Djilas And The Lies Of Half-Truth

Milovan Djilas is in jail once more, this time because he has published, during the era of deStalinization, a book with unflattering recollections of Stalin. As he himself remarks, there is little new in what he says. Anyone who remembers the impressions left by Trotsky, Bukharin and other victims of the Stalin terror will find Djilas’ portrait of the dictator quite familiar.

“Reasons of state” are said to lie behind Tito’s decision to persecute Djilas again. These have to do with Yugoslav-Russian relations, an effort to patch a rapprochement between the Communist parties of the two countries, Khrushchev’s hostility to Djilas, etc. Such, no doubt, are the immediate causes; but if we think in terms of limiting conditions rather than operative causes, it may be useful to suggest that a more fundamental process is at work here, a process of alternate loosening and tightening in the pollitical repression of the Communist system.

For some years...