Milovan Djilas on the self-destruction of Communism

Abstract

The chapter presents the results of an examination of the attitude of Milovan Djilas (1911- 1995), the world's most famous opponent of Communist power and the Communist system during the Cold War, who was removed from the ranks of the political elite in the early 1950s for his critique which predicted the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the monopoly of Communist power. Djilas was convinced of the inevitability of such a finale from the second half of the 1950s, describing in his article “Storm in Eastern Europe” the theoretical beginning of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. The validity of the three stages and the protective reaction of the USSR he predicted was confirmed in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. His hypotheses about the process of changes in Eastern Europe, the mutual influence of processes in the USSR and Eastern Europe, Stalinism as a logical continuation of Leninism, the futility of returning to Lenin's practice, and the idea of the rotting and decomposition of the governing stratum of the Communist bureaucracy (the “New Class”) as a natural result of its evolution formed the basis for his assessments of processes in the Soviet camp in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Djilas focused in his writing mainly on the activities and personality of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The complex nature of Djilas's ideas and their evolution from Marxism to critical positivism are also confirmed in the third book of his trilogy Managers and the Collapse of Communism, written in the early 1990s, about the “new class” as the losing stratum of Communists.