Conversations with Stalin Read online

  My entire being quivered from the joyous anticipation of an imminent encounter with the Soviet Union, the land that was the first in history—I believed, with a belief more adamant than stone—to give meaning to the dream of visionaries, the resolve of warriors, and the suffering of martyrs, for I too had languished and suffered torture in prisons, I too had hated, I too had shed human blood, not sparing even that of my own brothers.

  But there was also sorrow—at leaving my comrades in the midst of the battle and my country in a death struggle, one vast battlefield and smoldering ruin.

  My parting with the Soviet Mission was more cordial than my encounters with it usually were. I embraced my comrades, who were as moved as I was, and set out for the improvised airfield near Bosanski Petrovac. We spent the whole day there inspecting the airfield and conversing with its staff, which already had the air and habits of a regular and established service, and with the peasants, who had already grown accustomed to the new regime and to the inevitability of its victory.

  Recently British planes had been landing here regularly at night, but not in great numbers—at most, two or three in the course of a single night. They transported the wounded and occasional travelers and brought supplies, most frequently medicines. One plane had even brought a jeep not long before—a gift from the British Command to Tito. It was at this same airfield, a month earlier, at high noon, that the Soviet Military Mission had landed in a plane on skis. In view of the terrain and other circumstances, this was a real feat. It was also quite an unusual parade, in view of the rather sizable escort of British fighter planes.

  I regarded the descent and subsequent take-off of my plane too as quite a feat: the plane had to fly low over jagged rocks in order to come in for a landing on the narrow and uneven ice and, then, take off again.

  How sorrowful and sunken in darkness was my land! The mountains were pale with snow and gashed with black crevices, while the valleys were devoured by the gloom, not a glimmer of light to the very sea and across. Below there was war, more terrible than any before, and on a soil that was used to the tread and breath of war and rebellion. A people was at grips with the invader, while brothers slaughtered one another in even more bitter warfare. When would the lamps light up the villages and towns of my land again? Would it find joy and tranquillity after all this hatred and death?

  Our first stop was Bari, in Italy, where there was a sizable base of Yugoslav Partisans—hospitals and warehouses, food and equipment. From there we flew toward Tunis. We had to travel circuitously because of the German bases on Crete and in Greece. We stopped in Malta on the way, as guests of the British Commander, and arrived in Tobruk for the night just in time to see the whole sky licked by a murky fire which rose from the ruddy rocky desert below.

  The next day we arrived in Cairo. The British lodged us discreetly in a hotel and placed a car at our disposal. The merchants and the help took us for Russians because ef the five-pointed stars on our caps, but it was pleasant to learn, as soon as we fleetingly mentioned that we were Yugoslav or spoke Tito’s name, that they knew of our struggle. In one shop we were also greeted in our tongue with profanity, which the salesgirl had innocently learned from émigré officers. A group of these same officers, carried away by the longing to fight and homesickness for their suffering land, declared themselves for Tito.

  Upon learning that the chief of UNRRA, Lehman, was in Cairo, I requested the Soviet Minister to take me to him that I might present him with our requests. The American received me without delay, but coldly, declaring that our requests would be taken into consideration at the following meeting of UNRRA and that UNRRA dealt only with legal governments as a matter of principle.

  My primitive and catechismal conception of Western capitalism as the irreconcilable enemy of all progress and of the small and oppressed found justification even in my first encounter with its representatives: I noted that Mr. Lehman received us lying down, for he had his leg in a cast and was obviously troubled by this and the heat, which I mistook for annoyance at our visit, while his Russian interpreter—a hairy giant of a man with crude features—was for me the very image of a badman from a cowboy movie. Yet I had no reason to be dissatisfied with this visit to the obliging Lehman; our request was submitted and we were promised that it would be considered.

  We took advantage of our three-day sojourn in Cairo to see the historic sights, and because the first chief of the British Mission in Yugoslavia, Major Deakin, was staying in Cairo, we were also his guests at an intimate dinner.

  From Cairo we went to the British base at Habbaniya, near Baghdad. The British Command refused to drive us to Baghdad on the grounds that it was not quite safe, which we took for concealment of a colonial terrorism we thought to be no less drastic than the German occupation of our country. Instead of this, the British invited us to a sports event put on by their soldiers. We went, and had seats next to the Commander. We looked funny even to ourselves, let alone to the polite and easygoing English, trussed up as we were in belts and buttoned up to the Adam’s apple.

  We were accompanied by a major, a merry and goodhearted old fellow who kept apologizing for his poor knowledge of Russian—he had learned it at the time the British intervened at Archangel during the Russian Revolution. He was enthusiastic about the Russians (their delegations too had stopped at Habbaniya), not about their social system but about their simplicity and, above all, their ability to down huge glasses of vodka or whisky at one gulp “for Stalin, for Churchill!”

  The Major spoke calmly, but not without pride, of battles with natives incited by German agents, and indeed, the hangars were riddled with bullets. In our doctrinaire way we could not understand how it was possible, much less rational, to sacrifice oneself “for imperialism”—for so we regarded the West’s struggle—but to ourselves we marveled at the heroism and boldness of the British, who had ventured forth and triumphed in distant and torrid Asian deserts, so few in numbers and without hope of assistance. Though I was not capable at the time of deriving broad conclusions from this, it certainly contributed to my later realization that there did not exist a single ideal only, but that there were on our globe countless co-ordinate human systems.

  We were suspicious of the British and held ourselves aloof from them. Our fears were made especially great because of our primitive notions about their espionage—the Intelligence Service. Our attitudes were a mixture of doctrinaire clichés, the influence of sensational literature, and the malaise of greenhorns in the great wide world.

  Certainly these fears would not have been as great had it not been for those sacks filled with the archives of the Supreme Command, for they contained also telegrams between ourselves and the Comintern. We found it suspicious too that everywhere the British military authorities had shown no more interest in these sacks than if they had contained shoes or cans. To be sure, I kept them at my side throughout the trip, and to avoid being alone at night, Marko slept with me. He was a prewar Communist from Montenegro, simple but all the more brave and loyal for that.

  It happened in Habbaniya one night that someone silently opened the door of my room. I was aroused even though the door did not creak. I spied the form of a native in the light of the moon, and, getting enmeshed in the mosquito net, I let out a shout and grabbed the revolver under my pillow. Marko sprang up (he slept fully clothed), but the stranger vanished. Most probably the native had lost his way or intended to steal something. But his insignificant appearance was sufficient to make us see the long arm of the British espionage in this, and we increased our already taut vigilance. We were very glad when, the next day, the British placed at our disposal a plane for Teheran.

  The Teheran through which we moved about, from the Soviet Command to the Soviet Embassy, was already a piece of the Soviet Union. Soviet officers met us with an easy cordiality in which traditional Russian hospitality was mixed in equal measure with the solidarity of fighters for the same ideal in two different parts of the world. In the Soviet Embassy we were shown
the round table at which the Teheran Conference had been seated, and also the upstairs room in which Roosevelt had stayed. There was nobody there now and all was as he had left it.

  Finally a Soviet plane took us to the Soviet Union—the realization of our dreams and our hopes. The deeper we penetrated into its gray-green expanse, the more I was gripped by a new, hitherto hardly suspected emotion. It was as though I was returning to a primeval homeland, unknown but mine.

  I was always alien to any Panslavic feelings, nor did I look upon Moscow’s Panslavic ideas at that time as anything but a maneuver for mobilizing conservative forces against the German invasion. But this emotion of mine was something quite different and deeper, going even beyond the limits of my adherence to Communism. I recalled dimly how for three centuries Yugoslav visionaries and fighters, statesmen and sovereigns—especially the unfortunate prince-bishops of suffering Montenegro —made pilgrimages to Russia and there sought understanding and salvation. Was I not traveling their path? And was this not the homeland of our ancestors, whom some unknown avalanche had deposited in the windswept Balkans? Russia had never understood the South Slavs and their aspirations; I was convinced that this was because Russia had been tsarist and feudal. But far more final was my faith that, at last, all the social and other reasons for disagreements between Moscow and other peoples had been removed. At that time I looked upon this as the realization of universal brotherhood. But also as my personal bond with the being of the prehistoric Slavic community. Was not this the homeland not only of my forebears but also of warriors who were dying for the final brotherhood of man and the final domination by man over things?

  I became embodied in the surge of the Volga and limitless gray steppes and found my primeval self, filled with hitherto unknown inner urges. It occurred to me to kiss the Russian soil, the Soviet soil which I was treading, and I would have done it had it not seemed religious, and, moreover, theatrical.

  In Baku we were met by a commanding general, a taciturn giant of a man made coarse by garrison life, war, and the service—the incarnation of a great war and a great land opposing a ravaging invasion. In his rough cordiality he was nonplused by our almost shy restraint: “What kind of people are these? They don’t drink, they don’t eat! We Russians eat well, drink even better, and fight best of all!”

  Moscow was gloomy and somber and surprisingly full of low buildings. But what significance could this have beside the reception prepared for us? Honors according to rank and a friendliness which was purposely restrained because of the Communist character of our struggle. What could compare with the grandeur of the war that we believed would be mankind’s final trial and that was our very life and our destiny? Was not all pale and meaningless beside the reality that was present precisely here, in the Soviet land, indeed, a land that was also ours and mankind’s, brought forth from a nightmare into a tranquil and joyous actuality?

  3

  They billeted us in the Red Army Center, the TsDKA, a kind of hotel for Soviet officers. The food and all other features were very good. They gave us a car with a chauffeur, Panov, a man well along in years, simple, and somewhat bent, but of independent views. There was also a liaison officer, Captain Kozovsky, a young and very handsome lad who was proud of his Cossack origin, all the more so inasmuch as the Cossacks had “washed away” their counterrevolutionary past in the present war. Thanks to him we were always sure, at any time, of obtaining tickets for the theater, the cinema, or anything else.

  But we were not able to make any serious contact with the leading Soviet personages, though I requested to be received by V. M. Molotov, then Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and, if possible, by J. V. Stalin, the Prime Minister and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. All my circuitous attempts to present our requests and needs were in vain.

  In all this no help was to be had from the Yugoslav Embassy, which was still royalist, though Ambassador Simić and his small staff had declared themselves for Marshal Tito. Formally respected, they were in fact more insignificant and accordingly more powerless than we.

  Nor could we accomplish anything through the Yugoslav Party émigrés. They were few in number—decimated by purges. The most distinguished personality among them was Veljko Vlahović. We were the same age, both revolutionaries out of the revolutionary student movement of Belgrade University against the dictatorship of King Alexander. He was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, while I was coming from an even more terrible war. He was a man of great personal integrity, highly educated and wise, though excessively disciplined and not independent in his views. He managed the radio station Free Yugoslavia, and his co-operation was valuable, but his connections did not go beyond Georgi Dimitrov, who, since the Comintern had been dissolved, shared with D. Z. Manuilsky the direction of the section of the Soviet Central Committee for foreign Communist parties. We were well fed and graciously received, but as far as the problems we had to present and to solve were concerned, we could make no headway whatsoever. To tell the truth, it must be stressed again that, except for this, we were received with extraordinary geniality and consideration. But it was not until a month following our arrival, when Stalin and Molotov received General Terzić and me and this was published in the press, that all the doors of the ponderous Soviet administration and of the rarefied heights of Soviet society were magically thrown open.

  The Panslavic Committee, which had been created in the course of the war, was the first to arrange banquets and receptions for us. But one did not have to be a Communist to perceive not only the artificiality but also the hopelessness of this institution. Its activity was centered on public relations and propaganda, and even in this it was obviously limited. Besides, its aims were not very clear. The Committee was composed almost entirely of Communists from the Slavic countries—the émigrés in Moscow who were in feet alien to the idea of Panslavic reciprocity. All of them tacitly understood that it was a matter of resurrecting something long since outmoded, a transitional form meant to rally support around Communist Russia, or at least to paralyze anti-Soviet Panslavic currents.

  The very leadership of the Committee was insignificant. Its President, General Gundorov, a man prematurely grown old in every respect and of limited views, was not a man one could talk to effectively even on the simplest questions of how Slavic solidarity could be achieved. The Committee’s Secretary, Mochalov, was rather more authoritative simply by virtue of being closer to the Soviet security agencies—something that he concealed rather badly in his extravagant behavior. Both Gundorov and Mochalov were Red Army officers, but were among those who had proved to be unfit for the front. One could detect in them the suppressed dejection of men demoted to jobs that they did not consider their line. Only their secretary, Nazarova, a gap-toothed and excessively ingratiating woman, had anything resembling love for the suffering Slavs, though her activities too, as was later learned in Yugoslavia, were subordinated to Soviet security agencies.

  In the Panslavic Committee headquarters one ate well, drank even more, and mostly just talked. Long and empty toasts were raised, not much different from one another, and certainly not as beautiful as those of tsarist times. I was truly struck by the absence of any freshness in Panslavic ideas. Such, too, was the building of the Committee—imitation baroque or something of the sort in the midst of a modern city.

  The Committee was the work of a temporary, shallow, and not completely altruistic policy. However, that the reader might understand me correctly, I must add that though all of this was quite clear to me even at that time, I was far from viewing it with horror or wonderment. The fact that the Panslavic Committee was a naked instrument of the Soviet Government for influencing backward strata among the Slavs outside the Soviet Union and that its officials were dependent on and connected with both the secret and public agencies of the government—all this did not trouble me one bit. I was only disturbed by its impotence and superficiality, and above all by the fact that it could not open the way for me to the Soviet Government and to a solution o
f Yugoslav needs. For I too, like every other Communist, had it inculcated in me and I was convinced that there could exist no opposition between the Soviet Union and another people, especially not a revolutionary and Marxist party, as the Yugoslav Party indeed was. And though the Panslavic Committee seemed too antiquated to me, and accordingly an unsuitable instrument for a Communist end, yet I considered it acceptable, all the more so because the Soviet leadership insisted on it. As far as its officials’ connections with security agencies were concerned, had I not also learned to look upon these as almost divine guardians of the revolution and of socialism—“a sword in the hands of the Party”?

  The character of my insistence that I reach the summits of the Soviet Government should also be explained. Though I urged, I was neither importunate nor resentful of the Soviet Government, for I was trained to see in it something even greater than the leadership of my own Party and revolution—the leading power of Communism as a whole. I had already gathered from Tito and others that long waits—to be sure, by foreign Communists—were rather the style in Moscow. What troubled me and made me impatient was the urgency of the needs of a revolution, my own Yugoslav revolution at that.