Wartime: Memories of Yugoslavia
Djilas, Milovan
Wartime is the title of a large work by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident, which will be published in June by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and is copyright © 1977 by Harcourt Brace...
...Only Tito and Molotov participated in the conversation...
...Besides Subagi6, the delegation also included two economic ministers...
...they had burned, tortured, slaughtered...
...I wanted to drink it to his health...
...And what is so awful in his having fun with a woman, after such horrors...
...We never spoke of it either in the Central Committee or privately among ourselves...
...He shouted that the Yugoslav army would soon show that it had gotten rid of its weaknesses...
...The same men, the same aims, the same means—they had to operate more or less in the same way everywhere...
...Their idealization is a cover-up for the egotism and love of power of the new revolutionary masters...
...Yet life must have some meaning...
...Tito headed the delegation...
...What, you won't drink to the Red Army...
...Though our authorities don't permit it even to this day, I didn't oppose this request...
...I too was stunned when I heard about it from the Montenegrin leaders, for a punishment is just only if meted out individually...
...They were particularly unhappy if some "meritorious" woman were given a place of honor in the front two rows, or invited to a formal dinner...
...Over the years, Stalin had embraced all sorts of increasingly irrational ideas and impulses with an ever more autocratic and total power...
...The minister for foreign affairs, Subagic, took all the credit, even though everything had already been arranged behind his back...
...I don't claim I spoke these very words, but I did react in that spirit, defending our ideology and decision from doubts, momentary and eternal, about collective retribution, violence, and death...
...Even Tito could understand why the Soviet top echelons drank so desperately...
...Once in a rambling conversation— after the clash with the Soviet leadership in 1948, of course—I mentioned that we had gone too far then, ber-use among the executed also were some who had been fleeing for ideological reasons alone...
...Tito said that socialism today was advancing in ways different from those of the past...
...Even though our army was crumbling, everyone knew that the Tadices were not our enemies, that they had been moved by powerful and primeval clan ties...
...It was a world which was no longer mine, and never could be again...
...Until the beginning of 1942, although they bickered and even fought with the Chetniks, the Communists did not regard them as enemies and collaborators of the invaders...
...Some of these groups got through to the British in Austria, who turned them over to us...
...Interrupting me, Stalin began to hold forth: "Yes, you have, of course, read Dostoevsky...
...The investigation was conducted by Radoje Dakic and Sava Kovacevic, but Milutinovid [a Communist leader] and I were kept informed and we approved the sentence: three TadiEes were sentenced to death, I believe...
...The revolution is hardest on revolutionaries...
...We shall recover in 15 or 20 years, and then we'll have another go at it...
...Someone remarked that it would take the Germans more than 50 years to recover...
...Even more horrible and inconceivable was the killing of kinsmen and hurling of their bodies into ravines—less for convenience than to avoid the funeral processions and the inconsolable and fearless mourners...
...Stalin observed, "No, they will recover, and very quickly...
...Give them 12 to 15 years and they'll be on their feet again...
...But the Communists and the Chetniks were deceived by their own propaganda—the former claiming that their main aim was the struggle against the invader, and the latter, that they were saving Serbia from annihilation...
...In Zagreb, too, purges were conducted according to Belgrade standards...
...one of the officers cursed and the other scowled in silence...
...His uncle Spasoje, a police agent, had gone over to the Chetniks...
...But efforts to restore prerevolutionary forms are even more meaningless and unrealistic...
...The treaty was signed on April 11, in the Kremlin, with Stalin drinking toasts to Yugoslav-Soviet friendship—the only charming episode...
...As soon as the toasts and jests had warmed up, the conversation took on a comradely directness, and Stalin "remembered" to liquidate the dispute with me...
...In essence this was a counterrevolution pitting itself against a revolutionary regime...
...The arrested TadiEes were taken under guard to Gornje Polje...
...Tito was so airsick that he vomited...
...Tito restrained himself...
...Revolution is no longer necessary everywhere...
...They all had a chance to see, to understand, and to leave...
...But my astonishment lasted only a moment...
...The important thing is that it fights Germans—and it is fighting them well, while the rest doesn't matter...
...No one fears death anymore...
...To protect their privileges, the Greater Serbian gentlemen in London have begun a class war, their tactic being to destroy the most dangerous opponent—that is, the Communist party and the Partisan movement—while temporarily collaborating with the remaining opponents...
...Tito was offered the place at Stalin's right...
...There were individual cases of retribution in the course of the disarming...
...How many victims were there...
...These killings were sheer frenzy...
...And so it was, somehow—"once and for all...
...And it is not ideal nor can it be, even if it did not contain a certain percentage of criminals—we opened up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody into the army...
...At one point he hitched up his pants and cried out, "The war shall soon be over...
...In fact, despite their verbal acrimony and moral revulsion, until the end of the war the Communists regarded the Chetniks in a special way, that is, not as fascists but as "domestic traitors"—adversaries who, for reactionary and chauvinistic reasons, were led into agreements and collaboration with the 174 invader...
...The truth of this was demonstrated most cruelly in those very same days with regard to the Tadi5 family...
...In all likelihood Tadija would not have warned his uncle had he realized how he would react...
...Thus it was learned that Spasoje was hiding in a hut in the woods, and a squad was sent to kill him...
...Tadija Tadicc, a student, was a party member and commander of a Partisan battalion...
...The opponents of the Communists—mostly from the royal government—could do nothing but rebel or 175 submit...
...I believe that no one knows exactly, or will ever know...
...Serbian and Croatian nationalists each echo the other in claiming that their own side was treated more harshly than the other side...
...Tito told me with an enigmatic but friendly smile, just two or three days before our departure, that I too was to go to Moscow...
...But the hatreds and divisions continued to bring destruction and death, both inside and outside the country...
...A kinsman of mine, an elderly peasant, joined us along the way: he walked in front of me the entire time, holding on to my stirrup, obviously hoping to make an impression on the authorities...
...He had said nothing about the whole affair, but there was no change in his relationship of cordial patronage toward me...
...Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometers of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones...
...On the surface the agreement made no sense: an alliance against a Germany which was on the verge of collapse, by countries which had been fighting together against it for nearly four years...
...On their way back from the execution, the Partisans were somber but not depressed...
...There were dinners with missions, and the seating arrangements brought us unprecedented headaches...
...Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system...
...with recitations against aggressors and traitors from Njegog's Mountain Wreath, while the Montenegrin Chetniks celebrated that same holiday the following year by the "inspirational reading" of the episode of the Massacre of the Renegades—the Moslems— from that same Mountain Wreath...
...I felt divested in front of him, and even glad that it was so...
...Without striking at Tito personally, Stalin took sideswiping jabs at conditions in Yugoslavia...
...And we were led by him, out of necessity, just like our forebears in the enslaved and powerless South Slavic lands...
...At the same time there was a noticeable reserve and awkwardness over our arrival among the Communists, particularly in the lower ranks...
...Yes, socialism is possible even under an English king...
...It is my belief that a written order didn't exist...
...Stalin then proposed a toast to the Yugoslav army, adding, "But which will yet fight well on level ground...
...But power and authority impose their forms in misery as well as in luxury...
...As if there were no justice, truth, and mercy outside the ideology, the party, and an aroused people, and outside us leaders as their essence...
...The delegation left on April 5, 1945, in a Soviet plane...
...Tito retorted immediately, as if he had long since come to a final, though hardly comforting, conclusion: "We put an end to it once and for all...
...In Hercegovina it was still more horrible and ugly: Communist sons confirmed their devotion by killing their own fathers, and there was dancing and singing around the bodies...
...Tadija had been put through school by that uncle, and was himself a model family head...
...Revolutions must take place when the political forms are unable to develop reasonable and just solutions...
...His nephew Tadija was able to warn him, however, and instead of running away, Spasoje got hold of a submachine gun and like a mad dog killed two Partisans and wounded several others...
...One could tell, especially from Molotov's remarks, that the Soviet leaders respected Churchill as someone farsighted and dangerous...
...Someone denounced Tadija for warning his uncle of the raid, and Tadija was arrested...
...on our side, by Tito and us three Communist ministers...
...Wartime is the title of a large work by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident, which will be published in June by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and is copyright © 1977 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...I believe he was the Tadid with whom I had a talk in my final review of the case...
...There was never any voting anyway...
...A year or two later, there was grumbling in the Slovenian Central Committee that they had trouble with the peasants from those areas, because underground rivers were casting up bodies...
...They sprang largely from their inconsistent, contradictory stand: they made themselves out to be nationalists, adherents of the Allies, who were opposed to the invader "in principle," while at the same time they accepted weapons and supplies from the Italians and coordinated their operations with them against the Partisans, most of whom were not Communists but a patriotic peasantry led by Communists...
...The penetrating and decisive thought in these reflections was that the comrades, the party, thought it necessary to put an end to our hesitation and to Chetnik hopes...
...Just recently a delegation of British Labourites was here, and we talked about this in particular...
...On our way to Montenegro I noticed that the peasants treated us with a marked air of confidentiality—as if they had something important to tell us but didn't dare, or else didn't know how to express it...
...And I would have agreed—perhaps with some reservation which would not have threatened my revolutionary resolve, my adherence to the party, and my solidarity with the leadership...
...He in turn dragged me into it, more because he felt unsure in matters of protocol than because the job had a propaganda aspect, too...
...I don't know, but several hundred doesn't seem too exaggerated...
...Blaio Jovanovie told me later that the Tadices wanted to claim the bodies of their executed kinsmen...
...But I was by now more relaxed, whether because of the tolerable atmosphere or because I had grown tougher even toward Stalin...
...223-25...
...Such a war can be won only by combined military and political action, and on fronts combined with partisan fighting.* The weaknesses of the Chetniks were fairly clear to me...
...But on the whole, though they were quite bloody, clashes between Chetniks and Communists in Montenegro—unlike those in Serbia, where the Chetniks earned the name of "cutthroats"—occurred without the killing of the young and old, or the raping of women: ancestral norms restrained ideologies...
...Stalin retorted, "No, your government is not Soviet—you have something in between de Gaulle's France 178 and the Soviet Union...
...Revolutions begin new epochs, whose direction no one can foresee, let alone determine...
...How can such a man react normally...
...Then appointments began...
...The most sensitive were the women comrades in the lower echelons, who would be separated from their friends or husbands and relegated to the impersonal middle of the hall...
...I gave careful thought to my duties in a complicated new situation...
...During bivouacs at night or while marching, we chatted about everything and everybody, and as the impressions and perceptions piled up, I was able to get the feel of things...
...But that was just a form, part of a pattern by which the Soviet government was establishing and reinforcing its influence...
...The Partisan command quelled the mutiny and arrested the ringleaders, all of them party members...
...You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal...
...On March 25, 1942, the third day after my arrival at the main headquarters in Montenegro, I wrote the following to Peko Dapcevic, Mitar Bakie, and Milinko Djurovic: The traitorous gentlemen are forcing a class war on us at a time when our task is the war of national liberation...
...The war and the revolution were at an end...
...Later I accepted that alienation...
...Yet the fundamental causes and roots of the Chetnik movement in Montenegro were not quite clear to me at the time—nor are they clear to official politicians and historians even today...
...The revolutionary war was still going on inside us—we who were so fresh and self-confident...
...The death sentence no longer has any effect...
...At first— perhaps because of the great strain—I didn't understand what Stalin intended...
...V 't was in Montenegro that I welcomed the end of our own fighting: on May 15, 1945, the German forces—estimated at 130,000finally recognized us as a legal Allied army and laid down their arms...
...I drank to the last drop, as if making a confession, but without shame or embarrassment, for it was to Stalin...
...Yet none of us had a single change of underclothing, and we all ate tasteless stews, were bombed every day, and lived in constant fear that we would be driven into the woods...
...It was as if all this had not been a calamity, terrible and majestic in its totality...
...This war is not as in the past," Stalin said...
...All too lightly the Communists destroyed the inherited, primeval customs—as if they had new and immutable ones to replace them with...
...without him, it wouldn't have had the necessary character...
...According to what I heard in passing from a few officials involved in that settling of scores, the number exceeds 20,000—though it must certainly be under 30,000 including all three of the groups just cited...
...The world seemed to turn against us Yugoslays and we were alone, growing lonelier all the while...
...Do you see what a complicated thing is man's soul, man's psyche...
...The Allies threw us out of Trieste and its environs after the Soviet Central Committee informed us that, after such a terrible war, the U.S.S.R...
...That meaning had to be found in a heightened belief in ideas, in justice, in the rationality of dying...
...177 I too was invited to an intimate supper in Stalin's villa...
...As it turned out, he was not guilty of anything...
...176 HH ill ierarchical relations began to take on a hardened external form at that time [1944...
...They were killed separately, each group on the territory where they had been taken prisoner...
...I don't know...
...Worse yet, functionaries began to get sensitive about rank and about the places assigned them...
...Deep down I didn't agree with this assessment of Stalin's, particularly since it seemed to me that he not only didn't know, but didn't wish to recognize, the essence of the change in Yugoslavia...
...Rankovid and I developed a protocol more out of concern lest we offend some patriot than that we might do an injustice to some party functionary, since we could always appeal to the latter...
...Until then, at public occasions and meetings, care was taken only where Tito would sit...
...The Communists had in fact gained power in the uprising of July 1941—a power which they then consolidated and institutionalized...
...I did some talking, the rest almost none at all...
...Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach...
...All this was obviously long since clear to him: in the Soviet displeasure over my so-called attack, there prevailed a Great Power sensitivity for which accuracy and good intentions are irrelevant...
...I also once found Tito in the cave practicing his signature—as befitted his new role as a ruler, and the atmosphere of titles, honors, and idolatry...
...I even made fun of it: yours or not, I would say to myself, this is the only world you have in which to survive...
...This gave Stalin an opportunity to say, "Today socialism is possible even under the English monarchy...
...179 they had run to the new masters...
...Such a stand inspired no authoritative leadership or spiritual cohesion...
...But choice does not depend only on one's personal outlook but also on reality...
...The adherents of the London [emigre—M...
...After supper, the toasts, and the inevitable films, he shook hands with me without a word...
...An atmosphere of revenge prevailed...
...By retrieving the bodies from the ravines and giving them solemn burial, the Chetniks made impressive gains, while pinning on the Communists the horrible nickname of "pitmen...
...The Communists in Montenegro celebrated Christmas Eve in early 1942 (January 6 N.S...
...Let us hope that in the end monolithic ideological revolutions will cease, even though they have roots in idealism and idealists...
...Both the plane and my faith swayed painfully, and yet it all seemed quite unreal...
...I t was a fanatical conviction that brought me [in 1942], exhausted and ailing, to Montenegro...
...I couldn't refuse the glass which Stalin offered me...
...The Tadie family continued to fight as Partisans and many died for the cause, but they did not forget the terrible fate of their kinsmen...
...The supper was attended on the Soviet side by Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, Bulganin, and General Antonov...
...On our way back, Tito, who also couldn't take large quantities of liquor, remarked, "I don't know what the devil is wrong with these Russians that they drink so much—plain decadence...
...Naturally, we cannot win this kind of war with military skill or textbook military tactics alone...
...And everyone agreed, with bitter conviction...
...The Central Committee did not decide that...
...The book is a richly detailed history of the Yugoslav partisan movement, and its relation to other groups in Yugoslavia, during the Second World War...
...As always there were many toasts, and much drinking and eating...
...It was decided that the Tadi&es would be executed by a firing squad on a secluded spot on a cliff...
...The Chetniks, or *Zbornik dokumenata i podataka (1953), pp...
...All were killed, except for women and young people who were under 18 years of age—so we were told at the time in Montenegro, and so I later heard from those who had taken part in these senseless acts of wrathful retribution...
...No one liked to speak of this particular experience—not even those who made a show of their revolutionary spirit—as if it were only a horrible dream...
...This struggle must in no way lead us to an erroneous conclusion about poor Anglo-Soviet relations—a conclusion which many of our comrades draw from the fact that the emigre government in London, through its supporters in our country, has begun to collaborate openly with the invader...
...The Anglo-Soviet alliance is directed against Hitler's imperialism...
...We must not fall for this tactic, we must carry on the war of national liberation ever more resolutely...
...No, no," Stalin insisted with pointed banter—as it dawned on me what he intended—"but just for the Red Army...
...And this is why the unity of the Slays is important...
...Late into the night we would move all sorts of functionaries around diagrams of tables and halls—tables made of boards slapped together and covered with bed sheets, and halls with floors reeking of kerosene...
...This made me uncomfortable, for I knew nothing about his conduct...
...for months prior to this trip, I had been made to feel like a transgressor who had little chance of redeeming himself...
...It all fell on Rankovic because of his gift for detail, and his involvement in organizational matters...
...This was not done merely for economy but to associate the fate of party enemies with that of outside enemies...
...With my present outlook, I would not have been able to do what I had done then...
...After all, side by side with the invader they had waged war for many years against the children of their own people...
...they did not change even on the long road of retreat with the invader: they took no prisoners...
...Doubtlessly the Central Committee would have gone along with those in power...
...I was pleased about that, though I had a presentiment of an encounter with Stalin over my [earlier] insult to the Red Army...
...These rebels did not have sufficient strength or means to resist without Italian support...
...He did it half jestingly: he poured a small glass of vodka for me to drink to the Red Army...
...Also, everyone could see Tito or the Central Committee members if they weren't busy...
...The captured Germans were sent to camps and put to work...
...Along with the Germans, our enemies who collaborated with the invaders or bound their destiny to the fascist powers—the Chetniks, the Ustashi, Home Guards, and the Slovenian Home Guards—also laid down their arms...
...Tito treated Stalin as his senior, but without humbling himself, and even countered criticisms of Yugoslavia...
...Revolutions are justified as acts of life, acts of living...
...I tried to persuade my comrades and myself: "Their treason has no end...
...Anyway, given the kind of courts that we had...
...At their execution the Tadices, particularly Tadija, shouted party slogans...
...Who issued the order for this extermination...
...And what if it had...
...I interjected that in essence Yugoslavia had a Soviet government because the Communist party held all the key positions, and there were no serious opposition parties...
...Dj.] government have had to take the path of open collaboration with the invader because of the force and scope of the national uprising against that invader...
...EDS...
...The people and the homeland have no need of those who sullied their name and betrayed them in their most fateful hour...
...It became increasingly clear to me that our imprudent, hasty executions, along with hunger and war weariness, were helping to strengthen the Chetniks...
...He also expounded on the reasons for his "Panslavic" policy: "If the Slays keep united and maintain solidarity, no one in the future will be able to move a finger...
...Given the power structure and the chain of command, no one could have carried out such a major undertaking without approval from the top...
...q 180...
...Stalin didn't tolerate monologues, not even his own, though he did most of the talking...
...All these weaknesses provided advantages for the Communists, who were confident and resolute, and had political leadership at the head of their military forces...
...I felt this encounter with the Tadices to be a part of my own fate...
...For people with such single-minded, heady views, all traditional values take on a one-dimensional, distorted aspect...
...As for me, the closer we got to Moscow—under a somber, opaque sky over a gloomy and ravaged land—the more keenly I felt a familiar and bitter loneliness...
...I sat across, to the right of Molotov...
...How many were executed in Montenegro and Sandz"ak at that time...
...It seemed as if Stalin and Tito held a grudge against each other...
...They didn't resent the sentence passed on the Tadi&es, and didn't really give a damn about the officers, yet everyone was struck dumb by the reality of what they had helped to create...
...Whenever Stalin made some witty remark, even though at our expense, Tito looked at me with a smile, and I would return his look with sympathy...
...When we had put it all together we went to Kardelj, and sometimes even to Tito...
...The Red Army is not ideal...
...One suggestion from them would throw everything out of whack, and impose more hours of stultifying rearrangement...
...Two royal officers suspected of a plot were to be executed with them...
...He even ventured to tell me that in the command they were executing people "for nothing...
...I was frequently beset by a feeling of alienation from the region, the people, and their speech...
...Hard liquor gave me headaches, and so—in order not to spoil the party—I drank beer...
...Face to face with Stalin, I suddenly acquired confidence...
...T IV he Soviet Government lost no time in underscoring its dominant role in Yugoslavia through the mutual aid treaty with the newly formed government [1945...
...Stalin was sulky toward me...
...They also said that piles of corpses were heaving up as they rotted in shallow mass graves, so that the very earth seemed to breathe...
...To kill collectively, without investigation, is senseless and contrary to our teaching, our faith in people—but in this case we've had enough...
...The sentence was too severe for one of them—a raw and agitated youth—even though he had said, "A bomb should be thrown at the Committee...
...But when Stalin said that the Bulgarian army was better than ours, Tito couldn't take it anymore...
...In this alienated world, death was nothing unusual, whereas life had lost all meaning apart from survival...
...Who signed it...
...With the kind permission of the publisher, we have here excerpted a few sections from the book that provide a vivid picture of the experience of civil war and resistance...
...could not embark upon another...
...The Partisans didn't yet have an organized intelligence service, but the people were so divided by bloodshed that almost nothing could be concealed...
...The only support that I felt came from Tito...
...rather the regime for which they nostalgically yearned, had lost the war without a fight...
...It was as if something terrible had happened to them...
...Then the Tadic family rose up, a whole regiment of them...
...Had we sat with folded arms, there would have been no conflict, and we too would be stuffing ourselves with roast lamb and drinking plum brandy...
...Ljubo Tadic, today a well-known leftist philosopher, barely got out of the mess through "self-criticism...
...I briefly explained to Stalin the reasons behind my remark about the Red Army...
...Would life be life if it had to conform to hypothesis...
...Although there was no formal state hierarchy, an unofficial political hierarchy existed...
...Yet OZNA continued to carry out executions, according to its own often local and inconsistent criteria, until late in 1945, when at a meeting of the Central Committee Tito cried out in disgust, "Enough of all these death sentences and all this killing...
Vol. 24 • April 1977 • No. 2
