The outspoken man who brought down the personal ire of Joseph Stalin on to the heads of Yugoslav Communists was a slim, sensitive-looking Communist intellectual named Milovan Djilas. He wrote the sharp anti-Soviet newspaper articles which preceded Marshal Tito's dramatic break from the Cominform in 1948. When Djilas' heretical words first broke into print, the Red world gasped. But Marshal Tito stood firmly behind Milovan Djilas. "Old Comrade," said Tito, "we'll stick together."
Promptly at 3 o'clock one afternoon last week, amid the marble columns and bronze grillwork of a onetime bank, the 108 members of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party gathered to arraign one of their distinguished members on charges of heresy. Tito himself was in charge. The man in the dock: Comrade Djilas.
More Democracy. No one save Tito was more popular in Yugoslavia than Vice President Djilas (pronounced jee-las). In actual rank he stood No. 3, if not No. 2, behind the dictator. A bright, tough product of the classic Yugoslav Red school (law studies, school riots, strikes, underground, jail, partisan warfare), he fought bravely with Tito in World War II. His father, two brothers and two sisters were killed by Axis troops. Only last month he was elected President of the Parliament. He was one of the few authorized to speak out on matters of party policy and dialectic; he did so, often and at length. But for once, Milovan Djilas had apparently spoken too loudly.
Most sensational of the fires Djilas built was a bitter, spicy article attacking wives of big shots in the Communist hierarchy for their snobbery and rudeness toward a pretty young actress named Milena Vranjak, who recently married Djilas' friend and fellow Montenegrin, Colonel General Peko Dapcevic (TIME, Jan. 18). But more basic was a series of articles he published in Borba, the official party daily, criticizing the theories and techniques of the Yugoslav party. He attacked bureaucracy, implied that it was "enslaving" the country's productive forces, poked fun at cell meetings and urged that they be opened to non-Communists as well as Communists. "When a revolution has been successful," wrote Djilas, "the next logical step is a turn toward democracy . . . There is and can be no other way out but more democracy, more free discussion, freer elections of social, government and economic organs, more adherence to law."
Djilas' attack came at a moment when Yugoslavia was astir with cold cross winds. Since Stalin's death, there has been a guarded renewal of relations between Belgrade and some Cominform capitals. Yugoslavia has renewed full diplomatic relations with Russia. Might Tito, the black-sheep Communist, return to the fold now that there was a change of shepherds? The State Department does not think he dares go back; the British only last week showed their belief in his continuing an tipathy for Moscow by granting Tito's regime another $8,400,000 in aid. It is a fact, however, that Tito's ranks are heavily populated with rugged, old-line Communists who, while not favoring a return to the boa-constrictor embrace of the Kremlin, resent any straying from the steely dialectics of true Communism, and distrust anything but opportunistic relations with the West.