Rise and Fall

...But if a Marxist-Leninist relinquishes power, what can he become...

...he organized her lecture tours, worked at Mother Earth, her journal, and was abundantly unfaithful to her...

...Much of her autobiography is devoted to her struggle to figure out whether the USSR was heaven or hell, but here she THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 37...

...There have been many minor reforms and even a major one--the constitution of 1974, which granted Yugoslavia's six republics considerable autonomy--but the Party remains the supreme arbiter...

...Thus, despite the break with Moscow, Tito and his comrades behaved in most respects like Communists under the Soviet yoke...

...The inability of the Party to move towards genuine democratization bodes ill for Yugoslavia's future...

...tion...

...Djilas can make such charges without getting arrested--so far at least-but last year, when a relatively unknown 29-year-old university lecturer from Sarajevo accused Party members of "continually referring to democracy and freedom, while clumsily concealing that their sole aim has been to retain their privileges," he was given eight years for "counterrevolutionary activity...

...The allure of the question is obvious enough: We ingest great buckets of journalistic slop in our burning desire to find out what celebrities are really like...

...After all, even Churchill admired Tito...

...They refrained, however, from calling for the end of the one-party state...

...With moving, irrefutable finality it dawned on me that there was no other way out of bondage to the whims of dictators and oligarchs than by the existence of another party . . . . " Rise andFall, however, is only in part about Djilas's break with the Party...

...In the 1940s, moreover, he was an ardent Stalinist-"obsessed," as he says in his latest book, Rise andFall, "with the 'perfection' of dogma...

...When historians write biographies, though, they devote themselves to giving us more than a revealing glimpse...

...Falk wants to puzzle over the apparent gap between a woman who publicly insisted on free love and human autonomy, but who privately and despairingly submitted to a series of destructive relationships...

...They seek out figures like Emma Goldman, the notorious anarchist blamed for everything from labor strikes to the death of President McKinley, the indefatigable firebrand who pushed birth control in America, vainly argued with Lenin for freedom in fledgling Soviet Russia, and hauled off to Spain in her sixties to help the doomed anarchists of the civil war...

...Do they hate puppies...

...Purchasing power has dropped some 40 percent in the past five years, the country is deeply in debt, economic growth is at a standstill...

...Despite such heralded reforms as workers' management, economic decisions remain the province of Party bureaucrats and economic planning continues to be dictated by ideology...

...They merely objected to Moscow's insistence on infallibility with regard to MarxistLeninist doctrine...

...Djilas did spend nine years in Tito's prisons in the 1950s and 1960s, but in the Soviet Union or in a Soviet bloc country such outspokenness would be rewarded either with a longer prison sentence or expulsion from the country...

...Because Stalin made no secret of his desire to replace the defiant Tito with a Yugoslav who would obey Moscow's dictates, Tito threw thousands into the camp without benefit of trial and on the flimsiest of pretexts: listening to short-wave radio, reading leaflets, or failing to report a conversation with someone who sounded pro-Soviet...

...The trial of the Belgrade intellectuals --six in all--revealed the government's weakness, not its strength...

...But woe to anyone who seriously questioned the Party's role as "supreme arbiter...

...The Communist party is not exclusively in charge here," Tito wrote...

...Like other Communist leaders in Eastern Europe, Tito sliced off his opposition slowly and methodically, usually by accusing antiCommunists of collaborating with the Nazis...

...Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, Djilas said that "by far the most important cause of the decline of the Yugoslav economy is the inefficiency of the obsolete political system," adding that "many of the 'reformers' are not really in favor of genuine democratic reforms...

...Most Yugoslav Communists would prefer not to move closer to Moscow, but if they want to stay in power they have nowhere else to turn...

...during World War II he supported Tito's Partisans rather than the forces of the Chetnik leader, General Draza Mihailovic, because the Yugoslav Communists were thought to be more effective Nazi-fighters...

...But Falk fails the reader, and one could pile up incidental objections...

...Unlike the other Communist leaders of Eastern Europe, most of whom sat out the war in Moscow and rode to power behind Soviet tanks, the Yugoslav Communists were authentic war heroes...

...Military men can set up a mechanism for free elections and then retire to their old job as sotdiersutheir only worry the possibility of being arrested by the new civilian government...

...Historians too get a shot...

...From Yugoslavia, then, we can expect closer ties with Moscow...

...There is a problem with false advertising: Reitman is too prominent, and Alexander Berkman, Goldman's lifelong comrade, far too subordinate, for this to be simply a biography...

...This antiSoviet stance has been rewarded by several American administrations with economic and military aid, including jet aircraft...

...too often, Falk's text only loosely stitches together the letters she quotes...

...Beginning where Wartime--his powerful memoir of the war years in Yugoslavialeft off, Rise and Fall offers an inside story about the first ten years of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, when Tito consolidated his power and then broke with Moscow...

...What counted as legitimate political activity in early twentieth-century America...

...According to Djilas, Yugoslav Communism is not very different from other brands...

...Journalists (real and so-called) aren't the only ones who can pander to our interest in these matters...

...It is much easier for a military dictator than a Marxist-Leninist to relinquish power...

...Both foreign and domestic support for the defendants was very strong...

...Fights, reconciliations, brief and elusive periods of harmony, and more fights: The cycle is relentless...

...We pay them to read other people's mail, an enterprise placing not only them in a morally dubious posiDon Herzog is assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan and author of the new book, Without Foundations: Justification in Political Theory (Cornell University Press...

...Still, Rise and Fall is a useful guide to contemporary Yugoslavia because the country has changed little in the past thirty years...

...Yet all the while there was talk of reform...

...Serious people read biographies, and not just because they'd be embarrassed to be caught with some sleazy tabloid...

...properly handled, it could speak to many contemporary concerns...

...What counts today...

...The memoir contains some arresting anecdotes of Stalin as well as some moving descriptions of Djilas's imprisonment, but it is most valuable for the light it sheds on the nature of Yugoslav Communism...

...Falk has left no archival stone unturned in documenting that suffering...

...None of Goldman's affairs was particularly happy...

...She may have tried consummating a relationship with a prostitute drawn to her, but lesbian relationships, she decided, were not for her...

...If the lid isn't kept on, this line of reasoning goes, the pot will boil over, and in that event the Soviet Union might find it convenient to intervene, especially if one republic invited it in at the expense of another...

...In a much publicized trial earlier this year, three Belgrade intellectuals who attended a private discussion group at which Djilas spoke were given prison sentences ranging from one to two years...

...What could possibly count as evidence for or against that claim...

...Goldman's anarchist friends endured Reitm~in, some making little secret of their contempt for him...

...We may be moved by idle curiosity--it's nice to have something to read on the supermarket checkout line---but there are less commendable motives at work here, too...

...She says, for example, that after ~6 Berkman's suicide, Nothing short of an actual war could bring Emma out of the depths of mourning...

...As a result, the prosecution reduced charges against three of the defendants, dropped charges against another, and called for a separate trial for two others...

...According to one observer, the current economic crisis coupled with nationalist agitation may result in a mass uprising in the ndar future...

...Goldman was Reitman's lover for some ten years...

...He remains alive and well in Belgrade--subject to occasional harassment and some restrictions (he is not allowed to travel...

...For the melancholy truth is that Communist regimes can only be changed--changed significantly, that is--through revolution...

...The Soviet Union would help, but of course for a price--at the very least extensive use of Yugoslav ports for the Soviet navy...

...She tried to get one old friend and lover to leave what she saw as his sterile, conventional marriage for her, but he refused...

...They neglected Yugoslavia's agriculture while rapidly expanding its industrial base...

...Milovan Djilas, the country's most famous dissident, would say that this image of Yugoslavia is highly misleading, even though his own status is testimony to the relatively liberal nature of Yugoslav Communism...

...Like other old lovers, the two exchanged sometimes maudlin, more often petty and manipulative, letters...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 Djilas himself says, "The ruling Communist bureaucracy cannot even conceive of such far-reaching reforms...

...Still, these lingering ethnic hatreds may have less to do with the past than with the present: Envy and resentment are bound to flourish in a political system that thrives on privileges doled out by the Party...

...These letters became the centerpiece of Falk's study of Goldman...

...3 LOVE, ANARCHY, AND EMMA GOLDMAN: A BIOGRAPHY Candace Falk/Holt, Rinehart & Winston/g25.00 EMMA GOLDMAN: AN INTIMATE LIFE Alice Wexler/Pant heon/$19.95 Don Herzog What is being famous like...

...Do they fight with their spouses and have affairs...

...many Yugoslavs genuinely fear that a multi-party state would aggravate the old ethnic hatreds that still linger from the atrocities of Yugoslavia's civil war...

...If dissent really does get out of control, the Party will probably look to the Soviet Union for economic and possibly even military aid...

...So historians do not publish biographies of the likes of Michael Jackson...

...Instead historians seek out figures who can profoundly illuminate their days-and, they often hope, our own...

...Moreover, he not only loses power...

...It does not have total dominion over all things, as if it were the supreme arbiter imposing its immutable, infallible judgment on all the various problems of social life . . . . " Tito, of course, never seriously entertained such an idea...

...Throughout his reign, he circulated talk of reform whenever it suited his purposes: when he wanted military or economic aid from the West, or when he wished to pose as the enlightened head of the non-aligned nations, a pragmatic and dynamic leader who was not a rigid Marxist-Leninist...

...Djilas probably gets away with his Stephen Miller is Director of A merican Programming at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty...

...I suffer, I suffer like Hell," Goldman wrote to Reitman in 1910...

...Goldman's life is not only enticingly colorful...

...Do they have seborrhea...

...When Djilas did so, he was imprisoned...

...popular as he may be, his life doesn't illuminate much of anything...

...Finding out that great stars also suffer soothes any sullen resentment we might have about our anonymous lot...

...Goldman did eventually wrest free of Reitman's compelling hold, but he continues to surface in this book long after their breakup...

...The regime tolerates strikes, allows its citizens to travel abroad, and permits a somewhat more open press than is found in other Communist countries...

...They're no better off than we are, after all...

...Such questions are manifestly different from those about toenails and seborrhea...

...The issue, as Djilas says, was "the free development of socialism as opposed to its development through the expansion of the Soviet state...

...At a recent meeting of the Serbian Academy of the Arts and Sciences, the majority of the participants called for the separation of the country's political and economic systems...

...The book is too long for what it is: Goldman's plight is first moving, then pathetic, then tiresome, and finally dull...

...Djilas's memoir ends with his release from prison in 1966, but his inside story ends in 1954, when he was stripped of his power...

...But the letters Falk found made their relationship much more vivid...

...Magically in love again toward the very end of her life, Goldman was even told by her last lover that he was somehow compulsively attracted to overweight women...

...in most histories, we can find a revealing vignette chosen to explain, say, just how FDR could brashly claim that he didn't care about the economic implications of Social Security...

...Do they pick their toenails in private...

...Until he broke with the Party (in Yugoslavia called the League of Communists), he was one of Tito's closest associates, the director of Agitprop and an occasional emissary from Tito to Stalin...

...Djilas is most outraged, however, not by the executions but by the Yugoslav Gulag of the late 1940s (created after the break with Moscow) on the island of Goli Otok, where many supposedly pro-Soviet Yugoslavs were tortured and assigned to hard labor...

...and no one is served by dragging out the story of human suffering until it is dull...

...he was devastated by what he took to be her dreadfully uncharitable account of their relationship in her autobiography, and wrote a string of pathetically plaintive letters bemoaning his poor lot, or threatening with transparent bravado that she would ride into history on his coattails...

...And in part, the letters revealed just how wrenching an emotional relationship this was: Goldman was Reitman's "blue-eyed Mommy," his supplicant lover, his angry teacher and pleading comrade, and through it all she felt helpless in her morbid dependency on him...

...What are the travails of a spurned and detested radical...

...Not just Reitman, but all of Goldman's other lovers--barring some new find--crowd the pages of this book...

...The economy is in a shambles...

...Is anarchism a defensible political theory...

...At a recent conference of high Party officials--Yugoslav Communists, it seems, are addicted to conferences--a leading Party spokesman said that "despite very severe criticism of and even pronounced dissatisfaction with the situation in the Party and in society in general, the value of our [1941-1945] revolution" has been confirmed...

...As it stands now, the Yugoslavs are dependent on the Soviet Union for almost half their oil, and the Soviet Union is their biggest trading partner...

...Typically, historians provide a quick glimpse of the personalities and then move back to their somber narratives...

...They want to provide us something quite different from the lurid headline, something less gossipy, more revealing, more illuminating...

...This "settling of accounts"--a sinister term Djilas invokes repeatedly --was worse in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, with approximately 100,000 executed...

...Goldman's treatment of the relationship in her autobiography makes it clear that she always found Reitman irresistibly attractive and often found him a nuisance and a threat...

...Party control invites invidious comparisons...

...Indeed, instead of squelching dissent, the trial seems to have encouraged many Yugoslavs to be more outspoken...

...There is a serious reason for charting every contour of Goldman's movingly sad private life...

...In 1975, Candace Falk, then a graduate student in history, stumbled on the sort of find every young historian dreams about: a collection of unpublished and apparently important letters from Emma Goldman to Ben Reitman, self-styled hobo, medical doctor, and sociologist...

...Though from the first he disliked the new regime's "banality and vulgarity," it was not until 1954 that he came to see the problem was the system itself, not simply the people running it...

...he loses his identity--admitting by his act that the ideology which shored up his privileged existence was a lie...

...Their interest explains why we have two new biographies of Goldman: Candace Falk's Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman: A Biography, and Alice Wexler's Emma Goldmarc An intimate Life...

...Reproduced letters simply swallow this book...

...Goldman's public life is too tidy in Falk's hands...

...Her book is over 600 pages long, with over 500 pages of text, and she explores in tireless detail every thrust, parry, and turn of this sadly tormenting relationship...

...Yet four years after Tito's death the Party is in trouble...

...The country is a complex ethnic mix, comprising many non-Slavic peoples as well: Hungarians in the north and Albanians in the south, for example...

...Such timidity arises from more than the fear of arrest...

...Most important as far as the West is concerned, Tito and his heirs have often attacked Soviet imperialism, most recently the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...They established a brutal secret police and made sure the judiciary followed the dictates of the Party...

...What would a genuinely autonomous human life look like...

...Feminists have been increasingly concerned with the links between private and public life, or, as they more often put it, between the personal and the political...

...On domestic issues, Yugoslav Communists have been regarded by many in the West as less doctrinaire than their Soviet bloc counterparts...

...And no other Communist country would allow such a critic to grant interviews to Western journalists-something Djilas has continually done...

...In a sense, it was only appropriate for Tito to erect a Gulag of his own, since the Yugoslav Communists never stopped professing their devotion to Marxism-Leninism...

...Falk did not set out to write a racy gossip column...

...And this is why Yugoslavia will never follow the example set by Spain--or by Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Egypt, or Turkey...

...In part, they revealed just how steamy a sexual relationship this was: Goldman assured Reitman that no other man had ever given her such pleasure, and the two exchanged concretely erotic fantasies in their longing absences...

...criticisms because he is a world-famous figure--known not only for his writings but also by virtue of his being a very special dissident...

...Do they worry about dying...

...And in 1948 they won over many Westerners by defying Stalin and vowing to fight if the Soviets invaded the country...

...Goldman learned that she could wound Reitman with a well-chosen word...

...Falk takes too many psychological peeps into Goldman's head...