Djilas and Yugoslavia Today

...Sometimes there are rumors that he is being poisoned in prison...

...In the West, the name Milovan Djilas is frequently mentioned, and his books are widely translated and read...

...But despite the total official silence, there is no person as operative in the life of every citizen of the new Yugoslavia as the prisoner in Sremska Mitrovica...

...The people are keenly aware, too, that Djilas never did anything antiSocialist or illegal (just as, in a legal sense, this article of mine is not in opposition to constructive Yugoslav laws...

...Yes, every totalitarianism, every one-party system, represents a kind of social schizophrenia...

...During the War he was one of the most popular leaders of the Partisan movement and an outstanding Party theoretician...

...As though it were not the inalienable right of every man to be politically motivated, as he wishes...

...Today, when Yugoslavia, like the whole Socialist world, finds itself on the eve of stormy historical changes, there is not a single place in our land where, in the evening, in the course of a serious conversation, the name Milovan Djilas is not remembered...

...The only medicine for the union is political freedom...

...The 23rd Congress demonstrated that there cannot be radical changes toward improvement within the framework of the one-party system...

...Today Yugoslavia stands at a fork in the road: one direction promising a democracy of a sort never before seen in history...

...Nor should you think that this is merely our problem...

...On several occasions he was sentenced to hard labor for political reasons, being the first and virtually sole politician who openly and courageously opposed the deadly monopoly of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in the socio-political sphere of the life of the land, although it is said that he is in prison because of certain legal formalities in connection with the printing of his book of memoirs, Conversations with Stalin...

...The people are beginning to understand that to be silent about what one thinks and feels, no matter how much it may contradict official attitudes, is not only sick but shameful, just as being a prisoner is as shameful as being a hangman...

...It seems as though the whole world has agreed that any direct, honest attempt to achieve political freedom justifies arraignment and persecution...

...It is enough to recall the silence of the Yugoslav press about the "Djilas affair," and the events of 1948...

...The authorities, trying to avoid any political fireworks for fear of upsetting the status quo, make maximum concessions, but only so long as one does not raise the most essential matters: liquidating the one-party system and establishing an openly critical publishing organ, for which numerous intellectual forces in the country are clearly ready...

...Thus Djilas has already become a legend, particularly among the young generation that is advancing on the social scene-a generation which, in contrast to its elders, is not afraid and will openly say what it thinks and do what it feels is right...

...Large groups of those who at the time of the "Djilas affair" were still sitting on schoolroom benches -be they common people, students, young members of the Party, even physicians, engineers, professors, and economists-know only these facts about him: Djilas is a Montenegrin...

...The question of Djilas is of immediate relevance...

...We have already had enough of what that genius George Orwell has called "double-think...

...Without political freedom, all these other freedoms are illusory and can be taken away at any moment, and society would be without any means of self-defense...

...Djilas is today the symbol of freedom within the framework of the Socialist communal system...

...And on the future of the Soviet Union hangs the future of all mankind...

...The very evolution of Yugoslavia's one-party system into a free, democratic, multi-party system would serve as the detonator for all the lands of Eastern Europe, and naturally for the Soviet Union as well...

...The absence of democracy in a society, that is, the granting of freedom of action to a single party, automatically leads to the denial of democracy within the party, which further leads to habitual civil totalitarianism and the "'cult of personality...

...That is all that is generally known...

...up to the time of his being charged with having "heretical" views, in 1954, he was the Vice President of the country, a man without a blemish on his record...

...In history one cannot go backward, only forward...

...None the less, the question of Milovan Djilas' freedom is more important than the question of the outcome of the war in Vietnam-just as the revolution in Hungary in 1956 was immeasurably more significant than the contemporaneous conflict over Suez...

...For that very reason the problem of Djilas and "Djilasism" has become all the more urgent for Socialism...

...As a reaction against this unnatural absence of freedom in the political life of the people, nationalistic extremes, religious fanaticism, and narrowminded clericalism manifest themselves...

...or its total silence about the bloody miners' strike in Novocherkassk in the Donbas in 1962, about the student demonstrations last December 5 in Moscow in support of Andrei Sinyavsky, and about the recent immolation of a 25-year-old Ukrainian, Nikolai Didik, in front of the central NKVD building in Moscow, as a protest against a halfcentury of terror (that same press would have commented for days and days on a similar suicide in Washington...

...But because all means of communication were in the hands of a single party-in other words, controlled by a group of men in the Central Committee-no one was able to speak in public or write about an event that agitated the entire country...

...The majority of non-Communists feel a great sympathy for him because they believe that he alone has atoned for and redeemed the sins of Communist fanaticism in the first postwar years -in the time of the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat"sins for which he was himself largely to blame...

...And no police measures can suppress these developments...

...No one ever, ever, ever speaks publicly even of the existence of this man who in his time was one of the outstanding leaders of the Communist movement in Southeast Europe...

...Is it true, as Yugoslav officialdom maintains, that except for a small number of fanatics, no one in Yugoslavia is seriously interested in the question of Djilas...

...Djilasism stands primarily for a democratic rather than a one-party Socialism...

...These state clearly that every person has the inalienable right freely to express his political point of view before the public, freely to hold meetings and create political organizations for legitimate activity in the society and land in which he lives...

...From time to time rumors start up that he has been given his freedom, that he has been seen here or there...

...If only a part of the energy that is being invested in warlike efforts in Vietnam and in the demonstrations against that war were engaged in an effort to free Djilas, the world would unquestionably receive more benefit than it will receive from the conflict in Southeast Asia, whatever its outcome...

...Future historians will not be able to uncover the truth about the life and interests of the so-called Socialist communities if they rely on the printed word of our time...

...Thus the future of freedom in Yugoslavia hangs on the future of Djilas, and the road that Yugoslavia takes will point the direction to all the lands of Eastern Europe...

...And without the engagement of all freedom-loving democratic forces in the world, the ruling party in Yugoslavia will not be moved to respect the national Constitution or permit the legitimate activity of independent, Democratic Socialist, political organizations...

...The people associate the name Djilas with the concept of "the new class," that is, the ruling party oligarchy is associated with the title of his best book...

...Unfortunately even the Western press, defending the accused, has used this argument...

...Unfortunately, except for us in Yugoslavia, few people in the world grasp that truth...

...The freedom to engage in political activity is the basic and only guarantee of freedom in all other aspects of human creativityin literature, art, religion, science, and economics...

...Djilas was the first in our midst who openly opposed social and political discrimination against those who disagreed with the League of Communists and did not belong to the so-called "unfriendly bourgeois classes.' That is why what happens to Djilas will determine the destiny of freedom in Yugoslavia...

...Until that happens, even the Yugoslav Workers' Councils will be mere masks behind which the totalitarian power of the only permissible party hides...

...The question of Djilas and a multiparty system is a political question...

...he is 55 years old...

...To be sure, not many in Yugoslavia have read it, but it is talked about everywhere and continually, the essence of the work emerging from the title itself...

...For us Socialists and non-Communists, it is unbearable to have to read only the Communist press, to learn only about the decisions and intentions of the Communist Central Committee, and to live in an unjust society where only the champions of Communist ideology are permitted to engage publicly in political activity...

...Never before in history has the fate of a single man been tied in such measure to the fate of all mankind...

...That is why at their trial in Moscow, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel tried to prove that their works were not politically motivated...

...It was said as a matter of course in prosecuting writers at various trials in the Socialist lands that what they had done was forbidden to anyone, no matter what his political stripe, that they were being judged in terms of literature, art, history, etc...

...Gone are many of the hopes for liberalization of the Socialist world raised last March by the 23 rd Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union...

...Every item of news about him that the foreign press or radio carries is discussed for months...

...Djilas stands for a democratic, non-totalitarian Socialism...

...You who, if you wish, may vote for Laborites or Conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, Socialists or Communists, who can read newspapers of the persuasion that corresponds with yours-remember that we can vote for only one party and read the daily press of only a single orientation...

...If it is unjust to practice discrimination against people of a different skin color-and the Negroes in the United States at least have the right of free political association-it is even less just for those of us who maintain democratic and Socialist, but not Communist, ideological and religious positions to be denied legitimate political activity in our own society...

...Djilas did not come out against Socialism or against the Constitution...

...We do not want those issues about which we have the stormiest discussions in our homes to be taboo as public polemic...

...Do not believe in Yugoslav "selfmanagement" until the people who are sympathetic to Djilas' views are truly able to act independently -to express their ideas and convictions publicly and to defend them in an organized way...

...The young, even many of the younger Party members, are especially impressed by Djilas' clean revolutionary past, his courage and uncompromising character, his suffering for his ideas...

...Gone are the days when Lenin and Trotsky, Radek and Bukharin could conduct ideological battles at Party congresses over the most important problems of current history...

...This is true everywhere-in Belgrade and Zagreb, Ljubljana and Skoplje, Sarajevo and Titograd, among university professors or in workers' taverns...

...Your future depends on ours, too...

...The latest number of Socialism, the Yugoslav magazine devoted to social questions, openly uses the term "the new class" (although it actually derives from the great Russian philosopher Nicholai Berdyayev, who first used it in 1938...

...In documentary films about the war against Fascism, sequences in which Djilas appears are cut out...

...No mention was made of the nature of his crime, however, which the report said "does not interest the community...

...As a believer in Democratic Socialism, I would like to say to Western Socialists: So long as Djilas is in prison, so long as there is no possibility of political activity by a free, Democratic Socialist party, absolutely independent of the Communists, do not believe the Communists when they tell you that they have moderated their oneparty system...

...It involves, rather, the question of the social and spiritual health of Socialist Yugoslavia, with implications for the whole Socialist world...

...he was a prewar revolutionary and ardent Communist, an intellectual, and a modernist poet...

...Djilas does not represent a return to capitalism...

...All this is as evident in Yugoslavia as it is in the USSR...

...the other threatening a new Stalinism, more perfidious and bestial than the one against which, in 1948, Yugoslavia was the first to rebel...

...Indeed, attitudes toward that name divide people in Yugoslavia into only two groups: for and against...

...So long as the present situation exists, so long as decisions about what may or may not be told to the people are made at a single center which controls all the means of information in the country, it will be possible to deceive the public...

...Though alone, Djilas stood at that same fork in the road and came to a decision 15 years ago-which explains why, despite his imprisonment, he is always present in the life of our land...

...So long as the oneparty system exists, so long as only the Communist party can participate in elections in the Socialist world-you should know that every union into which you enter with Communists in your land represents merely a tactical accommodation of the Communist party...

...Quite the opposite, he urged respect for constitutional rights, which guarantee freedom of action to all socio-political organizations, even those in outright opposition to the League of Communists, so long as they are not anti-Socialist, chauvinistic, or warinstigating...

...What is amusing is that the Yugoslav government is trying to convince the world it is leading the country into a Djilasism without Djilas...

...Until there is respect for the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, which Yugoslavia has signed, and for the Yugoslav Constitution, until there is a genuine basis for the existence of a Democratic Socialist opposition that is beyond any control by the League of Communists -until then all talk about Socialist democracy, Yugoslav self-management, Djilasism without Djilas, is nothing but a bluff...

...For that very reason, regardless of how hard the Yugoslav League of Communists tries to move toward liberalism in its economic, cultural, and religious plans-there is not, and there can never be, Djilasism while Djilas is in prison, while we who are active ideological antagonists of any one-party system whatsoever (and there are more and more of us every day) are deprived of the opportunity to engage legally in organized political activity...

...The straggle for a free world is not being waged in Vietnam, but in Yugoslavia...

...At this historical moment in Yugoslavia there is oppression...

...Why can, let us say, a Sartre or Bertrand Russell participate actively and usefully in the political life of his country, while we in the Socialist lands must continually deny that our activities have a political resonance...

...The Challenge in Belgrade - Two Articles Djilas and Yugoslavia Today By Mihajlo Mihajlov The best evidence of a genuine love of freedom in any land is the condition of the groups that find themselves in the minority...

...This is obviously an illusion...

...That is, so long as one does not touch on Djilas...

...This Congress changed nothing, said nothing new...

...Will your children be the prisoners of a totalitarian society and potential schizophrenics, or free and healthy people in a democratic community...

...We want Yugoslav law, the Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights to be obeyed...

...On the fate of Djilas, to which is tied the fate of democratic Socialism, hangs the fate of the Western world, your fate, the fate of your children...

...Theodore Roosevelt, 1910 Zadar Milovan Djilas...

...To draw an accurate picture of the life of the people, they will have to understand the schizophrenia of the social organism in a totalitarian system: the separation between the true life, thoughts, feelings, and that pseudo-life which dares to show itself in public...

...Gone is the time when we considered it wholly normal that only Communists had the right to engage in political action...

...And everyone recognizes now that it is precisely the League of Communists that violates the Constitution when it tries to keep its unnatural monopoly on the socio-political life of the land...

...Political democracy has been and, yes, always will be the basis for every other kind of democracy...

...Yugoslav society is ready for democracy and does not want anyone, in any central committee, in any single party, to decide what people may or may not know about the world, about life and political events...

...Nowhere in the Yugoslav Constitution is the goal of Socialism identified with the maintenance of a one-party system...

...The Djilas issue, therefore, does not simply involve the question of an innocent man who has been imprisoned...

...Every event in the political, cultural, or economic life of Yugoslavia is usually accompanied with the comment: "Djilas had said that...

...In the Socialist world today no one can deceive himself anymore about the so-called pacification of the country, the reorganization of the parties into a "selfmanaging" or "multi-national" society where there are allegedly no political groups...

...What does that name mean to the youth of Yugoslavia, the generation that is 30 or 40 years old, the generation that will soon be determining the destiny of the land in which it lives...

...Yet the fact is that the community was deeply interested in the Djilas trials when they were held...

...Djilasism means, first of all, a genuine respect for the Constitution, which allows free, organized, sociopolitical activity to those who, even though they may be deeply Socialistic in orientation, do not support the ideological positions of the League of Communists...

...What does that name mean to us in Yugoslavia...

...What do the young Communists know about him...

...In his homeland, as in all the parts of the world where the Socialist system rules, for some 15 years now not a single newspaper, magazine, or book has mentioned him, nor a single public lecturer or radio commentator...

...And now it is time to say openly that the question of political freedom is most important and most essential to us in the Socialist world, and that the time is past when we will deny that we have any kind of relationship to political activity...

...Without a free, democratic Russia, humanity will not be able to defend itself against Asian Communist totalitarianism...

...What do the intellectuals and the common people of our land think of him...

...In Yugoslavia, by far the most democratic of all the so-called Socialist countries, where it is possible to speak and write about Socialism, the USSR, Marx, and Stalinism with incomparably greater freedom than in any "people's democracy"-there exists a very painful, neuralgic spot that is dangerous to touch: Djilas and "Djilasism...

...In the histories of the struggle for national freedom, in the annals of the post-war period, of the heroic year 1948-not a word is said about the existence of this man who for years had been one of the legendary Partisan leaders...

...Is it true that the fate of this man, who is still confined to a cell at the infamous Yugoslav prison in Sremska Mitrovica, has become irrelevant to the life of the country...

...For experience shows that progress in the Socialist lands, including the USSR, goes straight down the Yugoslav road...

...Yugoslavs fully understand what Djilas opposed, and the controversy for and against him is conducted along the line that divides democratic from one-party totalitarian Socialism...

...That is what Milovan Djilas had wanted and that is what his name means to us today...

...The youth of Yugoslavia also knows that Djilas has more than once been tried and convicted in a proceeding that was closed to the public, and that during the last such session a brief notice appeared in the Yugoslav press to the effect that the former Vice President had been convicted...

...It is time that we began to talk openly about the phenomenon of Djilas and the means for achieving liquidation of the oneparty system...