Anatomy of a Moral

About this book

This volume contains translations of the articles written by Milovan Djilas in the last months of 1953 in the official newspaper of the Yugoslav League of Communists, Borba, of which he was then the director. In them can be traced the development of his ideas from the critical analysis of the Soviet system to the conclusion that dictatorship by a Communist party (even the Yugoslav party) is incompatible with socialist progress. The essay which gives its name to the book, and is longer than the others, appeared in the review Nova Misao, also edited by Djilas. It was a savage attack an the new snobbery and respectability of the Communist upper caste, and especially of their wives, and was based on the case of the young actress wife of a Communist general who was boycotted and insulted by the wives of his colleagues. This essay, written in an immoderate style, brought the rage of the party bureaucrats, already annoyed by Djilas’s political articles, to the boil, and compelled Tito to call the special meeting of the Central Committee in January 1954 which expelled Djilas from its ranks and deprived him of his public offices. Djilas is an outstanding example of a social group that has played, and will continue to play, a leading part in the politics of the 20th century—the revolutionary intelligentsia of an underdeveloped society. The most interesting thing about Djilas is that he chose to challenge the regime at a time When he stood just below the apex of the power elite. Consideration of his own’ interests would have kept him where he was, as the chief mouthpiece of ideological orthodoxy. But he acted against his interests and according to his convictions. When his reflections, in the years from the breach with the Cominform to the end of 1953, led him to conclude that the party dictatorship no longer served a useful purpose, he did not hesitate to say so.In this Djilas is unique among all Communist leaders since 1917. The greatest of Communist rebels, Trotsky himself, did not oppose the regime created by the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1923 he disagreed on important issues of policy with the troika, and political controversy became still further embittered by personal conflict. The more fiercely Trotsky was persecuted, the more radically he criticized important features of the regime and of its leaders’ policies—the bureaucratic organization of the party, “socialism in one country,” the whole strategy of the Comintern in China. But he never questioned the necessity of dictatorship by the Bolshevik party over the peoples of the Russian Empire, never upheld freedom of opinion and organization as matters of principle. Djilas’s proposal, that the party be reduced to a “union of ideologically united men,” a debating society which should abandon its monopoly of power and “‘wither away’ as a classical party,” would have been summarily rejected by Trotsky. Djilas saw that concentration of power in one centralized party is bound to deprive of liberty not only the “class enemy” and the people at large, but also the members of the party. He argued that Lenin’s methods “were adapted to a specific time . . . the period of preparing for the struggle for power.” Once the revolution had triumphed, however, these methods were no longer suitable. “Our progress can proceed in two directions,” he wrote in Borba on January 4, 1954, “towards a Leninist form of state and parity which cannot be democratic today, at towards a renunciation of that form for a more democratic, free and decentralized form of political life and struggle.” None of other communist dissidents understood so clearly the essential political problem, or chose, as Djilas did, gratuitously to sacrifice a position of unchallenged power for a conviction reached by his own reasoning.--- by Hugh Seton-Watson