WHEN THE RUSSIANS CAME OR, MAKING A MOVIE IN YUGOSLAVIA
Djilas, Milovan
With considerable help from Soviet troops as the war drew toward its end, the new [Titoist] regime found, in Belgrade, a permanent home at last. Our exhausted political leaders, famished...
...But all the support work fell to Zogovió and others in Agitprop: stage sets, staff, food, and lodging...
...he was a good coffeemaker and dutiful in all things...
...Yielding to debauchery brought in its wake conflict with the reigning party morals and authority, thus creating a basis for recruitment...
...Copyright e 1983 by Milovan Djilas...
...He may not have been exactly dazzled by the ingenuity of his agents, but he surely must have had a good laugh at our revolutionary gullibility...
...Our own artists, not to mention party members, would never have dared to do such things, not in their wildest fantasies...
...We tried to understand those little "weaknesses," which we stifled in ourselves, tried to justify Soviet "deviations," which had been uprooted in ourselves...
...THE MOTIVATION for those who joined the Soviet secret service—including B.—was the safeguarding of communism in Yugoslavia...
...Meddlesome, greedy, and dissolute, he was removed before the confrontation began, at which point he came out for Stalin...
...and forced himself on the director of a new film enterprise in the capacity of "expert...
...Their more experienced control was needed...
...113...
...IDEOLOGICAL UNITY AND BROTHERHOOD made us leaders trusting and indulgent, despite our hardwon experience at the cost of so many lives, despite our power forged in fire and tempered in blood...
...To be sure, this was not the original animal—that one had met his end at the height of the Fifth Offensive...
...Yet such kinship would be affirmed with special fervor at parties, for which the Soviet representatives displayed matchless talent and zeal...
...There was no chance of our influencing the film's political or artistic content, in spite of all our ideological identity and Slavic brotherhood with the Soviets...
...But that was only the beginning...
...For right up to the end of the war the Russians had been so far away that their agents could not even be brought in by plane...
...But B., who only yesterday had been a soldier and was now lapping up the sweets of victory, B., whose party puritanism and responsible position still kept those sweets from going to his head, was lured by three con artists into some orgy and then recruited into their intelligence service...
...Our Soviet "experts," however, had ingratiated themselves by assigning Tito the hero's role...
...Yugoslavia just for the purpose of shooting a film...
...They had been preceded by a Yugoslav emigrant named S., who had arrived from the U.S.S.R...
...was a thoroughly commonplace, cliché-ridden peasant rebellion with virtuoso effects...
...B.'s conscience—like that of the vast majority (but not all) of the Partisans who declared for Stalin—was not, at least in the beginning, so alienated and hatefilled that Soviet intelligence could induce him to commit murder...
...Romm was jaded and withdrawn, while Mdivani—touted to us as a famous writer—was a vulgar, always tipsy chatterbox who in the wink of an eye could contrive whatever artistic solution was needed...
...The revolution was still at a boil then and its doctrinaire asceticism still prevailed...
...S. served mainly as an intermedi112 ary between Moscow and us on film questions...
...So a Russian escapee from German forced labor was invented, who had somehow become Tito's "good angel" adviser...
...The Russian film crew was at work for several months poking here, there, and everywhere in Yugoslavia, mostly 111 at our expense...
...Most other leading party comrades took the pragmatic view: our struggle was finally on film, which was better than nothing...
...Tigar, luckily for him, was just a dog and unable to get embroiled in human and ideological difficulties...
...Why was no attempt made on Tito's life by Moscow, acting through B...
...Zogovi6, too, regarded it as a dead loss, especially artistically...
...According to the terms, Soviet films were to monopolize the Yugoslav market, and the most unfavorable, most humiliating conditions for us were set...
...I consulted with Kardelj and notified Tito...
...Mild and cooperative though he was, Ribnikar noticed something inappropriate in the agreement and, since it touched on ideology, consulted with me in Agitprop...
...Even though we were continually surprised by new demands from these Soviet filmmakers, organizational and material difficulties were overcome...
...One can only guess...
...Both the carousing and the wandering around Yugoslavia, like the film itself—as our secret police discovered after the "bubble burst" in 1948— were designed to recruit Yugoslays into Soviet intelligence and to infiltrate the art world...
...I imagine they were checked by B.'s own hesitancy, as he vacillated between his past and a present under the spell of pro-Soviet dogma...
...Large numbers of us were repelled by this "immorality" and "dissoluteness," but no one —not a soul—saw through the film's duplicity or discovered the ulterior motive of the orgies...
...True, Tito's remorse and compassion for the sufferings of the Valjevo unit whose remnants, including B., had found refuge in Bosnia, possibly played a part in the relationship...
...We all knew it, but looked the other way...
...Thus it happened that B. and Tigar were attached to the film crew— B. as a kind of consultant into the bargain...
...Yet throughout the country Yugoslav blood was still being spilled—heroically, ruthlessly—in settling accounts with our conquerors or with each other...
...But enough subservience remained in the revised agreement, approved by Tito and Kardelj and accepted by the Soviets, to make us feel the sting of shame, until our later resistance rendered that agreement obsolete...
...The portals of the Soviet art bunker would swing ajar only to admit our knowledge of folklore...
...The agreement would have crippled our Yugoslav film industry, which our filmmakers were developing from scratch...
...No doubt, this is where the moral disintegration of the personality began...
...That "creative" little joke was more Mdivani's than Romm's...
...Later he was exposed as a spy...
...Because he was to be the film's main hero, Tito was involved in the project early...
...A most suitable man was picked to do this, Tito's personal bodyguard, whom...
...Published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and printed here with the kind permission of the publisher...
...Under the pretext of verisimilitude, the filmmakers assigned a part to Tigar, Tito's dog...
...Professionally, B. lagged behind his comrades in arms except in rank: overnight, he had been jumped to major...
...That was the moment—early 1945—chosen by Moscow to send a film crew to Belgrade to make a movie about the struggle of a "Yugoslav patriot...
...Our own people were engaged to play the secondary roles and to provide technical services...
...I dictated those solutions, in negotiations with Soviet embassy employees and S., who quickly backed down, obviously annoyed...
...Recognizing the film's shallowness and derogatory nature, I made my feelings known to Tito and others...
...Mikhail Romm, the director, and Georgi Mdivani, the scriptwriter, found themselves in quite a different dilemma...
...Why, these were artists—Soviet comrades...
...How should they realize "artistically" the mandate they had been given, to show that in the Yugoslav uprising the Russians played a crucial role...
...In 1946, he submitted the draft of a Soviet-Yugoslav agreement for film collaboration to Vladislav Ribnikar, who directed cultural affairs for the federal government...
...Its arrival was like a Mongol invasion—violent and irresistible...
...The result Excerpted from Rise and Fall by Milovan Djilas...
...The banquets that the crew arranged everywhere often turned into orgies...
...Both agreed with my assessment but argued that a rift had to be avoided and compromise solutions sought...
...Later, upon seeing the film, he raged with shame when he realized how subordinate his role had turned out to be, both in the plot and in history...
...The actor impersonating him—famous, of course —fussed around Tito learning his gestures and mannerisms...
...Tigar knew perhaps even better than his master, since they spent most of the day together in front of Tito's living quarters...
...I was present at one such banquet, in the villa at Dedinje assigned to the film crew, and only my restraint and Zogovie's puritanism curbed the debauchery...
...Moreover, Tito always resisted change, both in his personal habits and in the personnel around him, so after the war B. continued to tend Tito's anterooms...
...English translation 0 1985 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc...
...for the "younger" and less "evolved," Yugoslav communism was identical with Soviet communism...
...Our exhausted political leaders, famished for creature comforts, rushed to take advantage of the blessings conferred by a villa of one's own...
...He remained directly under Tito and constantly by his side, if I recall, for about two years after the feud with the Soviets broke out...
...Upon his discovery and arrest, it became clear that B. had been depressed throughout that period...
...But the conscience was locked in a dilemma, especially for participants in the war...
...Naturally, his master could hardly accompany the dog all over...
...The Soviet filmmakers had added more than B. to their "cast...
...Stalin had long since dealt with the likes of us in the U.S.S.R...
...An unprepossessing, myopic peasant, B. had made himself indispensable as Tito's bodyguard by virtue of his diligence...
...Nor could we manage to change the film's title—"In the Mountains of Yugoslavia"—to something more pithy and historically apt...
...But he was the same breed, a German shepherd, and had even been captured from the Germans...
...Everyone was shocked at the dangers to which Tito had been exposed, and Tito himself was exasperated— at the Soviets, at his own negligence, and at the disloyalty of a fellow soldier whom he himself had promoted...
...It was no hit at the box office, and no succes d'estime either, despite our critics' sincere ideological and political identification with the Soviets...
...Tito had a poor role—unenterprising, static...
...Even Tito got fed up...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
