Conversations with Stalin

by Milovan Djilas

  This time, too, only Kiev left an impression of discreet beauty and cleanliness, culture and a feeling for style and taste, despite its poverty and isolation. Because it was night, there was no view of the Dnieper and the plains merging with the sky. Still it all reminded one of Belgrade—the future Belgrade, with a million people and built with diligence and harmony. We stopped in Kiev only briefly, to be switched to the train for Moscow. Not one Ukrainian official met us. Soon we were on our way into a night white with snow and dark with sorrow. Only our car sparkled with the brilliance of comfort and abundance in this limitless desolation and poverty.

  4

  Just a few hours after our arrival in Moscow we were deep in a cordial conversation with the Yugoslav Ambassador, Vladimir Popović, when the telephone on his desk rang. The Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asking if I was tired, for Stalin wished to see me immediately, that same evening. Such haste is unusual in Moscow, where foreign Communists have always waited long, so that a saying circulated among them: It is easy to get to Moscow but hard to get out again. To be sure, even if I had been tired, I would have accepted Stalin’s invitation most willingly. Everyone in the delegation regarded me with enthusiasm, though also not without envy, and Koča Popovič and Todorović kept reminding me not to forget why they, too, had come along, even though I had taken advantage of our traveling together to acquaint myself in detail with their requests.

  My joy over the impending meeting with Stalin was sober and not quite pure precisely because of the haste with which it had come. This misgiving never left me the whole night that I spent with him and other Soviet leaders.

  As usual, at about nine o’clock in the evening they took me to the Kremlin, to Stalin’s office. Gathered there were Stalin, Molotov, and Zhdanov. The last, as was known to me, had charge in the Politburo of maintaining relations with foreign parties.

  After the customary greetings, Stalin immediately got down to business: “So, members of the Central Committee in Albania are killing themselves over you! This is very inconvenient, very inconvenient.”

  I began to explain: Naku Spiru was against linking Albania with Yugoslavia; he isolated himself in his own Central Committee. I had not even finished when, to my surprise, Stalin said: “We have no special interest in Albania. We agree to Yugoslavia swallowing Albania! . . .” At this he gathered together the fingers of his right hand and, bringing them to his mouth, he made a motion as if to swallow them.

  I was astonished, almost struck dumb by Stalin’s manner of expressing himself and by the gesture of swallowing, but I do not know whether this was visible on my face, for I tried to make a joke of it and to regard this as Stalin’s customary drastic and picturesque manner of expression. Again I explained: “It is not a matter of swallowing, but unification!”

  At this Molotov interjected: “But that is swallowing!”

  And Stalin added, again with that gesture of his: “Yes, yes. Swallowing! But we agree with you: you ought to swallow Albania—the sooner the better.”

  Despite this manner of expression, the whole atmosphere was cordial and more than friendly. Even Molotov expressed that bit about swallowing with an almost humorous amiability which was hardly usual with him.

  I approached a rapprochement and unification with Albania with sincere and, of course, revolutionary motives. I considered, as did many others, that unification—with the truly voluntary agreement of the Albanian leaders—would not only be of direct value to both Yugoslavia and Albania, but would also finally put an end to the traditional intolerance and conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Its particular importance, in my opinion, lay in the fact that it would make possible the amalgamation of our considerable and compact Albanian minority with Albania as a separate republic in the Yugoslav-Albanian Federation. Any other solution to the problem of the Albanian national minority seemed impracticable to me, since the simple transfer of Yugoslav territories inhabited by Albanians would give rise to uncontrollable resistance in the Yugoslav Communist Party itself.

  I had for Albania and the Albanians a special predilection which could only strengthen the idealism of my motivations: The Albanians, especially the northern ones, are by mentality and way of life akin to the Montenegrins from whom I spring, and their vitality and determination to maintain their independence has no equal in human history.

  Though it did not even occur to me to differ with the view of my country’s leaders and to agree with Stalin, still Stalin’s interjections for the first time confronted me with two thoughts. The first was the suspicion that something was not right about Yugoslavia’s policy toward Albania, and the other was that the Soviet Union had united with the Baltic countries by swallowing them. It was Molotov’s remark that directly reminded me of this.

  Both thoughts merged into one—into a feeling of discomfort.

  The thought that there might be something obscure and inconsistent about Yugoslav policy toward Albania did not, however, cause me to admit that this policy was one of “swallowing.” Yet it did strike me that this policy did not correspond with the will and the desires of the Albanian Communists, which, for me, as a Communist, were identical with the aspirations of the Albanian people. Why did Spiru kill himself? He was not “petty bourgeois” and “burdened by nationalism” as much as he was a Communist and a Marxist. And what if the Albanians wished, as we did vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, to have their own separate state? If the unification were carried out despite Albanian wishes and by taking advantage of their isolation and misery, would this not lead to irreconcilable conflicts and difficulties? Ethnically peculiar and with an ancient identity, the Albanians as a nation were young and hence filled with an irrepressible and still unfulfilled national consciousness. Would they not consider unification as the loss of their independence, as a rejection of their individuality?

  As for the other thought—that the USSR had swallowed the Baltic states—I linked it with the first, repeating, convincing myself: We Yugoslavs do not wish, do not dare, to take that road to unification with Albania, nor is there any immediate danger that some imperialistic power, such as Germany, might bring pressure on Albania and use it as a base against Yugoslavia.

  But Stalin brought me back to reality. “And what about Hoxha, what is he like in your opinion?”

  I avoided a direct and clear answer, but Stalin expressed precisely the same opinion of Hoxha as the Yugoslav leaders had acquired. “He is a petty bourgeois, inclined toward nationalism? Yes, we think so too. Does it seem that the strongest man there is Xoxe?”

  I confirmed his leading questions.

  Stalin ended the conversation about Albania, which lasted barely ten minutes: “There are no differences between us. You personally write Tito a dispatch about this in the name of the Soviet Government and submit it to me by tomorrow.”

  Afraid that I had not understood, I sounded him out, and he repeated that I was to write the dispatch to the Yugoslav Government in the name of the Soviet Government.

  At that moment I took this to be a sign of special confidence in me and as the highest expression of agreement with the Yugoslav policy toward Albania. However, while writing the dispatch the next day, the thought occurred to me that it might someday be used against my country’s Government, and so I formulated it carefully and very briefly, something like this: Djilas arrived in Moscow yesterday and, at a meeting held with him on the same day, there was expressed complete agreement between the Soviet Government and Yugoslavia concerning the question of Albania. That dispatch was never sent to the Yugoslav Government, nor was it ever used against it in later clashes between Moscow and Belgrade.

  The rest of the conversation did not last long either and revolved idly around such uneventful questions as the location of the Cominform in Belgrade and its newspaper, Tito’s health, and the like.

  However, I seized an opportune moment and raised the question of supplies for the Yugoslav Army and our war industry. I stressed that we frequently encountered difficulties with Soviet rep
resentatives because they refused to give us this or that, using “military secrets” as an excuse. Stalin rose shouting, “We have no military secrets from you. You are a friendly socialist country—we have no military secrets from you.”

  He then went to his desk, called Bulganin on the phone, and gave a short order: “The Yugoslavs are here, the Yugoslav delegation—they should be heard immediately.”

  The whole conversation in the Kremlin lasted about a half hour, and then we set out for Stalin’s villa for dinner.

  5

  We seated ourselves in Stalin’s automobile, which seemed to me to be the same as the one in which I rode with Molotov in 1945. Zhdanov sat in back to my right, while Stalin and Molotov sat in front of us on the folding seats. During the trip Stalin turned on a little light on the panel in front of him under which hung a pocket watch—it was almost ten o’clock—and I observed directly in front of me his already hunched back and the bony gray nape of his neck with its wrinkled skin above the stiff marshal’s collar. I reflected: Here is one of the most powerful men of today, and here are his associates; what a sensational catastrophe it would be if a bomb now exploded in our midst and blew us all to pieces! But this thought was only fleeting and ugly and so unexpected even to myself that it horrified me. With a sad affection, I saw in Stalin a little old grandfather who, all his life, and still now, looked after the success and happiness of the whole Communist race.

  While waiting for the others to gather together, Stalin, Zhdanov, and I found ourselves in the entrance hall of the villa, by the map of the world. I again glanced at the blue pencil mark that encircled Stalingrad—and again Stalin noticed it; I could not fail to observe that my scrutiny pleased him. Zhdanov also noticed this exchange of glances, joined us, and remarked, “The beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad.”

  But Stalin said nothing to that.

  If I remember well, Stalin began to look for Königsberg, for it was to be renamed Kaliningrad—and in so doing we came across places around Leningrad that still bore German names from the time of Catherine. This caught Stalin’s eye and he turned to Zhdanov, saying curtly: “Change these names—it is senseless that these places still bear German names!” At this Zhdanov pulled out a small notebook and recorded Stalin’s order with a little pencil.

  After this Molotov and I went to the toilet, which was located in the basement of the villa. It contained several stalls and urinals. Molotov began to unbutton his pants even as we walked, commenting: “We call this unloading before loading!” Thereupon I, a long-time resident of prisons, where a man is forced to forget about modesty, felt ashamed in the presence of Molotov, an older man, entered a stall and shut the door.

  After this both of us proceeded to the dining room, where Stalin, Malenkov, Beria, Zhdanov, and Voznesensky were already gathered. The last two are new personae in these memoirs.

  Zhdanov, too, was rather short, with a brownish clipped mustache, high forehead, pointed nose, and a sickly red face. He was educated and was regarded in the Politburo as a great intellectual. Despite his well-known narrowness and dogmatism, I would say that his knowledge was not inconsiderable. Although he had some knowledge of everything, even music, I would not say that there was a single field that he knew thoroughly—a typical intellectual who became acquainted with and picked up knowledge of other fields through Marxist literature. He was also a cynic, in an intellectual way, but all the uglier for this because behind the intellectualism one unmistakably sensed the potentate who was “magnanimous” toward men of the spirit and the pen. This was the period of the “Decrees”—decisions by the Soviet Central Committee concerning literature and other branches of the arts which amounted to a violent attack against even those minimal freedoms in the choice of subject and form that had survived (or else had been snatched from) bureaucratic Party control during the war. I remember that that evening Zhdanov recounted as the latest joke how his criticism of the satirist Zoshchenko had been taken in Leningrad: They simply took away Zoshchenko’s ration coupons and did not give them back to him until after Moscow’s magnanimous intervention.

  Voznesensky, the Chairman of the Planning Commission of the USSR, was barely past forty—a typical Russian, blond and with prominent cheekbones, a rather high forehead, and curly hair. He gave the impression of being an orderly, cultured, and above all withdrawn man, who said little and always had a happy inward smile. I had previously read his book on the Soviet economy during the war, and it gave me the impression that the author was a conscientious and thoughtful man. Later that book was criticized in the USSR, and Voznesensky was liquidated for reasons that have remained undisclosed to this day.

  I was well acquainted with Voznesensky’s older brother, a university professor who had just been named Minister of Education in the Russian Federation. I had had some very interesting discussions with the elder Voznesensky at the time of the Panslavic Congress in Belgrade, in the winter of 1946. We had agreed not only with respect to the narrowness and bias of the prevailing theories of “socialist realism,” but also concerning the appearance of new phenomena in socialism (that is, communism) with the creation of the new socialist countries and with changes in capitalism which had not yet been discussed theoretically. It is probable that his handsome contemplative head also fell in the senseless purges.

  The dinner began with someone—it seems to me that it was Stalin himself—proposing that everyone guess how many degrees below zero it was, and that everyone be punished by being made to drink as many glasses of vodka as the number of degrees he guessed wrong. Luckily, while still at the hotel, I had looked at the thermometer, and I added to the number to allow for the temperature drop during the night, so that I missed by only one degree. I remember that Beria missed by three, remarking that he had done so on purpose so that he might drink more glasses of vodka.

  Such a beginning to a dinner forced upon me a heretical thought: These men shut up in a narrow circle were capable of inventing even more senseless reasons for drinking vodka—the length of the dining room in feet or of the table in inches. And who knows, maybe that’s what they do! At any rate, this apportioning of the number of vodka glasses according to the temperature reading suddenly brought to my mind the confinement, the inanity and senselessness of the life these Soviet leaders were living gathered about their superannuated chief even as they played a role that was decisive for the human race. I recalled that the Russian tsar Peter the Great likewise held such suppers with his assistants at which they gorged and drank themselves into a stupor while ordaining the fate of Russia and the Russian people.

  This impression of the vacuity of such a life did not recede but kept recurring during the course of the dinner despite my attempts to suppress it. It was especially strengthened by Stalin’s age, by conspicuous signs of his senility. No amount of respect and love for his person, which I stubbornly nurtured inside myself, was able to erase that realization from my consciousness.

  There was something both tragic and ugly in his senility. The tragic was invisible—these were the reflections in my head regarding the inevitability of decline in even so great a personality. The ugly kept cropping up all the time. Though he had always enjoyed eating well, Stalin now exhibited gluttony, as though he feared that there would not be enough of the desired food left for him. On the other hand, he drank less and more cautiously, as though measuring every drop—to avoid any ill effects.

  His intellect was in even more apparent decline. He liked to recall incidents from his youth—his exile in Siberia, his childhood in the Caucasus; and he would compare everything recent with something that had already happened: “Yes, I remember, the same thing. . . .”

  It was incomprehensible how much he had changed in two or three years. When I had last seen him, in 1945, he was still lively, quick-witted, and had a pointed sense of humor. But that was during the war, and it had been, it would seem, Stalin’s last effort and limit. Now he laughed at inanities and shallow jokes. On one occasion he not only failed to get the po
litical point of an anecdote I told him in which he outsmarted Churchill and Roosevelt, but I had the impression that he was offended, in the manner of old men. I perceived an awkward astonishment on the faces of the rest of the party.

  In one thing, though, he was still the Stalin of old: stubborn, sharp, suspicious whenever anyone disagreed with him. He even cut Molotov, and one could feel the tension between them. Everyone paid court to him, avoiding any expression of opinion before he expressed his, and then hastening to agree with him.

  As usual, they hopped from subject to subject—and I shall proceed likewise in my account.

  Stalin spoke up about the atom bomb: “That is a powerful thing, pow-er-ful!” His expression was full of admiration, so that one was given to understand that he would not rest until he, too, had the “powerful thing.” But he did not mention that he had it already or that the USSR was working on it.

  On the other hand, when Kardelj and I met with Dimitrov in Moscow a month later, Dimitrov told us as if in confidence that the Russians already had the atom bomb, and an even better one than the Americans’, that is, the one exploded over Hiroshima. I maintain that this was not true, but that the Russians were just on the way to making an atom bomb. But these are the facts, and I cite them.

  Both that night and again soon after, in a meeting with the Bulgarian and Yugoslav delegations, Stalin stressed that Germany would remain divided: “The West will make Western Germany their own, and we shall turn Eastern Germany into our own state.”

  This thought of his was new, but understandable; it proceeded from the whole trend of Soviet policy in Eastern Europe and toward the West. I could never understand the statements by Stalin and the Soviet leaders, made before the Bulgars and the Yugoslavs in the spring of 1946, that all of Germany must be ours, that is, Soviet, Communist. I asked one of those present how the Russians meant to bring this about. He replied, “I don’t know myself!” I suspect that not even those who made the statements actually knew how but were caught up by the flush of military victories and by their hopes for the economic and other dissolution of Western Europe.