Milovan Djilas
Milovan Đilas or Djilas (Serbian Cyrillic: Милован Ђилас) (4 June 1911 - 20 April 1995) was a Montenegrin Serb[1] Communist politician, theorist and author in Yugoslavia. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during the World War II as in the post war government, and became one of the best known and most determined critics of the system, domestically and internationally.
Revolutionary
Born in Podbišće village near Kolašin in Kingdom of Montenegro, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a Belgrade University student in 1932. He was a political prisoner from 1933 to 1936. In 1938 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and became a member of its Politburo in 1940.
In April 1941, as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their allies defeated the Royal Yugoslav army and dismembered Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Đilas helped Tito found the Partisan resistance, and was a resistance commander during the war. Following Germany's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22 (Operation Barbarossa), the Communist Party of Yugoslavia's (KPJ) Central Committee decided that conditions had been created for armed struggle and on July 4 passed the resolution to begin the uprising.
Đilas was sent to Montenegro to organise and raise the struggle against the Italian occupying force, which on July 12, 1941 proclaimed the fascist puppet entity: "Independent State of Montenegro" run by figurehead Sekule Drljević, but in actuality closely controlled by Italian authority led by Mussolini's confidant Alessandro Birolli. The July 13th uprising which Đilas had an important role in was a national one, spaning ideological lines, and large parts of Montenegro were quickly liberated. Đilas remained in Montenegro until November, when he left for the liberated town of Užice in Serbia, where he took up work on the paper Borba, the Party's main propaganda organ. Following the withdrawal of the Supreme Commander Tito and other Party leaders to Bosnia, Đilas stayed in Nova Varoš in the Sandžak (on the border between Serbia and Montenegro); from there he retreated with the units under his command in the middle of winter and in difficult conditions to join the Supreme Staff. There were no serious divisions or conflicts between communists and non-communists among the insurgents.
It was only in March of next year that he went back again to Montenegro, where in the meantime a civil war between Partisans and Chetniks had broken out. Momčilo Cemović, who has dealt mostly with this period of Đilas' war activities, believed that the CPY Central Committee and the Supreme Staff had sent Đilas to ascertain the actual state of affairs and to dismiss the communist leaders responsible. This, in fact, he did.
In 1944 he was sent to the Soviet Union to meet with Joseph Stalin.
He fought among the Partisans to liberate Belgrade from the Wehrmacht. With the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Đilas became Vice-president in Tito's government. It is generally agreed that Đilas was not directly or indirectly involved in the Bleiburg massacre.
Đilas was sent to Moscow to meet Stalin again in 1948 to try and bridge the gap between Moscow and Belgrade. He became one of the leading critics of attempts by Stalin to bring Yugoslavia under greater control from Moscow. Later that year, Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and left the Cominform, ushering in the Informbiro period.
Initially the Yugoslav communists, despite the break with Stalin, remained as hard line as before but soon began to pursue a policy of independent socialism that experimented with self-management of workers in state-run enterprises. Đilas was very much part of that, but he began to take things further. Having responsibility for propaganda, he had a platform for new ideas and he launched a new journal, Nova Misao ("New Thought"), in which he published a series of articles that were increasingly freethinking.
Dissident
He was widely regarded as Tito's eventual successor, and was about to become President of Yugoslavia in 1954. However, from October 1953 to January 1954 he wrote 19 articles for the Borba journal, where he demanded more democracy in the party and in the country. Tito and the other leading Yugoslav communists saw his arguments as a threat for their positions, and in January 1954 Đilas was expelled from the government and stripped of all party positions for his criticism. He resigned from the Communist Party soon afterwards. In December 1954 he gave an interview to the New York Times in which he said that Yugoslavia was now ruled by "reactionaries". For this he was brought to trial and convicted.
In 1955 Đilas published The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, in which he argued that communism in Eastern Europe was not egalitarian, and that it was establishing a new class of privileged party bureaucracy - who enjoyed material benefits from their positions. In 1956, Đilas was arrested for his writings and for his support of the Hungarian Revolution and sentenced to nine years in prison. While jailed, Đilas remarkably translated John Milton's Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian.
In 1958 he also wrote a memoir entitled Land Without Justice and was imprisoned again in April 1962 for publishing Conversations with Stalin. During his previous internment 1961 Đilas also completed a massive and scholarly biography of the great Montenegrin prince-poet-priest Njegos.
Đilas was redeemed in the eyes of the West despite his communist leanings, and remained a dissident - almost hero in the eyes of many western powers. He was also opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the descent into nationalist conflict in the 1990s.
Despite his decades of dissident activity he continued to think of himself as a communist and continued to believe in communism. His ideas about how Socialist Yugoslavia should be organised was the root of his split with Tito.
Bibliography
- Djilas, Milovan, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, 1957
- Djilas, Milovan, Land without Justice, 1958
- Djilas, Milovan, Conversations with Stalin, 1962
- Djilas, Milovan, Montenegro, 1963
- Djilas, Milovan, The Leper and Other Stories, 1964
- Djilas, Milovan, Njegoš: Poet-Prince-Bishop, 1966
- Djilas, Milovan, The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class, 1969
- Djilas, Milovan, Lost Battles, 1970
- Djilas, Milovan, The Stone and the Violets, 1970
- Djilas, Milovan, Wartime, 1977
- Djilas, Milovan, Memoir of a Revolutionary
- Djilas, Milovan, Of Prisons and Ideas
- Djilas, Milovan, Parts of a Lifetime
- Djilas, Milovan, Rise and Fall
- Djilas, Milovan, Tito: The Story from Inside
Translations
- Milton, John, Paradise Lost (from the original English to Serbo-Croatian), 1969
Further reading
- Zinaic, Rade. "Crucified Wilderness: The Tension Between Tradition and Modernity in the Djilasian Void." East Central Europe. 29. 2002. 1-2, 27-44.
See also
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- Partisans
Key Partisans
- Josip Broz Tito
- Aleksandar Ranković
- Moše Pijade
Literary Subjects
- Communism
- John Milton
- Petar II Petrović-Njegoš
- Joseph Stalin
- Stalinism
External links
- Remembering Milovan Djilas by David Pryce-Jones
- Nije bio ideološki pisac by Matija Bećković, NIN, March 30, 2006
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- ↑ David Binder: Thoughts About Serbs Milovan Djilas: "Montenegrins are Serbs."
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