Description

This is one of the gravest political books of today,not only because of the extraordinary events it records but also – and chiefly- because of the authority
with which the author speaks.Milovan Djilas was for years Tito’s closest associate.He was Vice-President of Yugoslavia; he sat in an inner cabinet of four; and he led three important missions to Moscow. These pages witness the slow disenchantment of a sincere and idealistic revolutionary.It was certainly not in Djilas’s interest – as it may have been in Khrushchev’s – to blacken Stalin or expose the power-mad imperialism which for years wore the Comintern as its mask. As he progressively revealed
his revulsion against Russia and many of the results of Communism – in articles, in The New Class, in a famous interview with the New York Times, and in his
championship of the Hungarians in 1956 – he was successively isolated, expelled from the Central Committee in 1954 and eventually imprisoned for ten years.But Djilas never ceased to speak out, Conversations with Stalio was written on his conditional release in 1961. In1962 he was re-arrested.Opinions of this courageous book, by Edward Crankshaw,
Michael Foot, and others, are printed inside this cover.’Here are the most revealing passages ever written not only about Stalin but also about the Soviet political arena in which Mr Krushchev received his education.’In fact this disturbing, brilliant book is new in spirit from beginning to end; and it is all one great secret given recklessly away. Because here, for the first time, a man who was a senior Communist politician, who has talked as a Communist with
Stalin and his creatures, relaxed, behind drawn blinds, writes of what he saw and heard as a human being writing about human beings. All the abuse of Stalin so far, from Trotsky through Tito to Krushchev, has been doctrinal, has thus carefully concealed the human secret.
‘Djias does not abuse Stalin. He has done a much more dangerous thing. He has helped us to understand him. The one
thing forbidden all good Communists is any attempt to understand Stalin, because this cannot be done without letting in light, as this short book blindingly does, into the hidden areas of the Soviet Union, of the Krushchev Government, of the Communist system
including the Yugoslav wing. Stalin is to be rejected not understood.Mr Krushchev and the communist system (but who will call it a system after reading this book?) are to be accepted,not understood’.