The Road to Berlin (73 page)

The British government meanwhile tried to disengage itself from General Mihailovic and to use the break as a means of effecting a compromise between Tito and the King. Early in February 1944 the Prime Minister put a straight
proposition to Tito: would the dismissal of Mihailovic facilitate ‘friendly relations’ between the King and the partisans, and might it permit the return of the King, though the fate of the monarchy itself must be decided after the complete liberation of Yugoslavia? Marshal Tito returned a resolute negative, insisting that the National Committee must be recognized as the sole government of the country, that the exile government in Cairo must be dissolved and Mihailovic dismissed for the traitor he was—then, perhaps, co-operation with the King might be considered, but not through any special arrangement, which would inevitably bring ‘suspicion and anxiety’. At the end of March Tito repeated that the National Committee would not countenance the return of the King.

To provide greater security for the National Committee and Supreme Headquarters, Tito abandoned the little town of Jajce at the end of 1943 in favour of Drvar, further to the west. It was from this ruined Bosnian town that two Yugoslav military missions went out in the spring of 1944, one under Vladimir Velebit to London, the other headed by Milovan Djilas to Moscow. Of all the tasks assigned to the Djilas mission, which assumed both ‘a military and party character’, the most important was to discover whether the Soviet government was prepared to recognize the National Committee as ‘the provisional legal government’ of Yugoslavia and also to ‘influence the Western allies to do so’. Passing through Bari and Cairo, ever on the alert for the fell hand of British intelligence (the Yugoslav mission was laden with the archives of the Supreme Command and the Central Committee, which included the exchanges between the Yugoslav Party and the Comintern), Djilas and his party flew on to Teheran, Baku and finally Moscow.

Djilas’s first requests to be received by Molotov, possibly by Stalin, fell on deaf ears. All the talk was of Russia’s great war against Hitler, the ‘patriotic character’ of the struggle and the decisive role of the Soviet Union. In the Pan-Slav Committee Djilas discovered an organization that was ‘artificial’ and ‘quite hopeless’, staffed with
émigré
Communists from other Slav nations who were basically unsympathetic to the idea of closer Pan-Slav ties. Neither this rather soggy group of tame ideologues nor the Yugoslav Party
émigrés
in Moscow, a group ‘decimated by the purges’ whose leading figure was Veljko Vlahovic, could help the impatient Djilas in his search for contact with the top Soviet leadership. In Manuilskii, former secretary of the Comintern, Milovan Djilas found only an
apparatchik
whose fortunes were fast fading, ‘a lost, senile old man’ sliding speedily into oblivion; Dimitrov, though a sick man and prematurely old in appearance, spoke out with greater vigour and frankness, but he too counselled caution in proclaiming ‘the communist character’ of the Yugoslav movement lest it damage relations between the Soviet Union and the Western allies. Djilas, burning with the reality of the Yugoslav revolution, thought it ‘senseless’ to insist upon a coalition of communist and bourgeois parties, for the resistance and the civil war in Yugoslavia had shown for all to see that ‘the Communist Party was the only real political force’. Dimitrov was far from unsympathetic, and he
understood the situation that prevailed in Yugoslavia: it was he who had personally interested Stalin in the question of helping the Yugoslav partisans back in 1941–2, though owing to the extreme range Soviet aircraft flew their hazardous missions in vain, failed to reach the partisan bases and returned carrying the frozen bodies of those Yugoslav Communists who set out on the flights in the hope of getting home. Dimitrov also enlarged on the circumstances surrounding the dissolution of the Comintern, first mooted in 1940 but abandoned lest it seem that the Soviet government was giving in to German pressure. Somewhat later Stalin gave Milovan Djilas his own version of how the Comintern met its end and was shovelled unceremoniously out of sight.

Their enforced wait upon the wishes, or the whims, of Stalin provided some opportunity for the Yugoslav mission to observe the Soviet Union at war and enabled them to clear up at least one mystery. What puzzled the Yugoslavs was where all the men had come from to form the ‘Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Brigade’, when so many of the Yugoslav communists resident in the Soviet Union had perished long before in the purges. Djilas discovered that the Brigade was manned largely by the collaborationist Croats from the ill-fated regiment sent by Ante Pavelic to serve on the Eastern Front. Like the Rumanians, Italians and Hungarians, the Croat soldiers along with their commander Mesic were sucked into the catastrophe of Stalingrad, taken prisoner and politically re-educated, to emerge as the ‘Anti-Fascist Brigade’, officered by Russians and with a few
émigré
Communists providing the political staff. It was even proposed that these mongrelly soldiers should wear the insignia of the Royal Yugoslav Army until Veljko Vlahovic protested and tried to devise a matching emblem with Tito’s partisans, though he was hampered in never having seen the original. On finding the same commander still at the head of this regiment Djilas apparently could not restrain his criticism, a point the Russians blandly brushed aside by saying that Mesic had ‘recanted’; there was nothing for the Yugoslav mission to do but leave ‘everything as it was’.

Chastened as he was by this experience, by the sight of a ‘Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Brigade’ so strangely blended, Milovan Djilas was coming to understand that under the impact of war Soviet society was changing. Massive resistance had beaten off the German assault; Soviet citizens had shown their devotion to their country and to ‘the basic achievements of the revolution’ with every expectation of the slackening of ‘political restrictions’ and the dissolution of ‘ideological monopolies held by little groups of leaders’. Deep down, however, the Soviet Communists felt that they were fighting alone. Their solicitude for the alliance with the Western powers was an act of self-interest, a manoeuvre, which scarcely dispelled the conviction that they were fighting ‘for their own survival and for their way of life’. Until the opening of the Second Front, by which time the feeling was very deeply ingrained, the ordinary man and the fighting soldiers also shared this mood of embattled isolation.

At Marshal Koniev’s headquarters the Yugoslav mission saw for itself the ravages of the fighting on the Eastern Front. Djilas and his colleagues inspected the destruction and carnage left in the wake of the Korsun–Shevchenkovskii operation with a horrified fascination while they listened to Marshal Koniev’s account of how the Cossack troops cut the encircled Germans to pieces—legs, arms and even hands raised in surrender. From Koniev, Djilas learned something of the fate that befell the old heroes of the Red Army, Voroshilov and Budenny, in the first days of the war; though scathing in his comments about Budenny—he ‘never knew much and he never studied anything’—Marshal Koniev preserved a very discreet silence on being asked about Stalin’s role, confining himself to the innocuous but acceptable formula that Stalin was ‘universally gifted … brilliantly able to see the war as a whole’.

The justification for such an encomium Djilas and his compatriot General Terzic were shortly able to test for themselves, when after all their waiting the summons came. The two Yugoslavs were whisked out of the premises of the Pan-Slav Committee, their lecture left unfinished, and driven in the company of an
NKVD
colonel to the Kremlin. For a Communist of Djilas’s temper, devotion and commitment, the sense of occasion almost overpowered him—joy combined with agitation at the prospect of facing Stalin, the embodiment of ‘the victorious battle today and the brotherhood of man tomorrow’. The implications of the meeting suddenly possessed Djilas—all that ‘seemed unpleasant about the USSR’ vanished and previous differences faded into nothing.

Nor did this first meeting, filled with comradely frankness and enlivened by Stalin’s own incisiveness, disappoint Djilas. He was at the very fount of orthodoxy and the source of decisions—‘I felt that I was in the right place …’—though he confessed himself surprised at the look of Stalin in the flesh, small in height, of ‘ungainly build’, with stiffened left arm and shoulder, paunchy, with thinning hair and yellow eyes, a restless, fidgety fellow who doodled and drew, ‘not quiet for a moment’, playing with his pipe, constantly moving his head. The talk, in which Molotov joined, lasted for about an hour. Almost at once Stalin broached the question of recognition for Tito’s National Committee, asking Molotov by way of a joke if it might not be possible ‘to trick the English into recognizing Tito’; with a self-satisfied smile Molotov replied that the English knew full well what was happening in Yugoslavia and could not be ‘tricked’. Djilas obtained no undertaking from Stalin about recognition, only the impression that the Soviet government would take this step in due time, the moment ‘it considered conditions ripe’. Stalin at the outset laid the blame on British obduracy and hinted that a ‘temporary compromise’ between the Soviet and British governments could well mean delay, requiring also a compromise between the Yugoslav Communists and the Royalists. What he did not tell Milovan Djilas was that such a ‘temporary compromise’ was already being fashioned, involving more than Yugoslavia. On the question of material aid Stalin spoke out much less ambiguously, offering an outright gift of the $200,000 that Tito had requested as a loan, promising
to look into a Soviet air-lift for the partisans but insisting that an army—‘and you are already an army’—needed supplies from the sea, an impossible undertaking for the Soviet Union with its Black Sea fleet destroyed.

Inconclusive though it was, this first meeting was a success, with Stalin all affability, understanding, shrewdness and decisiveness. At the second meeting, held on the eve of the landings in Normandy, much of the affability vanished to be replaced by rough impatience and spurts of unrestrained anger. The meeting to which Milovan Djilas was driven that June night was his real initiation into the world of the Soviet leaders, that nightly ritual of talk and supper but none the less a world of ‘horrible unceasing struggle on all sides’ which promised only ‘victory or death’, a world in which all policies must now bend to Stalin’s own and all men must be bound to him. On the way to the
dacha
, Molotov quizzed Djilas on the situation brought about by the German surprise attack launched on 25 May against Tito’s headquarters, an airborne assault preceded by a heavy bombing raid on Drvar. The cave in which Tito had taken shelter from the bombing was sealed off at the mouth, but the Marshal and Kardelj managed to make their escape from what seemed certain capture by using a deep inner passageway which led out to the plateau at the top of the cave. The Soviet Military Mission with the Yugoslav partisans gave Moscow news of the dangerous turn in the situation, and Soviet aircraft flew by night on supply-dropping missions to Tito’s men, though the supplies dropped lay largely strewn about and uncollected in the woods that the partisans were forced to abandon under German pressure.

The danger to Tito and the predicament of the Yugoslav partisans formed Stalin’s first questions to Milovan Djilas, once he had drawn him into a small, wholly unadorned room for a preliminary talk. ‘They will starve to death’: Djilas managed to assuage this particular fear of Stalin’s, reminding him that the Yugoslav partisans had suffered and survived worse, but it was not easy to restrain Stalin on the subject of his own air crews—‘cowards, by God, cowards’, frightened to fly by day (a point Molotov rebutted by pointing to the great range, the lack of fighter cover and the small loads caused by the need to carry fuel). Djilas himself added that Soviet pilots had in fact volunteered to fly by day, without fighter escort. Only partly mollified, Stalin then argued that Tito must get himself to safety, an injunction that was not mere pious talk, for the Soviet Military Mission with the Yugoslav partisans speedily received instructions to expedite this move. General Korneyev personally urged Tito to leave Bosnia; he impressed on him that this was the wish of ‘the Soviet government’, and a Soviet Dakota, operating out of Bari, did finally fly Tito and his staff to the Italian mainland.

The main business, however, proved to be policy, in particular Tito’s relations with the Western allies. The English must not be ‘frightened’, least of all by suggesting that Yugoslavia was in the grip of revolution. The ‘form’ did not matter: ‘What do you want with red stars on your caps? … By God, there’s no need for stars’—not a very vehement protest by Stalin, but he was serious in his warning to handle ‘the English’ carefully, reading Djilas a lecture on the
quality of his allies, above all Churchill—‘the kind of man who will pick your pocket for a kopeck if you don’t watch him.… By God, pick your pocket for a kopeck’. Roosevelt was different, ‘he dips his hand in only for bigger coins’, but Churchill—he ‘will do it for a kopeck’. Beware of British Intelligence, Stalin insisted, and take care for Tito’s life: ‘they [British Intelligence] were the ones who killed General Sikorski in a plane and then neatly shot down the plane—no proof, no witnesses.’ On the question of recognition for the National Committee, Stalin also counselled caution and compromise: ‘you cannot be recognized right away. You must take a halfway position.’ King Peter of Yugoslavia had finally agreed under heavy British pressure to reorganize his government, with the Foreign Office recommending the appointment of Dr Ivan Subasic, a Croat politician and governor of Croatia until 1941, after which he lived in the United States. On 1 June the King appointed Dr Subasic prime minister and charged him with forming a small, non-political government. On his side Stalin pressed Djilas to advise Tito and the Yugoslav Central Committee to talk to Subasic, ‘on no account’ to refuse to talk to Subasic, and then to ‘reach a compromise somehow’.

With the formal business concluded Stalin took Djilas to dinner, a meal that meandered well into the small hours of the morning. Amidst the eating, drinking and talking ‘a significant part of Soviet policy was shaped’, with the talk ranging over an enormous field. Stalin ate heavily but drank only moderately, mixing red wine and vodka, though the others indulged themselves with a will. Through all the anecdotes and cross-talk about the Slavs, the Turks and the Tsars, Stalin probed for information about the revolutionary movement in Yugoslavia, avoiding direct questions but building up his own picture of Yugoslav strength and political organization. Passing to the Comintern, Stalin made no reference to any plan to dissolve this body in 1940, stressing instead that the existence of ‘a general Communist forum’ created an ‘abnormal’ situation, generated friction and was wholly ‘unnatural’ at a time when all communist parties were better ‘searching for a national language’ and were more effective ‘fighting under conditions prevailing in their own countries’. Stalin could work with Dimitrov, but ‘with the others it was harder’. Nor could Stalin resist a dig at ‘the Westerners’, claiming that the dissolution of the Comintern was carried out in spite of them: ‘… had they mentioned it, we would not have dissolved at all!’