Conversations with Stalin

by Milovan Djilas

  The variety of food and drink was enormous—with meats and hard liquor predominating. But everything else was simple and unostentatious. None of the servants appeared except when Stalin rang, and the only occasion for this was when I requested beer. Everyone ate what he pleased and as much as he wanted; only there was rather too much of urging and daring us to drink and there were too many toasts.

  Such a dinner usually lasted six or more hours—from ten at night till four or five in the morning. One ate and drank slowly, during a rambling conversation which ranged from stories and anecdotes to the most serious political and even philosophical subjects. Unofficially and in actual fact a significant part of Soviet policy was shaped at these dinners. Besides they were the most frequent and most convenient entertainment and only luxury in Stalin’s otherwise monotonous and somber life.

  Apparently Stalin’s co-workers were used to this manner of working and living—and spent their nights dining with Stalin or with one of their own number. They did not arrive in their offices before noon, and usually stayed in them till late evening. This complicated and made difficult the work of the higher administration, but the latter adapted itself, even the diplomatic corps, insofar as they had contacts with members of the Politburo.

  There was no established order according to which members of the Politburo or other high officials attended these dinners. Usually those attended who had some connection with the business of the guest or with current issues. Apparently the circle was narrow, however, and it was an especial honor to be invited to such a dinner. Only Molotov was always present, and I maintain that this was not only because he was Commissar, that is, Minister for Foreign Affairs, but also because he was in fact Stalin’s substitute.

  At these dinners the Soviet leaders were at their closest, most intimate with one another. Everyone would tell the news from his bailiwick, whom he had met that day, and what plans he was making. The sumptuous table and considerable, though not immoderate, quantities of alcohol enlivened spirits and intensified the atmosphere of cordiality and informality. An uninstructed visitor might hardly have detected any difference between Stalin and the rest. Yet it existed. His opinion was carefully noted. No one opposed him very hard. It all rather resembled a patriarchal family with a crotchety head whose foibles always caused the home folks to be apprehensive.

  Stalin took quantities of food that would have been enormous even for a much larger man. He usually picked meat, which reflected his mountaineer origins. He also liked all kinds of specialties, in which this land of various climes and civilizations abounded, but I did not notice that any one food was his particular favorite. He drank moderately, most frequently mixing red wine and vodka in little glasses. I never noticed any signs of drunkenness in him, whereas I could not say the same for Molotov, and especially not for Beria, who was practically a drunkard. As all to a man overate at these dinners, the Soviet leaders ate very little and irregularly during the day, and many of them dieted on fruit and juices one day out of every week, for the sake of razgruzhenie (unloading).

  It was at these dinners that the destiny of the vast Russian land, of the newly acquired territories, and, to a considerable degree, of the human race was decided. And even if the dinners failed to inspire those spiritual creators—the “engineers of the human spirit”—to great deeds, many such deeds were probably buried there forever.

  Still I never heard any talk of inner-Party opposition or how to deal with it. Apparently this belonged largely to the jurisdiction of Stalin and the Secret Police, and since the Soviet leaders are also human, they gladly forgot about conscience, all the more so because any appeal to conscience would be dangerous to their own fate.

  I shall mention only what seemed significant to me in the facile and imperceptible rambling from subject to subject at that session.

  Calling to mind earlier ties between the South Slavs and Russia, I said, “But the Russian tsars did not understand the aspirations of the South Slavs—they were interested in imperialistic expansion, and we in liberation.”

  Stalin agreed, but in a different way: “Yes, the Russian tsars lacked horizons.”

  Stalin’s interest in Yugoslavia was different from that of the other Soviet leaders. He was not concerned with the sacrifices and the destruction, but with what kind of internal relations had been created and what the actual power of the rebel movement was. He did not collect even this information through questioning, but in the course of the conversation itself.

  At one point he expressed interest in Albania. “What is really going on over there? What kind of people are they?”

  I explained: “In Albania pretty much the same thing is happening as in Yugoslavia. The Albanians are the most ancient Balkan people—older than the Slavs, and even the ancient Greeks.”

  “But how did their settlements get Slavic names?” Stalin asked. “Haven’t they some connection with the Slavs?”

  I explained this too. “The Slavs inhabited the valleys in earlier times—hence the Slavic place names—and then in Turkish times the Albanians pushed them out.”

  Stalin winked roguishly. “I had hoped that the Albanians were at least a little Slavic.”

  In telling him about the mode of warfare in Yugoslavia and its ferocity, I pointed out that we did not take German prisoners because they killed all of our prisoners.

  Stalin interrupted, laughing: “One of our men was leading a large group of Germans, and on the way he killed all but one. They asked him, when he arrived at his destination: ‘And where are all the others?’ ‘I was just carrying out the orders of the Commander in Chief,’ he said, ‘to kill every one to the last man—and here is the last man.’”

  In the course of the conversation, he remarked about the Germans, “They are a queer people, like sheep. I remember from my childhood: wherever the ram went, all the rest followed. I remember also when I was in Germany before the Revolution: a group of German Social Democrats came late to the Congress because they had to wait to have their tickets confirmed, or something of the sort. When would Russians ever do that? Someone has said well: ‘In Germany you cannot have a revolution because you would have to step on the lawns.’”

  He asked me to tell him what the Serbian words were for certain things. Of course the great similarity between Russian and Serbian was apparent. “By God,” Stalin exclaimed, “there’s no doubt about it: the same people.”

  There were also anecdotes. Stalin liked one in particular which I told. “A Turk and a Montenegrin were talking during a rare moment of truce. The Turk wondered why the Montenegrins constantly waged war. ‘For plunder,’ the Montenegrin replied. ‘We are poor and hope to get some booty. And what are you fighting for?’ ‘For honor and glory,’ replied the Turk. To which the Montenegrin rejoined, ‘Everyone fights for what he doesn’t have.’” Stalin commented, roaring: “By God, that’s deep: everyone fights for what he doesn’t have.”

  Molotov laughed too, but again sparely and soundlessly. He was truly unable either to give or to receive humor.

  Stalin inquired which leaders I had met in Moscow, and when I mentioned Dimitrov and Manuilsky, he remarked, “Dimitrov is a smarter man than Manuilsky, much smarter.”

  At this he remarked on the dissolution of the Comintern, “They, the Westerners, are so sly that they mentioned nothing about it to us. And we are so stubborn that had they mentioned it, we would not have dissolved it at all! The situation with the Comintern was becoming more and more abnormal. Here Vyacheslav Mikhailovich and I were racking our brains, while the Comintern was pulling in its own direction—and the discord grew worse. It is easy to work with Dimitrov, but with the others it was harder. Most important of all, there was something abnormal, something unnatural about the very existence of a general Communist forum at a time when the Communist parties should have been searching for a national language and fighting under the conditions prevailing in their own countries.’’

  In the course of the evening two dispatches arrived; Stalin handed me bot
h to read.

  One reported what Šubašić had said to the United States State Department Šubašić’s stand was this: We Yugoslavs cannot be against the Soviet Union nor can we pursue an anti-Russian policy, for Slavic and pro-Russian traditions are very strong among us.

  Stalin remarked about this, “This is Šubašić scaring the Americans. But why is he scaring them? Yes, scaring them! But why, why?”

  And then he added, probably noticing the astonishment on my face, “They steal our dispatches, we steal theirs.”

  The second dispatch was from Churchill. He announced that the landing in France would begin on the next day. Stalin began to make fun of the dispatch. “Yes, there’ll be a landing, if there is no fog. Until now there was always something that interfered. I suspect tomorrow it will be something else. Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans! What if they meet up with some Germans! Maybe there won’t be a landing then, but just promises as usual.”

  Hemming and hawing in his customary way, Molotov began to explain: “No, this time it will really be so.”

  My impression was that Stalin did not seriously doubt the Allied landing, but his aim was to ridicule it, especially the reasons for its previous postponements.

  As I sum up that evening today, it seems to me that I might conclude that Stalin was deliberately frightening the Yugoslav leaders in order to decrease their ties with the West, and at the same time he tried to subordinate their policy to his interests and to his relations with the Western states, primarily with Great Britain.

  Thanks to both ideology and methods, personal experience and historical heritage, he regarded as sure only whatever he held in his fist, and everyone beyond the control of his police was a potential enemy. Because of the conditions of war, the Yugoslav revolution had been wrested from his control, and the power that was generating behind it was becoming too conscious of its potential for him to be able simply to give it orders. He was conscious of all this, and so he was simply doing what he could—exploiting the anticapitalist prejudices of the Yugoslav leaders against the Western states. He tried to bind those leaders to himself and to subordinate their policy to his.

  The world in which the Soviet leaders lived—and that was my world too—was slowly taking on a new appearance to me: horrible unceasing struggle on all sides. Everything was being stripped bare and reduced to strife which changed only in form and in which only the stronger and the more adroit survived. Full of admiration for the Soviet leaders even before this, I now succumbed to a heady enthusiasm for the inexhaustible will and awareness which never left them for a moment.

  That was a world in which there was no choice other than victory or death.

  That was Stalin—the builder of a new social system.

  On taking my leave, I again asked Stalin if he had any comments to make concerning the work of the Yugoslav Party. He replied, “No, I do not. You yourselves know best what is to be done.”

  On arriving at Vis, I reported this to Tito and to the other members of the Central Committee. And I summed up my Moscow trip: The Comintern factually no longer exists, and we Yugoslav Communists have to shift for ourselves. We have to depend primarily on our own forces.

  As I was leaving after that dinner, Stalin presented me with a sword for Tito—the gift of the Supreme Soviet. To match this magnificent and exalted gift I added my own modest one, on my way back via Cairo: an ivory chess set. I do not think there was any symbolism there. But it does seem to me that even then there existed inside of me, suppressed, a world different from Stalin’s.

  From the clump of firs around Stalin’s villa there rose the mist and the dawn. Stalin and Molotov, tired after another sleepless night, shook hands with me at the entrance. The car bore me away into the morning and to a not yet awakened Moscow, bathed in the blue haze of June and the dew. There came back to me the feeling I had had when I set foot on Russian soil: The world is not so big after all when viewed from this land. And perhaps not unconquerable—with Stalin, with the ideas that were supposed finally to have revealed to man the truth about society and about himself.

  It was a beautiful dream—in the reality of war. It never even occurred to me to determine which of these was the more real, just as I would not be able today to determine which, the dream or the reality, failed more in living up to its promises.

  Men live in dreams and in realities.

  II

  DOUBTS

  1

  MY SECOND trip to Moscow, and thus my second meeting with Stalin, would probably never have taken place had I not been the victim of my own frankness.

  Following the penetration of the Red Army into Yugoslavia and the liberation of Belgrade in the fall of 1944, individuals and groups within the Red Army perpetrated so many serious assaults on citizens and on members of the Yugoslav Army that a political problem arose for the new regime and for the Communist Party.

  The Yugoslav Communists idealized the Red Army. Yet they themselves dealt unmercifully with even the most petty looting and crime in their own ranks. They were more dumfounded than were the ordinary people, who through inherited experience expected looting and crime by every army. The problem did in fact exist. Worse still, the foes of Communism were exploiting these incidents by Red Army soldiers in their fight against the unstabilized regime, and against Communism in general. The entire problem was complicated by the feet that the Red Army commands were deaf to complaints, and so the impression was gained that they themselves condoned the attacks and the attackers.

  As soon as Tito returned to Belgrade from Rumania—at which time he also visited in Moscow and met Stalin for the first time—this question had to be taken up.

  At a meeting held at Tito’s, which I attended with Kardelj and Ranković—the four of us were the best-known leaders of the Yugoslav Party—it was decided to discuss this with the chief of the Soviet Mission, General Korneev. In order to have Korneev understand the whole matter in all its seriousness, it was decided that not only Tito should talk with him, but that all three of us should attend the meeting along with two of the most distinguished Yugoslav commanders—Generals Peko Dapčević and Koča Popović.

  Tito presented the problem to Korneev in an extremely mild and polite form, which only made the latter’s crude and offended rejection all the more astonishing. We had invited Korneev as a comrade and a Communist, and here he shouted, “In the name of the Soviet Government I protest against such insinuations against the Red Army, which has . . .”

  All efforts to convince him were in vain. There suddenly loomed within him the picture of himself as the representative of a great power and of a “liberating” army.

  It was then that I said, “The problem lies in the fact, too, that our enemies are using this against us and are comparing the attacks by the Red Army soldiers with the behavior of the English officers, who do not engage in such excesses.”

  Korneev reacted to this especially with gross lack of understanding. “I protest most sharply against the insult given to the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of capitalist countries.”

  Only later did the Yugoslav authorities gather statistics on the lawless acts of the Red Army soldiers. According to complaints filed by citizens, there were 121 cases of rape, of which 111 involved rape with murder, and 1,204 cases of looting with assault—figures that are hardly insignificant if it is borne in mind that the Red Army crossed only the northeastern corner of Yugoslavia. These figures show why the Yugoslav leaders had to consider these incidents as a political problem, all the more serious because it had become an issue in the domestic struggle. The Communists also regarded this problem as a moral one: Could this be that ideal and long-awaited Red Army?

  The meeting with Korneev ended without results, though it was noticed later that the Soviet commands reacted more severely to the willfulness of their soldiers. As soon as Korneev left, some of the comrades reproached me, some mildly and others more sharply, for what I had said. It truly never crossed my mind to compare the Soviet Army wi
th the British—Britain had only a mission in Belgrade—but I was stating obvious facts and presenting my reaction to a political problem, and I had been provoked too by the lack of understanding and intransigence of General Korneev. It was certainly far from my mind to insult the Red Army, which was at the time no less dear to me than to General Korneev. In view of the position I held, I could not keep silent when women were being violated—a crime I have always regarded as being among the most heinous—and when our soldiers were being abused and our property pillaged.

  These words of mine, and a few other matters, were the cause of the first friction between the Yugoslav and Soviet leaders. Though actually more serious causes than these were to arise, it was precisely these words that were to be most frequently cited as the reason for the indignation of the Soviet leaders and their representatives. I may mention incidentally that this was certainly the reason why the Soviet Government did not present me with the Order of Suvorov when it distributed these to some other leading members of the Yugoslav Central Committee. For similar reasons it also passed over General Peko Dapčević. This caused Ranković and me to suggest to Tito that he decorate Dapčević with the Order of Yugoslav National Hero, to counter this snub. Those words of mine were also one of the reasons why Soviet agents in Yugoslavia began, in early 1945, to spread rumors about my “Trotskyism.” They themselves were forced to abandon this measure, not just because of the senselessness of such charges, but because of an amelioration in our relations.

  Nevertheless, because of my declaration, I soon found myself almost isolated, not particularly because my closest friends condemned me—though there were indeed some severe reproaches—or because the Soviet leaders had exaggerated and blown up the entire incident, but perhaps more profoundly because of my own inner experiences. That is to say, I found myself even then in the dilemma in which every Communist who had adopted the Communist idea with good will and altruism finds himself. Sooner or later he must confront the incongruity between that idea and the practice of the Party leaders. In this case, however, it was not because of the discrepancy between an ideal depiction of the Red Army and the actual deeds of its members; I, too, was aware that, though it was the army of a “classless” society, the Red Army could “not yet” be all that it should be and that it still had to contain “remnants of the old.” My dilemma was created by the indifferent, not to say benign, attitude of the Soviet leaders and Soviet commands toward crime, revealed by their refusal to recognize it and by their protests whenever it was brought to their attention. Our own intentions were good: to preserve the reputation of the Red Army and of the Soviet Union, which the propaganda of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia had been building up for years. And what did these good intentions of ours encounter? Arrogance and a rebuff typical of a big state toward a small one, of the strong toward the weak.