The Unyielding Man

No. 8 Palmoticeva Street is a seedy apartment house in Belgrade. On a balcony across the street a cameraman waits all day. A police car stands constantly at the curb, and lounging detectives peer into the faces of all who enter. Few enter, for here lives the one man in Yugoslavia who really bothers Marshal Tito: onetime Vice President Milovan Djilas.

Two years ago Party Philosopher Djilas dared to criticize the political rigidity of the Yugoslav Communist Party and the loose morals of its hierarchy. He called for a "democratic-socialist" party to contest Tito's one-party rule. Thus Djilas brought Tito's wrath down on his head, lost his party rank and privileges. His punishment might have been worse. The fact that it was not probably stems from Tito's desire to stay on good terms with the social democratic parties of Western Europe: British Socialists, among others, urged Tito to go easy on Djilas.

The Slow Pressure. Shunned and isolated, Djilas lived quietly in Belgrade until a few months ago. Then police began to intimidate his friends, and police agents began to jostle him in the streets, blow smoke into his face, hoping to provoke an incident. On one occasion his wife was attacked by a woman who noisily claimed to have been Djilas' mistress, but Djilas took the case to court, where the woman, a provocateur, was fined. Children in the neighborhood were told not to play with the Djilas' three-year-old son. A spy was planted in the grocery where the family bought its food. When these methods failed to shake the stubborn Djilas, the authorities insisted that he leave his old apartment for another in a house not yet built. Fearing that he was being run into the ground, Djilas wrote a letter to his friend, Morgan Phillips, general secretary of the British Labor Party.

Tito (who is making a triumphal return call to Moscow this week) has recently been acting as self-appointed broker for Russia's Nikita Khrushchev in the Communist campaign to woo Western socialists. The campaign has not been going at all well, particularly since B. & K.'s disastrous' dinner with British Laborites (TIME, May 7). Last week Tito's patience broke down when he received a letter from Phillips bringing up the subject of the shabby treatment given to Djilas.

"Indeed it is painful for me to have to write you a letter of such content," said Phillips, who feared that Yugoslavia might "slip back into the evil paths." He added, "This is none of my business ... I am only concerned with the human side of the administration, and I still hope that, in your relations with individuals, you can show to the world the basic superiority of a socialist social system."

The Angry Reply. Tito passed the letter over to Party Propagandist Veljko Vlahovic, and in the party newspaper Borba Vlahovic gave it the heavy ironic treatment. Yugoslavs, he said, resent Phillips' "attitude of a tutor," and if the subject is humane administration, the "Yugoslav public (not only our Orthodox Church) is very dissatisfied with the deportation of Makarios, to say nothing of the hanging of people on Cyprus or ... the shootings in Kenya."

At No. 8 Palmoticeva Street Milovan Djilas (with or without British Socialism's help) appeared safe for the moment. But Belgrade's gossip, neither confirmed nor denied by the political police, probably as a means of further demoralizing their victim, has it that a special dossier of Djilas' "crimes" is being prepared, and that the police have been doing a lot of talking to Djilas' old friend, onetime Partisan Hero (and Tito Biographer) Vladimir Dedijer.

In Belgrade last week TIME Correspondent James Bell found Djilas worried but smiling defiantly. Wearing a frayed suede jacket, Djilas said he was being virtually starved out of existence. He was asked what he thought the regime wanted of him. Said Djilas: "They want me to just admit that I was wrong and ask forgiveness." Would he do this? "No, I will not," replied Djilas, his Montenegrin eyes flashing.

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