Milovan Djilas

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(b. Podbivice, Montenegro, 12 June 1911; d. Belgrade, 20 Apr. 1995) Montenegrin Serb; Secretary of Central Committee of Yugoslav Communist Party heading Propaganda Department 1948 – 54 After studying literature and law at Belgrade University Djilas became a Communist in 1932 and was imprisoned until 1936 for taking part in demonstrations against King Alexander. When Tito returned to Yugoslavia to head the Communist Party in 1937 Djilas became one of his closest friends and aides, joining the Central Committee in 1938 and the Politbureau in 1940. He played a prominent role in organizing partisan forces during the War. In 1948 he was made a Secretary of the Central Committee and head of its Propaganda Department, his best-known political role. Initially he was responsible for imposing a ruthless cultural dictatorship, but after the break with Stalin in 1948 he played a major part in denouncing Stalinism, encouraging greater freedom of literary expression and creating the new ideology of "self-management". In 1953 he was made Vice-Premier and Speaker of the parliament, but in January 1954, after publishing articles arguing for a relaxation of party discipline and criticizing the lifestyle of party leaders, he was deprived of all his offices and expelled from the party. He was imprisoned after a secret trial in 1956 for three years, during which time his best-known book The New Class was published in New York, for which he was given a further sentence. In 1961 he was released on parole but in 1962 was imprisoned once more for the US publication of Conversations with Stalin. Released in 1966 he was allowed to travel abroad for two years, but his increasingly anti-Communist pronouncements (as in The Unperfect Society) led to a permanent travel and publication ban. He became a non-person and there was no mention of his name or work in public. He was an embarrassment to the Yugoslav authorities, so East-West negotiations covered cases of human rights abuses. Despite this he published abroad his memoirs and a biography of Tito. Rehabilitated in 1989, he supported the liberal opposition to the Serbian leader Milosevic. Djilas was famous more as a literary than a political figure, and as a political prisoner.

The Yugoslavian writer and political prisoner Milovan Djilas (1911-1995) was the most celebrated of the Eastern European intellectuals who supported communism in the 1930s but were disillusioned by the practices of Communist regimes after 1945.

Milovan Djilas was born on June 12, 1911, in the Kingdom of Montenegro. His family was very poor, and notoriously non-conformist: his grandfather Aleksa was an anti-Ottoman bandit leader, and was supposedly assassinated by orders from the royal family, while his father Nikola, during his time as a police commandant, resisted Montenegro's incorporation into Yugoslavia after World War I. Young Milovan's education in Podbise and Berane was rich, however, and spanned the works of Marx and Lenin to Dostoevski and Tolstoy.

When Djilas attended the University of Belgrade to study literature in 1929, he was indubitably a Communist. He joined the Yugoslavian Communist party in 1932 as a student opposed to King Alexander of Yugoslavia's dictatorial monarchy. He was jailed for eight days to scare him, but when he failed to be frightened he was tortured and sent to prison for 3 years, where he met famous Communists. Upon his release he went underground as a revolutionary, siding with Tito against Stalin, even to go so far as to recruit 1,500 Yugoslav Communists to fight in the Spanish Civil War. His progress through the ranks of the party was rapid; in 1938 he was elected by Tito to the Central Committee and in 1940 to the Politburo.

During World War II, Djilas was ranked a general among the Partisan leaders for his guerilla tactics against Axis forces. He edited the party newspapers, and was chief negotiator between Axis Powers and Soviet Allies, even to Stalin himself. In 1945, after the war, he was appointed minister for the province of Montenegro and in 1948 minister without portfolio and secretary of the Politburo. In 1953 he became vice president of the Yugoslavian Republic.

Although by this time Djilas was third in the party hierarchy and Tito's heir apparent, he had become increasingly disillusioned even with Tito's brand of "national" communism. At the beginning of 1954 he published a number of newspaper articles critical of the regime, and was promptly stripped of his various offices and given a suspended sentence. In November 1956, after the publication of similar criticisms in the American journal New Leader, he was sentenced to 3 years' hard labor.

Djilas was still in prison when his book The New Class was published in September 1957 in the United States. This acute analysis of the Communist system sought to show that communism did not lead to a "withering away" of the state, as Karl Marx had predicted, but rather to the formation of a new ruling class just as selfish as any previous oligarchy. One month after the publication of The New Class he was sentenced to a further 7-year term of imprisonment.

In January 1961 Djilas was released on condition that he abstain from all political activity, but his freedom was short-lived. He was rearrested in April 1962, charged with providing material for foreign newspaper articles critical of Yugoslavia, and was sentenced to 5 years in prison, to which was added 3 1/2 years (the unserved balance of the previous sentence). Shortly afterward his book Conversations with Stalin (1962), which developed further the arguments first expressed in The New Class, was published abroad.

Djilas was not released from prison until 1966. Two years later his confiscated manuscripts were returned, together with a passport for foreign travel. His relations with the government remained tense, however, and early in 1970 his passport was removed again. He continued to write, publishing novels set in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, some of which were published while he was still in jail. He also wrote several autobiographies, including Land Without Justice (1958), an epic about his childhood that has been said to be evocative of Serbian poetry, Memoir of a Revolutionary, chronicling his early days as a Communist, Wartime (1977), about his activities during the Yugoslav Revolution and WWII, and Rise and Fall (1983), which traces his political career. After the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, The New Class was finally published in Yugoslavia in 1990, over 30 years since he had written it. He died in 1995, a free man.

Further Reading

The best biographies of Djilas are his own, Land Without Justice (1958), Memoir of a Revolutionary (1973), Wartime (1977) and Rise and Fall (1985). The most revealing books about him, however, could be his political writings: The New Class (1957) and Conversations with Stalin (trans. 1962). The best work on Yugoslavia is Phyllis Auty, Tito: A Biography (1970), which has a full bibliography.

Djilas, Milovan (mē'ləvän jē'läs), 1911-95, Yugoslav political leader and writer, b. Montenegro. A Communist party member from 1932, he helped Josip Broz Tito organize volunteers to fight in the Spanish civil war. He was active in the Yugoslav resistance in World War II and after the war rose to high posts in party and government. As a top political adviser to Tito and an outspoken critic of Russian attempts to bring Yugoslavia into the Soviet orbit, he was widely regarded as a possible successor to Tito. He was about to assume the presidency when, in 1954, he was abruptly dismissed from government service. His support of the Hungarian revolution (1956) brought him a prison term, extended in 1957 when his influential book criticizing the Communist oligarchy, The New Class, was published in the West. Released in 1961, he was jailed again in 1962-66. He also wrote Land Without Justice (1958, repr. 1972), Conversations with Stalin (tr. 1962), The Unperfect Society (tr. 1969), Tito (1980), Fall of the New Class (posthumous, 1998), and a novel, Under the Colors (tr. 1971). Although Djilas welcomed the end of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, he was critical of both Croat and Serb nationalism.

Bibliography

See his Memoir of a Revolutionary (tr. 1973).

Quotes:

"Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long."

"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."