Milovan Đilas (or
Djilas) (Serbian Cyrillic: Милован Ђилас) (June 4 1911 - April 20 1995) was a
YugoslavianYugoslavs Yugoslavs Yugoslavs (Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Macedonian: Jugoslaveni/Jugosloveni/Jugoslovani,
[Latin script was used in Serbo-Croat, and Slovene languages. Identical spelling is used in the Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic script (Serbian variant)...]
Communist politician,
theoristMarxism is the political philosophy and economic worldview based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis of capitalism, a theory of social change, and an atheist view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; three primary aspects of...
and author from
MontenegroMontenegro , is a country located in Southeastern Europe. It has a coast on the Adriatic Sea to the south-west and is bordered by Croatia to the west, Bosnia and Herzegovina to the northwest, Serbia to the northeast, Kosovo to the east and Albania to the south...
. He was a key figure in the
PartisanThe Yugoslav Partisans, or simply the Partisans were a Communist-led World War II resistance movement engaged in the fight against Axis forces and their collaborators in Yugoslavia during the Yugoslav People's Liberation War from 1941 to 1945...
movement during
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, as in the post war government. A self-identified communist, Đilas became one of the best known and most determined critics of the system from the perspective of Marxist ideology, domestically and internationally.
Revolutionary
Born in Podbišće village near
KolašinKolašin , is a town in northern Montenegro. It has a population of 2,989 .Kolašin is the centre of Kolašin municipality and unofficial centre of Morača region, named after Morača River.-History:...
in the
Kingdom of MontenegroThe Kingdom of Montenegro was a kingdom in southeastern Europe.The capital of the kingdom was Cetinje. The currency of the Kingdom was the Montenegrin perper. It was a constitutional monarchy, but absolutist in practice...
, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a Belgrade University student in 1932. He was a
political prisonerA political prisoner is someone held in prison or otherwise detained, perhaps under house arrest, for his or her involvement in political activity.-"Political" prisoner:...
from 1933 to 1936. In 1938 he was elected to the
Central CommitteeA central Committee is commonly the central executive unit of a Leninist or Communist party, whether ruling or non-ruling. In a Communist party, the Central Committee is made up of delegates elected at a Party Congress...
of the Communist Party and became a member of its
PolitburoPolitburo, from German Politbüro, short for Political Bureau, , is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.- Marxist-Leninist states :...
in 1940.
In April 1941, as
Nazi GermanyNazi Germany and the Third Reich are the common English names for Germany between 1933 and 1945, while it was led by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Worker's Party . The name Third Reich refers to the state as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages and the German...
,
Fascist ItalyThe term Italian Fascism denotes the authoritarian nationalist Fascismo political movement that ruled Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943 under leader Benito Mussolini...
and their allies defeated the Royal Yugoslav army and dismembered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Đilas helped Tito found the Partisan resistance, and was a guerilla commander during the war. Following Germany's attack on the
Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
on June 22 (
Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a 2,900 km front...
), 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 DrljevićSekule Drljević , was a Montenegrin politician, lawyer, and author.His political views and ideological aims ranged wildly and changed frequently during his career in politics...
, 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, spanning ideological lines, and large parts of Montenegro were quickly liberated. Đilas remained in Montenegro until November, when he left for the liberated town of
UžiceUžice is a town and municipality located in Serbia at 43.87° North, 19.84° East. The 2002 Census Data records that the town has a total population of 55,025. Including the suburban settlements of Buar and Sevojno, the Užice city proper has 63,577 inhabitants. It is the administrative center of the...
in Serbia, where he took up work on the paper
BorbaBorba, or Борба in Cyrillic, is a Serbian newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia ....
, the Party's main propaganda organ. Following the withdrawal of the Supreme Commander Tito and other Party leaders to
BosniaHistorically and geographically, the region known as Bosnia lies mainly in the Dinaric Alps, ranging to the southern borders of the Pannonian plain, with the rivers Sava and Drina marking its northern and eastern borders...
, Đilas stayed in
Nova VarošNova Varoš is a town and municipality in Zlatibor District of Serbia. According to the 1991 census, the municipality of Nova Varoš had a population of 21,812, while according to the 2002 census, the number of inhabitants in the municipality was 19,982...
in the
SandžakSandžak is a historical region lying along the border between Serbia and Montenegro...
(on the border between
SerbiaSerbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a country located in both Central and Southeastern Europe. Its territory covers the southern part of the Pannonian Plain and central part of the Balkans...
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
ChetniksThe Chetnik movement or the Chetniks were a Serbian nationalist and royalist paramilitary organization operating in the Balkans before and during World Wars...
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 UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
to meet with
Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953...
.
He fought among the Partisans to liberate
BelgradeBelgrade Belgrade Belgrade (Serbian Cyrillic: Београд, Serbian Latin: Beograd (meaning "White City" in Serbian) is the capital and largest city of Serbia. The city lies on two international waterways, at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where Central Europe's Pannonian Plain meets...
from the
WehrmachtWehrmacht was the name of the unified armed forces of Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the Heer , the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe ....
. With the establishment of the Federal People's 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 massacreThe Bleiburg massacre is a term encompassing events that took place during mid-May 1945 near the Carinthian town of Bleiburg on the Austrian-Slovenian border...
.
Đilas was sent to
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
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
CominformCominform is the common name for what was officially referred to as the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties...
, ushering in the
InformbiroInformbiro was a period in the history of Yugoslavia characterized by conflict and schism with the Soviet Union...
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 socialismTitoism is an adaptation of communist ideology named after Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, primarily used to describe the specific socialist system built in Yugoslavia after its refusal of the 1948 Resolution of the Cominform, when the Communist Party of...
that experimented with
self-management of workersWorker self-management is a form of workplace decision-making in which the workers themselves agree on choices instead of an owner or traditional supervisor telling workers what to do, how to do it and where to do it...
in state-run enterprises. Đilas was very much part of that, but he began to take things further. Having responsibility for
propagandaPropaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience...
, 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
freethinkingFreethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma...
.
Dissident
He was widely regarded as Tito's eventual successor, and was about to become President of Yugoslavia in 1954. He was President of the Federal Assembly of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from December 25, 1953 to January 16, 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 the stability of the nation, 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 "
reactionariesReactionary refers to any political or social movement or ideology that seeks a return to a previous state . The term originated in the French Revolution, to denote the counter-revolutionaries who wanted to restore the real or imagined conditions of the monarchical Ancien Régime...
". For this, he was brought to trial and convicted.
In 1956, Đilas was arrested for his writings and for his support of the
Hungarian RevolutionThe Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the Stalinist government of the People's Republic of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from 23 October until 10 November 1956....
and sentenced to nine years in prison. While jailed, Đilas translated
John MiltonJohn Milton was an English poet, author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost and for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica....
's
Paradise LostParadise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books. A second edition followed in 1674, redivided into twelve books with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification...
into Serbo-Croatian. In 1957 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 classThe new class is a term used to describe the privileged ruling class of bureaucrats and Communist Party functionaries which typically arises in a Stalinist Communist state. Generally, the group known in the Soviet Union as the Nomenklatura conforms to the theory of the new class...
of privileged party
bureaucracyBureaucracy is the collective organizational structure, procedures, protocols, and set of regulations in place to manage activity, usually in large organizations and government...
- who enjoyed material benefits from their positions.
In 1958 he also wrote a
memoirAs a literary genre, a memoir , forms a subclass of autobiography – although the terms 'memoir' and 'autobiography' are almost interchangeable in modern parlance. Memoir is autobiographical writing, but not all autobiographical writing follows the criteria for memoir, as listed here...
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
westernThe Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term that can have multiple meanings depending on its context...
powers. He was also opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the descent into
nationalistNationalism is an ideology, a sentiment, a form of culture, or a social movement that focuses on the nation. It is a type of collectivism emphasizing the collective of a specific nation...
conflict in the 1990s.
Despite his decades of dissident activity he continued to think of himself as a communist and continued to believe in
communismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
. His ideas about how
SocialistIn political science, a Communist state is a state with a form of government characterized by single-party rule of a Communist party and a professed allegiance to a communist ideology as the guiding principle of the state....
YugoslaviaThe Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the second half of World War II until it was formally dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro,...
should be organised was the root of his split with Tito.
Works
- The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, 1957
- Land without Justice, 1958
- Conversations with Stalin, 1962
- Montenegro, 1963
- The Leper and Other Stories, 1964
- Njegoš: Poet-Prince-Bishop, 1966
- The Unperfect Society: Beyond the New Class, 1969
- Lost Battles, 1970
- The Stone and the Violets, 1970
- Memoir of a Revolutionary, 1973
- Wartime, 1977
- Of Prisons and Ideas, 1984
- Parts of a Lifetime
- Rise and Fall
- Tito: The Story from Inside
Selected Essays
- "Disintegration of Leninist Totalitarianism", in 1984 Revisited: Tolitarianism in Our Century, New York, Harper and Row, 1983, ed. Irving Howe
- "The Crisis of Communism". TELOS
Telos is an academic journal published in the United States. It was founded in May 1968 to provide the New Left with a coherent theoretical perspective. It sought to expand the Husserlian diagnosis of "the crisis of European sciences" to prefigure a particular program of social reconstruction...
80 (Summer 1989). New York: Telos Press
Translations
- Milton, John, Paradise Lost (from the original English to Serbo-Croatian), 1969
Further reading
- Reinhartz, Dennis. Milovan Djilas: A Revolutionary as a Writer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
- Zinaic, Rade. "Crucified Wilderness: The Tension Between Tradition and Modernity in the Djilasian Void." East Central Europe. 29. 2002. 1-2, 27-44.
In Fiction
Đilas is mentioned in
Saul BellowSaul Bellow was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
's
Humboldt's GiftHumboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Saul Bellow, which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year....
, where he writes about Stalin's "twelve-course all-night banquets" and the theme of boredom.
Key Partisans
- Josip Broz Tito
Josip Broz Tito Josip Broz Tito Josip Broz Tito (Cyrillic script: Јосип Броз Тито, (7 or 25 May 1892 – 4 May 1980) was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. He was Secretary-General (later President) of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (1939–80), and went on to lead the World War II...
- Aleksandar Ranković
Aleksandar "Leka" Ranković was a leading Yugoslav Communist politician of Serbian origin....
- Moše Pijade
- Edvard Kardelj
Edvard Kardelj also known under the pseudonyms Sperans and Krištof was a Slovene communist political leader, economist, partisan, and publicist. He is considered the main creator of the Yugoslav attempt at establishing workers' self-management.- Early years :Kardelj was born in Ljubljana...
Literary Subjects
- Communism
Communism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
- John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, author, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost and for his treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica....
- Petar II Petrović-Njegoš
Petar II Petrović-Njegoš was a Serbian Orthodox Prince-Bishop of Montenegro and a ruler who transformed Montenegro from a theocracy into a secular state. However, he is most famous as a poet and is considered by many to be among the greatest poets of the Serbian language and a national poet of...
- Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953...
- Stalinism
Stalinism was the political system and ideology of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from 1928–1953...
External links
- Remembering Milovan Djilas by David Pryce-Jones
David Eugene Henry Pryce-Jones is a conservative British author and commentator.- Career :He was educated at Eton and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under A.J.P. Taylor...
- Nije bio ideološki pisac by Matija Bećković
Matija Bećković is a Serbian writer and poet. He is one of the most prominent Serbian poets of the 20th century and a full member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.- Life :Bećković was born in Senta, in the Serbian province of Vojvodina, to Serbian parents from Montenegro...
, NINNIN is a weekly newsmagazine published in Belgrade, Serbia. Its name is an acronym for Nedeljne informativne novine which roughly translates into Weekly Informational Newspaper....
, March 30, 2006