Milovan Djilas, RIP.(Yugoslav author)(Obituary)

THE OLD axiom that the great moral struggle of the Cold War pitted Communists against ex-Communists may have been coined with Milovan Djilas in mind. There is no more damning account of the corruption of the Communist system than The New Class, published by Djilas in 1957, not long after he became disillusioned with the Communist regime in Yugoslavia that he had helped bring to power.

Djilas had, at one point, been considered Tito's heir apparent. But in the 1950s he came to see the postwar Communist regimes in Eastern Europe as nothing more than a new privileged bureaucratic…