Conversations with Stalin (3 page)

Finally a Soviet plane took us to the Soviet Union—the realization of our dreams and our hopes. The deeper we penetrated into its gray-green expanse, the more I was gripped by a new, hitherto hardly suspected emotion. It was as though I was returning to a primeval homeland, unknown but mine.

I was always alien to any Panslavic feelings, nor did I look upon Moscow's Panslavic ideas at that time as anything but a maneuver for mobilizing conservative forces against the German invasion. But this emotion of mine was something quite different and deeper, going even beyond the limits of my adherence to Communism. I recalled dimly how for three centuries Yugoslav visionaries and fighters, statesmen and sovereigns—especially the unfortunate prince-bishops of suffering Montenegro —made pilgrimages to Russia and there sought understanding and salvation. Was I not traveling their path? And was this not the homeland of our ancestors, whom some unknown avalanche had deposited in the windswept Balkans? Russia had never understood the South Slavs and their aspirations; I was convinced that this was because Russia had been tsarist and feudal. But far more final was my faith that, at last, all the social and other reasons for disagreements between Moscow and other peoples had been removed. At that time I looked upon this as the realization of universal brotherhood. But also as my personal bond with the being of the prehistoric Slavic community. Was not this the homeland not only of my forebears but also of warriors who were dying for the final brotherhood of man and the final domination by man over things?

I became embodied in the surge of the Volga and limitless gray steppes and found my primeval self, filled with hitherto unknown inner urges. It occurred to me to kiss the Russian soil, the Soviet soil which I was treading, and I would have done it had it not seemed religious, and, moreover, theatrical.

In Baku we were met by a commanding general, a taciturn giant of a man made coarse by garrison life, war, and the service—the incarnation of a great war and a great land opposing a ravaging invasion. In his rough cordiality he was nonplused by our almost shy restraint: “What kind of people are these? They don't drink, they don't eat! We Russians eat well, drink even better, and fight best of all!”

Moscow was gloomy and somber and surprisingly full of low buildings. But what significance could this have beside the reception prepared for us? Honors according to rank and a friendliness which was purposely restrained because of the Communist character of our struggle. What could compare with the grandeur of the war that we believed would be mankind's final trial and that was our very life and our destiny? Was not all pale and meaningless beside the reality that was present precisely here, in the Soviet land, indeed, a land that was also ours and mankind's, brought forth from a nightmare into a tranquil and joyous actuality?

They billeted us in the Red Army Center, the TsDKA, a kind of hotel for Soviet officers. The food and all other features were very good. They gave us a car with a chauffeur, Panov, a man well along in years, simple, and somewhat bent, but of independent views. There was also a liaison officer, Captain Kozovsky, a young and very handsome lad who was proud of his Cossack origin, all the more so inasmuch as the Cossacks had “washed away” their counterrevolutionary past in the present war. Thanks to him we were always sure, at any time, of obtaining tickets for the theater, the cinema, or anything else.

But we were not able to make any serious contact with the leading Soviet personages, though I requested to be received by V. M. Molotov, then Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and, if possible, by J. V. Stalin, the Prime Minister and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. All my circuitous attempts to present our requests and needs were in vain.

In all this no help was to be had from the Yugoslav Embassy, which was still royalist, though Ambassador Simić and his small staff had declared themselves for Marshal Tito. Formally respected, they were in fact more insignificant and accordingly more powerless than we.

Nor could we accomplish anything through the Yugoslav Party émigrés. They were few in number—decimated by purges. The most distinguished personality among them was Veljko Vlahović. We were the same age, both revolutionaries out of the revolutionary student movement of Belgrade University against the dictatorship of King Alexander. He was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, while I was coming from an even more terrible war. He was a man of great personal integrity, highly educated and wise, though excessively disciplined and not independent in his views. He managed the radio station Free Yugoslavia, and his co-operation was valuable, but his connections did not go beyond Georgi Dimitrov, who, since the Comintern had been dissolved, shared with D. Z. Manuilsky the direction of the section of the Soviet Central Committee for foreign Communist parties. We were well fed and graciously received, but as far as the problems we had to present and to solve were concerned, we could make no headway whatsoever. To tell the truth, it must be stressed again that, except for this, we were received with extraordinary geniality and consideration. But it was not until a month following our arrival, when Stalin and Molotov received General Terzić and me and this was published in the press, that all the doors of the ponderous Soviet administration and of the rarefied heights of Soviet society were magically thrown open.

The Panslavic Committee, which had been created in the course of the war, was the first to arrange banquets and receptions for us. But one did not have to be a Communist to perceive not only the artificiality but also the hopelessness of this institution. Its activity was centered on public relations and propaganda, and even in this it was obviously limited. Besides, its aims were not very clear. The Committee was composed almost entirely of Communists from the Slavic countries—the émigrés in Moscow who were in feet alien to the idea of Panslavic reciprocity. All of them tacitly understood that it was a matter of resurrecting something long since outmoded, a transitional form meant to rally support around Communist Russia, or at least to paralyze anti-Soviet Panslavic currents.

The very leadership of the Committee was insignificant. Its President, General Gundorov, a man prematurely grown old in every respect and of limited views, was not a man one could talk to effectively even on the simplest questions of how Slavic solidarity could be achieved. The Committee's Secretary, Mochalov, was rather more authoritative simply by virtue of being closer to the Soviet security agencies—something that he concealed rather badly in his extravagant behavior. Both Gundorov and Mochalov were Red Army officers, but were among those who had proved to be unfit for the front. One could detect in them the suppressed dejection of men demoted to jobs that they did not consider their line. Only their secretary, Nazarova, a gap-toothed and excessively ingratiating woman, had anything resembling love for the suffering Slavs, though her activities too, as was later learned in Yugoslavia, were subordinated to Soviet security agencies.

In the Panslavic Committee headquarters one ate well, drank even more, and mostly just talked. Long and empty toasts were raised, not much different from one another, and certainly not as beautiful as those of tsarist times. I was truly struck by the absence of any freshness in Panslavic ideas. Such, too, was the building of the Committee—imitation baroque or something of the sort in the midst of a modern city.

The Committee was the work of a temporary, shallow, and not completely altruistic policy. However, that the reader might understand me correctly, I must add that though all of this was quite clear to me even at that time, I was far from viewing it with horror or wonderment. The fact that the Panslavic Committee was a naked instrument of the Soviet Government for influencing backward strata among the Slavs outside the Soviet Union and that its officials were dependent on and connected with both the secret and public agencies of the government—all this did not trouble me one bit. I was only disturbed by its impotence and superficiality, and above all by the fact that it could not open the way for me to the Soviet Government and to a solution of Yugoslav needs. For I too, like every other Communist, had it inculcated in me and I was convinced that there could exist no opposition between the Soviet Union and another people, especially not a revolutionary and Marxist party, as the Yugoslav Party indeed was. And though the Panslavic Committee seemed too antiquated to me, and accordingly an unsuitable instrument for a Communist end, yet I considered it acceptable, all the more so because the Soviet leadership insisted on it. As far as its officials' connections with security agencies were concerned, had I not also learned to look upon these as almost divine guardians of the revolution and of socialism—“a sword in the hands of the Party”?

The character of my insistence that I reach the summits of the Soviet Government should also be explained. Though I urged, I was neither importunate nor resentful of the Soviet Government, for I was trained to see in it something even greater than the leadership of my own Party and revolution—the leading power of Communism as a whole. I had already gathered from Tito and others that long waits—to be sure, by foreign Communists—were rather the style in Moscow. What troubled me and made me impatient was the urgency of the needs of a revolution, my own Yugoslav revolution at that.

Though nobody, not even the Yugoslav Communists, spoke of revolution, it was long since obvious that it was going on. In the West they were already writing a great deal about it. In Moscow, however, they obdurately refused to recognize it—even those who had, so to speak, every reason to do so. Everyone stubbornly talked only about the struggle against the German invaders and even more stubbornly stressed exclusively the patriotic character of that struggle, all the while conspicuously emphasizing the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the whole matter. Of course, nothing could have been further from my mind than the thought of denying the decisive role of the Soviet Party in world Communism, or of the Red Army in the war against Hitler. But on the soil of my land, and under conditions of their own, the Yugoslav Communists were obviously waging a war independent of the momentary successes and defeats of the Red Army, a war, moreover, that was at the same time converting the political and social structure of the country. Both externally and internally the Yugoslav revolution had transcended the needs and accommodations of Soviet foreign policy, and this is how I explained the obstacles and lack of understanding which I was meeting.

Strangest of all was the fact that those who should have understood this best of all submissively kept still and pretended not to understand. I had yet to learn that in Moscow the discussion and especially the determination of political positions had to wait until Stalin, or at least Molotov, had spoken. This applied even to such distinguished persons as the former secretaries of the Comintern, Manuilsky and Dimitrov.

Tito and Kardelj, as well as other Yugoslav Communists who had been to Moscow, had reported that Manuilsky was particularly well disposed toward the Yugoslavs. This may have been held against him during the purges of 1936–1937, in which almost the entire group of Yugoslav Communists had perished in the Party purge, but now, after the Yugoslav uprising against the Nazis, this could be taken for farsightedness. In any case, he injected into his enthusiasm for the Yugoslavs' struggle a certain dose of personal pride, though he knew none of the new Yugoslav leaders except, perhaps, Tito, and him only very slightly. Our meeting with him took place in the evening. Also present was G. F. Aleksandrov, the noted Soviet philosopher and, much more important, chief of the section for agitation and propaganda of the Central Committee.

Aleksandrov left no definite impression with me: Indefiniteness, or, rather, colorlessness, was his basic characteristic. He was a short, pudgy baldpate whose pallor and corpulence proclaimed that he never set foot outside his office. Except for a few conventional observations and benign smiles, he spoke not a word about the character and scope of the Yugoslav Communist uprising, though in my conversation, supposedly without design, I touched on these very points. Obviously the Central Committee had not yet determined its stand; thus, as far as Soviet propaganda was concerned, it remained simply a struggle against invaders without any real repercussions for the internal Yugoslav state or for international relations.

Nor did Manuilsky take any definite stand. Yet he exhibited a lively, emotional interest. I had already heard of his oratorical gift. One could detect this gift even in his articles, and he fairly scintillated through the polish and vividness of his expression. He was a slight and already hunched old-timer, dark-haired, with a clipped mustache. He spoke with a lisp, almost gently and—what astonished me at the time—without much energy. He was also this way in other things—considerate, affable to the point of joviality, and obviously worldly in culture.

In describing the development of the uprising in Yugoslavia, I pointed out that there was being formed in a new way a government which was in essence identical with the Soviet. I made a special point of stressing the new revolutionary role of the peasantry; I practically reduced the uprising in Yugoslavia to a tie between a peasant rebellion and the Communist avant-garde. Yet though neither he nor Aleksandrov opposed what I was saying, neither did they indicate in any way that they approved of my views. Even if I regarded it natural that Stalin's role was decisive in everything, still I expected from Manuilsky a greater independence and initiative in word and deed. I went away from my meeting with him impressed by the vitality of his personality and moved by his enthusiasm for the struggle in Yugoslavia, but also convinced that Manuilsky played no real role in the determination of Moscow's policies, not even concerning Yugoslavia.

When speaking of Stalin he attempted to camouflage extreme flattery in “scientific” and “Marxist” formulas. This manner of expression about Stalin went approximately like this: “You know, it is simply incomprehensible that a single person could have played such a decisive role in a crucial moment of the war. And that so many talents should be combined in one person—statesman, thinker, and soldier!”