Conversations with Stalin

[10], 211, [3] pages. Selected Biographical Notes. Index. Ink name, folds, and soiling on 2nd front flyleaf, small rough spot on spine. Milovan Djilas (12 June 1911 - 20 April 1995) was a Yugoslav communist politician, theorist and author. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during World War II, as well as in the post-war government. He fought with the Partisans to liberate Belgrade from the Wehrmacht. With the establishment of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, Djilas became Vice-president in Tito's government. Djilas later claimed to have been sent to pressure the Italians to withdraw from Istria. Djilas was sent to Moscow to meet Stalin in 1948 to try and bridge the gap between Moscow and Belgrade. He became one of the leading critics of attempts by Stalin to bring Yugoslavia under greater control by Moscow. Later that year, Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and left the Cominform, ushering in the Informbiro period. A self-identified democratic socialist, Djilas became one of the best-known and most prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and all of Eastern Europe. During an era of several decades, he critiqued communism from the viewpoint of trying to improve it from within; after the revolutions of 1989 and the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, he critiqued it from an anti-communist viewpoint of someone whose youthful dreams had been disillusioned. On 1956, Djilas was arrested for opposing the Yugoslav abstention in the United Nations vote condemning Soviet intervention in Hungary and his supporting the Hungarian Revolution. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment. He would be imprisoned again in April 1962 for publishing abroad Conversations with Stalin, which became another international success and which Djilas personally considered his greatest work. Conversations with Stalin was written in 1961 after his release, although it had long been on his mind before. For Conversations with Stalin, Djilas was sentenced in August 1962 to another five years - or fifteen, added to the earlier punishments - allegedly for having "revealed state secrets", which he denied. The book's references to Albania and its possible union with Yugoslavia were considered embarrassing by Yugoslav communist leaders. On 31 December 1966, Djilas was granted amnesty and freed unconditionally after four years in jail. He was never to be imprisoned again. He continued as a dissident, living in Belgrade until his death on 20 April 1995. Conversations with Stalin is a historical memoir by Yugoslav communist and intellectual Milovan Djilas. The book is an account of Djilas's experience of several diplomatic trips to Soviet Russia as a representative of the Yugoslav Communists. Writing in hindsight, Djilas recounts how his initial enthusiasms and feelings of ideological and ethnic brotherhood towards the Russian Communists were replaced by feelings of bitterness and disappointment following his repeated confrontations with the brutal, despotic reality of the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin. Other figures which appear in the memoir include Josip Broz Tito, Aleksandar Rankovi , and Edvard Kardelj of Yugoslavia, Vyacheslav Molotov, Ivan Stepanovich Konev, and Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, and Georgi Dimitrov of Bulgaria. Milovan Djilas was one of four senior members of Tito's government until his expulsion from the Yugoslav Communist party in '54 & eventual imprisonment on political charges. He wrote Conversations With Stalin in '61, between arrests. The book is a diary of his three voyages to Moscow in '43, '44 & '48. Djilas, memories no doubt leavened by hindsight, titles the three meetings "Raptures", "Doubts" & "Disappointments". As these names indicate, the book chronicles his growing disillusionment with Soviet-led socialism. Djilas was an educated man, a sophisticated thinker & a writer. So that when we read passages in the "Raptures" section such as, "My entire being quivered from the joyous anticipation of an imminent. …