Milovan Djilas - Conversations with Stalin

By the time of its first English publication in 1962, the author of Conversations with Stalin was already famous, both inside and outside his own country. Milovan Djilas had for many years been a close confidant of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party, as well as a senior Party figure in his own right. During the Second World War, Djilas commanded a communist partisan unit, eventually receiving the title of general. After the war, he helped found the postwar communist regime in Yugoslavia. And then, in 1957, he wrote a book: The New Class.

In The New Class, Djilas, once an orthodox communist, argued that communism was a sham. Instead of creating a workers paradise, the leaders of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet bloc states had conferred a whole new set of privileges upon themselves. Instead of bringing greater freedom and wealth to everybody, the Soviet and East European Communist Parties had created a corrupt system designed to advance their personal interests. The high priests of the Communist Party had, he wrote, become simultaneously policemen and owners of all the media which the human intellect can use to communicate its thoughts press, movies, radio, television, books and the like as well as of all substance that keeps a human being alive food and a roof over his head. They used their monopoly on power not to procure general prosperity but to provide themselves with elegant villas and luxury goods.

To the modern ear, the arguments Djilas made in The New Class no longer sound surprising. The Soviet Union has collapsed, and from the perspective of the present, Soviet communism seems as if it had always been doomed to fail. But in 1957, or even 1962, that was not the case. The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe had survived the Hungarian revolution of 1956, and seemed more stable than ever. Soviet influence appeared to be expanding to Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Pro-Soviet Communist Parties in Western Europe, most notably Italy and France, still had enormous popular support. Marxism was not then an obscure and forgotten philosophy, but a viable alternative political system which was hotly debated in London, Paris and New York as well as in Moscow and Belgrade.

In this context, The New Class won Djilas tremendous praise. It also caused enormous shock and outrage. Although these arguments were not entirely original George Orwells Animal Farm, featuring revolutionary pigs who learn to walk on two legs like humans had been published in 1945 Djilass description of elite corruption had extra credibility because Djilas himself had spent so many years inside the Yugoslav Communist Party, and because he had a reputation for honesty and integrity. In his own country, Djilas was already a dissident. Expelled from the Party in 1954 for his critical views, he was arrested in 1955, and received an additional sentence following the publication of TheNew Class abroad.

Foreign communists were no less angry, however. Yugoslavia was considered by many at the time to be the most ideologically pure of all the East European communist regimes, and Djilass critique was correctly understood not merely as a criticism of Stalin and Stalinism, but as an attack on the most fundamental elements of the system itself. Western Marxists were horrified by his language. One British reviewer at the time wrote of Djilass degeneration and his incompetent anti-materialist approach, even while praising his astute observations. To anti-communists in the West, and to regime opponents inside Eastern Europe, Djilas became, of course, a hero.

All of this helps explain the intense interest which greeted Conversations with Stalin when it appeared a few years later. Djilas had met Stalin as a representative of the Yugoslav government on three occasions, each time speaking to him at some length and in some depth, sometimes with others and sometimes alone. He attended dinners with Stalin in the Kremlin and at the Soviet leaders dacha outside of Moscow. He met Stalins inner circle Molotov, Kalinin, Zhdanov, Beria, analysed their conversations, observed their behaviour in great detail and then dared to write these conclusions down. Upon its publication,