Recollections of Milovan Djilas

...Despite the rigid supervision of his activities, Djilas took the first opportunity of expressing his disgust with his Government's passive acceptance of the Russian intervention...

...He was followed everywhere he went, and there were constant attempts to provoke him and his wife to physical violence...

...When he dealt with the dispute with the Soviet Union, he became more than usually sardonic...

...The attack took the familiar form of the Communist "side-kick" or diversion of the argument to alleged weak points in the record of the Labor party...

...Men of good will from all classes of society have supported the establishment of Communist regimes in many countries in the sincere belief that a democratic free society would eventually emerge peacefully from a revolutionary situation...

...In a statement to the French press agency, Djilas attacked the Yugoslav decision to abstain in the United Nations vote to put Soviet military intervention in Hungary on the Assembly agenda...

...I emphasized that as Djilas was a political journalist he could not earn a livelihood in that field...

...This voice from a prison cell in Central Europe is a small one, but it may yet shake the world...

...In that final staccato sentence he sums up the grim lesson which the monolithic state, much of it of his own making, had taught him over the years...

...I had been informed that Djilas had been deprived of his war pension, that members of his family had been dismissed from their jobs...

...I had always appreciated the nature and the extent of the problems that they had to overcome, but recently I had been disturbed by news that I had received...

...I am not mentioning this out of any malice but because the Yugoslavs, as men who wish to perfect the human side of government, are very pained by the miseries and misfortunes of other people, as well as by a certain passivity and impotent resignation of the party headed by Morgan Phillips toward human tragedies of this type...

...The climax came, however, with the Hungarian tragedy...

...Hungary was threatened by "the same imperialism which menaced the independence of Yugoslavia...

...Djilas give her husband a divorce...

...At first there were the familiar assurances to my colleagues of the Labor party delegation that we were free to ask any questions we liked and to discuss any matter we chose...

...And, indeed, our prudence was well rewarded, for I was never more surprised in my life at the staggering critical frankness of this Communist statesman, who for three years after the war had plugged the orthodox Stalin line...

...In his book, The New Class, which he wrote some six years later and managed to send to America for publication, he expresses a belated perception of the constant need of Communists to treat the state as an instrument of force...

...I was personally acquainted with Marshal Tito, whose guests my family and I had been on the island of Brioni in 1952...

...Rejecting the necessity for a multiparty state, he declared: "It seems to me that the essence of democracy lies elsewhere—and it consists in this: that the masses are really in a position to express their opinions, that there is a guarantee that they can freely elect those who they feel will represent them well, and that it should be possible to engage in the free battle of opinions...

...Djilas, however, destroyed that illusion completely...

...The police arrived and a court case followed...

...Secret police occupied the flat opposite and photographed even one who visited him...

...This was only a short time after Yugoslavia's break with the Comin-form, but Tito's rejoinder to Stalin's denunciations had been, up to that time, so restrained that it seemed that a reconciliation was still not out of the question...

...After my two-day talk with Djilas, then the chief intellectual among the triumvirate at Tito's side, I had no doubt whatever that it was his critical and bitter resistance to the crushing domination of the Soviet Union that was the inspiration behind the break...

...Naturally, already during the war we felt certain differences between ourselves and them, but only in practical state relationships after the war these differences began to assume a more serious character...

...After a staged trial in January 1955, his pension was taken away and his family victimized...

...He was immediately arrested on a charge of "activities against the regime" and, after a secret trial, sentenced to three years' imprisonment, which he is now serving in the selfsame prison of Sremska Mitrovica to which he was sent for three years by the former fascist government of Yugoslavia...

...Knowing him as I do, I would say that he has, and has actively demonstrated in an unanswerable personal history that, on the contrary, the means determine the end and that Communism is, in effect, a disease that is incurable from within...

...The long tirade concluded with the following solemn castigation: "The Yugoslav public, and not only the Yugoslav Church, are very displeased with the case of the internment of Makarios, to say nothing of the hangings in Cyprus or that terrible figure which was recently published on the executions in Kenya...

...No doubt he has long since regretted the lamentable naivete of that statement, for it was in the very act of furthering his ideas that he fell foul of the Communist system, which brooks no opposition...

...More distant relatives still had been dismissed from the Army after long service because they visited his family...

...So many of these reports reached me that I felt impelled to take what action I could to relieve the plight of a man whom I not only regarded as a friend, but who had once brought personally to the Labor Government in England the hope of a new spirit of freedom in the lands of Eastern Europe...

...I therefore felt that a private letter to him expressing ray real sorrow and concern at what was happening would make a deeper impression than a formal public statement...

...The state, as Lenin had promised, would "wither away" and men would achieve the final state of civilization in which they were truly their own masters...

...Has he now finally rejected the materialistic view of all Communists that the end justifies the means...

...We had explained that in our view this was the kind of test that would demonstrate to progressive opinion throughout the world the measure of Yugoslav progress toward a real socialist democracy...

...What were conditions like under capitalism...

...It seemed as if the lineup for the next conflict was complete—and then came the great rift between Tito and Stalin...

...He with his mother and son were forced to exist until his imprisonment on his wife's pay as an official, and from the sale of personal property...

...In the spring of 1954, after his final break with Tito, I learned from a variety of sources of the deliberate and remorseless process of denigration and humiliation of the man who had been Yugoslavia's Vice President...

...I confessed that I was appalled that the country which since 1950 I supported in articles and speeches should have slipped into the evil ways of the Cominform countries...

...Djilas, like many others before him, has been earnestly seeking the elusive road back from Communism to a free society, but has failed...

...The unprecedented publicity which Vlahovic's denunciation of my "interference" was accorded in Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe spoke for itself...

...What did it mean...

...This attitude on the part of the Yugoslav Government," he said, "constitutes the abandonment of the principles of sovereignty and of the right of every nation to develop its own internal affairs...

...The only significance in this grotesque distortion of the truth is the desperation with which it must have been written...

...Capitalism did not thwart any battle of opinion as long as it did not endanger the capitalist ownership of the means of production...

...We were a Communist party, the most devoted to the Bolshevik party of the Soviet Union, and we confirmed this with the war...

...When it became obvious to us what the point was, although we were alone, a small undeveloped country, we said to ourselves: 'The people heeded us when we called them to fight in the war for their independence...

...Even if Communist leaders wished to do so, they could not create a lawful state without imperiling their own totalitarian power...

...It was obviously only meant to be read by the ignorant, and one can only assume that the Yugoslav people have not been kept informed of the Labor party's public declarations on the events in Cyprus and Kenya...

...I emphasized to Tito that it was painful to have to write such a letter because, for six years, I had been particularly interested in the experiments in Yugoslavia and had become attached to many of the Yugoslav leaders through personal contacts...

...Since the persecution of Djilas began four years ago, Mr...

...British Socialist describes the evolution of a Yugoslav rebel Recollections of Milovan Djilas By Morgan Phillips When i first met Milovan Djilas in Belgrade in 1950, I took it as a matter of course that our discussions would follow the same formal, guarded character that seemed to be the standard adopted in all Communist dictatorships at that time...

...Vigorous, straight-backed, and yet relaxed, he would discourse with quiet fluency on the problems of his country...

...Sure enough, only a few weeks later, Stefania Djilas, his wife, was accosted in a Belgrade street by a screaming woman who declared she was Djilas's mistress and demanded that Mrs...

...I concluded by expressing the hope that Yugoslavia in its relations with individuals would demonstrate to the world the fundamental superiority of a socialist system of society...

...In practice there is no such thing...

...An independent judiciary and the rule of law," he reflects somewhat bitterly, "would inevitably make it possible for an opposition to appear...

...In April 1954, I learned that this persecution was to be intensified by attempts to compromise him publicly on moral issues and to destroy his marriage and family life...

...I have no doubt that the irony of the situation must appeal to Djilas's subtle mind...

...This was extended even to the husband of one of Djilas's sisters...

...The Communist state, he says, cannot become a lawful state in which the judiciary would be independent of the Government...

...What had caused the Communist empire to stagger so violently...

...Sam Watson and I had private talks with Yugoslav friends in London...

...People who came into contact with him were immediately interrogated by the police and ordered to keep away from him or to act as an informer...

...I have seen Djilas several times since that memorable interview, and on each occasion I have been more and more impressed by his remarkable personality...

...We firmly believed their words about equality among peoples, about equality among workers' movements, that the Soviet Union had no hegemonic appetites, etc...

...The Iron Curtain had crashed across Europe, dividing the world into two camps...

...They made enormous sacrifices in that war...

...I asked for observations on these points...

...One of his favorite themes in those days was the development of democracy in a one-party state (he has revised his ideas considerably since then...

...Among the first Western Socialists to develop a sympathetic personal interest in Yugoslavia after 1948, he visited the country on several occasions and met Djilas, Tito and other political figures...

...I quote the following passage from his conversation to show that even as long ago as 1950 he had fully made up his mind where his duty lay: "I am now speaking as a Communist...

...but it was essentially concerned with the issue of personal freedom and I did not want to become involved in other political questions...

...The cold war was at its peak...

...I reminded the Marshal that when Djilas and Dedijer were first put on trial in lc1.i3...

...For the sake of amity, we resisted the temptation to point out that we were more interested in candid answers than in the careful questions we had prepared...

...Phillips has helped to organize many private and public protests to Belgrade by the Labor party and the Socialist International...

...Secretary of the British Labor party, was president of the Socialist International...

...MORGAN PHILLIPS...

...I do not see why this battle of opinion should not develop in our own country on the basis of socialist ownership...

...Not only did he hit ruthlessly at the sacred Russian "centralism," but his obvious enthusiasm for the importation of a more truly democratic system into his own country helped to clear a little of the extraordinary mystery which surrounded the dramatic quarrel between two great Communist leaders...

...This letter has never been published, and I received no reply to it other than a crude, violent and sustained attack in the Yugoslav press and radio...

...We have no right to betray that struggle for the sake of some kind of words about the leading power in the world of socialism and about socialist solidarity with the Russians and I know not what!' " But even more significant I found his views on democracy—which, undoubtedly, have put him in the jail where he languishes to this day...

...We had been relieved at the result of the trial but we now feared that our relief had been misplaced...

...I asked that something should be done to enable him to earn an honorable livelihood...

...The main reply to this letter took the form of a savage attack on me by Veljko Vlahovic, President of the Foreign Relations Commission of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, in the newspaper Borba on May 20, 1956...

...Laws in the Communist system guarantee all sorts of rights to citizens and are based on the principle of an independent judiciary...

...In his latest writings it is clear that he has recognized that the story of Milovan Djilas, intellectual revolutionary, Communist leader, unorthodox theoretician and finally scapegoat, sums up the classic dilemma which is expressive of this day and age...