Conversations with Stalin (24 page)

Tito-Šubašić Agreement,
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Tobruk,
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Todorović, Mijalko,
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Town of Okurov, The
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Tsankov, Aleksandr,
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Tunis,
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Turkey,
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Ukraine,
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Uman,
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Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
see
Soviet Government; Soviet Union

United Nations,
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Užice,
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Vasilevsky, Aleksandr Mikhailovich,
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Vatutin, Nilolai F.,
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Vis,
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Vishinsky, Andrei Y.,
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Vlahović, Veljko,
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Western Europe,
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World War I,
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Xoxe, Koči,
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Young Guard
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Yugoslav Air Force,
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Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Brigade,
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Yugoslav Army,
see
Army of People's Liberation and Partisan Units

Yugoslavia,
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Yugoslavian Communist Party émigrés,
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M
ILOVAN
D
JILAS
was free on parole for fifteen months following his imprisonment for more than four years on charges of “slandering” and writing opinions “hostile to the people and the state of Yugoslavia.” He was, up to the time of his expulsion from the Communist Central Committee in January of 1954, one of the four chiefs of the Yugoslav Government, at times a Minister, head of the Parliament, and Vice-President.

Djilas was born in 1911 in Montenegro, the fateful land he describes poetically in the autobiography of his youth,
Land Without Justice
. At the age of eighteen he went to Belgrade to the University and won early recognition for his poetry and short stories—and notoriety as a revolutionary. He joined the illegal Communist Party in 1932 and was subsequently arrested by the Royal government, tortured, and imprisoned for three years. By the time he was twenty-seven he was a member of the Central Committee of the Party, and in 1940 a member of its Politburo.

Following the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, Djilas became a Partisan leader. In 1944, as a Partisan General he headed a Military Mission to Moscow; the following year, as a Minister in the postwar Tito government, he went again to Moscow to hold talks with Stalin, Molotov, and other Russian leaders. In 1947 he took part in the formation of the Cominform, which had its headquarters, at Stalin's insistence, in Belgrade. In 1948 he once again headed a Yugoslav delegation to Moscow in a futile attempt to stave off the break between the two Communist states that occurred later in the same year.

Ideological disagreements between the Party leadership and Milovan Djilas arose in Yugoslavia beginning in 1959. He wrote articles critical of the bureaucracy he was later to call “the new class,” and in January of 1954 he was expelled from the Central Committee. During this period he devoted himself to the writing of
The New Class
, which was to become known the world over for its analysis of Communist oligarchy, and
Land Without Justice
. The year following his break with the Party, 1955, found Djilas being tried and sentenced (a sentence of three years was passed but suspended) for “hostile propaganda” arising from an interview he gave
The New York Times
. After the uprising in Hungary, Djilas criticized the Yugoslav Government's position toward the brutal Soviet action and was, as a result, sentenced to three years in prison. The manuscripts of his two books were, shortly before he was arrested, sent out of Yugoslavia, and the publication of
The New Class
caused him to be brought from prison and, following a third trial, given a further sentence of seven years.

Djilas was conditionally released from Sremska Mitrovica—the very same prison where he had, ironically, suffered as a Communist rebel at the hands of the prewar Royal government—in January of 1961. While in confinement he wrote steadily and completed three books: A massive and scholarly biography of the great Montenegrin prince-poet-priest Njegoš; an historical and fictional account of Montenegro during the First World War; and sixteen short stories (or tales).
Conversations with Stalin
(in Serbian
Susreti sa Staljinom)
was written during the short period he was free. In 1962 Djilas was rearrested in connection with the publication of
Conversations with Stalin;
tried, convicted, and given a five-year sentence. He was released at the end of 1966.

Writing both in prison and out, Milovan Djilas has produced several important and popular critical studies of communism, as well as short stories, novels, and four volumes of memoirs:
Land Without Justice, Memoir of a Revolutionary, Wartime
, and
Rise and Fall
. He now resides in Belgrade.