The Indomitable Djilas
THAYER, CHARLES W.
The Indomitable Djilas CONVERSATIONS WITH STALIN By Milovan Djilas Harcourt, Brace and World. 211 pp. $3.95 Reviewed by CHARLES W. THAYER Former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, the Soviet...
...Those who have yet to deal with the Communist leaders would do well to remember the intelligent young revolutionary, keeping in mind that the wine of revolutionary Communism is just as stupefying as the vodka Djilas so abhors...
...But then he would not have been Djilas...
...In the background hover the depraved sycophants who formed Stalin's court and nightly indulged in bacchanalian feasts at his dacha: Lavrenty Beria discussing sex, Vyacheslav Molotov indulging in urinal humor, Andrey Zhdanov joking about depriving a writer who displeased him of food rations...
...In the present volume he confesses that even at his last encounter, in 1947, when Stalin failed to invite him to one of his orgiastic dinners, he felt hurt, "so great was my human and sentimental fondness for him still...
...In his conclusions addressed to the future of Russia, Djilas is gloomy but not hopeless...
...Ostensibly Conversations with Stalin is a detailed report of Djilas' encounters with Stalin during three visits to Moscow between 1944 and 1947...
...Inevitably the Conversations reflect the fiery fury of a puritanical fanatic and the passionate indignation of a dreamer whose dream Stalin shattered...
...Needless to say, he spurned my offer of cocktails, and as soon as we sat down to eat launched into a eulogy of Stalin more impassioned than any I had heard in all my years in Moscow...
...In addition to his views on the Kremlin, past and present, Djilas paints a third picture—perhaps less consciously but just as vividly—of a young, naive, fanatically puritanical Communist, deaf to reason and blind to facts, condoning the bestiality of Stalin's "justice" but constantly revolted by his drinking habits...
...Djilas was especially impressed by his gentle, sensitive hands...
...According to Djilas, not only was Stalin intellectually a genius and morally without sin but he also possessed great physical charm...
...author, "Diplomat," "Interlude in Moscow" That Stalin was a "bloodthirsty monster" and the "greatest criminal in history" is not startling news to most of us...
...The treatment of Khrushchev is considerably more charitable than that of Stalin, but it is obviously not intended to please...
...When I pointed out that I had already had the pleasure, but without the predicted results, Djilas scornfully relegated me to the category of "fascist beast...
...As though these caustic comments were not enough to infuriate Tito's friends in the Kremlin, Djilas ends his report with a characteristically belligerent challenge: "Those who wish to live and to survive in a world different from the one Stalin created and which in essence and in full force still exists must fight...
...He eats no less than Stalin and drinks even more," and "The commonplaces with which his conversation abounds are the expression of both real ignorance and Marxist maxims learnt by rote...
...In graphic and vivid language, excellently translated by Michael B. Petrovich, Djilas paints a gruesome portrait of the Soviet tyrant, his amorality, his cynicism, his coarse tastes and his shallow understanding of the non-Communist world...
...But the book is much more than that, and its supplementary observations and comments explain why Tito saw fit to send Djilas back to jail...
...With characteristic courage Djilas makes no attempt to conceal his original beguilement by Stalin...
...Nevertheless, it is fascinating in its details, convincing in its candor and intriguing in its conclusions...
...In this respect, Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin is no revelation...
...Djilas comments: "I maintain that not even today is there any essential change in this respect in the policy of the Soviet Government...
...Among Stalin's henchmen Djilas includes Khrushchev, whom he met during his visits to Kiev...
...In his present report Djilas does not mention Stalin's hands but he recalls his surprise at "his small stature and ungainly build," adding that his left arm seemed rather stiff (like Wilhelm II and Hitler, Stalin had a deformed left arm...
...If only you Westerners could talk with Stalin personally," Djilas kept repeating that evening, "all your animosities and suspicions would disappear...
...Recalling Stalin's attitude toward revolutions outside Russia, Djilas suggests that Stalin was not necessarily against revolutions in general but only against those he could not control...
...Foreign Service Officer, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia...
...Though he helped revolutions up to a point, he was always ready to leave them in the lurch when they slipped from his control...
...The creation of revolutionary centers ouside of Moscow, Stalin felt, could endanger Soviet supremacy in world Communism...
...While this cautious attitude toward revolutions may be anathema to the fiery Montenegrin revolutionary, it is not entirely unwelcome to those of us who advocate less violent cures for the ills of the world...
...Nor are Djilas' comments on the present Soviet regime flattering...
...After one of his early visits to Moscow, Djilas came to dinner with me at the American Military Mission in Belgrade...
...Though clever and wide awake, the true Communist believer can be as impervious to logic as the most besotted of drunks...
...Scornfully dismissing Nikita Khrushchev's gestures to eradicate Stalin's heritage, he argues that "Stalin still lives in the social and spiritual foundations of the Soviet society," and that his policies are still the basic policies of the present Soviet leaders...
...As such the book is a major contribution to the study of Communism, and particularly of the type of leadership it creates...
...This is the portrait of Djilas himself before his apostasy...
...In the foreseeable future new ideas and phenomena may reveal its contradictions but "since the leaders themselves are too poor to find dogmatism and monopoly of rule a hindrance or superfluous, conditions for a more substantial change do not exist...
...Soviet society still imprisoned in its own Stalinist framework, he says, has barely begun to change...
...Had Djilas confined himself to this picture, he would have provided some first-rate, firsthand material for future historians—and perhaps kept out of jail...
Vol. 45 • September 1962 • No. 18
