Djilas as Symptom
RADITSA, BOGDAN
Djilas as Symptom By Bogdan Raditsa Tito's Former Foreign Press Chief An entire generation of Yugoslavs is disaffected Unrest among the youth of Yugoslavia has not been curbed by the expulsion...
...the revolt of the youth which Djilas symbolized will be heard again...
...In the letters which tell the story of the Stalin-Tito dispute, Djilas is singled out as one of the most violent critics of Soviet activity in Yugoslavia...
...Having spat on Stalinism, he now began to revise Leninism...
...The younger members of the party and the people at large interpreted his voice as a revolution within the revolution...
...His metamorphosis truly epitomized the slow changes in this generation's attitudes...
...In the Borba of December 21, 1944, he wrote: "Stalin cannot die, he cannot grow old for his thought is immortal, forever young, completely mature...
...Djilas traveled in the West, was in close touch with Western European Socialists (especially Aneurin Bevan), and finally visited the United States three times...
...it brought Yugoslavia within the Soviet orbit...
...In Rankovich, he saw King Alexander's General Zivkhovich, who thought that only a perfect bureaucracy regimented by secret police could make a state strong...
...Djilas as Symptom By Bogdan Raditsa Tito's Former Foreign Press Chief An entire generation of Yugoslavs is disaffected Unrest among the youth of Yugoslavia has not been curbed by the expulsion of Milovan Djilas from Tito's high command...
...When, after World War I, this liberation turned in Yugoslavia into the suffocating, corrupt rule of a pan-Serbian group, Djilas's generation suffered severe disappointment...
...what moved them was his "Anatomy of Morals," published in Nova Misao (New Thought...
...Prison terms, the failure of his ambitions as a poet, the lack of home and bread??all these deepened Djilas's restlessness and revolt...
...Djilas was born in the rugged, poverty-stricken mountains of Montenegro, whose people contributed so much to the liberation of the Balkans...
...This stimulated new thoughts...
...Yet, even his recantation could not restore the unity of Tito's party...
...When charges were brought against him, he recanted, just as he had done when arrested by the Royal Police before the war...
...Djilas saw great possibilities for Yugoslavia in the break with the Kremlin: In the heart of the Balkans, he hoped to build a true Leninist state of the type that had been destroyed by the decrepit Kremlin ruler...
...But Djilas also felt that the men charged with creating this new entity were basically Stalinists, little different from their counterparts in the Soviet Union...
...For Djilas typified, at his best and at his worst, the young Yugoslav Communist generation that emerged from the anarchic prewar Yugoslav intelligentsia...
...He wished to open the windows and the doors, to let the people invade the state and assume power from the bureaucrats in their palaces...
...In Kardelj, he saw another Msgr...
...Dissatisfied at the outcome of the national revolution that had failed to unite the various Yugoslav peoples, this generation looked to Russia for the solution of the deadlock between conflicting nationalisms...
...The last time he was in the United States, he told an old non-political acquaintance: "I would rather be a dishwasher in New York than second in the line of succession to Stalin in the Soviet Empire...
...recent escapees to Austria and Italy speak of a rising opposition around Djilas...
...Djilas persecuted the Stalinists in Yugoslavia with the same fury he had directed at the nationalists...
...During the war, the Djilases followed Stalin faithfully, even sacrificing large numbers of their countrymen to liquidate "Mikhailovitch-nationalist" elements and bring Soviet Communism to power...
...At Dedinje, he saw yesterday's ascetic partisans living a life of luxury where earlier Yugoslav tycoons had once prospered...
...At the last Yugoslav election, he received a greater majority than Tito...
...As he had rebelled against prewar Yugoslavia and Stalinist Yugoslavia, Djilas now rebelled against Tito...
...its thirst for absolute power and its appetite for food, women, luxurious clothes, "Truman" automobiles, Marshall Plan pullmans, Westinghouse freezers and large subsidies from American capitalists...
...From 1945 through 1948, Djilas was restless again...
...In Tito, Djilas saw another pasha like Milovan Stojadinovich, whose daughters he had once taught literature...
...World War II not only brought Djilas's generation to power...
...Soon it began to offer radical resistance...
...Koroshetz??shrewd, hypocritical, obsessed by the craving for invisible rule...
...Yugoslav readers were not much taken with Djilas's abstruse theses published in Borba...
...Because an entire generation cannot be so easily punished as an individual, the reactions and ideas of Djilas must still be taken as the prevailing sentiments of an active, militant section of Yugoslav opinion...
...The same despair overtook Djilas that had possessed him then...
...He began to believe that Yugoslavia had a unique opportunity to create an entirely new political entity...
...In it, Djilas depicted the new Communist leadership...
...In 1942, Djilas saw Stalin as a "super-human entity, a genius and an expression of everything exceptional...
...This new bourgeoisie (coming, like the old one, from peasant stock) repelled Djilas...
...Things move slowly in the Balkans...
...In downtown Belgrade, he saw the power of the bureaucracy worse than it had ever been before the war...
...Having seen the Soviet Communists at first hand, the younger generation was disillusioned...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 17
