Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism's Self-Destruction

Description

eBookCN.com
"This is a book about the loss of illusions." Milovan Djilas (1911-1995) was one of the most profoundly outspoken apostates of Communism. A loyal Stalinite and high-ranking official in the Yugoslav Party until the early 1950s, when he was ostracized for "revisionism" and eventually imprisoned for denouncing the Red Army's invasion of Hungary, he wrote one of the first internal critiques of the communist movement to be widely published, The New Class, describing how ideology was brutally imposed through bureaucratization and repression. In this collection of thematically linked essays, Djilas returns to that theme, examining how the movement collapsed upon itself and reflecting on how he himself had come to reject its goals. "There is in each of us a Communist spirit," he writes, "hunger for fair dealing and social equality." But the world, he concluded, is simply not fair, and perfection, although it must be strived for, cannot be imposed upon humanity. Djilas had reservations about Westerners who criticized communism for its economic shortcomings; as a true insider, Djilas came to his understanding of its inherent flaws the hard way.

From Library Journal
This book consists of a series of essays, some new, some familiar, by one of communism's most trenchant critics, himself a Communist who was twice imprisoned for his dissenting views. Djilas, called in the introduction "a great writer who had the ill luck to be also a politician," describes his early political development, his disenchantment with Stalin and Tito and the New Class of bloated privilege, his impressions generally of leaders and dissidents, and, finally, the most telling part of his narrative, "the end in grief and shame" of communism. Though not an easy read, his book repays careful attention for what it says about lost faith, along with a ruthlessly bleak analysis of how communism succeeded in destroying itself, leaving murderous ethnic nationalism to do its work. No one comes out well in this indictment. A book for the specialist.?Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ont.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Copyright Disclaimer:
Contents of this page are indexed from the Internet. All actions are under your responsability. Email us to report illegal contents or external links and we'll remove them immediately.

Link Desc...: required

Download Link: required