Page 98 - Age of Peace Goodword.indd

It Requires a Literary Bomb

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ilovan Djilas (1911 – 1995) who was born in Yugoslavia,
Mwas influenced in his early youth by communism and
became an active member of the communist party. Later in life,
he rose to become the Vice President of the Federal People’s
Republic of Yugoslavia. But when he saw the practical results
of communism, he became a strong critic of the communist
regime.
In 1957, Djilas published a book, The New Class: An
Analysis of the Communist System, in which he argued that
communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was
not egalitarian, and that it was establishing a new class of
privileged party bureaucrats, who enjoyed material benefits
from their positions. This book proved to be very successful
and was translated into more than 40 languages.
Reviews on this book were written throughout the world.
The Reader’s Digest reviewed the book under the title: The Book
1
That Is Shaking the Communist World. America was strongly
opposed to communist Russia, but rather than drop a nuclear
bomb on it, it devised and supported a literary campaign
against the communist regime. A sizeable number of books
were published and disseminated in various languages which
criticized the flaws in the philosophy of communism. All this
had taken careful planning and amounted to throwing down a
challenge to communism at the ideological level. This strategy
was successful, and in 1991 the USSR collapsed after sixty-
nine years of existence.

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