Description:
"This is a book about the loss of illusions." Milovan Djilas (1911-1995) was one of the most profoundly outspoken apostates of Communism. A loyal Stalinite and high-ranking official in the Yugoslav Party until the early 1950s, when he was ostracized for "revisionism" and eventually imprisoned for denouncing the Red Army's invasion of Hungary, he wrote one of the first internal critiques of the communist movement to be widely published, The New Class, describing how ideology was brutally imposed through bureaucratization and repression. In this collection of thematically linked essays, Djilas returns to that theme, examining how the movement collapsed upon itself and reflecting on how he himself had come to reject its goals. "There is in each of us a Communist spirit," he writes, "hunger for fair dealing and social equality." But the world, he concluded, is simply not fair, and perfection, although it must be strived for, cannot be imposed upon humanity. Djilas had reservations about Westerners who criticized communism for its economic shortcomings; as a true insider, Djilas came to his understanding of its inherent flaws the hard way.
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