Milovan Djilas has analysed with sincerity, passion and clarity the emergence of party and governmental officials in communist regimes as a new category using official positions to amass wealth and privileges
I became an admirer of Milovan Djilas immediately after reading his The New Class, a year after its first publication in the West in 1957. By then the dichotomy between communist promises and the claims, and performances of communist regimes on the ground, had become known. The East Berlin bread riots of 1953 had confirmed the essentially colonial nature of Soviet domination over East Europe. Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 had confirmed chilling accounts of Stalin’s purges and the tyrannical system over which he presided. The God That Failed, an anthology of essays by louis Fischer, Andre Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender and Richard Wright, and edited by Richard Crossman of Britain’s labour Party, explaining their break with communism, had sent shockwaves round the world after its first publication in 1949.
What had struck me about The New Class, was the sincerity, passion and clarity with which Djilas had analysed the emergence of party and governmental officials in communist regimes as a new, exploiting category using official positions to amass wealth and privileges that set them apart from the rest of their countrymen wallowing in poverty and without democratic rights. This development, I learnt later, had been foreseen as early as the late 19th century by Georgi Plekhanov, an early mentor with whom lenin had broken subsequently.
In his Socialism and Political Struggle (1883), he had argued that any attempt to establish socialism in Russia without modern industry and a concentrated, enlightened and organised industrial proletariat, would discredit the very idea of socialism and create a new socialist caste — he did not use the word class — like the one the ruling Incas of Peru constituted. These “Peruvian sons of the sun”, would act as guardians, bureaucratic socialisers, administrators, tribute takers, absolute rulers over the people, who would have to obey the centralised supreme command and its bureaucratic functionaries. Far from being educated for socialism, they would be reduced to total subservience to a state more powerful that even that of the Tsars, and would lose their capacity for further progress toward freedom, democracy and socialism.
I had not read Plekhanov then and known nothing about his warning which proved prophetic. But even my later acquaintance with his work did not diminish my admiration for Djilas whose rare commitment to principles made him speak his mind despite knowing full well that this would not only mean the loss of his position of being only next to Tito’s in the Yugoslav Communist Party, but imprisonment. No stranger to torture and prisons under the royal Yugoslav Government, he was by all means an extraordinary individual.
I had, therefore, leapt to buy a copy of Djilas’s Conversations with Stalin, which I saw in a Kolkata bookshop recently. There he describes graphically the new class prospering in the Soviet Union in the midst of the bloodletting and devastation of World War II. For example, Djilas writes, “As children of the Party and the revolution, who acquired faith in themselves and the faith of the people through ascetic purity, we could not help being shocked at the drinking party that was held for us on the eve of our departure from the front, in Marshal Konev’s headquarters, in some village in Bessarabia”, adding, “Girls who were too pretty and too extravagantly made up to be waitresses brought in huge quantities of the choicest victuals — caviar, smoked salmon and trout, fresh cucumbers and pickled young eggplant, boiled smoked hams, cold roast pigs, hot meat pies and piquant cheeses, borsch, sizzling steaks and cakes a foot thick and platters of tropical fruit under which the tables buckled.”
Simultaneously, the personality cult around Stalin was clearly manifest. Referring to it, Djilas writes that the “deification of Stalin, or the ‘cult of personality’, as it is now called, was at least as much the work of Stalin’s circle and the bureaucracy, which required such a leader, as it was his own doing.” The relationship, however, changed. “Turned into a deity, Stalin became so powerful that in time he ceased to pay attention to the changing needs and desires of those who had exalted him.” It was worse. “His country was in ruins, hungry, exhausted. But his Armies and marshals, heavy with fat and medals and drunk with Vodka and victory, had already trampled half of Europe under foot, and he was convinced that he would trample over the other half in the next round. He knew he was one of the cruellest, most despotic personalities in human history. But this did not worry him one bit, for he was convinced that he was executing the judgement of history. His conscience was troubled by nothing, despite the millions who had been destroyed in his name and by his order, despite thousands of his closest collaborators whom he had murdered as traitors because they doubted that he was leading the country and the people into happiness, equality and liberty.”
External domination was an extension of the internal. “A man who has subjected all activities in his own country to his views and to his personality, Stalin could not behave differently outside. Having identified domestic progress and freedom with the interests and privileges of one party, he could not act in foreign affairs other than as a hegemonist.”
Noting that every crime was possible for Stalin, for there was not one he had not committed, Djilas asks how “such a dark, cunning and cruel individual could ever have led one of the greatest and most powerful statesIJ” Stalin, he explains, had the advantage of dealing with an “exhausted and desperate Russian post-revolutionary society”, but “it is also true that certain strata of the same society, to be more exact, the ruling political bureaucracy of the Party, found use for just such a man…”
The basic cause, of course, was the utterly secretive and authoritarian character of the CPSU organised on the lenin’s principle of ‘democratic centralism’. It facilitated dictatorship. Referring to it, Vera Zasulich once said that louis XIV’s idea of the state [The StateIJ That’s me] was lenin’s idea of the party. In a pamphlet entitled Our Political Tasks, Trotsky predicted a situation in which “the party is replaced by the organisation of the party, the organisation by the central committee, and finally the central committee by the dictator”. These words too proved prophetic
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