Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism's Self-Destruction FROM THE PUBLISHER
He was a true believer in communism who became disillusioned with the totalitarianism and corruption of the Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A wartime partisan leader in Yugoslavia and later the number three man in the politburo, he broke with Marshal Tito in 1954 and spent most of the next decade in prison, where he began to write about the inner workings of the Communist system. Here, Milovan Djilas — who died in 1995 — discusses why Communism failed in Europe, what its failure means for the future of the continent, and how he transformed himself from ideologue into humanist.
Djilas's publication, in 1957, of The New Class, which was translated into 60 languages, caused a worldwide sensation with its description of the bureaucratization of the movement, of the special privileges accorded its leaders and cadres, and of its reliance on secret police and repression.
His new book re-emphasizes and enlarges on those themes, giving the reader intimate portraits of Tito and his colleagues, describing the wartime struggle against the Nazis and rival Yugoslav factions, and showing why Mikhail Gorbachev failed in his efforts to reform the Soviet system.
Controversial and courageous to the end, Milovan Djilas sharply criticized Serbia's war on Croatia, and once again is the target of vilification in his native land. Fall of the New Class is the final testament of one of the most remarkable thinkers of the century.|
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
This book consists of a series of essays, some new, some familiar, by one of communism's most trenchant critics, himself a Communist who was twice imprisoned for his dissenting views.
Djilas, called in the introduction "a great writer who had the ill luck to be also a politician," describes his early political development, his disenchantment with Stalin and Tito and the New Class of bloated privilege, his impressions generally of leaders and dissidents, and, finally, the most telling part of his narrative, "the end in grief and shame" of communism.
Though not an easy read, his book repays careful attention for what it says about lost faith, along with a ruthlessly bleak analysis of how communism succeeded in destroying itself, leaving murderous ethnic nationalism to do its work. No one comes out well in this indictment. A book for the specialist.
--Robert H. Johnston, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario
Booknews
Djilas (1911-95), a persistent critic of the communist regime in his native Yugoslavia, was lionized in the west both by capitalists who welcomed any thorn in the side of The Evil Empire and by socialists to whom he represented reform possibilities inherent in communism. Here is his version of why communism failed in Europe and how he metamorphosized from ideologue to humanist. Some of the material has been retranslated from his earlier publications. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Adam B. Ulam
Milovan Djilas's death on April 20, 1995, was little noted in this country. Yet this once leading figure in the Yugoslav Communist Party, who became an unsparing critic of Communism both in Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union, should be gratefully remembered -- not only by his fellow citizens but by the devotees of freedom everywhere. He played an important role in unmasking the true face of Stalinism. And quite apart from his historical significance, he is the kind of person for whom that much abused term 'idealist' is just the right word....This book is largely a compilation of previously published material, but it is less an attempt at self-vindication than a search, which continued to Djilas's end, for the meaning of ideology in the modern world. And much as he repudiates Marxism, he is far from endorsing the materialist values of the contemporary West. -- New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
The last reflections, together with a lot of older ones, of Djilas, one-time number three in the Yugoslav hierarchy and its most famous dissident. Djilas, who died in 1995, added an introduction and a final chapter to material that has mostly been published before. Some of the older material (theoretical arguments about what constituted advances in Marxism) has all the immediacy of last week's pizza. His more literary efforts are slightly embarrassing. But nothing can detract from the role he played in formulating the theory, dealt with in some detail here, that the supposedly classless society produced in fact a class more ruthless than any of its predecessors:
'Communism,' he notes, 'consisted above all of a new class of owners and exploiters.'
His observations on those with whom he dealt are penetrating. Of Stalin he writes that there may never have been a figure from history with as little in common between the public persona and the private man:
'Stalin was a bundle of nerves sticking out in all directions, sensitive to the most subtle allusions.'
He dismisses the theory that Stalin was crazy or criminal, arguing that his murderous actions were the consequence of a perverted ideology. Tito, who, despite his break with Moscow, never abandoned the Leninist ideology, had something similar in his make-up, 'an immediate, ferocious sense of danger.'
Not surprisingly, Djilas's newest material is also the most interesting, and his most significant conclusion may be that the economic failure of communism was less important in leading to its demise than the failure of its ideology. The final turning point, he argues, was when President Reagan undertook the decisive policy of rearmament in response to the Soviet challenge. The final conclusions, some reflecting old battles, some devastatingly contemporary, of a brave and honest man who, for his defense of freedom, spent nine years in the jails of his former comrades.
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