Conversations with Stalin

by Milovan Djilas

  There was something terrible in his words: a horrible war was still going on. Yet there was something impressive, too, about his cognizance of the paths he had to take, the inevitability that faced the world in which he lived and the movement that he headed.

  The rest of what was said that evening was hardly worth remembering. There was much eating, even more drinking, and countless senseless toasts were raised.

  Molotov recounted how Stalin stung Churchill. “Stalin raised a toast to secret agents and to the Secret Service, thus alluding to Churchill’s failures at Gallipoli in the First World War, which occurred because the British lacked sufficient information.” Molotov also cited, not without glee, Churchill’s bizarre sense of humor. “Churchill had declared in Moscow, in his cups, that he deserved the highest order and citation of the Red Army because he had taught it to fight so well, thanks to the intervention at Archangel.” One could tell in general that Churchill had left a deep impression on the Soviet leaders as a farsighted and dangerous “bourgeois statesman”—though they did not like him.

  During the ride back to his villa, Tito, who also could not stand large quantities of liquor, remarked in the automobile: “I don’t know what the devil is wrong with these Russians that they drink so much—plain decadence!” I, of course, agreed with him and tried in vain, who knows after how many attempts, to find an explanation of why Soviet high society drank so desperately and determinedly.

  On returning to town from the villa in which Tito was housed, I collected my impressions of that night in which actually nothing significant had happened: there were no points of disagreement, and yet we seemed farther apart than we ever were. Every dispute had been resolved for political reasons, as something hardly to be avoided in relations between independent states.

  At the end of our visit (following the dinner with Stalin), we spent an evening at Dimitrov’s. To fill it up with something, he invited two or three Soviet actors, who gave short performances.

  Of course there was talk of a future union between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, but it was very general and brief. Tito and Dimitrov exchanged Comintern reminiscences. All in all, it was more a friendly gathering than a political meeting.

  Dimitrov was alone at the time because all the Bulgarian émigrés had long since gone to Bulgaria—in the footsteps of the Red Army. One could tell that Dimitrov was tired and listless, and we knew at least part of the reason, though nothing was said about it. Although Bulgaria had been liberated, Stalin would not permit Dimitrov’s return, with the excuse that it was not yet the right time, for the Western states would take his return as an open sign of the establishment of Communism in Bulgaria—as though such a sign was not evident even without this! There had been talk of this, too, at Stalin’s dinner. Winking noncommittally, Stalin had said, “It is not yet time for Dimitrov to go to Bulgaria: he’s well off where he is.”

  Though there was nothing to prove it, still it was suspected even then that Stalin was preventing Dimitrov’s return until he himself settled affairs in Bulgaria! These suspicions of ours did not yet imply Soviet hegemony, though there were premonitions of this too, but we saw the matter as a necessary accommodation with Stalin’s alleged fears that Dimitrov might push matters toward the left too soon in Bulgaria.

  But even this was significant and sufficient—for a beginning. It evoked a whole series of questions. Stalin was a genius, but Dimitrov was hardly a nobody. By what token did Stalin know better than Dimitrov what ought to be done in Bulgaria? Did not holding Dimitrov in Moscow against his will undermine his reputation among Bulgarian Communists and the Bulgarian people? And, in general, why this intricate game over his return, in which the Russians were not accountable to anyone, not even to Dimitrov?

  In politics, more than in anything else, the beginning of everything lies in moral indignation and in doubt of the good intentions of others.

  6

  We returned via Kiev, and at our wish and that of the Soviet Government we remained two or three days to visit the Ukrainian Government.

  The Secretary of the Ukrainian Party and Premier of the Government was N. S. Khrushchev, and his Commissar for Foreign Affairs was Manuilsky. It was they who met us and it was with them that we spent the entire three days.

  At the time, in 1945, the war was still on and one was permitted to express modest wishes. Khrushchev and Manuilsky expressed one—that the Ukraine might establish diplomatic relations with the “people’s democracies.”

  However, nothing came of it. Stalin soon enough encountered resistance even in the “people’s democracies,” so that it hardly would occur to him to strengthen any Ukrainian separateness. As for the eloquent lively old veteran Manuilsky—a minister without a ministry—he later gave speeches in the United Nations for two or three years, only to disappear one day and to sink into the anonymous mass of the victims of Stalin’s or someone else’s displeasure.

  Khrushchev’s destiny was quite different. But at that moment no one could have surmised it. Even then he was in the top political leadership—and had been since 1939—though it was considered that he was not as close to Stalin as Molotov and Malenkov were, or even Kaganovich. In Soviet top echelons he was held to be a very skillful operator with a great capacity for economic and organizational matters, though not as a writer or speaker. He came to leadership in the Ukraine after the purges of the mid-thirties, but I am not acquainted with—nor was I then interested in—his part in them. But it is known how one rose in Stalin’s Russia: certainly by dint of determination and dexterity during the bloody “anti-kulak” and “anti-Party” campaigns. This would have had to be especially true for the Ukraine, where in addition to the afore-mentioned “deadly sins” there was “nationalism” as well.

  Though he had achieved success while still relatively young, there was nothing surprising about Khrushchev’s career in the light of Soviet conditions: he made his way through schools, political and other, as a worker, and climbed the Party ladder by means of his devotion, alertness, and intelligence. Like most of the leaders, he belonged to the new postrevolutionary Stalinist generation of Party and Soviet officials. The war found him in the highest position in the Ukraine. Because the Red Army had to withdraw from the Ukraine before the Germans, he was given a high political post in it, but not the highest—he was still in the uniform of a lieutenant general. He returned as chief of the Party and the Government in Kiev after the expulsion of the Germans.

  We had heard somewhere that he was not a Ukrainian by birth, but a Russian. Though nothing was said about this, he himself avoided mentioning it, for it would have been embarrassing if not even the Premier of the Ukrainian Government was a Ukrainian! It was indeed unusual even for us Communists, who were able to justify and explain away everything that might becloud the ideal picture of ourselves, that among the Ukrainians, a nation as numerous as the French and in some ways more cultured than the Russian, there was not a single person capable of being premier of the Government.

  Nor could it be concealed from us that the Ukrainians had deserted en masse from the Red Army as the Germans advanced into their regions. After the expulsion of the Germans, some two and a half million Ukrainians were drafted into the Red Army. Although minor operations were still being carried out against Ukrainian nationalists (one of their victims was the gifted Soviet General Vatutin), we still could not quite accept the explanation that this state of affairs in the Ukraine was caused exclusively by the stubbornness of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. The question imposed itself: Whence this nationalism if the peoples of the USSR are really equal?

  We were bewildered and astonished at the marked Russification of public life. Russian was spoken in the theater, and there were even daily newspapers in Russian.

  However, it was far from our intention to blame our solicitous host, N. S. Khrushchev, for this or anything else, for, as a good Communist, he could do nothing else but carry out the orders of his Party, his Leninist Central Committee, and his leader and teacher, J. V. St
alin. All Soviet leaders have distinguished themselves by their practicality and, in Communist circles, by their directness. N. S. Khrushchev stood out from the rest in both respects.

  Neither then nor now—after carefully reading his speeches at congresses—did I have the impression that his knowledge went beyond the limits of classical Russian literature and Russian history, while his grasp of theory was on the level of an intermediate Party school. Beside this external knowledge gathered from courses, much more important is the knowledge that he gained as an autodidact, by constantly improving himself, and, even more, the experience he gained from his lively and many-sided activities. It is impossible to determine the quantity and quality of that knowledge, for equally astonishing is his knowledge of some rare fact and his ignorance of some elementary truths. His memory is excellent, and he expresses himself vividly and graphically.

  Unlike other Soviet leaders, he exhibited an unrestrained garrulity, although like them he was fond of using folk proverbs and sayings. This was a kind of fashion at the time and proof of one’s ties with the people. With him, however, there was less artificiality about this because of his naturally simple and unaffected behavior and manner of speaking. He also had a sense of humor. Unlike Stalin’s humor, which was predominantly intellectual and, as such, cynical, Khrushchev’s humor was typically folksy and thus often almost crude, but it was lively and inexhaustible. Now that he has attained the most exalted heights of power and is in the gaze of the whole world, one can tell that he is careful of his pose and manner of expression, but he has remained basically unchanged. Beneath the present Soviet chief of state and Party it is not difficult to discern a man of the popular masses. Yet it should be added that he suffers less than any Communist autodidact and unfinished scholar from a feeling of inferiority, that is, he does not feel the need to hide his personal ignorance and weaknesses behind an external brilliance and generalizations. The common places with which his conversation abounds are the expression of both real ignorance and Marxist maxims learned by rote, but even these he presented with conviction and frankness. The language and manner with which he expresses himself encompass a broader circle than the one to which Stalin spoke, though he, too, addressed himself to the same—Party—public.

  In his not very new, unpressed general’s uniform, he was the only one among the Soviet leaders who delved into details, into the daily life of the Communist rank and file and the citizenry. Let it be understood: he did not do this with the aim of changing conditions, but of strengthening, perfecting existing conditions. He did look into matters and remedy them, while others issued orders from offices and received reports.

  None of the Soviet leaders went to collective farms, except occasionally to attend some feast or parade. Khrushchev accompanied us to a collective farm and, without harboring in any little corner of his mind the slightest doubt of the justice of the system itself, he not only clinked huge glasses of vodka with the collective farmers, but he also inspected the garden hotbeds, peeked into the pigsty, and began discussing practical problems. During the ride back to Kiev he kept coming back to the question of the collective farms and openly brought out shortcomings.

  We could observe his extraordinarily practical sense on a grand scale at a meeting of the economic sections of the Ukrainian Government. Unlike Yugoslav ministers, his commissars were excellently acquainted with matters and, what was more important, they realistically gauged possibilities.

  Rather short and stocky, but brisk and agile, he was strongly hewn and of one piece. He practically bolted down impressive quantities of food—as though wishing to spare his artificial steel jawbone. While Stalin and his entourage gave the impression of gourmandism, it seemed to me that it was all the same to Khrushchev what he ate and that the important thing was to fill up, as it is to any hard worker, if, of course, he has the means. His board was also opulent—stately but impersonal. Khrushchev is not a gourmand, though he eats no less than Stalin and drinks even more.

  He possesses an extremely powerful vitality and, like all practical men, a great ability to adapt. I do not think he would trouble himself much over the choice of methods as long as they brought him practical results. But like all popular demagogues who often themselves believe what they say, he would find it easy to abandon impractical methods and readily justify the change by appeals to moral reasons and the highest ideals. He likes to quote the proverb “In a fight don’t stop to pick cudgels.” It serves him well to justify the cudgel even when there is no fight. Everything I have said here is not at all what one should tell about Khrushchev today. Still I have given my impressions from another time, and also, along the way, my incidental reflections of today.

  At that time I could not detect in Khrushchev any disapproval of Stalin or Molotov. Whenever there was talk of Stalin, he spoke of him with respect and stressed their closeness. He recounted how, on the eve of the German attack, Stalin had phoned him from Moscow warning him to be on the alert, for he had information that the Germans might begin operations the next day—June 22. I offer this as a fact, and not in order to refute Khrushchev’s charges against Stalin concerning the unexpectedness of the German attack. That unexpectedness was the consequence of Stalin’s error in political judgment.

  Nevertheless, in Kiev one felt a certain freshness—thanks to Khrushchev’s limitless vigor and practicality, to Manuilsky’s enthusiasm, to the beauty of the city itself, which, with its unobstructed horizons and with its hills overlooking a vast muddy river, was reminiscent of Belgrade. Though Khrushchev left the impression of strength, self-confidence, and realism, and Kiev one of conscious and cultivated beauty, the Ukraine has remained associated in my memory with a loss of personality, with weariness and hopelessness.

  The more I delved into the Soviet reality, the more my doubts multiplied. The reconciliation of that reality and my, human, conscience was becoming more and more hopeless.

  III

  DISAPPOINTMENTS

  1

  MY THIRD encounter with Stalin came in early 1948. This was the most significant encounter, for it took place on the eve of the rift between the Soviet and the Yugoslav leaders. It was preceded by significant events and changes in Yugoslav-Soviet relations.

  Relations between the Soviet Union and the West had already assumed the contours of the Cold War between two blocs. The key events leading to this, in my opinion, were the Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan, the civil war in Greece, and the creation by some Communist parties of an Information Bureau, the Cominform. Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union were the only two East European countries that were decisively against the Marshall Plan—the former largely out of revolutionary dogmatism, and the latter for fear that American economic aid might shake up the empire it had so recently acquired militarily.

  As Yugoslav delegate to the Congress of the Communist Party of France in Strasbourg, I found myself in Paris just at the time Molotov was having conversations with the representatives of the Western states regarding the Marshall Plan. Molotov received me in the Soviet Embassy, and we agreed on boycotting the Marshall Plan, and also in our criticism of the French Party, with its so-called “national line.” Molotov was especially interested in my impressions of the Congress, and he remarked about the periodical La Nouvelle Democratic, of which Duclos was the editor and which purported to express the united views of the Communist parties: “That isn’t what was needed and what ought to be done.”

  Regarding the Marshall Plan, Molotov wondered whether a conference should not be called in which the Eastern countries would also participate, but only for propaganda reasons, with the aim of exploiting the publicity and then walking out on the conference at a convenient moment. I was not enthusiastic about this variation either, though I would not have opposed it had the Russians insisted; such was the stand taken by my country’s Government. However, Molotov received a message from the Politburo in Moscow that he should not agree even to this.

  Immediately upon my return to Belgrade I learned that a conf
erence of East European countries was to be held in Moscow to take a stand with respect to the Marshall Plan. I was designated to represent Yugoslavia. The real aim of the conference was to bring collective pressure to bear on Czechoslovakia, whose Government was not against participating in the Marshall Plan. The Soviet plane was already waiting at the Belgrade airfield, but I did not fly the next day, for a telegram arrived from Moscow stating that there was no need for the conference—the Czechoslovak Government had abandoned its original stand.

  That same conformity with the Soviet Union, though for reasons other than the Soviet Union’s, manifested itself also in the creation of the Cominform. The idea that it was necessary to create some agency that could facilitate the co-ordination and exchange of views among the Communist parties had been discussed as early as 1946; Stalin, Tito, and Dimitrov had talked about it in the spring of the same year. However, its realization had been postponed for many reasons, mostly, to be sure, because everything depended on the Soviet leaders’ judgment of when the time was ripe. It ripened in the fall of 1947, most probably in connection with the Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan and the solidification of Soviet domination over Eastern Europe.

  At the founding meeting—in western Poland, that is, on former German territory—the only two delegations that were decidedly for the Cominform were the Yugoslav and the Soviet. Gomulka was opposed, cautiously but unequivocally holding out for the “Polish path to socialism.”

  In connection with this, I might mention as a curiosity that it was Stalin who thought up the name of the Cominform’s organ, For a Lasting Peace—For a People’s Democracy, with the idea that the Western press would have to repeat the slogan each time it quoted something from it. But Stalin’s expectation was not fulfilled: because of the length and transparent propaganda nature of its name, the newspaper was—as though for spite-most frequently referred to simply as “the organ of the Cominform.” Stalin also decided in the end where the seat of the Cominform was to be. The delegates had agreed on Prague. The Czech representative, Slansky, hurried to Prague by car that evening to consult Gottwald about this. But that night Zhdanov and Malenkov talked with Stalin (for not even in that remote pension and distant location did they fail to have a direct telephone connection with Moscow), and though Gottwald was reluctant to agree, Stalin ordained that the seat should be in Belgrade.