What Djilas said

and women who work for the car firm can produce this £10 million which the owners must have in this year if they are to keep things going.

How do the bosses get such a sum from the workers? In this way: let us assume that each worker in the factory gets £20 per week, that is f4 a day. And let us say that he works 8 hours a day. Not counting raw materials, etc., used up he produces f4 worth of goods in the first 4 hours of each working day.

But this does not mean that he can then go home after 'earning his wage' as it were! No, his boss has hired him for the full 8 hours.

During the remaining 4 hours, when he again produces £4 worth of goods, he works for his employer and receives no payment in return. During the whole week he produces £40 worth of goods for his employer STALIN, by Milovan Djilas. Published by Rupert Hart-Davis, price 16s.

THERE is no greater indictment of the Tito regime today than the persecution and imprisonment of Milovan Djilas for publishing his recollections of Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet bureaucracy.

'Conversations with Stalin' will remain his most important work, a satisfying historical document which fills a gap left by the many biographers (dead or living) of Stalin. It casts a new and different light on the immediate postwar situation in the Balkans. What he says about Stalin does not injure Tito, and his description of Khrushchev is not only fair but rather flattering.

Being a leading member of the YCP and a trusted confidante of Tito he was chosen to represent the insurgent republic in Moscow on many occasions and was able to gather at first hand his impressions of the Soviet people, their leaders and Stalin.

Stalin feared the extension of revolution more than he did Hitler's armies. The Yugoslav insurrection would be a potential danger to his authority.

The other serious difference was on the nature of the Partisan war; the Soviet leaders belittled the significance of the fighting ability of the Yugoslav partisans. It was only the undying loyalty and irrational devotion to Stalin of the Yugoslav party that prevented an earlier rupture of relations.

Djilas estimates realistically the impact of the war and the Yugoslav Revolution on the morale of the Soviet people and Red Army. To the latter he gives restrained praise to their fighting ability but criticises their behaviour in Yugoslavia, a prominent factor in the Soviet-Yugoslav dispute.

Time and again the author reveals Stalin's apprehension at the prospect of a social revolution in the Balkans and his attempts to prevent any leftward movements in the CPs (Dimitrov was not allowed to return home; Ukraine-East European relations were banned).

With the eruption of the social revolution in Greece-and the setting up of the Marshall plan— relations between the Yugoslavs and the Russians deteriorated rapidly. The Yugoslavs supported the Greeks, the soviet Union, however, kept discreetly quiet and sabotaged the war.

Stalin 'felt instinctively that the creation of revolutionary centres outside Moscow could endanger its supremacy in world communism ... That is why he helped revolutions up to a certain point-as long as he could control them—but he was always ready to leave them in the lurch whenever they slipped out of his grasp?

Many people have believed Yugoslavia was right and just in her dealing with Albania and that Stalin drove a wedge beween them in order to isolate Yugoslavia. This as Djilas proves is only part of the truth. This constitutes his main crime against the Yugoslav state.

The discussion on the Balkan Federation and how Stalin brutally strangled it at birth (a decision that his successors will regret now that the Common Market is being formed) is one of the redeeming features of the book.

The main weakness of Djilas is that he abstracts Stalin from the historical conditions. Djilas correctly identified Stalin with the needs and desires of the bureaucracy. But he is unable to explain the growth and continued existence of this parasitic stratum in Soviet society, and how the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia can be regenerated. He states that, the 'Soviet' economy can exist enclosed in its own empire and can absorb the losses caused by its separation from the world market. The language of a vintage Stalinist, although an inverted one.

Major class From A Spanish Correspondent