PARTISAN REVIEW
455
INT:
Was he kind of senile, then?
DJILAS: Not senile. As confused as a man who was so near to death
could be.
INT:
He knew it.
D JlLAS: Of course, he must have known it. The next day he dictated
the testament.
INT:
Who wrote it down?
D JlLAS: His secretary. And everybody speaks about this testament as
something very great. Maybe, in reading it carefully, one may feel
that Lenin had some fears for his personal power. He was afraid
to lose his power as a dictator.
INT:
And Stalin might have taken it.
D JILAS: He couldn't have, but one may feel that Lenin was afraid
of that. Because, imagine a man who is writing something like a
testament and doesn't say clearly: this must be my successor.
It
must be analyzed in more details, and my conclusion is that Stalin
was his nearest successor. Practically, that was his idea. Because, if
you read Lenin's last works, his correspondence and everything, you
see that he criticized bureaucracy, but only as an inefficie'nt appara–
tus, not as a social phenomenon. That means his intention was to
improve it. But he did not criticize it as a social phenomenon, as a
new force.
INT:
He didn't see it.
D JILAS: He didn't see it. He saw that there was too much bureaucracy
and not enough efficiency, and so on.
INT:
That's what you did with
The New Class.
D JILAS: Yes, in essence that's what
I
did.
INT:
Do you feel that you have lost a lot by not writing as much as
you wanted?
D JILAS: Yes,
I
lost more than twenty years, participating in politics.
And at the same time that gave me something.
I
think it gave me
a deeper understanding of society and man. Of course, if
I
hadn't
participated in politics
I
would have written many books, probably.
But at the same time
I
think that now
I
am writing better.
INT:
What would you have done if you hadn't been in politics?
D
JILAS:
I
would have been a writer.
INT:
Wouldn't you also have been something else?
A
journalist, or a
professor?
D
JlLAS: Probably not. Only a writer.
INT:
But could a writer live in Yugoslavia just by writing?
D JILAS:
I
think
I
could have, because
I
wrote relatively easy and
much.
