Yugoslav Passage to Communism
WILLEN, PAUL
Yugoslav Passage to Communism THE BELOVED LAND By Vladimir Dedijer Simon & Schuster. 381 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by PAUL WILLEN Contributor, "Encounter," "Commentary," the "Reporter" "Stand up...
...Don't you know that the party creates men but it can also destroy them Oskar is a trotskyet, he is dangerous to the party, and you have to do what the party is asking of you.' " Dedijer obeyed, and saw no more of his friend Davico...
...Nor did he easily relinquish the puritanical notions his mother, the Vice President of the Yugoslav League of Suffragettes, had instilled in him...
...asked his friend...
...She refused...
...Not unexpectedly, the central figure in Dedijer's transformation was the same Djilas who denounced him in 1943 for taking cover from German rifles, and in whose defense 10 years later Dedijer's career as a Yugoslav Communist terminated...
...Party-related activities absorbed more and more of his time...
...She's rather conservative...
...You deserve the honor," Djilas told him...
...It describes in great detail the prewar years, when Communism became the dominant ideology of an enormous segment of the Yugoslav intelligentsia...
...Tito, Edvard Kardelj, Aleksandar Rankovic were there for breakfast, short conferences, quick escapes from the police, a good dinner...
...Dedijer responded by renouncing his plans for a career in the Yugoslav YMCA...
...Then came the turning point, the test for young Dedijer...
...You must stop selling his poems and stop seeing him...
...Dedijer's wife herself joined up, independently of Vlado, several months after he left Belgrade...
...Olga is not selfish...
...His brother in America, a student at Princeton University, wrote him feverish letters denouncing the social order, in the style of the 1930s...
...As far as her qualities as a human being are concerned, they are fine,' I said...
...What shall I do?' "'What kind of person is she?' asked Djilas...
...After Norway he was sent to England, with which he was strangely entranced...
...I have something very personal to ask you...
...it was not forthcoming...
...There he met a lovely girl who was not a Communist, providing him with still another personal problem...
...When his editor asked him to extol English democracy as a weapon against the Belgrade dictatorship he responded eagerly: "In England alone, and in no other country in Europe from the beginning of the last century, eight governments have been defeated in general election...
...These are harrowing pages, filled with the now-familiar details of ferocious combat and civil war...
...In short, the interview between the two men was a success...
...We have tested you...
...He impressed me greatly although he was only three years older than I leaving me with a feeling of inferiority...
...After the 1948 TitoStalin split, it was Dedijer who successfully fought efforts to recast his history, in customary Stalinist fashion, by deleting the names of Partisan leaders who had since gone Cominformist...
...The double shock nearly robbed Dedijer of his sanity, which he slowly recovered only after months in Allied hospitals in Cairo and Italy...
...Talk went on into the night...
...The result was a work that has not lost its value with the passing of time and ideologies...
...A few months later, Dedijer's wife was killed, only a few hours after Vlado himself had been badly wounded...
...Her father was a member of the King's government...
...In 1935, he was recalled to Belgrade, where respect for law was not exactly a prominent trait, and his life took a different course...
...Indeed, 15 years later, this displacement still occupies his mind as he attempts to reassemble his life in his beloved England...
...In time he remarried, and took up party work in liberated Belgrade...
...a person with such qualities must find her own way...
...Dedijer's own personal loss was only one element in a larger national pattern of war, breakdown and disciplined rebirth...
...As Dedijer traces his own passage into Communism, he makes comprehensible the larger movement of which he was a part...
...In Norway, on assignment, he was befriended by a tender woman, whom he kissed...
...Dedijer offered to help him out by selling copies of his poetry among his mother's rich friends...
...Go ahead and marry her.' " The Dedijer apartment in Belgrade became one of the central congregation points for Communist operatives...
...Perhaps he expected an invitation to membership...
...This is due to the democratic conscience of the English and their respect for law...
...His first glimpse of Djilas came during a university demonstration against King Alexander's dictatorship in 1933...
...Not about the last part of my monologue, but about the inequalities of society, and I realized that he had not listened to the rest...
...I love a girl and she loves me...
...He took consolation in having been used as a courier by the Communists...
...The Beloved Land, written in self-imposed exile in England during 1959-60, broadens the scope of Dedijer's story...
...Dedijer replied at some length...
...In the case of Yugoslavia, the details are particularly horrible, and the reader does not find it difficult to understand the extraordinary success of the Partisan movement, nor why it engaged so large a portion of Yugoslavia's educated class...
...He was sent to cover the Civil War in Spain, and was downcast when his offer to bear arms was rejected...
...War was coming, the internal Yugoslav situation was increasingly ominous, and divisions sharper...
...The question of whether a man would or would not yield under police torture was a central one among Yugoslav Communists in those days...
...One of his friends, a Communist surrealist poet named Oskar Davico, was released from prison after five years...
...Dedijer proved to be a good historian...
...But Dedijer was a good listener, and was moved as Djilas, shifting the conversation on his own, described his dreams during his last stay in prison: "The Tara river dark, blue-green, racing down deep canyons past his native village of Podbisce...
...Dedijer complied with the Party's request, going off to the mountains for a week of skiing...
...She comes from a rich family...
...I was told that his name was Djilas...
...But this meant nothing to the Montenegrin Djilas, who promptly reported Dedijer's "cowardice" to Tito...
...Attending the San Francisco United Nations conference in April 1945, Dedijer was jubilant at his own sudden prominence, but he soon saw that, in the very shadow of triumph, a massive and disturbing human displacement had occurred...
...Please, Vlado, listen to what I am telling you...
...When Dedijer decided to marry his skiing companion he first took the matter up with Djilas...
...When he returned he gave a series of strident lectures on the situation in Spain, and was finally sacked by Politika, under strong Government pressure...
...He is no longer a good comrade...
...The next shock was the Soviet-German pact...
...Djilas telephoned Dedijer, by then a famous journalist, at Politika, and proposed that they get together for a talk...
...Shall we walk, and if you don't mind, I prefer dark streets," said Djilas, referring to the police, who were hunting Communists down like flies...
...Whether for this reason, or for his greater value as a writer, Dedijer was henceforth permanently attached to Tito's command and became the official "historian" of the Partisan war...
...But, much to her husband's grief, "Olga did not take part in the discussions...
...He sought an explanation from his comrades—but got none...
...Instead, Djilas advised him to get out of Belgrade lest he be arrested and tortured into a confession of the source and destination of the mail he had transmitted to Paris...
...Suddenly Djilas raised his eyebrows, waved his hand, and launched into talk...
...She is industrious and modest.' "'One has to be patient in these great days...
...If he lacked the perspective to tackle the big historic issues, he more than made up for it by his superb style of reporting—lean, unencumbered, often powerful in its simplicity and directness...
...That was the first kiss I had which did not give me a feeling of revulsion," he writes...
...He had long talks with Communist writers, to whom he later gave money for special relief funds, but he did not give up his promising journalistic career...
...Next Djilas entered the picture again, and a most curious relationship began...
...They met, almost by accident, when their batallions were in joint action...
...Recovery took months, indeed years, and left many permanent marks on Dedijer and on Yugoslavia...
...Vlado, would you take the [party] mail to Paris...
...But she is not a Communist...
...That is the party's wish...
...This was the lyrical Djilas, who did not appear in public again until 1958 when from his exile he wrote Land Without Justice...
...she became a much-respected surgeon...
...I have not this Montenegrin mentality, this fear of showing fear," Dedijer later explained...
...but they were unable to remain together, as husbands and wives were strictly segregated in the Partisan units...
...The students were throwing chairs, benches, furniture at the police, and Dedijer noticed "one youth in Russian rubashka standing on a bench giving instructions" to the demonstrators...
...All went well until Djilas told him, "Vlado, I understand that you have been selling the poems of Oskar Davico...
...So the 22-year-old Dedijer finally said: "I am ready to do anything the Communist party askes me...
...Reviewed by PAUL WILLEN Contributor, "Encounter," "Commentary," the "Reporter" "Stand up and don't dodge bullets," Milovan Djilas shouted to his comrade, Vlado Dedijer, as Dedijer took swift cover in an early engagement in Yugoslavia's great Partisan war...
...Several weeks later, after a brief arrest during which he did not confess, Dedijer was accepted into the party...
...Soon war came to Yugoslavia, and the Communist machinery was transferred from the German-held cities to that vast no-man's land of the mountains of Bosnia and Montenegro...
...Kardelj stayed a week, and tried to engage her in political conversation...
...The two men discussed politics, and Djilas explained why he had become a Communist, concluding: "Don't forget also that we are a nation which admires martyrs...
...Dedijer was impressed but, as a successful young journalist for a respectable Belgrade newspaper, did not join the demonstration himself...
...I embraced him and he handed me a thick envelope and said that it should be sewn in my overcoat...
Vol. 45 • February 1962 • No. 3
