No single commentator provided as much ammunition to conservative and liberal critics of communism than the Yugoslav dissident and author Milovan Djilas, one-time vice-president of Yugoslavia and author of the celebrated The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (1957). Yet the great paradox is that this most trenchant and vociferous critic of the system built by Stalin never renounced his ideology, dying an unrepentant Marxist idealist in 1995. It was not the god that had failed so much as the human institutions devised in its name.
June 4 marked the centenary of the birth of Djilas. Even more than half a century after its publication, his best-known work still reverberates and is still quoted, even though the system it picks apart with such surgical dexterity has itself been transformed. Djilas’s depiction of a powerful bureaucratic elite ostensibly dedicated to serving the people but in fact growing ever more remote and self-serving continues to have relevance in contemporary political discourse.
Of course, like Djilas himself, the very concept of a “new class” in a supposedly classless society is a paradox. An intellectual and a writer first (translator, for example, of Milton’s Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian), Djilas never wavered from the view that a country could be democratic as well as socialist, and that totalitarian conformity was not only unnecessary but also a perversion of communism. Despite his scornful accounts of Soviet and Yugoslav communism and those who defended its orthodoxy, Djilas just as adamantly rejected any identification with “bourgeois capitalism,” unlike many former fellow travellers.
Djilas made clear in the preface to The New Class that his argument was with “the reality of contemporary Communism” and not with the idea itself, and he continued to uphold “the ideas of equality and brotherhood among men… [as] principles to which fighters for progress and freedom will always aspire.”
There were people, like himself, who sought to reform the system, but those enjoying the benefits conferred by holding power fiercely resisted not just attempts at reform but any criticism, all of which made it impossible to be a man and a capital-c Communist (although he continued to self-identify as one, albeit not a party member). He once wrote: “The terrible thing is that one cannot be a Communist and not let oneself in for the shameful act of recantation. One cannot be a Communist and preserve an iota of one’s personal integrity.”
His fall from grace took place in 1954, the year after Stalin died, when as vice-president he wrote an article in a party journal complaining that many high military and state officials had transformed themselves into a new class and had received benefits along with houses in the best parts of Belgrade. He was imprisoned after criticising the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and it was in prison that he wrote The New Class.
Djilas served just over four years and on release published what he regarded as his best work, Conversations with Stalin (1961), detailing his three meetings with the Soviet dictator during and after the war when he was sent to Moscow to negotiate Yugoslavia’s growing differences with the Soviet rulers. It remains to this day a most perceptive insight into the way Stalin and his inner circle operated. It cost him another prison sentence.
And again there is paradox. Every crime was possible for Stalin, he wrote “and to him will fall the glory of being the greatest criminal in history.” But Djilas still can write of “a human, sentimental fondness” for Stalin, expressing a stab of sadness at how Stalin had aged (“a little old grandfather... who looked after the success and happiness of the whole Communist race”) in 1948 just three years after their first meeting and how personally aggrieved he was when Stalin did not invite him to dinner on his last meeting as he had done previously.
I met Djilas, then almost seventy, in Belgrade, not long after Tito died in 1980. The weight of a hard life – imprisoned and tortured first under the Yugoslav royalist regime for his communist activities and then under Tito for alleged anti-communist activities – bore heavily on him, a resigned world-weariness evident in every gesture and inflexion. The eyes were heavy-lidded, the carefully chosen words laced with wry irony as he sat, wearing threadbare slippers, in a dark, book-lined room. The smell of the pungent Turkish cigarettes he favoured – his only vice, he quipped – hung in the air.
The world was entering a decade of turbulent change, he said. The United States had been weakened and humiliated over first Vietnam and then Iran, and the prospect of a hardline Republican presidency would dramatically reshape East–West relations. The Soviet Union was in a state of paralysis, and once Brezhnev was gone, it too would undergo change, but of what sort it was hard to predict. He had come to the view, presciently as it turned out, that the Soviet system was in terminal decay.
I asked him what his feelings were now towards Tito – the former comrade-in-arms whose likely successor he was thought to be – who had stripped him of his office and imprisoned him.
“Tito was Tito,” he said after a pause. “He built a system that served him and served him well: he was a survivor. But the system won’t survive now Tito is gone. And I don’t think Yugoslavia will either.”
Djilas was right again. But nobody was listening at home where he had become a non-person. He lived long enough to see what he predicted come to pass – his cherished ideas of equality and brotherhood as far away as ever, both at home and abroad. •
