties when the police penetrated Party organizations in Belgrade and northern Serbia, breaking up all assemblies and arresting a considerable number of members. Only the university organization held on.

Since I was by now well known among Communists and had the look of a convict, the remnants of the Party and the media under its influence turned to me. At first, most of the work and responsibility fell to my lot. From dawn till late at night I was busy with the work of the Party, until I would literally collapse from fatigue. Nor did things get any easier for me when the organization came back to life once more and stood on its own two legs. In 1937-38 Tito arrived from Moscow to head the Party, and along with others I was taken by him into the innermost circle of leadership (the Politburo), a move soon to be confirmed by the Comintern. Of the yearning for literary creation there remained only restless dreams. But impact I did have--as, often, I was supposed to have--on the leftist cultural and antifascist movement. I was at once the editor and the only writer for an illegal journal, Komunist. At last the theory I had mastered at hard labor could be put into effect and made to fit reality. I was all the more reliable for being an intellectual well drilled (as they said) in Marxism, and all the more zealous for having outlived thereby, all unawares, my enforced literary sterility.

It was a time when the Party was finally becoming "Bolshevized" in the Yugoslav way (or more exactly, Stalinized). Taking little thought in advance and without the slightest hesitation, the Party was incorporating a kind of revolutionary brotherhood and unsparing self-criticism. If I was not the first in this regard, I was surely among the first: the true believer, molding himself into a Communist missionary. Thus we Yugoslav Communists, not even daring to think what we were about, were unwittingly outpacing our model, the Russian Bolsheviks. It was all in tune with my puritanical leanings and played up to my militancy. At some later time a final decision could be made with regard to literary work, with its characteristically long and tormented period of reflection and meditation.

In the midst of my fiery ascent to the heights of Bolshevism I came into conflict with a renowned leftist and man of letters, Miroslav Krleza. Krleza after World War I had been a Party member. At the time of savage harassment of Communists when the Party was being demolished, he withdrew from active participation in its life. Never, though, did he cut his ties with the Party entirely, no more than he ceased to subject all existing institutions, especially European militarism, to his own poetic brand of criticism. In the meantime the Soviet Union had evolved from Leninism to Stalinism and the Yugoslav Party had arrived at a watershed. The "Krleza" generation of leaders, which had grown out of the left Social Democrats, to the extent it had not been neutralized or destroyed by the Soviet purges, had been replaced by a new, younger generation, tempered in struggle with the royal dictatorship and steeled in Stalinist doctrine. Krleza, knowing them as he did, could not accept the new leaders with their simplistic, uncompromising views and hot-tempered ways. He was also deeply shocked by the Soviet purges of the 1930s, where ruthless bloodshed was steeped in slander. Partly by indirect hints, partly in the form of literary criticism, he mounted an attack on the Party and its policies. And since he enjoyed (with good reason) enormous prestige both in literary and in non-Communist urban circles, his criticisms had a devastating impact. This was especially true among the left intellectuals in Croatia. Schism threatened. There was vacillation within an illegal Party that had managed finally to consolidate itself through pain and sacrifice in the midst of a war in Europe (1940) and on the verge of a likely invasion by Nazis and Fascists. I took the initiative to part with Krleza clearly and with energy, and to subject his positions to a critique. This found favor with the leadership, including Tito. (Tito was still in Moscow when the confrontation began.) Krleza's views were suppressed and repudiated, and even though I still valued him highly as a writer, it spelled my coming of age as a revolutionary as well as the maturation of the Party as a revolutionary movement. True believers thus confirmed their "belief." Although Krleza was right to think that one's artistic work should be independent of any political party, when I look back now I still think that his political views, even with no prospects of being taken up in the Party core, did sow doubts and hesitation among sympathizers, both at the center and throughout the periphery, at a time when the coming military occupation was to bestow upon us the leading role as the most consistent, most organized, anti-Fascist revolutionary force.

Each revolution is special and shuns all preconceived schemes. No revolution's course can be predicted, even by its protagonists. The Yugoslav revolution too had its unique features and unforeseen contingencies, to unravel which there is no space here. It is important simply to say that our revolution was an inextricable tangle of rebellion against an occupying force combined with a civil war, a war within a war waged against a conquering enemy. All Communist opponents, even those who took a principled stand against the invaders or who had personal reasons for being opposed to them, aligned themselves one way or another with the occupation forces. As a result, the course of war impelled the Western allies (Great Britain) to accept as allies the Communists, Communists being the strongest fighting force on their side.

Before the civil war ever flared up, at the very start, I judged that what was at issue was an anti-Fascist revolution whose whole idea was that all opponents of fascism, whether foreign or homegrown, must coalesce into a militant partnership. The Party leadership, however, meaning Tito and Edward Kardelj, in line with prevailing policy and conforming to Moscow's relations with the West, criticized my formulation. They maintained that what was at issue in Yugoslavia was not revolution but a national liberation struggle. Tito and the other leaders thought that any allusion to revolution, even an anti-Fascist one, was limiting and off-putting. I myself saw no great difference, though to me the term "national liberation" as such lacked clarity.

Many years later, following the Soviet confrontation in 1948 and when the rights we had won in our struggle deserved the spotlight, an idea took hold, mainly on the basis of my pronouncements, that it was indeed a revolution we had produced within the war, a Yugoslav revolution. And yet out of that disagreement with the leaders, meaningless now but for my memory of it, I drew self-confidence and learned a moral lesson. This was to be disciplined and to subscribe in good faith to the views of the majority but at the same time, deep inside, not to yield to pragmatic, everyday, political "generalizations." To have a mind of one's own and think for oneself while at the same time doing what has to be done.

Yet war and revolution not only left indelible imprints on my thinking and on me as a writer but also indirectly and gradually, just because they were indelible, essentially stamped the way I formulated them.

At first the civil war, treacherously and unexpectedly insinuating itself into the struggle against the occupation forces, caused me to lose heart. Evil was a necessity, evil was inescapable, but this was evil beyond any other. I used to imagine revolution and civil war as a process of lining up the troops in two classes, bourgeois and proletarian; I had imagined them as making war in the cities, fighting for the great urban centers; but this war, this revolution, had degenerated into a village bloodletting among predominantly working people, often even between neighbors and close relatives. Periodically it assumed such cruel forms that the fight against the occupying power blurred over and receded into the background. My imagined ideological confrontation, like my ideological motivation, grew pale and twisted. What kind of ideology was this, what kind of Marxism that, instead of taking up arms against the bourgeoisie and the exploiters, fought the little people of the villages and towns, the petty employees and peasants? And what kind of Serbs and nationalists were they who accepted weapons from the occupier, fed in his mess halls, and collaborated in his military operations?

I myself was implicated in this double-edged war, and among the most responsible, at that. There was a strict mandate to carry out the Party line, the Party's decisions. They were all the more mandatory in that I agreed with this line and had even helped make the decisions. Man may be the creator of his own history, but man is also history's victim. Nonetheless, alongside my own belligerence and inseparable from it, an inexplicable, boundless sadness could seize bold of me, especially when I found myself alone after witnessing fearful events. Was this the way things had to be? Could they not be otherwise? A vague awareness would come over me that our own peoples, the peoples of Yugoslavia, primarily Serbs and Croats, had stumbled into a great and irreversible disaster. In time, with my estrangement from communism and Communists, this awareness would take firm and unbending shape:

no greater misery can befall a people than civil war, the kind of war in
which no one side is ever guilty--or rather all sides alike are guilty,
and to emerge the victor means little or nothing so far as history is
concerned, only misery being the winner, misery that so far as I am
aware not a single people has ever avoided, and it may not only be
simply the product of some specific, unsolved and unsolvable, political
relationship but instead arises out of mankind's sleep-drugged,
potential nature, or is the outcome of those who extravagantly want
change--often with reason--vying with those who grip fast to a given
reality and obstinately, stupidly, with all their might and main thwart
change.
For nearly six months without letup a German-Italian offensive had been under way in an effort to destroy the heaviest concentrations of Partisan troops around our Supreme Staff. The culminating battle arrived and I found myself the senior man politically, my only companions the gravely wounded and units that were encircled. At dawn on June 13, 1943, we attacked a network of SS bunkers and ramparts amid a hail of machine-gun and artillery fire. Units that just that morning had been well bloodied, some left with only a third of their complement, were now nearly cut in half. Commanders and commissars alike were mowed down in the act of making hopeless assaults; non-Communist patriots fell too. The renowned rebel commander Sava Kovacevic was killed. We leaders, along with a group of fighters from the splintered units, withdrew into a craggy, wooded ravine.

During the night I awoke. All around me, in the soft light of the moon filtering through the thick treetops, slept our soldiers. Then between the tree trunks and branches appeared the countenance of Christ. As the night wore on, whether before or after that unexpected vision I can't say, I kept fitfully reflecting on this vision, asking myself: What force drives men to exterminate each other? Obviously it could not be just ideology--particularly the Nazi one, simplistic and antihuman. Yet national discipline, even German national discipline, also was inadequate to explain this sheer destructiveness. What was it that drove Heidelberg professors and the descendants of Hanseatic patricians to flounder about in the wilds of Montenegro and Bosnia for the purpose of taking the lives of herdsmen and students, for the purpose of dispatching the wounded and the unlucky wherever they lay hidden, and for the purpose of killing off Jews the length and breadth of Europe? If such slaughter could not be explained by Nazi ideology, was it on the other hand really our own ideology that drove us Communists to hurl Our own people into death, to drag our own men and women into our own deadly whirlwind? Even if our own people were in fact dying for their mother's breast, for their human and ethnic identity? No, it was not just ideology, neither ours nor theirs, it was some inexplicable force that ideology, politics, and the nation sensed to be lurking within peoples and ethnic groups, that was indeed found where it was suspected of being, and that was then used for "exalted purposes." That something is a basic quality. Only the inspiration of art can articulate this essential something, somehow, in its own way; only the mystical ecstasies of the believer, only the insights of the philosopher.

But meditations such as these, or rather such presentiments, such self-questioning, were overshadowed by new military problems, by assignments that could not be postponed, and by more important obligations. Above all I was slated to go to Moscow in the spring of 1944 as part of a military mission, when I could at long last realize my dream of meeting the living incarnation of an idea--Stalin.

There will be much to say about Stalin later in this book. Here I would only point up what had an impact on my intellectual development.

In the Kremlin I approached Stalin in an ecstasy of idolatry that had first taken root during my years at hard labor and had later been whipped into a passion during the "Bolshevization," or Stalinization, era of my Party. For all that, I was still capable of forming a healthy impression of Stalin even when we first met, though this impression was as yet raw and undigested. I was especially rational at our second encounter on the night of the fifth and sixth of June, in his dacha outside Moscow.

What especially stood out with Stalin and captivated a listener was the absence of trite phrases, of cliches. Even when he showed his true colors as a demagogue and trickster, Stalin did so in such a crisp and weighty, confidence-inspiring manner that he bewitched not only his conversational partner but himself as well. Or if he wanted the person talking with him to think he was being led by the nose, then that too was exactly the way it was and what Stalin really wanted. He got right to the heart of a matter with lightning speed and in such a way that little or nothing was left to discuss and resolve. Stalin was decisive. Even at those moments when, like any human being, he might have been mistaken or uninformed, he acted decisively and scarcely hesitated. Such raw, naked realism made Stalin the true representative of both the problems and the answers to them that were vital for his country, as for his political power, and vital for his people--as he, of course, understood these and wanted them to appear. To Stalin, not only the world of politics but also the world in general was a world of enemies, real or potential. If you wanted to survive as your own master, you dared not trust a soul. Everyone but yourself was either a crook or a knave. You had to battle it out, you dared not rely on anyone's strength but your own. Take no action ahead of time, but also don't delay. Be master of time and man. Only thus is history made. Such is true history. To Stalin, Machiavelli's prince would have been a blushing acolyte.

Here, then, is what I learned in the Soviet Union from Stalin and from Soviet conditions, such as I understood them to be:

we Yugoslav Communists, being undeviating internationalists, were tied
to the Soviet Union and had to remain so and yet ... and yet we had to
solve our problems of national policy all by ourselves, for they,
too--Stalin and the other Soviet leaders--they, too, were before all
else turned inward and preoccupied with their own country, of that there
could be no doubt, the reasons for it being probably enemy encirclement,
long isolation, and, more specifically, Russian backwardness, while we
on the other hand were relatively developed, some parts of Yugoslavia
being close to the level of Western Europe, added to which our socialism
was somewhat different, but we dared not lean on the West for support
unless it be in our safe and secure interest, for the West was
anti-Communist and our enemies' friend, through whom they hoped to
perpetuate their influence and safeguard interests that had broken the
back of our national struggle for liberation.
Such was the insight I carried back with me from my first stay in the Soviet Union. My colleagues had come to the same understanding independently. As for my second visit, in 1945, in the capacity of an unrepentant penitent before Stalin (owing to my having "insulted" the Red Army)--it left me harboring doubts. From my third visit, at the beginning of 1948 I returned a faultfinder, disappointed with nearly everything in the "first land of socialism," while yet remaining insufficiently critical toward the idea of communism, as such, and its embodiment in Stalin. I still cherished the delusion that they, the Soviets, had not yet put everything well into practice, whereas He, now an old man, was inadequately informed. To attain to a full understanding, to have the courage to embark on the path of final criticism, one has to live long enough to grasp that one's own political reality (I being among its creators) is a lie, a delusion, a dead end. To shake oneself loose from an ideal, to emancipate oneself from a faith, is always a painful and slow process, more painful and slower than choosing to serve that ideal in the first place.

Victory takes a very different shape from the way it is expected or foreseen.

Thus I, too, was taken by surprise at the ending of war. I had anticipated hardships and what we called national renewal and reconstruction. I had imagined that victory, which is to say the war's end, would confer freedom on everyone alike, liberating Communists and lifting the restraints of Party affiliation. A brotherhood of Communists, though begun already in wartime by the Party and military hierarchies and by the cults of Stalin and Tito, would readily spread to all Yugoslavia's citizens. For me, freedom did not consist of this or that political structure but instead meant freeing up a whole way of life. Freedom would begin by abolishing exploitative, capitalist property and class ownership and would continue by destroying capitalist representatives and lackeys. In short, freedom meant empowering working people. I had imagined myself as finally set free from Party responsibilities and everyday political work. I would be a free writer, a writer who was a Communist.

It all turned out otherwise. The exact opposite. The debasement and betrayal of an idea and of oneself began first with the Communists, and (it could be said with equanimity) only with them. As for their hangers-on, it must be remembered that Communists held absolute power. There ensued the looting of villas and riches, including personal property, and finally the fabrication of charges against many proprietors--that is, charges of collaboration with the enemy. Still more drastic action was taken against the owners of factories, banks, workshops, trade establishments, and large estates. Not that I was against punishing collaborators: They were being meted out the same measures the length and breadth of Europe. No mercy was shown them there, either, by victorious anti-Fascism. Nor, naturally, was I opposed to nationalizing big property. For Communists, being in power presupposed socialization of the capitalist mode of production. It was the very basis of power, and the only way to construct a classless society.

And yet the thought plagued me of having to devise false, shameful reasons for reaching this end. Justice and truth, no matter how savage, should be unmarred and unclouded for every person. In those days the absolute power that victory had brought Tito was transforming his personality into a cult right alongside the cult of Stalin. I had always inwardly protested all cults, particularly the ones within the Communist movement, if only because I considered that they were at variance with basic Communist teaching and Communist friendship, and that they signified undeniably and surely the transformation of a revolutionary movement into a power-grasping, bureaucratic one. The new state more and more resembled an absolutist police state in its capacity to throw off the habit of trite phrasemaking. Without terror and a monopoly over Party and state, Tito could never have been anything more than a distinguished revolutionary leader. Maintaining that semblance, he subjugated Party and state to his absolutist rule while at the same time getting rid of revolutionaries by fair means or foul. Here we had a little Stalin, one who was a bit more temperate, one who operated in a small, nonimperialist country.

Such political power first arose and flourished under conditions of revolutionary war. But it consolidated into limitless terror only out of fear for its own survival and its standing in the outside world, and out of fear for a loss of influence within the country. A conquered and armed enemy was now replaced by a hypothetical, potential, political enemy--the remnants of fascism and reaction.

This was the most barren and painful period in my life, especially in my intellectual life. To the extent that Party and state obligations permitted, I withdrew into solitude. But those obligations consisted of meeting people and reading endless papers and projects, exasperating tasks. It was as if everything had been said in advance, all decisions made. Theoretical speculation was now, under better circumstances, reduced to monotonously belaboring the trivialities and generalizations already voiced by the founders of Marxism-Leninism, while practice was largely reduced to imitating Soviet experience. Light and life had become enclosed by a crust of dogma or by trumped-up claims of hostility. I found myself psychologically and mentally disoriented, disengaged. I was not willing or able to abandon myself to such victor's perquisites as come with total power, nor had I the knowledge or skill to set such power to rights, even within my own self. Besides, in secret I was always grieving for my two fallen brothers, my slain sister, my murdered father. Little by little we all were turning willy-nilly into imitators of a foreign power, politically, turning into courtiers and clerks for our own ambitious master.

What do I now conclude about that time lost?

victory won by blood in a civil war is more destructive and poisonous
for the victors than for the vanquished because defeat ennobles some at
least of the conquered, lifting them out of their wretched adversity,
while the victors, almost without exception awash in the spoils of war,
lapse into spiritual decay and so no one, least of all a man of thought,
ought to take much joy in victories like these and this is all the more
true since it is wishful, stupid thinking to believe that your enemy and
compatriot has been annihilated merely because he has been beaten, for
just like you, the winner, he too is a product of the same vital spirit,
the same tradition, the same national attainments, he emerges from the
same national community, and the time will come when he will rise again,
if only as a plaintiff in the court of history and unerring justice.
Where this path might have taken me I do not know, nor how I might have extricated myself, but I would have had to remove myself somehow from a bureaucratic reality that had gone stale and where I myself was disintegrating had there not intervened an underground dialogue in the top ranks involving critical, questioning observations and disagreement with the Soviet government.

On the history of that confrontation much has been written. Soviet attempts to treat Yugoslavia as a vassal state, its colonial domain, were beyond dispute but have been given too much attention. The confrontation actually began--how else under communism?--in Soviet attempts to assist their military and political intelligence organs in imposing control over our leading Party and state organs, meaning the established power structure. A similar train of events took place when they browbeat the conquered lands of Eastern Europe. Here, they began by bickering and squabbling with the Yugoslav political police and by trying to gain power over the media, which I was in charge of.

To back up even further, when it all began at the end of 1944 I was witness to this confrontation at first hand. The Soviet leadership, now grown conservative, tried to keep a young, revolutionary Yugoslav force from developing independently and thereby from broadening its own influence and contributing to the theory and practice of Soviet socialism. My remarks to that effect, however, were subdued and indirect, buried in the tightest circle of leadership. This circle had already closed ranks around Tito in the prewar period of illegal struggle, and our ensuing sacrifices, our suffering, the exploits of both Party and people as they made war against the Nazi and Fascist occupiers and their quislings and supporters, had only further toughened and hardened the leaders.

Within that circle we used to debate deep into the night, trying to find answers, leafing through the Marxist classics to penetrate the meaning of what we viewed as Soviet deviation, trying to understand the metamorphosis of the Soviet Union into an imperialistic power. How? How come? Who? It was a case of fresh, consistent dogmatism against ossified, utilitarian dogma.

No matter how preoccupied we were dogmatically with finding a more honest path than the Soviet one, however, we were at the same time firmly and pragmatically loyal to defending our country and its revolutionary heritage. Dogmatism, once a real path is found, can be and certainly is extremely pragmatic and effective. But in the course of distancing ourselves from particular delusions about the Soviet model and what it had to teach us, we would feel as if the plated helmets protecting us were instead bursting inside our very heads.

Although the Yugoslav Party was already well advanced in bureaucratization, the flame of an ideal still burned brightly for most of its leaders, a patriotic, revolutionary ecstasy. And as for the people--they caught their collective breath with enthusiasm when the confrontation broke into the open.

We knew beforehand that at the end of June 1948 the so-called Information Bureau of the Communist parties of Eastern Europe plus Italy and France had been summoned to meet in Bucharest. It was the Soviet re-creation of a mini-Comintern, to which we, too, belonged up to that point. But taking our cue from preliminary letters addressed by the Soviet Central Committee to the other Party members concerning the sins and errors of the Yugoslav Central Committee, it was not hard to figure out that there, in Bucharest, the Yugoslav Party and Yugoslavia itself would be anathematized as anti-Communist and treasonous. So Tito called a plenary session of the Central Committee and I, waking in the middle of the night (as I recall), wrote out for the Yugoslav media a point-by-point rebuttal of the bill of indictment. The next day, June 28, our Central Committee adopted this text with minor changes as its public reply.

It was with our rift with the Soviet Union and Stalin that my own independence and self-sufficiency began. This was a process at first intellectual, then emotional and private, slow to mature but perfectly sure. My growing independence would have come to light more rapidly had I been able to part company with the collective leadership; had I not been obliged to function within this circle. Otherwise, in the heated atmosphere then prevailing, I would have been arrested and proclaimed a pro-Soviet traitor, a deserter to the cause at the most critical and dramatic juncture for Party, for country, and for the socialist ideal. As if the sluices had opened, all my suppressed, critical ideas began to gush forth unbridled, aimed, of course, at the Soviet system and Stalinist methods but also indirectly, silently, reflective of Yugoslav realities. For there can be no question that the Yugoslav and Soviet realities were essentially alike, if not identical. Neither Tito nor some of the other top leaders were happy with these newfangled Djilasisms, at least at the beginning. But they were in no position to take issue with my ideas, mirroring as these did the state of mind and the thinking of many in the Party's highest ranks and directed against the grotesque, deadly enemies of our Party, our country, and our people. I was convinced at the time that my ideas were still largely antidogmatic, or represented a rejuvenated dogmatism. Even dogma can be creative. Once it has become ritualized, the faith of officials can be shattered by a dogma still more persuasive, more logical, by a faith still more redemptive.

No sooner, though, had we introduced democratic measures (relatively so, by comparison with the Soviet Union and the East European countries); no sooner did we reject the notion of imposing our own brand of Stalinism and endorse the ideas of democratic socialism; no sooner had we begun to overcome the inertia of an inherited, petrified way of thinking and fossilized forms of governance, all a mixture of Yugoslav and Soviet experience--than we noticed that the current had started to flow in the opposite direction, toward conservatism. It often happened that just to show Moscow we had not betrayed the Communist idea in adopting a new course, in practice we adopted punitive forms such as collectivizing villages and persecuting Stalin's followers, outrivaling in perfidy Moscow's own methods of double-dealing and retaliation.

That Stalin was in the wrong was plainly to be seen from the beginning, though such a view did not pass beyond the narrowest circle of leaders. By the fall of 1948 I dared to declare, with Tito's grudging consent, that "this time Comrade Stalin is not in the right." But in proportion as Soviet pressures spread and grew stronger, taking even such silly forms as "trying to convince," to that same degree our own perceptions grew keener and we began pushing back. At a UN session in 1949, in the name of the Yugoslav delegation, I delivered a critical report on Soviet behavior toward our country.

However, to rest our case simply on repudiating Stalin was not a smart thing to do and would be unconvincing. In my own reflections, and partly, too, in internal discussions with certain top-ranking colleagues, Lenin's name would regularly emerge. For Stalin had merely "perfected" the Leninist system.

A group of us turned finally to Marx as a source of explanation and a road sign. Even I plunged into diligent study of Marx. But I could find no explanation for Soviet socialism's conversion to state capitalism. (It was I who formulated this term, which was then taken up by the Party until I was expelled from its Central Committee at the beginning of 1954, on the eve of my government's reconciliation with the USSR.) Accurate or not, my term "state capitalism"--one that gained currency in the West, though at the time I was only vaguely aware of this--served the Yugoslav Party as a pointed weapon, even the major one, with which to criticize the Soviet system and to set ourselves apart from it ideologically.

But if after rereading Marx I could arrive at no explanation for the Soviet deviation from the path of socialism, I did come up with the concept of self-management. Others later elaborated and applied it with a broad brush, in wholesale fashion and dictatorially, throughout Yugoslavia. Self-management was a utopia as well, but one that cushioned the Lenin-Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat, the totalitarian power of a Party bureaucracy.

Finally, I turned to the classical and European philosophers, though with no intention of myself becoming a philosopher. What I discovered was that final truths were not to be found in Marx, and that Marx had taken many of his own truths from German and European classical philosophy. At the time I could not completely rid myself of the notion that Marx was a "scientist" and a first-rate economist and philosopher. For that to happen, years of meditation were required, years mostly spent behind prison bars.

Here in substance is what I learned from the experience of having confronted the Soviet Union:

If national policy, even that of a great and mighty people, wishes to
play a creative role, it inescapably must stand alone spiritually,
intellectually and programmatically, must be in character when it
collaborates with others, distinctive and original even when it
unwillingly bends the knee before them, for though no one's ideas and
ideologies are uniquely one's own, if and where they do
exist they must raise their own voices and spring from their own roots,
yes, yes, they must emerge from their very own fountainheads and if this
be not so then such ideas and ideologies and indeed the whole national
policy is but a naked imitation and either it must change or the ideas
and ideologies must be replaced and the same holds true for the
individual, if he wishes to be creative, and I was capable of being
creative to the end, in fact had to create in order to become a whole
being, free and unrestricted in thought and deed throughout all
hesitancies and twistings and turnings, but this I came to recognize
only when I found myself alone, alone with my wife Stefaniya and our
son, for it was only then that I discovered how self-sufficiency and
solitude are intertwined, or to state it differently I was on the way to
becoming my own man and alone but this was something that did not come
to pass all of a sudden, only gradually, at intervals, something I
became fully aware of only after parting company with Stalin and the
Soviet system, with all the disgrace and risk that action brought down
upon my head, and only after parting company with the companions whose
business, whose thoughts--whose bread--I had shared for years, all so as
to finally become what I am, to belong to a spiritual world of my own,
hounded and cursed by those very comrades with whom I had shared all I
had ever owned up to then, all that I was, all I believed in, exposed to
risk, risk both unpredictable and fatal, risking even that which I had
no right to risk--my family, my wife and children, a son and daughter:
without sacrifice and damnation, mild or harsh depending on the
circumstances, no one at bottom is or can be even tolerably independent
and creative in a human world where nothing is so odious as authentic
independence and creativity.
The parting of the ways occurred gradually and almost unnoticeably, even to me. In my criticism of the Soviet Union there was much that bore, if only indirectly, on the Yugoslav political and economic system. I was aware of this but kept it out of sight, a fact that was noticed by certain comrades who favored greater democracy as long as the power structure and their own slots within it were not threatened thereby. Partly for this reason, but more because the ruling circle was rendered powerless by its own inflamed anti-Sovietism, my criticism was tolerated by our sovereign "strong arms" and by Tito. They suppressed their frowns and merely gave me comradely rebukes.

Within Yugoslavia I freely offered opinions on sundry topics in sundry directions. There was too much of it. Nor did it behoove a responsible official in a normal political and bureaucratic system to offer such opinions.

This situation steadily intensified up to the very moment of Stalin's death. Quite soon thereafter criticism so caustic, criticism that was growing ever more pointed, began to disturb the ideologists of what was termed Tito's Marxism, who had hitherto lain low and held their tongues. In July 1953 the Central Committee, at Tito's initiative, put a stop to our modest liberalization and announced that criticism of the bureaucracy and of totalitarian structures was to be toned down. To me, it was an unambiguous signal to cease and desist, to change my way of working, or, in other words, to suppress the evidence and choke off its free expression. More, I was entrusted with the highly visible position of president of the Yugoslav Federal Parliament.

But I was hardly a devotee of titles. The glitter of high politics turned me off, and at that point, familiar as I was with the origin and essence of these things, titles even disgusted me. I could be only a leader or a common soldier--leader on a path of my own, soldier like others on that same path.

I simply was not able to "cease and desist." I was being carried along by ideas and ideals that were more freedom-loving than Marxist. Something stronger than my still wobbly willpower and my still unripened thoughts. Something that did not permit me to halt, even with the prospect before me of ostracism, humiliation, and prison, of my young wife's suffering and that of my newborn son, my daughter. Something that did not shrink from death itself. What that something was is unclear to this day: Man is in thrall to his work, to his creative work, to the extent that it is his own and that he believes it to be original.

That something which was stronger than I would perhaps not have come into the open, or at least not to such a degree, had concrete political circumstances not dictated a turning point, a watershed: We could move toward democracy or turn back into totalitarianism and the cult of the leader. We were faced with a choice, not one involving policy but inner consistency: Either rot in sly pretense, awaiting the leader's demise, or affirm our conviction, our own new faith, one that was all our own. Be true to our own selves.

I resolved to proceed with my criticism. Mild and confined to generalities, it was in line with my striving for a gradual democratization. The Communist order in Yugoslavia was very close to my heart, after all. But the clarity and concreteness of my criticism left no doubt that above all it was directed at the Yugoslav Party. In one narrative text the nascent contours of my future book The New Class are noticeably present.

I had no thought at that point of organizing a factional group within the Party. Indeed, this would have been beyond my power, even though in the top ranks there were comrades who shared my views. I was aware of the fate of factions in Communist parties, especially Stalinist ones. But I also knew and had seen for myself the futility of all attempts to "Bolshevize" communism. The sole possible path was criticism. Communism can only change itself from within by using its own resources in the form of ideas.

I wrote a series of articles for the Party newspaper Borba, articles that would continue to be published for some time since the themes I had sketched and the ideas I was forging were still incomplete. But in January 1954 a plenary session of the Central Committee was convened to consider "the case of Comrade Djilas," a session that ended with the first verdict on me and my work.

At the session my "erroneous conceptions" failed to serve as the basis of any discussion, such as might have been expected from a Party that had long proclaimed itself to be a departure from Stalinism. We might have escaped domination by the Soviet state, but from the point of view of ideology and the basic features of the system any such escape was a delusion, a mistaken idea, real only to the extent needed by Tito and the bureaucratic circle around him.

Halfheartedly and unconvincingly, I "acknowledged" my "errors"--an unexpected thing for me to do. To this day I cannot explain it other than by my loyalty to communism and the fact that I was simply unable to part company without shamefully stumbling. Such is the lot of all true believers before they detach themselves from their faith for good.

At that plenary session of slander, lies, and threats, all substantive arguments came down to my being excluded from the Central Committee. The verdict was initially pronounced by Tito, followed by Kardelj's theoretical-bureaucratic explication (Kardelj was informally number two in the Party). The two of them were joined by others who expressed their opposition to a "revisionist," a "flag-bearer of Counter-revolution," a "fractionalist," a "Bernsteinist" under the influence of British Labourites, and so on and on. Total ostracism began at once, automatically, and two months later I handed in my Party membership card.

In itself the Plenum would not have meant anything decisive for me, but the way in which it was conducted--fabrication of guilt, humiliation, groundless ferreting out of "Djilasites"--did touch me deeply. Even here, in my own Party, the leaders and fellow fighters with whom I had worked closely for nearly two decades differed from Stalinists only in having one ear cocked to the outer world and in having in some cases become soft ideologically. They were incapable of resorting to the most savage methods of maintaining what was essentially dictatorial power. Incapable of clipping the wings of any and all criticism of the system. Incapable of settling accounts with innocent and well-intentioned faultfinders. And they were not up to doing these things more ruthlessly inside the Party than outside it. In other words, the problem lay not with this or that leader, but with communism as such: From communism there is no exit, and for this reason a critical judgment, if it is to be really honest, has to find fault with the very idea itself.

I set to work on cherished literary projects, writing my memoirs and clearing the way for a literary study of the great Montenegrin poet Njegos, and along with these preparing a critique of communism.

The idea of Vie New Class was finally thought through and shaped into a book in closest conjunction with a new and merciless attack on me: The Central Committee forbade the printing of my literary description of my childhood, Land Without Jastice, though there was not a thing in it that might in any way have been construed as censure of communism or of the Communist order in Yugoslavia. I understood this prohibition to be setting a price: Either knuckle under in shame, or spiritual death will ensue for you. Instead of fostering irresolution this only made me resolved to fight on wherever I could, using any honest means. That is, I would publish abroad. I now had a keen grasp of how matters stood. This was the way it had to be because communism, once in power, "evolved" into a monopolistic ideology and Communists themselves into a closed and privileged social layer, a new class of its own kind. "Sparks live in the rock; blows only find them there," in the words of Njegos.

Critics have taken note that The New Class, in structure and manner of argument, remained to a certain extent Marxist. And this was no coincidence. A Marxist approach appeared to be the most authentic and convincing way to tell how Communists create not a classless society but the reverse--their own class society.

The work would not have been published but for the courage of my wife, Stefaniya, who entrusted it to the American newswoman Catherine Clark while I was in prison. (I had been sent to prison for a statement to the Associated Press and an article in The New Leader, in both of which I was critical of the Yugoslav government's stand on the Hungarian uprising of 1956.) Sending the manuscript to the United States evoked hesitation and painful second thoughts for the purist that I was. To publish abroad a work opposed to ideas that had been until so recently my own? Surely, for the bigoted consciousness of a Communist this would be plain proof of mercenary betrayal.

Writing The New Class came easy for me: I had first lived through and then recovered from injustice and disgrace, while the gist of the book had gradually been ripening to maturity within. But in my sleepless wanderings about the nightmarish, unpeopled expanse of Belgrade (as it appeared to me), I shilly-shallied and wobbled, imagining at times that I was going mad, looking for topics and retorts, finding them, constructing them. All is of value once created--created of obstinate, convoluted meditation and brought to completion as a personal drama. Creation is the joy of suffering conscious of itself.

Imprisonment followed. I went to prison for defending the Hungarian uprising, I was kept there for coming out with The New Class while being punished, and I went back to prison for Conversations with Stalin while on probation: prison for thirteen years, of which I served nine. On the last day of December 1966 I was let out of prison and, to the accompaniment of threats and interference, continued energetically to find fault in the foreign media with specific Communist countries and with specific, sometimes current, instances of behavior and viewpoint on the part of the Communist governments. Open publication in Yugoslavia was permitted me only in 1989.

In prison I worked intensively on writing fiction, and during my second term, between 1962 and 1966, I thought through The Unperfect Society, writing it down upon my release.

"Jail is a strange house," goes the Serbian song. What is so for everyone is especially so for the prisoner of conscience, the person who resists morally--the person under discussion here. For him, the issue is whether his personality will break or whether he will master himself. The oscillation between these alternatives either breaks the will or strengthens it, daily and hourly. Nights are filled with nightmares, mornings with crazed confusion. Savage, irrational thirst for life is followed by a tranquilizing faith and pride. At the victorious conclusion--if victorious it can be called, for anyone--you leave yourself out of history, particularly your own history. You deny life, turn your back on any life beyond your own ideas, your own beliefs, your own inner world. History vanishes. There remains only the person. Personal ambition, personal plans--all are superseded. Weaknesses and errors in overcoming history, overcoming life, overcoming oneself, are neither denied nor justified. There is no system without fault, no perfect world. Perfection, to the degree it exists at all, is only to be found in our "unperfect" selves.

Such would have been the message at the end of this book, to the extent that it is not spelled out in what follows.

(C
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company