Historical Background to Conversations with Stalin
Historical Background to Conversations with Stalin
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) was arguably the most significant Communist dictator of the 20th Century. He effectively ruled the Soviet Union/USSR from 1928 to 1953. The Stalin era is known for four developments.
First, from 1928 to 1932, the USSR became a “command economy,” with the government directing economic developments. Industry was built up and agriculture was collectivized (brought under state control.) Millions of people died of famine during this process, a death toll largely hidden from the outside world.
Next, from 1936-40, Stalin purged Soviet society and the international Communist movement, eliminating those who could conceivably challenge him. Millions of people were unjustly arrested and shipped to the Gulag (state camp) system in Siberia. During the Purges, Stalin came to be seen as the great genius guiding both the Soviet Union as well as the world Communist movement.
In 1939, the Second World War began. From 1939-41, the USSR took advantage of this to pick up territory that had been lost to Russia after the First World War. However, in June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the USSR. The result was horrific bloodshed. The Soviets eventually contained the German invasion and pushed back, capturing Berlin in 1945. During this era, the USSR was allied to Britain and the US, receiving aid from the US, mostly food (canned meat, aka “spam”) and cars and trucks that would make the Red Army more mobile. The Soviets relied on their own weapons.
After the end of the World War, as the USSR began establishing Communist governments in east-central Europe, relations between the United States and the USSR worsened, leading to a “Cold War” starting around 1947. In 1953, Stalin died.
As for how Conversations with Stalin came to be, between the World Wars, Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state dominated by a Serbian monarchy. The Axis Powers (Germany and Italy) invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941 and partitioned the country, which set off a three-way struggle between the Cetniks, Serbian nationalists who wanted to restore Yugoslavia as a monarchy; the Ustase, Croatian fascists who wanted an independent Croatia affiliated with the Axis; and the Partisans, who wanted a united Yugoslavia that was Communist.
The Partisans were led by Josip Tito, who was of Croatian-Slovenian background. Tito was determined that the Communists would dominate postwar Yugoslavia. Milovan Djilas was a close associate of Tito’s during the war. Djilas was Montenegrin/Serbian in his ethnicity.
During the war the British government and to a lesser extent the Americans supported Tito with weapons and other supplies because the Partisans did not shy away from fighting the Germans. This was despite the fact that the British and Americans knew Tito intended to Communize Yugoslavia. By contrast the USSR, while Communist, was stingy with aid to the Partisans, in part because the Soviet struggle against the Germans was so intense that the Soviets had little to share with Tito’s movement.
In 1944-5, the Germans left Yugoslavia as the Soviet Red Army advanced through the Balkan peninsula. Tito and the Partisans did NOT liberate Yugoslavia by themselves.HOWEVER, Tito and the Partisans DID maintain themselves as a cohesive armed force in Yugoslavia during an era of foreign occupation and civil war. (Compared to the new Communist leaders of postwar Hungary and Poland, Tito did not arrive in Yugoslavia in the baggage of the Red Army.) In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Tito did make Yugoslavia into a Communist republic and took revenge on his opponents, both Cetnik and Ustase.
However, Tito proved too independent-minded for Stalin, who expected to be the leader of all the world’s Communists. By June 1948, the tension between the two Communist dictators had become unmanageable. Stalin declared Tito to be a false Communist and called on real Yugoslav Communists to overthrow Tito. This failed and Tito remained in power, ruling a Communist Yugoslavia that was “Non-Aligned” with either the Soviet Bloc or the European countries allied to the United States. Tito remained the leader of Yugoslavia until his death in 1980.
After 1948, Milovan Djilas was tasked by Tito to prove that the Yugoslav form of Communism was truer than the Soviet form. Ultimately, this led Djilas to argue that all Communist parties tended to become a new ruling class. This led to his expulsion from the government of Yugoslavia in 1954 and his eventual arrest and imprisonment in the late Fifties.
Released from prison in 1961, Djilas then wrote Conversations with Stalin, based on his wartime experiences. This was at a time when the Soviet Union was now led by Nikita Khrushchev, who had improved relations with Tito and permitted some criticism of Stalin in the USSR. However, Conversations with Stalin was condemned by the Yugoslav government for what it revealed about relations between Yugoslavia and Albania, and Djilas was arrested in 1962 and sent back to prison. He was released in 1966 and died in 1995.
Name
History 1020
Milovan Djilas, Conversations With Stalin
This is what your paper should look like. Have your name and the class information in the upper left-hand corner of the page. You don’t need a cover sheet. Have the name of the author and book at the top of center of the first page. Be sure to use 12 pitch type, which is used in this paper. Be sure to double-space your text, so the lines are not bunched together. Your margins at the top and sides of each sheet of paper should be about the same as those on this paper. Your essay should be three pages long.
Conversations with Stalin is a memoir by Milovan Djilas, a former Yugoslav Communist remembering the three times he met Josif Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union and the leader of the world Communist movement. The meetings took place between 1944 and 1948, that is in the last years of World War II and the beginning years of the Cold War. Djilas wrote the book in 1961 after he had become disillusioned with Communism. He would be imprisoned by the Communist Yugoslav government for writing this book.
This book shows the inner workings of the government of the USSR/Soviet Union under Stalin as seen by a Communist outsider in the Soviet Union. Did Conversations with Stalin fit with what you already thought about Communist governments? Did it challenge your ideas or surprise you with what it showed about the operation of a Communist government?
What is the picture of Stalin that you have after reading this book? Did anything impress you favorably about Stalin? What impressed you unfavorably about Stalin? Was there anything he said that you found particularly memorable? Why did you find those statements memorable?
Milovan Djilas is our “guide” in this book. What is your impression of Djilas? Is he trustworthy? Why or why not? Why do you think he wrote this book after having been imprisoned for writing an earlier book and thus knowing the risks? Does this book shed any light on why Djilas became a Communist?
While Conversations with Stalin focuses on Djilas’ meetings with Stalin, the figure of the Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Tito is inescapable. What impression of Tito do you get from this book? In what ways does Tito perhaps come across as a positive alternative to Stalin? What do you think Djilas thinks about Tito?
Both the USSR and Yugoslavia, besides being Communist, were multi-ethnic states. Both countries broke apart in the 1990s. Talk about ethnicity and what is a nation is common in Conversations with Stalin. Were there any surprising instances when these Communists talked about nations, such as referring to Russia and Ukraine or Serbia and Croatia, instead of the multi-ethnic USSR or Yugoslavia that they “should have” mentioned? Why do you think that happened?
Conversations with Stalin was written sixty years before the current war between Russia and Ukraine. Are there any instances in the book where you find attitudes that might explain or foreshadow the current war? What do you think this means?
This book was written by a man who knew he would go to prison for writing it. How does knowing that make you think about this book? How does it make you think about a government system that would send a person to prison for writing a book?
You may quote from the book, but you keep your quotes short. “By God, that’s deep: everyone fights for what he doesn’t have.” (p. 80) You just need to give the page number, since your only source is Conversations with Stalin. Remember that you, and not Djilas, are writing this paper.
Conclude with an assessment of what you got out of reading Conversations with Stalin. Do you think a future HS 1020 class would benefit from reading this book?
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