Appointment with Destiny
MIHAJLOV, MIHAJLO
A Dissident's Tale Appointment with Destiny By Mihajlo Mihajlov Belgrade This is how it all started. In June 1964, under a cultural exchange program between Yugoslavia and the...
...Three of the articles cited appeared in The New Leader—"Letterio a Friend in the West" (September 17, 1973), "Rumanianization" (January 21,1974) and "The Mihajlovich Tragedy" (February 3,1975...
...The next morning I was found guilty on both counts and given a ninemonth sentence, but I was released pending the outcome of an appeal...
...He was regarded as the man who had broken the Kremlin's total control of the Communist bloc, and his involvement in the formation of the Movement of Nonaligned Countries further burnished his image in the West...
...And, as in Djilas' case, it was largely The New Leader that first put me in the Western spotlight...
...During the '70s and early '80s, more than 40 were killed in West Germany...
...An unbelievable clamor soon arose...
...With his NL article, "The Storm in Eastern Europe" (November 19, 1956), which brought about his imprisonment, and with his book The New Class (already out of his hands when he was arrested), Djilas set the pattern for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and practically all the rest of the dissidents in the USSR and Eastern Europe...
...Encouraged by the new climate, a group of friends and intellectuals from Zadar, Zagreb, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Ljubljana, etc., tried in August to put together an independent magazine...
...What I needed was political protection in the form of public exposure...
...By contrast, when I traveled to various conferences in Europe, I was followed by men who were indisputably UDBA agents...
...This was excellent political protection...
...But I was extremely careful never to go anywhere alone...
...Their best option was to target prominent émigré publishers, editors andjournalists...
...The UDBA would not kill someone whom the FBI had said it knows is on a Yugoslav hit list, especially if this became widely publicized...
...Nobel Prize winner Sakharov nominated me for the prize in 1975...
...At the time, I was an assistant professor of modern Russian and contemporary Soviet literature at a branch of Zagreb University in the Adriatic coastal city of Zadar...
...Apparently he now felt that for the sake of balance the pendulum had to swing toward the Kremlin...
...I had "slandered" the "brotherly Soviet Union," he said, and was guilty of "a new form of Djilasism...
...I frequently appear on television and give numerous interviews to the media of all the countries of the former Yugoslavia...
...This was my introduction to Djilas and his mischievous humor...
...We have to talk...
...Shortly after CADDY was formed, two FBI agents came to my sister's home in Arlington, Virginia, where I was living...
...Meanwhile, in June the International pen association was scheduled to hold its annual congress at Lake Bled in Slovenia, marking the first time it would be meeting in a Communist country...
...My lawyer and friend Jovan Barovic drove me from Sremska Mitrovica to my mother's apartment in Novi Sad (my father had died in 1968...
...In June 1964, under a cultural exchange program between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, I went to Moscow and Leningrad for five weeks and a professor from Moscow University came to Belgrade...
...In Part III of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn argues with me that the camps were formed even earlier, in 1918...
...When I immediately resumed my dissident activities, the authorities realized that whatever I said or wrote would be less damaging if I were outside the country and let me go to the West...
...The reason for such actions was hardly a mystery...
...In- . terestingly, too, as an example of my "slandering" the prosecutor cited my writing that the Soviet concentration camps were set up even in Lenin's time in 1921...
...On March 4, when Tito's speech appeared in every Yugoslav newspaper, I was arrested at my office in Zadar...
...It soon became evident that to maintain his balancing act he would have to arrest "proWesterners...
...He was helpful in the formation of what for me was an extremely important endeavor: the establishment in the fall of 1979— within the framework of Democracy International at Freedom House—of the Committee to Aid Democratic Dissidents in Yugoslavia (CADDY...
...My first NL article, "Why We Are Silent" (August 30, 1965), was translated into many languages...
...Nevertheless, "Moscow Summer" was accepted for publication by Delo, a respected Belgrade literary monthly...
...THE FOLLOWING YEAR, Aleksandar Rankovic, the longtime chief of Yugoslavia's secret police, fell from power...
...I telephoned Myron and told him of my predicament...
...Thus did my life as a dissident begin—a life in which The New Leader and its executive editor would play a crucial role...
...Tito then enjoyed the U.S.' full support...
...Of course, he was not allowed to see me—and Tito, enraged by a U.S...
...In fact, during my stay in the United States I never noticed anything suspicious...
...Vice Presidential candidate showing an interest in human rights in Yugoslavia, refused to meet with him...
...I refused the offer, knowing that the UDBA's "liquidators" would not phone me to arrange a duel but would shoot me in the back somewhere in a parking lot or on a dark street...
...That summer, his last as the USSR's Party chief, Nikita S. Khrushchev's liberalization reached its peak...
...The regime evidently was worried that my case would be discussed, so at the end ofNovember I was released...
...It should perhaps be emphasized that Tito himself, during his struggle with Stalin, had spoken more harshly about the Soviet Union than I had...
...In the West, mostly in Western Europe, there were more than a million Yugoslav guest workers whose income provided a third of the Yugoslav state budget...
...Part III, June 7,1965...
...All they could do was give me a list of telephone numbers to call if I noticed something suspicious, and offer me a "Federal" gun permit...
...But after the February issue came out the Soviet ambassador (his name, I remember, was Aleksandr Puzanov) visited President Tito and lodged an official protest against my series...
...In the spring of 1974, the political atmosphere in Yugoslavia, and unaccountably my destiny, suddenly changed again...
...moreover, I praised Khrushchev's liberal reforms in my report...
...Having been unlawfully ousted from my job at the university, I initiated court proceedings to regain it...
...The Senator spent the evening in Barovic's home before returning to the United States...
...Before coming to Belgrade, I once more returned to Moscow, where it all started in the summer of 1964, to teach as a visiting professor...
...Over the next several years the book was translated into more than 10 European and Asian languages...
...I was convicted, and in this instance received a seven-year sentence...
...Tito, the lifelong president and general secretary of the Yugoslav League of Communists (as the Party was called following his 1948 clash with Stalin), had cleverly been steering a middle course between East and West...
...From that day to his death on April 24, 1995 we were friends and had endless, sometimes heated, talks...
...Published for 10 years, the bulletin was praised as the best source of information about human rights in Tito's Yugoslavia...
...Then the NL published "The Trial of Mihajlo Mihajlov" (January 19,1976)— a detailed "transcript" constructed from notes of an observer sent by the International League for the Rights of Man...
...They told me they had solid information that the Yugoslav Secret Service (UDBA) was planning my liquidation...
...At the moment of my arrest I did not really know what "Djilasism" was...
...The secret police could not control a million guest workers...
...Serbian National Television has aired an excellent hourlong film about me in prime time...
...For the past five years I have been living in Belgrade...
...The French PEN awarded me an honorary membership...
...But I did not actually meet Milovan Djilas until my release in March 1970 from Sremska Mitrovica prison, where I had the same cell he was placed in earlier (it was probably bugged better than the others...
...When the door opened, instead of my mother I was greeted by a tall, gray-haired man, who said to me, "Mr...
...On March 24,1980, the Times published a long article describing the life of émigrés in Washington...
...So his attacking me for "Moscow Summer" was bound to raise eyebrows there...
...Tito, angered by a conclave of "Stalinists" held in Montenegro's port city of Bar, launched a campaign to sweep them up...
...CADDY'S primary activity was the publication in English of a monthly bulletin, edited by Rusko Matulic, a CroatianAmerican originally from Split...
...In the U.S., assassinations of this sort were relatively uncommon, although in Chicago the editor of the weekly Sloboda (Liberty) was killed, and two months later so was his heir...
...I stayed alive thanks to The New Leader and the Times...
...Later, for good measure, my citizenship was revoked, giving me the dubious distinction of being the only Yugoslav dissident whose citizenship was taken away...
...It was scheduled to appear in three installments—January, February and March 1965...
...Times are still radically changing...
...I was two and a half months short of the stipulation...
...It mentioned their talking about how the "FBI warned Mihajlov that Tito's police are preparing his assassination...
...Because Tito accused me of slandering the Soviet Union, my arrest provoked interest throughout the world...
...The day I frnishedit,Octoberl3, something unforeseen happened that would completely alter my existence: Khrushchev was removed from power and the triumvirate replacing him—Leonid I. Brezhnev, Aleksei N. Kosygin and Nikolai V Podgorny—immediately initiated a re-Stalinization...
...Concern about my personal destiny made me quickly learn about the father of the dissident movement in the Communist world...
...The Western press started writing that he was moving further away from the East...
...That alone would inhibit the UDBA...
...He went to Abe Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the New York Times, and related the whole story...
...If not for the December 1977 followup Helsinki Accords conference scheduled to be held in Belgrade, though, I probably would have served all seven years...
...They included such well-known figures as Leonid Leonov and Uya Ehrenburg, and poets popular in Russia but little known in the West, like Bulat Okudzhava, whose songs I taped...
...On April 29, 1965,1 was tried in the Zadar District Court for "damaging the reputation of a foreign state" and for violating the Press Law by mailing a manuscript to a Rome publisher after De/o was banned...
...The February issue was banned and confiscated...
...I also started writing numerous articles for The New Leader, and some for the New York Times and the New York Review of Books...
...To begin with, it prominently presented an English translation of "Moscow Summer" (Parts I and II, March 29, 1965...
...It also arranged for the prestigious publishing house of Farrar Straus Giroux to issue a hardcover Moscow Summer, with a Foreword by Myron Kolatch and an Introduction by Andrew Field...
...Once more I found myself in Sremska Mitrovica...
...It was printed and distributed to a thousand relevant individuals throughout the world by the AFL-CIO...
...Mihajlov, I am from the police...
...I also recorded a large number of songs that were sung by the prisoners in Stalin's concentration camps that had been adopted by Moscow's students...
...An arrest warrant was issued, to prevent my returning...
...In my case, for the better...
...Djilas and Franjo Tudjman, who was not yet a fanatical nationalist, were named cochairmen...
...I had never been a member of the Communist League, my work generally kept me focused on Russian and Soviet literature, and I was 23 years younger than Djilas...
...I remember strolling down the streets of Belgrade with Djilas and Barovic and discussing which of us would be arrested...
...Taking everything into consideration, I knew that no physical protection would save me...
...Finally, only I was tried, convicted and sentenced to three and a half years of hard labor, which I served to the last day...
...Since Russian was my first language (my parents both immigrated to Yugoslavia as children in 1920, after the Russian Civil War),andsincelhad written for years in the Yugoslav press about Soviet literature, it was not difficult for me to meet in Moscow with a great number of writers...
...Upon my return to Yugoslavia, I spent the month of August at my parents' house in Novi Sad, where I wrote a literary report titled "Moscow Summer 1964...
...In the fall of 1976, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, the Republican candidate for Vice President, arrived in Yugoslavia with the intention of visiting me at Sremska Mitrovica prison...
...I left on May 25,1978, and arrived in Washington, where my sister and mother now lived, on June 4. Right after my departure the District Court in Belgrade called a press conference to inform foreign correspondents that criminal charges had been lodged against me...
...I naturally continued to write for the NL, and whenever I was in New York I met with Myron...
...The FBI could not provide me with protection, they explained, because I did not have diplomatic status...
...On October 7,1974,1 was the one arrested...
...It was restored under public pressure during the Milosevic regime...
...Barovic had been dubbed the "human rights advocate" when he started to come out of political trials and speak freely to the foreign press about them...
...Before my incarceration, I wrote an article for the NL on "Djilas and Yugoslavia Today" (July 4,1966...
...Oddly, the Soviet KGB at that time killed far fewer political enemies in the West than Tito's UDBA...
...For he attacked me by name in a speech at the annual conference of public prosecutors...
...I did not take the FBI warning lightly, because the UDBA had recently killed a number of political émigrés, notably in Western Europe...
...Djilas and I were openly writing for Western newspapers and magazines, and giving numerous interviews...
...It seemed that a wave of liberalization was gathering momentum in the country...
...In the New York Times and in Le Monde in France, Djilas wrote longpieces supporting me...
...One of the liquidators was Zeljko Raznatovic, better known as the infamous Arkan, organizer and leader of paramilitary operations in Croatia and Bosnia in the Milosevic era...
...On February 25,1975, a day after Tito again attacked me in a speech, I went on trial in Novi Sad for disseminating "hostile propaganda...
...Once in the U.S...
...I was chosen as chairman...
...Had I been charged with slandering Yugoslavia, few if any in the West would have lifted a finger on my behalf...
...Though this was theoretically permissible under Yugoslav law, we were all arrested and spent varying amounts of time in jail...
...For Tito's regime, the problem was that these workers could freely read the émigré anti-Communist press and write home about it, thereby undermining the country's severe censorship...
...But Arthur Miller, then International pen's president, warned it would not come to Yugoslavia if my sentence was upheld...
...On June 23, the Supreme Court of Croatia suspended my sentence and placed me on probation for two years...
...Like all my arrests, this violated Yugoslav law, which said no pardon could be granted prior to the completion of at least half of a sentence...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
