Vladimir Dedijer

Vladimir Dedijer has the style of a man who, though 51 and well-known, has never felt either old or "famous." At a party after his speech, the former Partisan colonel, Yugoslav delegate to the United Nations and high government leader exuberantly embraced old friends, sat on the floor, and drank beer with students twenty-five years his junior. A large man with a great shock of black hair, he looked like he would have been at home in the American Senate of the last century, trading stares with Webster and Calhoun. His energy appeared inexhaustable; the roles of journalist and professor, Yugoslav patriot and international intellectual, revolutionary and humanist seemed to struggle inside him with the fervor of old and friendly competitors. The tensions were there, but they were sources of strength, not weakness.

Dedijer's strength included a grace of personal relations. To me, the reporter, he recalled his days as a correspondent in London. With a history student he spoke of the assassination at Sarajevo, then switched to the problems of peasant revolution for the May 2nd crowd. He told jokes in Italian about the Bulgarians, and chatted in English (with occasional Russian) about the Partisan War. An Eastern European whose father was born the peasant serf of a Turkish bey, he smiled a little when slipping in words like "hip" and "camp." He felt at home.

But as the evening went on, Dedijer's internal complexities and his age began to make themselves felt. The conversation drifted away from him; he had little to say about SDS and M-2-M, about faculty meetings and student marches. Surrounded by Americans who called themselves revolutionaries, he (and his wife) had alone experienced revolution. Yet he found himself in the extraordinary position of defending the United States, insisting on the complexities of Vietnam, and praising the American right of free speech. In another context he might have spoken differently, but the quota of radicalism was well filled that night. Dedijer as an intellectual humanist, and even more, as a European, tried to redress the balance.

For this was the basic gap between him and his disciple-adversaries: he was a European, a deep European, not just from the fringe of Britain, France, and Scandinavia. He grew up in the center of Europe between the wars, when old Balkan societies were in flux, governments were tyrannical or unstable, and economies sickly or chaotic. For Western Europe, terror was still an outrage, even in war-time an exception to the rule. In Eastern Europe, terror walked in everyday clothes; Dedijer's first wife joined the fighting against the Germans after she saw four Partisans hanging from street-lamps in Belgrade's main square.

Against this background, Dedijer the revolutionary has conceded some points to Dedijer the humanist. He still believes that the "proletarian nations"--the under-developed countries--have a basic right to industrialize. Suppression of the individual, violence, and even Communism, however, are not the only means of revolution. Europe bequeathed to Africa and Asia what Dedijer calls a "double legacy"--a hatred of capitalist exploitation and a love for equality and freedom. This double legacy has been fused into the new revolutionary force of socialist movements of national liberation, which will hopefully remain neutral and avoid the excesses of either of the great world blocs.

In the meantime, Dedijer the historian and Yugoslav patriot has had to come to terms with revolution in his own land. After a brilliant record as Partisan officer and member of the Central Committee of the League of Yugoslav, he was expelled from the party in 1955 for defending Milovan Djilas' right to speak. He also lost his chair in modern history at Belgrade University, and from 1960 to the present he taught and wrote at British and American universities. Recently returned to official favor, he is going back to Yugoslavia to begin a study of the Partisan War of 1941-1945, which he sees as Yugoslavia's military, political, and social revolution.

Dedijer's return to Yugoslavia as a student of his country's past is consistent with his double role of patriot and international intellectual. He defined his book The Beloved Land as "a story of one man's destiny seen against the background of the history of his family and of his country." In his life and work, Dedijer has displayed what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination"--a quality of mind which dramatically links individual and social reality. Born in a land of many cultures and ideologies, he combines within himself a series of paradoxical styles of life. Faced with pressures which would have torn most men apart, Dedijer played his roles like a master historical gambler, shifting with the social context yet holding some basic values constant. The cost of this freedom was, for ten years, disgrace and exile. The reward has been personal vitality and historical peace of mind.