Yugoslavia and the Expansion of the Soviet State

Milovan Djilas

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1980

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Summary:  The possibility that the world will awake with surprise one morning to a radical change?whether hoped for or feared?in the Soviet system of government is so remote that we can only wonder that the prospect continues to tantalize us, provoking a recurrent international concern. Perhaps it is because we are all too aware of the vulnerability of our analyses and hypotheses as they apply to even the most ?open? and flexible of political systems that we do not cease to marvel at the opaque intransigence of the ?closed,? rigid, ?perfect? system of the Soviet Union, and its indisputable reality in our time.

Milovan Djilas was, until 1954, Vice President of Yugoslavia, President of the Federal Parliament, and a Member of the Politburo and Central Committee. His publications include The New Class, Conversations with Stalin, Land Without Justice, The Unperfect Society and Wartime.

The possibility that the world will awake with surprise one morning to a radical change-whether hoped for or feared-in the Soviet system of government is so remote that we can only wonder that the prospect continues to tantalize us, provoking a recurrent international concern. Perhaps it is because we are all too aware of the vulnerability of our analyses and hypotheses as they apply to even the most "open" and flexible of political systems that we do not cease to marvel at the opaque intransigence of the "closed," rigid, "perfect" system of the Soviet Union, and its indisputable reality in our time.

The peculiar futility of such speculation seems all the more glaring when we reflect that the Soviet system has presented itself as a monolithic design since its very inception-a structure "closed" and made immutable to time even at the very flush of its coming to birth; one paralyzed by its architects at the outset, and rendered immune to mutation, whether of growth or decay.

In speaking of the rigidity of this closed Soviet system, we should be aware that we are addressing first its internal, organic structure, and not its relations to or with other systems of political or social theory. Any system claiming to embody a substantial social entity will gravitate inexorably toward consolidation, and the elimination or exclusion of change. What is unique about the Soviet system is its promotion of this condition by deliberately "conscious" acts and measures, endorsed and enforced by the state on a scale far larger than that to which other systems of government lay claim. Here we confront what must be seen, within the Soviet order, as the progressive compounding of its "immutability."

Even though it would be possible to draw parallels between the Soviet system and the despotic regimes of Asia and the East, it is the dubious prestige of the Soviet form of government to stand as the most relentlessly implacable and ossified in modern history. The essential elements within that system-ideology, power and capital-are indivisibly intertwined. To weaken or mitigate one arm of this triumvirate would place either or both of the remaining two in hopeless jeopardy. For example: to abandon the concept of "collective" ownership would fatally negate the reality of monopolistic power. To permit toleration of "alien" ideologies would throw open to pitiless scrutiny the inefficiency and inadequacy of the very premises on which the commanding ideology rests.

To ensure that no such weakening or chink in this monolithic structure occurs, an ideological class has emerged, a privileged stratum brought to birth to maintain dominant, if not total, control over production of the most basic material goods. This stratum has a stake in the system that cannot be overemphasized; its vigilance in overseeing every component of the whole is constant. Indeed, it may be said to derive from the system not only its conscious strength, but its vital existence.

What complicates all this is the framework of the Soviet system, which rests on a fluctuating ...

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