Conversations with Stalin (2 page)

Among us Communists there were men with a developed aesthetic sense and a considerable acquaintance with literature and philosophy, and yet we waxed enthusiastic not only over Stalin's views but also over the “perfection” of their formulation. I myself referred many times in discussions to the crystal clarity of his style, the penetration of his logic, and the harmony of his commentaries, as though they were expressions of the most exalted wisdom. But it would not have been difficult for me, even then, to detect in any other author of the same qualities that his style was colorless, meager, and an unblended jumble of vulgar journalism and the Bible. Sometimes the idolatry acquired ridiculous proportions: we seriously believed that the war would end in 1942, because Stalin said so, and when this failed to happen, the prophecy was forgotten—and the prophet lost none of his superhuman power. In actual fact, what happened to the Yugoslav Communists is what has happened to all throughout the long history of man who have ever subordinated their individual fate and the fate of mankind exclusively to one idea: unconsciously they described the Soviet Union and Stalin in terms required by their own struggle and its justification.

The Yugoslav Military Mission went to Moscow, accordingly, with idealized images of the Soviet Government and the Soviet Union on the one hand and with their own practical needs on the other. Superficially it resembled the mission that had been sent to the British, but in composition and conception it in fact marked an informal nexus with a political leadership of identical views and aims. More simply: the Mission had to have both a military and a Party character.

Thus it was no accident that, in company with General Velimir Terzić, Tito assigned me to the Mission in my role as a high Party functionary. (I had by then been a member of the innermost Party leadership for several years.) The other members of the Mission were similarly selected as Party or military functionaries, and among them was one financial expert. The Mission also included the atomic physicist Pavle Savić, with the aim of having him pursue his scientific work in Moscow. We also had with us Antun Augustinčić, a sculptor, who was given a respite from the rigors of the war so that he might pursue his art All of us, to be sure, were in uniform. I had the rank of general. I believe that my selection was based in part on the fact that I knew Russian well—I had learned it in prison during the years before the war—and in part because I had never been to the Soviet Union before and thus was not burdened with any factional or deviationist past. Neither had the other members of the Mission ever been to the Soviet Union, but none of them had a good command of Russian.

It was the beginning of March 1944.

Several days were spent in assembling the members of the Mission and their gear. Our uniforms were old and motley, and since cloth was lacking, new ones had to be made from the uniforms of captured Italian officers. We also had to have passports in order to cross British and American territories, and so they were hastily printed. These were the first passports of the new Yugoslav state and bore Tito's personal signature.

The proposal arose almost spontaneously that gifts be sent to Stalin. But what kind and from where? The Supreme Command was located at the time in Drvar, in Bosnia. The immediate surroundings consisted almost entirely of gutted villages and pillaged, desolated little towns. Nevertheless a solution was found: to take Stalin one of the rifles manufactured in the Partisan factory in Užice in 1941. It was quite a job to find one. Then gifts began to come in from the villages—pouches, towels, peasant clothing and footwear. We selected the best among these—some sandals of untanned leather and other things that were just as poor and primitive. Precisely because they were of this character, we concluded that we ought to take them as tokens of popular good will.

The Mission had as an objective to arrange for Soviet help to the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. At the same time Tito charged us with gaining, either through the Soviet Government or other channels, UNRRA aid for the liberated areas of Yugoslavia. We were to ask the Soviet Government for a loan of two hundred thousand dollars to cover the expenses of our missions in the West. Tito emphasized that we declare that we would repay the sum as well as the aid in arms and medicine when the country was liberated. The Mission had to take with it the archives of the Supreme Command and of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Most important of all, it had to sound out the Soviet Government on the possibility of their recognizing the National Committee as the provisional legal government and of having the Soviets influence the Western Allies in this direction. The Mission was to maintain communications with the Supreme Command through the Soviet Mission, and it could also make use of the old channel of the Comintern.

Besides these tasks of the Mission, Tito charged me at our leave-taking to find out from Dimitrov, or from Stalin if I could get to him, whether there was any dissatisfaction with the work of our Party. This command of Tito's was purely formal—to call attention to our disciplined relations with Moscow—for he was utterly convinced that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had brilliantly passed the test, and uniquely so. There was also some discussion about the Yugoslav Party émigrés (Communists who had gone to Russia before the war). Tito's attitude was that we were not to become involved in mutual recriminations with these émigrés, especially if they had anything to do with Soviet agencies and officials. At the same time Tito emphasized that I ought to beware of secretaries, for there were all kinds, which I understood to mean that we were not only to guard an already traditional Party morality, but that we were to avoid anything that might endanger the reputation and distinction of the Yugoslav Party and of Yugoslav Communists.

My entire being quivered from the joyous anticipation of an imminent encounter with the Soviet Union, the land that was the first in history—I believed, with a belief more adamant than stone—to give meaning to the dream of visionaries, the resolve of warriors, and the suffering of martyrs, for I too had languished and suffered torture in prisons, I too had hated, I too had shed human blood, not sparing even that of my own brothers.

But there was also sorrow—at leaving my comrades in the midst of the battle and my country in a death struggle, one vast battlefield and smoldering ruin.

My parting with the Soviet Mission was more cordial than my encounters with it usually were. I embraced my comrades, who were as moved as I was, and set out for the improvised airfield near Bosanski Petrovac. We spent the whole day there inspecting the airfield and conversing with its staff, which already had the air and habits of a regular and established service, and with the peasants, who had already grown accustomed to the new regime and to the inevitability of its victory.

Recently British planes had been landing here regularly at night, but not in great numbers—at most, two or three in the course of a single night. They transported the wounded and occasional travelers and brought supplies, most frequently medicines. One plane had even brought a jeep not long before—a gift from the British Command to Tito. It was at this same airfield, a month earlier, at high noon, that the Soviet Military Mission had landed in a plane on skis. In view of the terrain and other circumstances, this was a real feat. It was also quite an unusual parade, in view of the rather sizable escort of British fighter planes.

I regarded the descent and subsequent take-off of my plane too as quite a feat: the plane had to fly low over jagged rocks in order to come in for a landing on the narrow and uneven ice and, then, take off again.

How sorrowful and sunken in darkness was my land! The mountains were pale with snow and gashed with black crevices, while the valleys were devoured by the gloom, not a glimmer of light to the very sea and across. Below there was war, more terrible than any before, and on a soil that was used to the tread and breath of war and rebellion. A people was at grips with the invader, while brothers slaughtered one another in even more bitter warfare. When would the lamps light up the villages and towns of my land again? Would it find joy and tranquillity after all this hatred and death?

Our first stop was Bari, in Italy, where there was a sizable base of Yugoslav Partisans—hospitals and warehouses, food and equipment. From there we flew toward Tunis. We had to travel circuitously because of the German bases on Crete and in Greece. We stopped in Malta on the way, as guests of the British Commander, and arrived in Tobruk for the night just in time to see the whole sky licked by a murky fire which rose from the ruddy rocky desert below.

The next day we arrived in Cairo. The British lodged us discreetly in a hotel and placed a car at our disposal. The merchants and the help took us for Russians because ef the five-pointed stars on our caps, but it was pleasant to learn, as soon as we fleetingly mentioned that we were Yugoslav or spoke Tito's name, that they knew of our struggle. In one shop we were also greeted in our tongue with profanity, which the salesgirl had innocently learned from émigré officers. A group of these same officers, carried away by the longing to fight and homesickness for their suffering land, declared themselves for Tito.

Upon learning that the chief of UNRRA, Lehman, was in Cairo, I requested the Soviet Minister to take me to him that I might present him with our requests. The American received me without delay, but coldly, declaring that our requests would be taken into consideration at the following meeting of UNRRA and that UNRRA dealt only with legal governments as a matter of principle.

My primitive and catechismal conception of Western capitalism as the irreconcilable enemy of all progress and of the small and oppressed found justification even in my first encounter with its representatives: I noted that Mr. Lehman received us lying down, for he had his leg in a cast and was obviously troubled by this and the heat, which I mistook for annoyance at our visit, while his Russian interpreter—a hairy giant of a man with crude features—was for me the very image of a badman from a cowboy movie. Yet I had no reason to be dissatisfied with this visit to the obliging Lehman; our request was submitted and we were promised that it would be considered.

We took advantage of our three-day sojourn in Cairo to see the historic sights, and because the first chief of the British Mission in Yugoslavia, Major Deakin, was staying in Cairo, we were also his guests at an intimate dinner.

From Cairo we went to the British base at Habbaniya, near Baghdad. The British Command refused to drive us to Baghdad on the grounds that it was not quite safe, which we took for concealment of a colonial terrorism we thought to be no less drastic than the German occupation of our country. Instead of this, the British invited us to a sports event put on by their soldiers. We went, and had seats next to the Commander. We looked funny even to ourselves, let alone to the polite and easygoing English, trussed up as we were in belts and buttoned up to the Adam's apple.

We were accompanied by a major, a merry and goodhearted old fellow who kept apologizing for his poor knowledge of Russian—he had learned it at the time the British intervened at Archangel during the Russian Revolution. He was enthusiastic about the Russians (their delegations too had stopped at Habbaniya), not about their social system but about their simplicity and, above all, their ability to down huge glasses of vodka or whisky at one gulp “for Stalin, for Churchill!”

The Major spoke calmly, but not without pride, of battles with natives incited by German agents, and indeed, the hangars were riddled with bullets. In our doctrinaire way we could not understand how it was possible, much less rational, to sacrifice oneself “for imperialism”—for so we regarded the West's struggle—but to ourselves we marveled at the heroism and boldness of the British, who had ventured forth and triumphed in distant and torrid Asian deserts, so few in numbers and without hope of assistance. Though I was not capable at the time of deriving broad conclusions from this, it certainly contributed to my later realization that there did not exist a single ideal only, but that there were on our globe countless co-ordinate human systems.

We were suspicious of the British and held ourselves aloof from them. Our fears were made especially great because of our primitive notions about their espionage—the Intelligence Service. Our attitudes were a mixture of doctrinaire clichés, the influence of sensational literature, and the malaise of greenhorns in the great wide world.

Certainly these fears would not have been as great had it not been for those sacks filled with the archives of the Supreme Command, for they contained also telegrams between ourselves and the Comintern. We found it suspicious too that everywhere the British military authorities had shown no more interest in these sacks than if they had contained shoes or cans. To be sure, I kept them at my side throughout the trip, and to avoid being alone at night, Marko slept with me. He was a prewar Communist from Montenegro, simple but all the more brave and loyal for that.

It happened in Habbaniya one night that someone silently opened the door of my room. I was aroused even though the door did not creak. I spied the form of a native in the light of the moon, and, getting enmeshed in the mosquito net, I let out a shout and grabbed the revolver under my pillow. Marko sprang up (he slept fully clothed), but the stranger vanished. Most probably the native had lost his way or intended to steal something. But his insignificant appearance was sufficient to make us see the long arm of the British espionage in this, and we increased our already taut vigilance. We were very glad when, the next day, the British placed at our disposal a plane for Teheran.

The Teheran through which we moved about, from the Soviet Command to the Soviet Embassy, was already a piece of the Soviet Union. Soviet officers met us with an easy cordiality in which traditional Russian hospitality was mixed in equal measure with the solidarity of fighters for the same ideal in two different parts of the world. In the Soviet Embassy we were shown the round table at which the Teheran Conference had been seated, and also the upstairs room in which Roosevelt had stayed. There was nobody there now and all was as he had left it.