Description
Cominformist takes the reader through the life of the famous Yugoslav communist, Vlado Dapčević. This book began, unbeknownst to Vlado himself, in 1987 while he was interned in “Zabela” prison in Požarevac when a journalist from Borba, the organ of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, showed up unexpectedly to speak to him and publish an article. After Vlado was released and living in Belgium, this journalist, Slavko Ćuruvija, would visit him once again — this time with the intention of publishing the entire story.
It is therefore that this book, Ibeovac in Serbo-Croatian, takes on an autobiographical character from the moment Vlado, at 16 years old, put on the red tie of Marxism-Leninism, through the struggle against the Karađorđević monarchy, to the National Liberation War, to historic 1948, to the jailings, brutality and torture of Tito’s regime, and even to a “kidnapping” on foreign soil. No matter what came his way, Vlado believed in revolutionary work in the centre, and amidst any space he could get to breathe, regardless of who held power, he took up communist work. Even in the the jails of Tito, which he describes as more brutal than the camps of the nazis, he organized.
When so many would have broken and in fact did, Vlado still believed that the new society was inevitable and unconquerable, that anything done to prevent this society was only temporary. This is how, in the face of great depravities, in the face of the unbelievable tortures, and by his former comrades, he never gave up his ideals nor his hope for their future.