Witness of an Epoch

Sometime in the spring of 1989 when the first cracks appeared in the concrete that Lenin mixed and Stalin poured over all of eastern Europe, the name Milovan Djilas stopped being a synonym for heresy in the former Yugoslavia. At the time, after 35 years of being a dissident spending years in jail and winning great respect among heretics (not just in Yugoslavia) he slowly became almost an everyday participant in political communication. In the Slovenian media at first.

That spring, Djilas appeared on TV Belgrade for the first time in a show called "Highly Confidential" on the popular Youth Channel whose broadcasts were live from an improvised studio.

Milorad Vucelic (then a young rising star) invited him on the show. Someone from above decided that it was still too early for Djilas and other critics of the system and the youth channel was discontinued soon afterwards.

Five springs later, Djilas, "one of the initiators of the dissident movement in the communist world", died in Belgrade at the age of 84.

In the meantime, Milorad Vucelic went from brave debutante on an alternative channel to director general of the state TV and now he decided that the news of Djilas' death deserved no more than a short news agency report. Or maybe someone from above told him it is still too early for Djilas.

In the last five years of his life, Milovan Djilas was forgiven for a lot of things by the authorities. First of all, the fact that he dared say (in 1953) that the Party is conservative and bureaucratic. He was forgiven for almost everything he wrote and said on his long road from dogmatist and firm believer in the communist idea to traitor and heretic who pointed out genetic mistakes implanted in the idea.

Over the past few years, mention of his name no longer drew the same reactions as mention of the Devil in the Vatican. The books he spent nine years in jail for and which were only published abroad for 30 years (in over 60 countries) could finally be found in Belgrade's book stores. As well as many books written about him providing many interesting details about his political suffering. For example, just after the third plenary session of the Central Committee (where he was purged for his ideological deviations and revisionism in January 1954) the Danube fishermen's club held a meeting and unanimously decided to throw him out for "traitorous activities against our people and the great achievement of our popular revolution".

What the current authorities have never forgiven him is his refusal to praise the Emperor's new clothes and the populism which he recognized as a false dawn before anyone else.

Unlike most dissidents, Djilas is one of the few who continued swimming against the tide, refusing to take part in pulling the black hood of nationalism over the head of the people. In his escape from communist totalitarianism he simply could not allow himself to end up in nationalist totalitarianism. Many of the people who shared his views and had a feeling for violations of political and human rights suddenly lost the ability to raise their voices even against the worst war crimes. Unlike them, Djilas, whenever he was asked, said:

"It could happen that we, the Serbs, end up after this war, if we haven't already, with a legacy just slightly less evil than the one the Ustashi left the Croats after World War II. If you bear in mind that today's modern intelligence services miss nothing, nothing will be hidden. And when they begin publishing documents there will be war crimes trials. I don't think the Croats will fare any better, but that's their problem," he said in 1991 interview.

That's probably why the state media only reported his death with a few biographical facts while leading international newspapers felt the death of Milovan Djilas merits a front page story and background features like the death of anyone else who took active part in an epoch. And there aren't many of them left. Djilas was one of the last who could speak about meetings and clashes with Tito, Stalin and Churchill and many others who wrote the history of this century. In Yugoslavia he was long regarded as an unreliable and embarrassing witness.

The man's spiritual evolution and everything he underwent made his life a drama. He was the youngest Yugoslav communist party Politburo member (some say the youngest member of any politburo). Just prior to and immediately after W.W.II he was one of the untouchable quartet: Tito, Kardelj, Rankovic and Djilas; and one of the immediate possible heirs to Tito. He was the first to drop out of the group but also the only one to see how their joint adventure ended up.

At the moment that his power peaked he was the first to have the moral and intellectual strength to start saying "something is wrong" and not exactly perfect. He didn't arrive at ideas of where the communist party should be heading after getting rapped on the knuckles. He slammed the door behind him.

When he decided to drop out of authority, he didn't know clearly whether he could save his own life and whether everything would end up with just a jail sentence. As a leading revolutionary of his time he knew those games were always played for keeps. Later, he was blamed for deciding the fate of many others through his turns to the Left and Right.

Djilas went on to become the only politburo member to outlive the fall of communism and the people who sent him to prison. At the same time, he never said a bad word about them even though he spent more time in the jails of the state he fought to create, than the jails of the state he fought to topple as a young man.

Belgrade sociologist Slobodan Inic noted recently that there are few examples in history of powerful ideologists or social engineers who saw their thoughts come to life twice. "He triumphed with Tito and outlived Tito," Inic said and added that Djilas was the most famous dissident in the communist movement after Trotsky, the most brilliant critic of the revolution, the best known prisoner, most imaginative predictor of the final fall of the Great Idea and the most famous Yugoslav after Tito.

Mihailo Mihajlov, another well known Yugoslav dissident, wrote a few days ago that encyclopedias in the future will list Djilas as "the father and founder of the dissident movement which opposed communism on its home ground". Djilas' path was followed for decades by Russian dissidents including Solzhenitsin and Saharov, as well as others in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and today in China, Mihajlov said. "Walesa, Havel and countless others braved the path that Milovan Djilas went down first with the greatest effort and danger."

Djilas defined himself as a democratic socialist and fierce critic of what he built himself, rather than an anti-Communist. He said communism is "a mixture of violence and ideals", that one or the other prevails at certain stages and that only violence remains in the end. He didn't see the fall of the system as his great triumph. "The fact that I'm in public now, that I'm in newspapers again, that passes by me like water that I can see but which doesn't get me wet. I get no thrill from it. I knew it would come one day," he said in 1989.

His close friends said he really suffered over what happened in the former Yugoslavia after the fall of the old system.

Djilas was even blamed for this war once it became clear that he would not use his restored freedom of public activity to become an ardent apologist for the warmongering of the new authorities just so he would be in favor. He was declared the main person to blame for the former Yugoslavia's internal borders. His only answer was that those borders were no more unjust than any others in Europe. "There are no just borders anywhere where the population is mixed. That simply is impossible to achieve," he said.

Djilas seemed to regret his actions at only one moment during the plenary session where he was ousted. They say Kardelj convinced him to voice regret and everything would be alright. Djilas did start criticizing himself at one point. He began with criticism from within like many others before him in an effort to "improve our common Party home", as Zarko Puhovski once noted.

The reactions convinced him that he had to make his position more radical and that that kind of regret simply made no sense. The devil in him grew daily until it finally turned him into public enemy No. 1.

Many years later, if Djilas signed a petition others who considered themselves dissidents would withdraw their signatures.

In the years that came, he slowly cleansed himself of the communist idea, frequently changed his opinion, sometimes overdid his praise for the achievements of western democracies and in the end became a truly wise man who took nothing for granted and who was ready to review and weigh everything carefully.

Informed sources said his wisdom and exceptional courage and self-respect kept him going.

One of Djilas' most persistent and most ruthless biographers Vladimir Dedijer wrote that is a pity Djilas wasted time with politics because he was a gifted author. A similar opinion was voiced recently by Prosveta director and literary critic Cedomir Mirkovic: "I am convinced literature is a more important and lasting result of Djilas' life than his, often contradictory, political activities."

Others feel that we should be grateful to Djilas because he helped many to reach their own criticism of the ruling communist structures without skipping over democracy and ending up in the most primitive nationalism.

The argument over whether Djilas was greater as a politician or writer can perhaps be resolved with the claim that his life was his greatest work.

A life as spectacular as that, a drama with so many turns, falls and rises, won't be written again. At least not in this century.