Milovan Djilas

...It was Djilas, too, who led the fight against the Communist and pro-Communist intellectuals grouped around the great writer Miroslav Krleza and the magazine he published in Zagreb...

...He had to greet the new turn in events with enthusiasm if he was to retain the confidence of the apparatus...

...Long live Stalin...

...Between those two dates were published 15 other articles, all still written in the customary party jargon but all fiercely challenging the certainties of the party faithful...

...Neither Eugène Zamiatin, nor Victor Serge, nor Ignazio Silone, nor George Orwell, nor Arthur Koestler, nor any of those who followed them, experienced what Djilas did...

...Only the Communistled Liberation Army had genuinely upheld the principle of the equality and brotherhood of all the peoples of Yugoslavia...

...Some six months after the bombing of Belgrade, Tito, Djilas, Alexander Rankovic, Edvard Kardelj and others launched military operations—first against the Germans and Italians, then against the Ustashi and Serbian fascists, and finally, after negotiations with Mihailovic were broken off, against the Chetniks, who had been the first to oppose the Nazi invaders...

...The hunt for deviationists went on indefatigably at a time when Nazism was on the march...

...The survivors fled, abandoning their homes and villages to the fratricidal Christians...

...Djilas was born in 1911, toward the end of a spring day, as he tells us in Land Without Justice (Harcourt, Brace, 1958), the first volume of his autobiography...

...Confronting social realities directly for the first time, without viewing them through the distorting lens of ideology, Djilas was dazzled as though by a searchlight suddenly turned on in the darkness...

...The break which was forced upon it was the result of a clash between two power apparatuses, the weaker of which had rejected one of the innumerable orders issued to it by the stronger one: an order to commit suicide...

...Of Djilas' three books, all published nearly everywhere except in'his own country and those of the Soviet bloc, The New Class has achieved the greatest success...

...Since the beginning of the 19th century, the peoples of Yugoslavia had risen against foreign domination 28 times...

...Djilas attacked himself...

...Now once again, without an ideology of any kind and without a program, they went forth to fight a terrifying foe whose presence, even to those who were resigned to it, became more hateful each day...

...It would be well worth while, however, to anatomize the morality of the various social strata in the countries ruled by a new class which calls itself Socialist or Communist...

...Indeed, the victims had included nearly all those who had founded the Yugoslav Communist party and had led it until 1937...

...The Yugoslav partisans unquestionably provided a stirring example of unfailing courage, limitless endurance, and infinite devotion and patience...

...Periods of brutal persecution alternated with periods during which the members of illegal groups enjoyed tacit toleration and an astonishing measure of freedom...

...For all doubts were dangerous in the era of the Moscow Trials, which were preparing the way for, among other things, the Hitler-Stalin Pact...

...Stalinists outside the Soviet Union submitted voluntarily to the rules and prohibitions of the GPU...

...The party leadership, however, quickly took steps to disabuse them, once and for all...

...Some skeptical individuals are even said to have been handed over to the police or, a few years later, liquidated when they were discovered among the partisans...

...a collection of 16 short stories, including "The War" (NL, April 16), the most promising piece of writing we have yet had from Djilas...

...All three works are scheduled to be published within the next two years...

...The Anatomy of a Morality" was the title of an article by Djilas which created a scandal and outraged the wives of the top party functionaries...

...And the eyes of the 2,344 delegates turned once again toward the bust of the "greatest leader of all time," which had been placed beside those of Marx and Lenin...

...The two party elders felt that by persecuting an intellectual for deviating from the line in a critique of, say, Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticìsm or Engels' Dialectic of Nature, the party was serving notice in unmistakable terms that it would not tolerate even the mildest expression of doubt...

...and a study of the life and works of the Montenegrin bishop-poet, Njegos...

...Khrushchev himself came to Belgrade to put an end to the unfortuante "misunderstanding...

...He read the proscribed Marxists, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and the other theorists of Democratic Socialism...

...what he has to tell us, no one else can...

...He invited Djilas to the Caucasus to take a rest—and to give the Soviet secret police an opportunity to get to know him better...

...His mother had to conceal herself when she delivered, for it was considered shameful to give birth before the family house was completed...

...When the Communist party took over full power throughout Yugoslavia and set up a totalitarian, Stalinist regime, it seemed the only possible solution to the country's problems...

...In his biography, Tito (Simon and Schuster, 1953), Dedijer traces the development of the rift between Moscow and Belgrade, but he is extremely discreet about the reactions of his friend Djilas during those weeks when the Yugoslav Communists felt the ground trembling beneath their feet...

...Marshal Tito's glory was second only to that of Generalissimo Stalin—and, it should be added, made the latter jealous...

...And the one great secret which is common to all dictatorships —that the people are governed foolishly—has long since been made known to the world, without the slightest effect, however...

...Quickly regaining possession of himself, Djilas resigned from the party four months later...

...It can scarcely be because, as charged, Djilas disclosed state secrets: Conversations with Stalin contains little that was not known before...

...It was not until July 4, 1941 that the Yugoslav Communist party called for a popular uprising against the occupying power...

...Stalin, for his part, showed great curiosity about the Montenegrin who spoke as if he was unaware that there are times when silence is the wisest course...

...It ceased to be a form of fascism and, for a time, ceased even to be regarded as revisionism...

...But even after the Seventh Comintern Congress, which decreed an end to the mad policy of class struggle and fighting the "Social Fascists," the Yugoslav Communist party was unable to break out of its isolation and take the initiative in forming a united front...

...Both Djilas himself and the world press greatly overestimated the importance of the article and of the subsequent uproar in Belgrade high society...

...Yet what is involved in the Djilas case is far more than the man himself, his writings, his past mistakes and his present sufferings...

...It must have affected him greatly, and surely it is for that reason that he acted as if he was irretrievably lost...

...If Land Without Justice, Djilas' second book, proves to be only the first of a number of autobiographical volumes, perhaps those still to come will contain the confession which alone can enable him to take his place in literature...

...Davico had recently finished a five-year prison sentence, and his sufferings for Communism made it all the more intolerable that he should dare to write as if he had the right to be a surrealist...

...A year later, he was arrested...

...Like the "logic of battle" of which so much is heard, the discovery of a truth which has long been scoffed at imposes unforeseen decisions...

...In deeds as in words, Djilas was the kind of zealous Stalinist functionary in whom doubt, once aroused, soon progressed to distrust, suspicion and, finally, total condemnation...

...For in its attitude toward the Soviet Union the entire party was partly heretical...

...Furthermore, it has unquestionably restored a great many liberties...

...The country's leaders, though, continue to keep a close watch for deviations on the part of those who belong to the ruling bureaucracy—somewhat as the kings of Prussia used to watch over the loyalty of their officer corps...

...In prison, however, and sick, Djilas will become a powerful enemy, one whose influence may still be felt after he and all of us are gone...

...After his abdication, let the crown prince become a beggar or the prophet of a new religion if he will, but let him beware of judging the king or the morals of the courtiers lest thereby he bring the wrath of all upon his head...

...This did not, however, prevent Josip Broz-Tito from assigning him important duties as a member of the party's new leadership...

...Tito's police were able to spot in time all those who, on Stalin's orders, directed the operation which was supposed to end with the Yugoslav leader confessing before the whole world that he had always been an agent of the Zagreb police and the Gestapo, an American spy, etc...

...He appeared rather confused at the Central Committee meeting, at one point even requesting the right to vote against himself with the others...

...Of the many Communists who have voluntarily left the party, Milovan Djilas is the only one who, faced with the ultimate choice, gave up all the privileges of membership in his country's ruling group...

...He had to be denounced as a Trotskyite, and sympathizers like Dedijer had to be prevented from lending him a helping hand in his affliction...

...At worst, he will merely say the same things your old enemies have long been saying without making an impression on anyone...

...And the coup d'etat of January 6, 1929, which installed a dictatorship in Yugoslavia, strengthened in Djilas, as it did in those like him, the certainty that things had to be changed from top to bottom...

...Their dictatorship is not a dictatorship of the party (or League, as they call it), much less of the proletariat or the people...

...By speaking out now he can, among other things, make his peace with certain Yugoslav intellectuals who have not forgotten his past intolerance...

...Instead of merely having to denounce a few individuals as traitors, he was ultimately forced to outlaw an entire ruling party and an entire country—a Socialist country whose praises had been sung by all the spokesmen of world Communism...

...For Djilas, freedom ceased to be a "petty-bourgeois prejudice...

...It was probably at that point that the 40-year-old Djilas, without fully realizing it himself, struck out on the path that was to lead him inexorably away from his orthodox ideological certainties, from his youth and from the Communist party, which, since his departure from Montenegro 20 years before, had been his second homeland...

...In his autobiography (The Beloved Land, Simon and Schuster, 1961) Vladimir Dedijer relates how his friend Djilas forbade him to help the young poet Oscar Davico...

...It is, as its rather ambitious subtitle indicates, an analysis of the Communist system...

...Stalin is the only statesman who has a serene conscience and an altruistic heart...

...Both the "camp of Socialism" and the "camp of peace" were now open to Yugoslavia...

...It became his dominant concern, and he himself became, after the Hungarian Revolution, a Democratic Socialist...

...In 1932, be became an active member of the party, quickly won recognition and was entrusted with increasing responsibility...

...Djilas was three years old at the outbreak of the Great War, which decimated the population of Serbia more cruelly than that of any other belligerent power...

...Recalling the death of this brother, who was shot, he says: "If as he faced the firing squad he had time to think of my love for him, perhaps it made dying a little easier...

...Nevertheless, to start with, the case of Milovan Djilas is that of a man who, since he left the places of power, has lived in soul-destroying solitude...

...Starting out in quest of propaganda arguments with which to defend Tito and his regime against the Stalinist assault, he encountered en route the truth about the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union...

...he continued to write novels, plays and essays as he saw fit...

...The Cominform established its headquarters in the Yugoslav capital, together with innumerable other bodies devoted to the service of Stalinism...

...He now experienced something we have all experienced in our youth: We all discover at some point in our reading that, long before us, our most original ideas occurred to others...

...It was during those years that Djilas, constantly in the public eye, recognized as Tito's "crown prince," apostle of sectarian vigilance and implacable accuser, finally came to possess the power to settle the "ideological" disputes of an earlier day...

...Why Tito decided to impose complete silence on his former disciple and friend at the present time is open to question...

...He discovered the truth and found that it in no way resembled the version of it which he had so long propagated with all the vehemence of supreme intolerance...

...Krleza, for example, was dangerously obstinate...

...It, too, becomes one's destiny...

...Indeed, the issues at stake go far beyond Marshal Tito, his regime and Yugoslavia...

...After arriving in Belgrade, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Literature, Djilas took part in student activities which were either directly organized by the illegal Communist party or inspired by it...

...The good people of Titograd had every reason to believe that Djilas had reached the end of the road: The Central Committee had expelled him at its meeting of January 17, 1954...

...At the Fifth Congress of the Yugoslav Communist party, a month after the break decreed by the Cominform, Tito ended his closing speech by crying: "Long live the Soviet Union...

...when he evokes these memories, his words take on an almost religious quality...

...For the first time, Stalin made a frontal attack on men who knew how to turn his methods against him...

...Only Mitra Mitrovic, his former wife, and Dedijer, courageous and eloquent, made an unavailing attempt to defend him...

...The only feelings of affection which he expresses without reticence are those which bind him to the blackened rocks, stony soil and impoverished villages of the little country in which he was born...

...Tito did not fall because he had at his disposal the resources of an authoritarian state and of a secret police modeled after the GPU in every detail...

...His next three years were spent in the Sremska Mitrovica prison, then a center of Communist studies, a kind of university in which the party trained its cadres...

...Naturally the War, which ended the reign of Ante Pavelic, left behind hatreds which bred murderous vengeance...

...During the War, the Ustashi had massacred Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Chetniks had persecuted the Croats whenever they found them...

...A relaxation of restrictions which seemed to herald the restoration of all liberties was often followed by a harsh tightening-up on the part of the regime...

...Tito emphasized that it was the nation's duty to aid the Soviet Union so that "that heroic people will not be alone in shedding its precious blood...

...All our dominant theories, particularly our political, economic and social theories, have been shaken and will be shaken further," he wrote in January 1954 in his article, "League or Party," after having explained on December 24, 1953, that his aim was "to escape from the unreal, abstract world of the 'elite' and the elect and to enter at last the real world of simple, hardworking people and of ordinary human relationships...

...When the book was published, Djilas was in Sremska Mitrovica prison—the same prison in which he had spent part of his youth—for his article in The New Leader condemning the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution ["The Storm in Eastern Europe," November 19, 1956...

...In its ideological battles, eloquently fought out in periodicals which occasionally enjoyed fleeting moments of legality, party members denounced each other to the Hegelian Weltgeist, to the shades of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and, without intending to, to the political police of the hated regime...

...Belgrade soon became the Medina of postwar Communism, taking its place beside the Muscovite Mecca...

...Two years later, in the fall of 1950, he published a series of articles which he would have condemned as an act of foul treason in 1948...

...Djilas, the guardian of ideological purity, denounced, accused and condemned all those who, in their special fields of competence at any rate, refused to surrender their right to judge things for themselves...

...He never hesitated to expose himself to danger with that Montenegrin daring which accentuates, sometimes needlessly, the puerile side of soldierly heroism...

...Of great value, too, would be an account of the moral evolution of a man like Djilas—underground Communist, totalitarian censor, general in a civil war, high official of a dictatorship...

...He began a new life, in which periods of imprisonment marked the pauses and books marked the successive advances in his passionate search for freedom...

...Facing him was Tito, who, more in sorrow than in anger, reproached Djilas not for holding dissident views but for making them public instead of discussing them privately, "in a goodhumored manner, for in that way anything can be said between friends...

...Those who survived gained an assurance which strengthened their Communist orthodoxy but at the same—truly a bit of dialectial irony!—prepared them psychologically for their resistance to Stalin after 1948...

...Like the others, Djilas felt no need to read anything but the Comintern weekly, International Correspondence, smuggled into the country for the party functionaries...

...Almost everything in this book has already been said elsewhere," the author acknowledges at the very outset...

...Whatever the men in Belgrade did, however much they protested their adoration, Stalin replied with scorn and hatred...

...Djilas was known in intellectual circles both in Belgrade and in the Croatian capital of Zagreb...

...Everywhere they faced an enemy who seemed as invincible as death itself...

...Djilas springs from a people which has never granted itself a breathing spell and has always refused to acknowledge defeat...

...And Djilas was one of those who guided them through the trials of those days...

...Djilas was deeply shaken by the threatening letters in which Stalin and the Cominform had signaled the break with Tito...

...The others, however, had not been members of that new class and had not shared in the power it wielded at the very moment when they ripped off its disguise...

...Montenegrin children were taught to have but one fear: the fear of showing fear...

...At the same time, the Tito regime has made major concessions in every sphere of economic organization and has granted the workers' councils a substantial role in the management of economic enterprises...

...His is the solitude of the prisoner who cannot forget that his jailors were not long ago comrades-inarms, and who knows that his fellow-prisoners will never forget that of all their enemies he was perhaps the most merciless...

...For Stalin there are no insoluble problems...

...They trained themselves to display at all times that exasperating kind of courage which drives a man to seek danger or to create it with senseless defiance...

...Montenegrins who had converted to Islam under Turkish pressure were murdered in their fields, in the forests or beside their grazing livestock...

...He cannot entirely have forgotten that young man or the goals for which he fought and suffered uncomplainingly...

...He cannot harm you if he leaves Yugoslavia...

...Djilas's journey toward understanding was a dramatic one indeed...

...Released in 1936, the 25-year-old Djilas resumed his political activity without delay, entering the curious kind of underground existence that at one time was both necessary and possible under certain Balkan and South American dictatorships...

...It was quite proper that The New Class won praise and expressions of warm encouragement for its author...

...But how many deaths and what apocalyptic suffering they have cost...

...After his first meeting with Tito, in Zagreb in 1937, Djilas rose steadily in the Communist hierarchy...

...The party's members were taken aback but hastened nevertheless to declare their support of the new line which, they supposed, Djilas had just outlined in the official organ...

...Josef Djugashvili was dead, and his "most faithful comrades" were hastening to revise their past and fill it retroactively with acts, or at least gestures, of resistance to the tyrant...

...everything human is near to him...

...For what was known as "Titoism" the day of glory had arrived...

...Titograd, the Montenegrin capital which had sent him to the Assembly with 98.8 per cent of its votes, now demanded the withdrawal of his mandate...

...Aren't you aware that the party makes men but that it can destroy them as soon as they depart from the party line...

...He paid a heavy price for the freedom to "think differently," as Rosa Luxemburg once expressed it, and to write differently...

...As a young man, Djilas unquestionably cultivated such courage...

...But in speaking of his deep affection for his older brother, for example, he is significantly inhibited: "Without my love for him, I could scarcely have experienced that genuine love which nothing can destroy or make one forget...

...Alone and defenseless, he has waged an unequal struggle whose outcome can hardly be in doubt...

...Let the Montenegrin leave," he might say, "he will learn to his sorrow that the world does not love heretics, that it despises the vanquished, and that the stories of exiles, whether repentant or not, interest it for but a minute and weary it for an eternity...

...He and his comrades found in it the answers—always changing but always final and absolute—to every political, social and economic question, together with directives on philosophy and the arts...

...The final episode marking the approach of Djilas's break with the party began on October 11, 1953 with the publication in Borba of his article, "New Content," and ended on January 7, 1954 with the article, "Revolution...

...The history of this area of Djilas's native Montenegro is largely one of battles and massacres...

...Occupied by the Austrians from 1916 on, Montenegro fell prey to famine, disease and more than the usual internecine strife...

...He will fall...

...The police, too, were of course well aware of the role he played in the subversive movement...

...New explosions of national hatred were feared, and many resigned themselves to living under the Communist regime in the hope that its dictatorial rule would put an end to ethnic strife and at least evolve a federal solution to the nationalities problem...

...Tito, Djilas and their henchmen brutally thrust aside those comrades who were suspected of not having approved of the Pact, the partition of Poland, and all the rest...

...It was probably not until then that Tito and his comrades made their final break with Stalin...

...Yet critics might have served the Yugoslav heretic better by telling him that what the world expected of him was not theoretical works but the re-creation of a unique experience, the confession of a doctrinaire Stalinist who, at the height of his power, rebelled against the lies that were stifling him...

...The Hitler-Stalin Pact was an "ideological" test to which every Communist or Communist sympathizer had to submit...

...He remained faithful to it as a Yugoslav Communist party militant and official...

...Except in the eyes of the Stalinists, the Yugoslav Communist party was never heretical, and it is not heretical today...

...A member of the Politburo, President of the National Assembly, Vice President of the Federal Executive Council, propaganda chief and hence supreme arbiter in all things intellectual, Djilas discovered how much he still had to learn if he was to find out at last what was true and what was not...

...It was past that "midnight of the age" of which Victor Serge had spoken in his vain effort to warn his errant comrades...

...It is Stalin who composed that glorious ode to liberty and fraternity among men and nations, the Stalin Constitution...

...They themselves had accepted and helped to propagate the stupefying lies set in motion at earlier Stalinist show trials, in which the defendants had blackened their own pasts and degraded themselves in every way before going to their deaths...

...Without the support of Tito and Mosha Pijade, he would not have dared to lash out so scurrilously at his comrades...

...He has lived in the solitude of one persecuted by those whom only yesterday he had thought of as friends and whom he had known to be his friends in adversity as in triumph...

...Djilas, whose total literary output consisted at that time of several rather wretched little pieces, sought to impose an "esthetic party line" on Krleza in the interests of the emancipation of the world proletariat and the future classless society...

...In addition to his little book, Conversations with Stalin, which was recently published in New York (Harcourt, Brace), Djilas is known to have completed three other works: a novel entitled Montenegro...

...But the Titoists admitted that since 1936, and not only in 1949, Stalin had extorted false confessions from veteran Communists in order to punish them for nonexistent crimes...

...Fascism was everywhere on the offensive...

...In other words, Yugoslavia is ruled today by a "new class...

...The Djilases had only recently moved to Podbishche, in the Kolashin region, where Milovan's father was to command the frontier guard detachment...

...Yet this spectacular fall from the seats of the mighty proved to be but a new beginning of a process of self-transformation which may still be under way...

...Even before he left Beran, the little village where he completed his secondary schooling, Djilas had made up his mind to be a Communist...

...To obtain their forgiveness, he must first ask for it...

...It is the dictatorship of an essentially bureaucratic oligarchy which is unwilling to surrender the smallest part of its political power or to permit the existence of any political group which might aspire to a measure of independence...

...Sperber, whose memorable article on the Hungarian Revolution, "The West Has Lost the Right to Weep," appeared in our November 11, 1956 issue, is the author of The Abyss and The Burned Bramble...

...Now, once again, the police power of the state has been turned against a political heretic who stands pitifully alone...

...That is what Milovan Djilas declared, and what others before him had said and proved about other Communist-ruled countries...

...I will move my little finger and Tito will be no more...

...For more than five centuries, Montenegro's several hundred thousand inhabitants waged brutal guerrilla warfare...

...However, he had not yet departed from the "line" of the Yugoslav party, of which he was, after Tito, the most prominent leader—taking precedence over both Rankovic, a friend since the years of his youth, and Kardelj...

...He knows all and sees all...

...the West, hesitant to resist, was losing one position after another...

...Djilas turned to the theoretical and political writings which he had hitherto ignored and yet condemned...

...He excluded himself from the "new class" and banished himself to that no-man's land which is the abode of rebels who have no party and no followers...

...they avoided reading anything that did not conform to the party line or that did not trumpet the perfection of the Stalinist empire, the infallibility of the Father of Peoples, etc...

...True, there have been changes and many improvements...

...Stalin confided to Khrushchev, who reported the remark to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist party, adding: "Stalin moved not only his little finger but everything he could move...

...But the hour was late...

...Milovan Djilas By Manes Sperber Like the hero after his triumph, the penitent who fails to make a swift exit runs the risk of wearying even the most indulgent of his contemporaries...

...In the twilight of his life, when a man dwells long and often on the past, President Tito cannot but admit to himself that the state of which he is today the inordinately praised leader bears little resemblance to the socialist society for which Broz fought until the age of 55...

...In so doing, he found out what form that dictatorship took in Yugoslavia...

...Djilas had several encounters in Moscow with "the most perfect of men.' If he was disillusioned in any way, he gave no hint of it...

...war had broken out in Spain...

...Their voices, suddenly very close, move us like the first echoes of our own voice...

...That applies particularly to a man who, after abandoning a position of power, devotes himself to discrediting the authority he has surrendered and to atoning for his sins by denouncing those who still cling to their privileges...

...As a boy, Milovan experienced both the violence which provokes and humiliates before crushing and that which kills without hesitating...

...Yet, Tito did not fall...

...Yugoslavs, especially non-Communists, are reasonably free to express unorthodox views on philosophical, esthetic and economic questions...

...He was already fully prepared to accept the violence of Communism and its apocalyptic threats...

...Those books or plays or pictures which displeased him were destined never to please anyone again, for they disappeared without a trace...

...The announcement of the forthcoming publication of Conversations with Stalin resulted in Djilas' fourth arrest on April 7. On May 14, after a trial which lasted only six-and-a-half hours, he was convicted of having divulged to "unauthorized recipients confidential information learned while serving in an official capacity," and sentenced to prison again, this time for close to nine years...

...This time, he triumphed unopposed...

...It abandoned neither its dogmatic sectarianism nor its exasperating Byzantinism...

...Since January 1954, he has persisted in vexing the spirits of the men who control Yugoslavia...

...When he published "Contemporary Themes," his series of anti-Soviet articles, Djilas became a traitor in the eyes of all foreign Communists...

...Thus Djilas lost the friendship which, after that of his older brother, had been the most meaningful of his life...

...The young bureaucrat was, of course, not alone...

...The liquidation in Moscow of all the leaders of the Yugoslav party, one by one, cleared the way for Josip Broz and the young militants with whom he surrounded himself...

...Almost all the party functionaries behaved admirably in the face of the enemy...

...It is pleasant to think that one of the Marshal's old comrades, perhaps a writer who once suffered beneath the heavy hand of Djilas the supercommissar, may yet come forward and make Tito see how little is to be gained by persecuting his erstwhile friend...

...A member of the Central Committee, he dealt more and more harshly with "ideological deviation" of any kind, which he treated as "objective," if not indeed subjective, betrayal to the enemy...

...A year later, Moscow staged the Rajk trial in order to discredit the Yugoslav Communist party and "expose" its fascist character...

...Djilas explained to Dedijer: "Davico is essentially a surrealist...

...These men affirmed their loyalty to the cause, but refused to embrace the obscurantism to which Andrey Zhdanov was later to give his name...

...They tried to move slowly, however, lest they draw too close to the Social Democrats, the Trotskyites and those former party members who were truly heretics because they repudiated not only the Stalinist regime but also the Leninist ideology which it professed...

...In 1948 as in 1953, in 1956 as today, the ideology of the rulers of Yugoslavia has been one based on false identity...

...Below Manès Sperber brings into focus the forces that have motivated Djilas' actions...

...Djilas, whom the National Assembly had unanimously elected its President on December 26, 1953, was reduced to a nullity four weeks later...

...They pronounced themselves fully convinced, and enthusiastically so...

...A resistance movement emerged, and bands formed in the forests, in the barren mountain regions and on some of the Adriatic islands...

...And he discovered in his mirror a man who had to be fought—fought together with his close friend Tito and all his comrades-inarms...

...Because of the party's long years of illegality, it pursued its activities in what at times amounted to complete obscurity...

...Rankovic and Djilas used the methods of terror, acting in accordance with the police theory of history, to which, as ardent Stalinists, they firmly subscribed...

...He informed the readers of Borba, the central organ of the Yugoslav Communist party, that the USSR was not the land of Socialism and was ruled by a bureaucratic group which, abandoning its Leninist heritage, had perverted Bolshevism in order to take over full power and create a system of state capitalism...

...He denounced the power that he himself held...

...They were continually defeated, suffered from hunger and cold and were lacking in everything: not only weapons but also medicine for the wounded, whom they did not abandon even when carrying them was a superhuman task...

...Thirty-four years ago, Josip Broz declared in a Zagreb courtroom that the Yugoslav state's repressive laws were not binding on him and that nothing could prevent him from acting in accordance with his conscience...

...In the 357 pages of Land Without Justice, Djilas emerges as an epic poet whenever his love of country liberates him from himself and from the isolation in which he is writing...

...Dostoyevsky points out how difficult it is to keep pent up within oneself a truth which has finally been revealed and how great is the need to communicate it to those with whom one once traveled along false paths...

...The Titoists now resolved to renounce that part of their past which had made them accept Stalinism unconditionally...

...Stalin is the most perfect of men...

...A model Stalinist, he wrote in October 1942, amid wartime disasters: "Is there a greater honor or joy than that of feeling that one's closest and most beloved comrade is Stalin...