Ex-Comrade And Critic Of Tito Dies At 83

Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav Communist revolutionary whose denunciation of his former comrades in 1957 as a privileged and self-serving “new class” became an early banner of dissidents and anti-Communists, died in Belgrade on Thursday. He was 83.

A revolutionary, soldier, political leader and writer, Djilas, in his own phrase, “traveled the entire road of Communism,” from partisan guerrilla fighter against Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia and ardent believer in Stalinism, through disillusionment and revulsion at the “all-powerful exploiters and masters” it had brought to power - Stalin first among them.

Djilas was the closest lieutenant to Tito in the resistance to the Serb monarchy, in the partisan struggle against German and Italian occupiers and in the creation of a Yugoslav Communist state. It was he whom Tito sent to Moscow in January 1948 to tell Stalin that Yugoslavia intended to pursue its own national development, independent of Moscow.

The divorce was made public in June 1948, and Yugoslavia became the first Communist state to break with the Kremlin, a move that gained it respect and assistance from the West and a leading role among nonaligned nations.

But Djilas soon began to voice disenchantment with his own party, and in 1954, Tito expelled him from its ranks. Djilas spent much of the next 36 years in prison or in official disgrace.

Djilas managed to smuggle the manuscript of “The New Class” abroad. Its publication in 1957 was an immediate sensation.

It was the first exposure of leading Communists - in Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union - as a new elite dedicated to its own privileges and power.