Milovan Đilas
From Freepedia
Milovan Đilas (1911-1995) was a Communist politician and theorist in Yugoslavia. He was a key figure in the partisan movement during the second world war as in the post war government. As extreme Communist hardliner, he was responsible for organizing terrible "red terror” actions killing even supposed opponents of Tito and Communist Party. The results of these actions euphemistically named "left deviations" were so called "dog's graveyards" as Djilas and his companions named them. Much later [in 1954] he became one of regime's best-known critics and as useful critic of post-war behavior of Tito and his totalitarian Communist Party, Djilas was in USA and Western Europe fully amnestied for previous crimes and remained a dissident - almost hero.
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Revolutionary
Born in Montenegro, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia while a student at Belgrade University 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.
Đilas helped Tito to found the partisan resistance to Nazi Germany during World War II and was a resistance commander during the war. He imposed iron discipline within partisan’s ranks, ordering the first shooting for corrective purposes. In 1944 he was sent to the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin.
He fought among the partisans to liberate Belgrade from the German Army in 1944. With the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Đilas became vice president in Tito's government. He was a critic of attempts by Stalin to bring Yugoslavia under greater control from Moscow.
Đilas was sent to Moscow to meet Stalin again in 1948 to try to stem an impending split. Later that year Yugoslavia broke with the USSR and left the Cominform ushering in the informbiro period of conflict with the Soviet Union.
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 profit-sharing with workers in state-run enterprises. Đilas was very much part of that began to take things further. Having responsibility for agitprop he had a platform for new ideas and he launched a new journal Nova misao (New thought) 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 when he was suddenly expelled from the government and stripped of all party positions for his criticisms. He resigned from the Communist Party soon afterwards. In December of that year he gave an interview to the New York Times in which he said that Yugoslavia was now ruled by reactionaries. For that he was brought to trial and convicted.
In 1955 Đilas published The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System which argued that communism in Eastern Europe was not egalitarian and was establishing a new class of privleged party bureaucrats who enjoyed material benefits from their position. Djilas was arrested for his writings and for his support of the Hungarian Revolution and sentenced to nine years in prison. While jailed, Djilas remarkably translated Milton's Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian.
He was imprisoned again in the 1960s for publishing Conversations with Stalin.
Đilas opposed to break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the descent into nationalist conflict.
Quotable
’The hardest thing about being a communist is trying to predict the past’.
See also
- Josip Broz Tito
- Moše Pijade
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- Partisans
- Members of the Central Committee
External links
Further reading
- Milovan Djilas, New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, Harcourt Trade Publishers, 1982, paperback, 224 pages, ISBN 015665489X
Categories: 1911 births | 1995 deaths | Yugoslav politicians | Communists | Serbian World War II people
