Djilas Disserts Communism

...They are not even hinted at, except in a passage in which he tries to explain the confessions in the purge trials and suggests how lonely the complete devotee feels when he has been rejected by the Party...

...Reviewed by Reinhold Niebuhr Every reader of The New Leader knows the identity of Milovan Djilas, a former hero of international Communism, intimate of Tito and leading intellectual of the Yugoslav Communist party, who is now languishing in one of Tito's jails...

...To compare a system designed to restore the innocence of the primitive community with the despotism of Egypt is to state the irony of Communism in a nutshell and to express the extent of the disillusionment of a former devotee of the system...

...Stalin,' he declares, "was the lawful, though wicked, offspring of Lenin and the revolution...

...The power of reality and of life has always been stronger than brutal force and more real than any theory...

...He attributes most of the developments in the post-Stalin era to frictions between the various national Communist bureaucracies, and asserts that "when Moscow renounced Stalin, it ceased to be the ideological center of the Communist world...

...This note of optimism comes in the very last page of his book: "The leaders," he writes, "lack realistic, or even approximately realistic, views...

...He admits that the technical achievements of the Soviet Union have been considerable and wrily summarizes: "While the Communist systems are only relatively opposed to scientific development, they are absolutely opposed to intellectual discovery and progress...

...He does speak of the Army oligarchy but wrote too early to speculate on the significance of Marshal Zhukov's rise to power and membership in the Presidium...

...One wonders what he means by "great monarchs and great ideas," particularly the great ideas...

...The "new class" is the class of oligarchs and bureaucrats who have seized the monopoly of power in the Communist state...

...He puts great emphasis upon the Communist movements, but does not hold out much hope for their leavening influence on the Communist despotism...

...Djilas says it is not possible to define the exact limits of this class...

...There are undoubtedly such possibilities even in this consistent despotism...

...In tracing this development, he does not allow himself a shred of beguiling illusion, after the manner of many anti-Stalinist Marxists, who regard Stalin as the corrupter of Leninism...

...In speaking about the privileges of the men of power, he says: "Communist leaders must always tend to personal extravagance—because of the inherent need of those in power to be recognizable prototypes of brilliance and might...

...Nor does he have confidence in the gradual democratization of the regime of his own Yugoslavia...

...Djilas quotes some interesting parallel passages to show the similarity between the "socialist realism" of Communism and the standards of Nazi art...

...Each one of the collective owners is deluded in that lie thinks he belongs to a unique movement, which would abolish classes in society.'' Djilas does not speculate on the degree of self-deception and cynicism which may inform the leaders of a Utopian movement who have become the most arrogant monopolists, though in some passages he attributes the most consistent cynicism to them...

...The coldly factual tone of it, hiding all personal feelings, is one of the marks of the unique genius of the man...

...He rightly has no confidence in the tyrants...

...But he is not conscious of the fact that he belongs to a new ownership class: he does not consider himself an (inner and does not consider the special privileges which he enjoys...

...He attributes the frictions between the national Communists and Moscow to the power rivalries between different bureaucracies...

...Yugoslavia's so-called workers' management and autonomy, conceived in the struggle with Russian imperialism," he writes, "as a far-reaching measure to deprive the Party of a monopoly of administration, has been increasingly relegated to one of the areas of Party work...

...For, on Djilas's own analysis, Communism can only survive if it maintains an absolute monopoly of power and allows no deviations in its ideology...

...Their adherance to obsolete dogmas incites to senseless actions...

...This brings us to the main thesis of the volume...

...One can only surmise the experiences of disillusionment which lie behind that sentence...

...but they would gain as human beings and as members of the human race...

...He has no great confidence in the leaders of the post-Stalin collective leadership, regarding them merely as small men who have been driven to mutual trust by the impulse of collective survival...

...There is no possibility of its restoration...

...But he sees no hope in this development, for "just as the shift from Stalinism to collective leadership did not alter the nature of the system in the USSR, so too national Communism has been unable, despite ever increasing possibilities of liberation from Moscow, to alter its internal nature, which consists in the total control and monopoly of ideas and ownership by the Party bureaucracy...

...In any case, the world will change and will go in the direction in which it has been moving and must go on: toward greater unity, progress and freedom...

...He is in fact so honest and he is so completely disillusioned with Communism that it is difficult to see what a dictator could do except throw him in jail...

...for the volume reveals much about Tito and Yugoslav Communism...

...He might have enlarged on Tito's medals and palaces, but he lets it go at that...

...The others are idealists and careerists...

...But he did attribute one great idea to Stalin, however morally reprehensible it was...

...It includes the oligarchs and the lesser bureaucrats who manage the system...

...The one remaining remnant of Marxist ideology in his thought, the emphasis on class and ownership, helps him here...

...Some of us appealed to Tito for his release in the name of democracy, which Djilas advocated for his country...

...He was an idealist, who being disillusioned tried to be satisfied with what might come to him in a normal bureaucratic career...

...It is a coldly objective analysis of the Communist system, written by a man who obviously knows the Communist world intimately but who also knows the outside world...

...It shows that it is almost as totalitarian as the Russian variety, and that, within terms of its presuppositions, it must be...

...Perhaps such speculations are vain...

...But since the oligarchs speak for the whole Party, they are really the "new class...

...The agonies of soul which must have preceded the final disillusionment can only be guessed...

...The Communist did not invent collective ownership as such," he declares, "but only its all-encompassing character, more widely extended than in earlier epochs, even more extensive than in Pharaoh's Egypt...

...The relation of the system to the artists is primarily revealed in the dogmatic canon of "socialist realism" in which the oligarch tries to confine the artist and make him an apologist for the regime...

...But if one were to voice any criticism of so thrilling a book, it is that Djilas does not show how freedom might triumph over tyranny in terms of detailed strategies...

...But it reveals even more about the author...

...He observes: "Obviously he was not a true Communist...

...The true Communist is a mixture of fanatic and power-holder...

...Trotsky was a cultured and intelligent man, declares Djilas, "but deficient in only one thing: a sense of reality...

...Nothing could be further from the truth...

...Djilas might have written a confessional book, recording the history of his enchantment and disenchantment with Communism, after the manner of the symposium The God Thai Failed...

...In fact the dust-jacket of the book falsely describes the volume as a "documentary record of a political soul in the agonies of intellectual liberation...

...It also includes the Communist party, inasmuch as the Party has a monopoly of political power...

...After reading this book I realize how vain the appeal was...

...His own realism prompts him to observe an analogy which I have never before seen in an analysis of the system by an ex-Communist...

...But after all Western civilization has, by gradual and tortuous process, freed itself of tyranny, partly by heroic defiance and partly because rivalry between the various oligarchies in its communities gradually frustrated the designs of the magnates...

...He is a very intelligent and honest man...

...One wonders whether this does full justice to the triumph of a man like Gomulka, whom Stalin tried to liquidate and whom Khrushchev would have liquidated if Polish patriotic sentiment had not made the step dangerous...

...In a chapter on "The Tyranny Over the Mind," he shows the necessity of ideological conformity for the maintenance of Communist rule and makes some shrewd observations about the new class of technicians and the method of co-opting them for the oligarchy...

...He does not take Trotsky's attack on Stalin seriously, for Trotsky believed that the revolution had been betrayed, but not annulled, because the property relations (which according to Marxist dogma determine a society) had not been altered by the betrayal of the bureaucracy...

...Naturally, his special experience in Yugoslavia makes his chapters on "national Communism" most interesting...

...Djilas goes on: "The unity of the world Communist movement is incurably injured...

...If the Communists would interpret the world realistically they might lose...

...This is an eloquent expression of general hope by a man who is too honest to indulge in any cheap hope...

...and the publisher missed the chance of revealing the striking merits of this volume...

...Djilas does not give us any detail on the tension between the various types of oligarchs within the system, the technicians, the Party oligarchy and the Army...

...That idea was the liquidation of the peasants because their independent power was a threat to the oligarchy...

...They spend more time in defending themselves from world reality and in attacking it than they do in accustoming themselves to it...

...A Communist member of the new class believes that without the Party society would regress and founder...

...Djilas allows only one ray of hope to pierce the gloom of this honest analysis of a fantastic despotism...

...Whatever problem of the Communist system the author touches, his analysis betrays an almost unrelieved disillusioned honesty, joined with astute knowledge of the human nature which is molded by such a system...

...That is all the Communist did...

...Djilas comes close to a personal viewpoint, which mirrors his own case, when speaking about a Communist who was worried about the envy he had of men who had better automobiles than he...

...But, after all, Djilas rejected the Party and has given us a stark acount of the reasons why the Utopian dream turned into a nightmare of tyranny...

...In Moscow, the era of great Communist monarchs and great ideas came to an end, and the reign of mediocre bureaucrats began...

...They are the "owners" because they alone have the right to manage and manipulate the collective property of the Communist state...

...Much of what Djilas asserts has been known by outside observers for a long time: but no one has ever put the facts quite so starkly...