(Veselin Pavlićević: "War comrades of Milovan Đilas", BON: Podgorica, 2021, p. 370.)
Milovan Djilas was excluded from the Yugoslav party leadership and public life in 1953. He was soon sentenced to 9 years in prison at secret political trials. His works were no longer published in Yugoslavia, nor - after the party campaign - were they written about him. By refusing the Serbian Literary Cooperative to publish his book A wasteland he was informed that the political condemnation would also apply to his literary work. Until 1980, the fate of Milovan Đilas and his work was in the jurisdiction Josip Broz Tito. He publicly attacked his interviews and articles in the foreign press and threatened him - even after 9 years in prison - with new arrests. It was also a warning to the ignorant people of Đilas who, like him, were looking for changes. And in the 60s, there were such things in all the Yugoslav republics.
No information can be found that dissidents ever reacted during Milovan Đilas' nine-year imprisonment. The focus, especially after 1968, was on the professors of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade - praxisians. Tito supported the students, but demanded the removal of their ringleaders from the faculty. The professors themselves admitted that they were the inspirers and organizers of the student rebellion (Mihajlo Marković). There was also a critical attitude towards the arrest Mihailo Đurić, a professor at the Faculty of Law, because of his criticism of the constitutional amendments and the arrest that followed.
Admittedly, the dissident movement never reacted even to the long-term imprisonment during which the professor and political champion was almost forgotten. Dr. Dragoljub Jovanović. The leadership in Serbia was divided - one part of it, as the latest research shows, was in ideological alliance with the critics and accused the party leadership of opportunism and disobeying Tito. This paradoxical situation shows that the resistance was not based on the principle of freedom as the basis of a law equal for all, but that it came from group political solidarity, or from professional commitment.
At the same time, Đilas's books were translated, published and studied (18 doctoral dissertations were defended) in the West. Thanks to that, the fund of his ideas remained present, which was the reason for the political reckoning with him. Milovan Đilas did not surrender. The bibliography of his works amounts to more than 5.000 items.
In the Diary 1989-1995. Milovan Đilas says that he never took care of his written work: he always assumed the need for creation to grieve for what was lost (investigations, prisons, imprisonment, war, abolition of the right to intellectual existence after 1953, relatives and friends who, out of fear for their own safety, destroyed manuscripts of Milovan Đilas that were entrusted to them for safekeeping). Simply put, Milovan Đilas lived by writing. And maybe he meant like his mother Vasilija. Comparing the number of her children who were killed in the Second World War (two sons and a daughter) with the number of children who survived the war (two sons and two daughters), she told Milovan Đilas: "I gave birth to a lot, so a lot has passed." .
Maybe the time to read and study Milovan Đilas is yet to come. History has described several circles. The Yugoslav Federation no longer exists. The communist system collapsed. More than 40 years have passed since the death of Josip Broz Tito. And almost 30 years since the death of Milovan Đilas.
After the release of Milovan Đilas from prison (1966) - on the wave of liberalization after the removal Aleksandar Ranković, the head of the State Security Administration for more than 20 years and the second man in the party whose competence was the organization and personnel, the question of Milovan Đilas also began to emerge. In the Association of Writers of Serbia, its opposition members (literary critic Borislav Mihajlović Mihiz and a poet Matija Bećković) demanded the publication of the still banned literary works of Milovan Đilas. Literary historians and critics (Vasilije Kalezić, Predrag Palavestra, Nikola Milošević) supported the publisher's intentions with their reviews. The Association of Serbian Translators gave an award to Milovan Đilas for his translation Milton's Paradise lost, on which he worked in a cell where the temperature was below zero. The questioning of the role of Josip Broz Tito has also begun. It came from different positions. Đilas participated in it scrupulously, as a contemporary who wants to communicate his experience. He attached greater importance to Tito's personality: with elementary school and locksmith trade, he reached the top of world politics. However, as a statesman, Tito leaves behind nothing outside the sphere of ideas. There is no more Yugoslav federation, there has been a decline in social and women's rights.
However, there is no revanchism with Đilas. He was a supporter of the point of view that one should also talk about his mistakes, but he was against making them up. The only thing that bothered him was Montenegro's attitude towards him. However, things started to change there as well. Authors devoted to Đilas' life and work appeared. One of them is Veselin Pavlićević (born 1950). He graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Podgorica, specialized at the University of St. Moritz, West Virginia (1972) and earned a master's degree in economics. He wrote several books about Milovan Đilas: Đilas and Articles (2011) The left mistakes of Milovan Đilas, or the party syllogism (2012) Essays on Milovan Đilas (2014) Dissident Milovan Đilas: polemics, reminders, interpretations (2016) Right turns of Milovan Đilas (2018). His books are very meticulous. For the thematic unit on Milovan Đilas, he too needed extensive research work in archives and libraries, knowledge of foreign languages and insight into the literature on Milovan Đilas. Pavlićević reconstructed the developmental path of Milovan Đilas and sought an explanation for the periods that others wrote about without his insights into historical sources.
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Veselin Pavlićević's latest book Military comrades of Milovan Đilas (Podgorica, 2021), which is the subject of this review, is partly a replica of a book by a very prominent Slovenian historian. Jože Prijevac Tito and comrades (Ljubljana, 2011). After several journalistic titles, it was the first historical study in the former Yugoslavia about Tito after his death. Tito's biography from his pen will come after it Ive i Slavka Goldstein Tito (Zagreb, 2015). Pirjevč's study was translated into Serbian: Tito and comrades (Belgrade, 2013) with a review Latin women Perović "A large historical study of Titus" which Jože Pirjevec included as a preface to his Serbian edition. Pirjevec limited himself to the historical four: Josip Broz Tito, Milovan Đilas, Edward Kardelj, Aleksandar Ranković. A special chapter presents Tito's relationship with women "Jovanka Budisavljević and others".
(Peščanik.net; Continued next Saturday)
Bonus video:
