I wrote: > He may have had it, but even a pact with Mephistopheles can be > breached -- albeit at a cost. But hey, if the benefit is greater....
Just to be a bit more serious, the conditions after WW2 were changing rapidly. I don't have the book at hand now, but Djilas himself wrote something to the effect that Stalin and Molotov were surprised by the political windfall once the Nazi defeat became clear to everybody. They were struggling to make sense of things and to try and consolidate those gains their way. One of the things I like about Djilas is his conscious effort to avoid cheap shots at Stalin. He mentions a few times in his memoirs (IIRC) that Stalin was until the very end very capable of seeing things as they were. Yes, he tended to project on others his own cunning and willingness to deceive. There's a telling episode in which he reproaches Djilas for complaining about Red Army soldiers raping Yugoslav women in northeastern Yugoslavia invoking the complexity of human nature as per Dostoievsky and telling Djilas that they had had to conscript criminals to fight the war. Djilas' (IMHO, inappropriate) comparison of the Red Army to the Brits offended Stalin and were used to attack Tito, etc. In that sense Stalin was extremely paranoid, a trait that kept him (and the Soviet regime) from extracting more fully (forgive my jargon) the gains from cooperation. This compares very unfavorably with the Cuban way (institutionalized by Fidel, Che, and Raul) of providing internationalist help to others without the anal-obsession for tangible at-hand gain. Djilas himself wrote something to the effect that effective political action always begins with "moral indignation" and distrust of the good intentions of people. (I'm relying on my flawed memory here.) (The archival material released after the disintegration of the Soviet Union shows, to my understanding, that the trauma of the Civil War on individuals, party, and social life in Soviet Russia was extraordinary. I can only imagine how what happened subsequently compounded all that.) Still, according to Djilas, even though his wits and other qualities deteriorated soon after the end of the war, Stalin remained extremely hard-nosed and in touch with real conditions as he was able to document them and observe them (he routinely discounted the exaggerated reports of his subordinates and was excellent at probing them for untold facts) until the very end. Trotskyist renditions of Stalin's personality tend to regard him as a 2nd rate intellect. He was not so, according to Djilas. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
