Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Djilas Read Free Book Online Page A

from all over Europe.
    It was proposed that we visit the Southwestern Front—the Second Ukrainian Front—which was under the command of Marshal I. S. Konev. We went by plane to Uman, a little town in the Ukraine—and into a gashed wasteland which the war and a measureless human hatred had left in their wake.
    The local Soviet arranged a supper and a meeting with the public figures of the town. The supper, which was held in a neglected, decrepit building, was hardly a gay affair. The Bishop of Uman and the Party Secretary were unable to conceal their mutual intolerance even though they were in the presence of foreigners, though both, each in his own way, were fighting against the Germans.
    I had previously learned from Soviet officials that as soon as the war broke out, the Russian Patriarch began, without asking the Government, to distribute mimeographed encyclicals against the German invaders, and that they enjoyed a response which went far beyond his subordinate clergy. These appeals were also attractive in form: in the monotony of Soviet propaganda they radiated with the freshness of their ancient and religious patriotism. The Soviet Government quickly adapted itself and began to look to the Church, too, for support, despite the fact that they continued to regard it as a remnant of the old order. In the misfortunes of war, religion was revived and made headway, and the chief of the Soviet Mission in Yugoslavia, General Korneev, told how many people—and very responsible people at that—considered turning to Orthodoxy, in a moment of mortal danger from the Germans, as a more permanent ideological mobilizer. “We would have saved Russia even through Orthodoxy if that were unavoidable!” he explained.
    Today this sounds incredible. But only to those who do not comprehend the weight of the blows that smote the Russian people, to those who do not understand that every human society inevitably adopts and develops those ideas that are, at a given moment, best suited to maintaining and expanding the conditions of its existence. Though a drunkard, General Korneev was not stupid, and he was deeply devoted to the Soviet system and to Communism. To one like myself, who had grown up with the revolutionary movement and who had to fight for survival by insistence on ideological purity, Korneev’s hypotheses seemed absurd. Yet I was not at all amazed—so widespread had Russian patriotism, not to say nationalism, become—when the Bishop of Uman raised a toast to Stalin as the “unifier of the Russian lands.” Stalin understood intuitively that his government and his social system could not withstand the blows of the German Army unless they leaned for support on the age-old aspirations and ethos of the Russian people.
    The Secretary of the Uman Soviet smoldered with bitterness at the Bishop’s skillful and discreet emphasis on the role of the Church, and even more at the passive attitude of the population. The Partisan unit which he commanded was so weak in numbers that he was hardly able to deal with the pro-German Ukrainian gendarmery.
    Indeed, it was not possible to conceal the passive attitude of the Ukrainians toward the war and toward Soviet victories. The population left the impression of a somber reticence, and they paid no attention to us. Although the officers with whom we were in contact covered up or embellished the behavior of the Ukrainians, our Russian chauffeur cursed their mothers because the Ukrainians had not fought better and because now the Russians had to liberate them.
    The next day we set out through the Ukrainian spring mud—in the tracks of the victorious Red Army. The destroyed, twisted German equipment which we encountered so frequently added to the picture of the skill and power of the Red Army, but we marveled most of all at the toughness and self-denial of the Russian soldier, who was capable of enduring days, weeks, buried in mud up to the waist, without