Djilas And The Lies Of Half-Truth
H ., I.
Milovan Djilas is in jail once more, this time because he has published, during the era of deStalinization, a book with unflattering recollections of Stalin. As he himself remarks, there is...
...Such, no doubt, are the immediate causes...
...Controlled: that is precisely the point...
...Djilas violates those systems...
...The dictators recognize him as their enemy...
...If anything, there is today more political and intellectual liveliness in Russia than in Yugoslavia, for once the Tito dictatorship repudiated Stalinism it managed to establish a temporary stasis from which it has since made no significant moves toward greater freedom...
...It comes, that is, closer to the model of an authoritarian dictatorship which tries to rule not by permanent terror but through a mixture of limited responsiveness to the desires of the population with an overriding commitment to its own power ambitions...
...As he himself remarks, there is little new in what he says...
...These have to do with Yugoslav-Russian relations, an effort to patch a rapprochement between the Communist parties of the two countries, Khrushchev's hostility to Djilas, etc...
...He repeats the one truth most unpalatable to the Communist rulers: that no fundamental social change is possible in the Communist countries as long as the party bureaucracies maintain a monopoly of power and rival parties are banned...
...For reasons involving the stability of the ruling elite and its relations with a people no longer cowed as it was in the past, the Russian dictatorship wishes to dissociate itself in part from the worst excesses of the Stalin terror...
...but it will also, one suspects, be part of an effort to achieve stability of political rule and homogeneity of political method among those nations, an effort to avoid both the rigidity of Stalinism and the freedom proposed by the "revisionists...
...Yet almost in exact proportion to its need for such a dissociation, it also fears those political voices within its realm that do not confine themselves to a calculated repetition of half-truths which by virtue of being half-truths are still lies...
...Between the party-state as a system and the political activity of a Djilas there is consequently an irreconcilable conflict...
...It will, that is, include a rough convergence of perspective as to the proper means for establishing systems of political control in the Communist world...
...He speaks as his own man...
...the Soviet Union finds itself in the bizarre position of not knowing at any particular moment what its history is supposed to be...
...Djilas, together with the younger Russian writers and Polish intellectuals, represents the urge among rising generations in the Communist world to break past the suffocating limits of authoritarian rule...
...Whole areas of the past remain unsettled...
...free men, as their friend...
...Anyone who remembers the impressions left by Trotsky, Bukharin and other victims of the Stalin terror will find Djilas' portrait of the dictator quite familiar...
...Reasons of state" are said to lie behind Tito's decision to persecute Djilas again...
...Now as the limited de-Stalinization proceeds, the internal life of Russia approaches in quality and character that of Yugoslavia...
...And to the dictators he seems more of a threat precisely as they find it expedient to abandon the terror in which they were trained...
...but if we think in terms of limiting conditions rather than operative causes, it may be useful to suggest that a more fundamental process is at work here, a process of alternate loosening and tightening in the pollitical repression of the Communist system...
...Any rapprochement between Khrushchev and Tito will obviously involve common interests vis a vis European politics and the internal disputes among the Communist nations...
...For some years the Khrushchev dictatorship has been releasing a series of controlled revelations of the past...
Vol. 9 • July 1962 • No. 3
