Rise and Fall

In the aftermath of the dramatic Communist partisan victory that gave them control of Yugoslavia in October 1944, Milovan Djilas became one of the three aides closest to Tito; he witnessed revolutionaries becoming rulers, conferred with Stalin, and confronted him at the historic meeting that led to the break with Moscow. Ten years later, because Djilas criticized the misuse of power that led to the rise of a 'new class' and championed the cause of democratic socialism, he was expelled from the Central Committee and imprisoned for nine years. Djilas's inside account of a revolution gone awry, of a dictatorship whose power ethic led it to seize control not only of minds but of bodies as well, is a painful, personal book of bitter truths forged from the struggle to remain true to a revolution that was cruelly untrue to him.

About the Author

Until his expulsion from the Communist party in 1954, Milovan Djilas was a vice-president of Yugoslavia and one of Tito's three highest aides. He was imprisoned by the Yugoslavian government from 1957 to 1961 and was returned to prison in 1962 because of the publication of Conversations with Stalin. Writing both in prison and out, he produced several important and popular critical studies of communism as well as short stories, novels, and personal memoirs. He died in 1995.