THE POWER OF IDEAS

FINAL REFLECTIONS ON THE FALL OF COMMUNISM BY AN APOSTATE WHO'D BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

Author: By Dusko Doder

Date: SUNDAY, May 3, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

But communism has also produced a long list of brave heretics who defied the totalitarian state at the pain of imprisonment, psychiatric torture, or worse -- men like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Bukovsky, and others. Milovan Djilas occupies a unique place among them.

One of the most ruthless of the communist leaders who seized power in Yugoslavia in 1945, Djilas was 34 years old when he tasted the ``unforgettable, majestic and demonic pleasures of power.'' But the fervent communist underwent a gradual change of heart and set out on a new path entirely his own, seeking to promote a ``democratic atmosphere'' within a Leninist party. One night he awoke with a ``piercing, irrevocable conviction'' that he had to part ways with his comrades -- to remain a communist would lead him ``not just to defeat but to hopeless, boundless shame.''

The showdown came in 1954. Djilas was Marshal Tito's vice president and heir apparent when he was ousted from the leadership. He sought solace in writing, but could find no publisher in Yugoslavia. He had his first book, ``The New Class,'' smuggled to the United States, and he landed in jail before it was published in 1957. He spent some nine years in the same prison in which he had been incarcerated by the royal government before the war.

He continued to write, in and out of jail, and 14 more books appeared in America over the years. None of them equaled ``The New Class,'' which was a huge bestseller throughout the West but was regarded as poisonously subversive in the East.

What emerged from that book was a picture of a totalitarian world of unspeakable cruelty, one in which a minority of obtuse, power-hungry bureaucrats squatted on the backs of a disenfranchised majority in the name of a false idea. Djilas believed the system would collapse under its own weight. What was remarkable was that he made the prediction in a good temper, without employing the abusive criticism so common in similar controversies.

When communism did collapse, in ``grief and shame,'' Djilas's private struggle ended as well. He died, age 83, in 1995. And having written about communism for many years, he writes, ``Now that I have reached the end I feel an urge to round out what I have learned.'' ``Fall of the New Class'' is essentially a political memoir, with the author using some of his earlier material to present his case in the best possible light. But as he sweeps over the great events in the communist world, partly as an original witness and partly as an analyst who forces his own interesting ego into the middle of things, Djilas offers some insights worth pondering.

The end of the Soviet empire, in his view, demonstrates the overwhelming importance of ideas in human affairs. A single man inspired by a righteous idea -- Gandhi -- could bring down an empire; Marx's ideas transformed the world, albeit not in the way foreseen by him; Lenin's belief that the state must assume control of the economy was widely adopted in various forms. (The Europeans invented the mixed economy and the welfare state; the Americans adopted increasing government regulations beginning with the New Deal; many Third World, or developing, countries adopted the Soviet model outright; and the rest of the world moved toward state-centered economic systems.)

Djilas notes that there was a time, after World War II, when communism seemed to be riding the crest of history and Western democracies seemed to be in retreat. But the Soviet ideology was deeply flawed. The slow decay began when it was accepted as a ``science''; subsequently Stalin turned it into his ``tool'' to suppress all domestic critics and to justify Moscow's quest for world domination. After Khrushchev's abortive attempt at improvements, the Brezhnev regime turned ideology into a spiritual crutch by ``insisting on the unalterability and holiness of what they called Leninism.''

By the 1980s, ideology was petrified. ``A system breaks down completely only when it recognizes that ideology no longer plays any role, including the function of ritual observance over a system that has turned into a mummy,'' Djilas writes. The collapse of the system under Gorbachev accelerated ``through the breakup and disavowal of ideology.''

Djilas argues that critics of communism have ascribed too much importance to economic problems as the source of the system's collapse. Had ideology not collapsed, he says, ``Communists might have succeeded in deceiving the people longer yet, all the while holding them down to a bare, vegetable existence.''

In retrospect, he argues, the crucial moment in the ideological struggle came after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which pushed President Kennedy and Khrushchev toward detente. From that point on, the Soviet Union was forced to assume ``a defensive [ideological] stance,'' which turned the East-West confrontation into a defensive rivalry ``that was first military and then ideological instead of being both ideological and military as before.''

In the end, the Soviet empire ``suffered a military defeat without war'' when President Reagan undertook the policy of rearmament. But the victory caught the Western democracies off guard. They ``lack the vision or the will'' to play a creative role in the post-Cold War era. ``Above all, the West has turned away from the ideas and values by which it stood up to communist tyranny and Soviet imperialism.''

Djilas is critical in particular of the West's failure to give more than ``lukewarm and declarative support'' to the new Russia, though much, ``perhaps the destiny of mankind, depends greatly'' on that country's political evolution. This attitude in the West ``can force Russia into a separate development,'' he writes, dismissing as ``illusion'' the prevailing Western belief that Russia can no longer be a great world power. Weakened as it is, Djilas says, Russia is still a great power -- and if it is unable to make its true weight felt today, ``tomorrow she will make up for this as a country transformed, with rejuvenated strength.''