Yugoslav dissident who attacked Western communist parties at the Cominform and later dissected the communist system in The New Class
I traveled the entire road of communism: from a youthful revolutionary, to a zealous Stalinist, to complete disillusionment.
A Montenegrin-born Yugoslav communist leader and one of Tito's closest comrades in the Partisan struggle and postwar state-building. At the founding conference of the Cominform in 1947, he joined Edvard Kardelj in delivering the sharpest criticism of the French and Italian Communist Parties for their 'parliamentary opportunism,' and his memoirs remain a key source on the conference's internal dynamics. After raising demands for democratization within the party and denouncing bureaucratic privilege, he was stripped of all positions in 1954; his book The New Class, smuggled out of prison, argued that communist party officials had become a new exploitative ruling class, sparking an international sensation. He spent over three decades in prison and under surveillance, becoming the first prominent dissident in communist Eastern Europe.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1932–1936KPJ activist, arrested and imprisoned
- 1937–1939Member of KPJ Central Committee and Politburo
- 1941–1945Led Partisan uprising in Montenegro, headed propaganda for Supreme Staff
- 1945–1953Vice President of Yugoslavia, President of the Federal Assembly
- 1953–1954Published critiques of one-party rule in Borba, expelled from the party
- 1956–1966Imprisoned twice for dissident writings; published The New Class and Conversations with Stalin abroad
- 1966–1995Lived under surveillance in Belgrade, continued writing until his death
Related historical events
- 1941–1945The Yugoslav Partisan WarMontenegrin uprising leaderHe led the Partisan uprising in Montenegro.
- 1947–1948The Marshall Plan and the Cold WarYugoslav delegate to the founding conferenceAt the Szklarska Poręba founding conference he and Kardelj led the attack on French and Italian Communist Party 'opportunism,' and his later dissident writings became a key source on the conference's internal dynamics.
- 1948–1955The Tito-Stalin SplitPolitburo member who met StalinIn early 1948 he met Stalin in Moscow, the last major contact before the split.
The Montenegrin National Question and His Revision of It
Across his life Djilas changed his position on the Montenegrin national question more than once. In an article published in Borba on 1 May 1945, "On the Montenegrin National Question," he set out the communist movement's understanding of Montenegrin distinctness. He argued that Montenegrins were "Serbs by origin" but had grown over the course of history into a separate nation, and that deducing a single nation from a shared origin failed to grasp how nations are actually formed and served in practice as the ideological justification for hegemony. Nation-formation in Montenegro, he wrote, began a century later than in Serbia and reached its culmination in the 1941-45 war, so a separate republic within the federation followed naturally. His father Nikola accepted his children's communist ideology but would not accept that Montenegrins were not Serbs, and Djilas recorded their arguments over this in his memoirs.
After his fall from power he revised these views sharply. In an interview with the Paris daily Le Monde on 30 December 1971 he said that Montenegrins form an integral part of the Serbian nation, and that Montenegro had been "punished" after World War II with the status of a separate republic and the invention of a separate Montenegrin nation. In the 1980s he acknowledged that he, above all, had been called by his position in the realm of ideas and power to produce untenable theoretical justifications for the Montenegrin nation, while still holding that Montenegrins were a Serbian variant. In 1991 he said he had always considered Montenegrins Serbs, that differences between them should be neither suppressed nor invented, and that Montenegro's administrative and state distinctness should not cost it its state identity. After 1954 he denied the existence of a separate Montenegrin ethnicity and national identity, notably in his books on Njegos and in Rise and Fall, and from the mid-1980s he described himself as a Serb. Some authors in the 1990s and later accused him of having "invented" the Montenegrin nation with the 1945 article.