"Stalin Still Lives"

The prisoner's voice, nervous at first, rose in a piercing accusation that stunned Belgrade's District Court. Shouted Milovan Djilas: "This trial is all propaganda.

The accusation is based on fabrication. I am not guilty, only intellectually disobedient." But Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito takes a harsh view of intellectual disobedience ; his onetime heir apparent was sentenced to nearly nine years in prison.

Ever since Djilas broke with the regime in 1954, he has spent more time in jail than out of it. Courageously he had provoked reprisal by denouncing Communism in his book, The New Class. What landed him back in prison at the age of 51 was a new book, Conversations with Stalin, suppressed in Yugoslavia but published this week in the U.S. by Harcourt Brace. In addition to re-airing Tito's bitter 1948 break with Moscow--at a time when Soviet-Yugoslav relations are steadily growing cozier--Djilas provides some choice examples of Stalin's political realism.

> Stalin on the unique significance of World War II: "This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise." -- On the Red-supported Greek civil war: "The uprising has to fold up. What do you think, that Great Britain and the United States--the most powerful state in the world--will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean Sea! Nonsense. And we have no navy." Djilas' personal impressions of Stalin confirm the cruel portrait drawn previously by others. No man was obscure enough to escape Stalin's barbs; once, recalls Djilas, it was a waiter whom Stalin forced to share a toast at a diplomatic reception as a "grotesque expression of Stalin's regard for the common people." Most surprising to Djilas were the Soviet rulers' big appetites, appeased at drunken, all-night banquets. Before one such repast, at Stalin's villa outside Moscow. Djilas met Molotov in the basement toilet. Explained the Foreign Minister: "We call this unloading before loading." The book's big point is not that Stalin was a revolting tyrant, but that the Communist system permitted and encouraged him to be one. Even "destalinization." suggests Djilas, has not changed the nature of Communism. He writes: "The essence of the problem is not whether this group is better than that, but that they should exist at all--and whether the ideological and political monopoly of a single group in the Soviet Union shall be ended.

Despite the curses against his name, Stalin still lives in the social and spiritual foundations of Soviet society."

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