Manès Sperber was a communist writer turned Cold Warrior who broke with communism because of Stalin’s Great Purge in the late 1930s. He was closely involved with both Austrian and Yugoslav communist parties, and wrote a wonderful semi-autobiographical novel about his time as a communist called Like a Tear in the Ocean (Wie eine Träne im Ozean). One of the main characters in the novel, Vaso Milić, is modeled after Đuro Cvijić, a Yugoslav communist who was a close friend of Sperber’s, and who perished in Stalin’s purges in 1938. Cvijić was a leading member of the party’s left faction in the 1920s, more closely aligned with the ideas of Orthodox Leninism, and was the party’s political secretary in 1925-26 and 1927-28. From 1928, following the supposed triumph of “anti-factionalism” in the Comintern, Cvijić was permanently removed from the party leadership. Living between Vienna and Moscow in the 1930s, he was a vocal internal critic of the Yugoslav party’s policies and the Communist International until his murder. In this autobiographical excerpt from the memoir All Our Yesterdays (All das Vergangene), Sperber fondly remembers a close friend and one of the finest Yugoslav communists in the interwar era:
Djuka Cvijić was a friend who was not murdered by the Nazis or the Ustaschi but by Stalin’s people. One of the top leaders of the Yugoslavian Communist party, he had been sent into exile on orders from the Russians and later “unhitched.” I made his acquaintance in Vienna, and for a time I met him almost daily. We rarely discussed personal matters; we knew the essential facts about each other. I never asked him, and he never told me, where he lived in Vienna; we always met in middle-class cafés. Although he had legal status as a correspondent of the Soviet news agency Tass, he observed the rules of conspiracy, the most important of which is not to do anything to attract attention anywhere. He was a well-built, slim man who dressed with discreet elegance. His oval, narrow face with no prominent features encouraged waiters to greet him as Herr Doktor or Herr Professor; this was also in keeping with the respectable tips they received from him. The only thing that might have attracted their momentary attention was his cigarette holder, which could be manipulated in such a way that the butt of the finished cigarette was ejected mechanically. Even more curious was the fact that almost all the people with whom he sat in the café, including his closest comrades, used the same “patented” cigarette holder. Djuka was a passionate smoker, and he underlined statements he deemed essential by placing his cigarette on an ashtray and not putting it between his lips again until he had finished the statement he had emphasized. All his movements were measured, but his gait was quick, as though he had to rush off in response to an urgent call.
Djuka Cvijić put me in touch with the Yugoslavian Communists who were guiding the illegal party from Vienna, including the general secretary Milan Gorkić, whom I shall discuss later, and representatives of the Croatian farmers’ movement, which was headed by Dr. Vladko Maček after the murder of its leader Radić. Of all those men Djuka was the only one whose human quality and political judgment I trusted instantly, and thus I never hesitated to undertake missions that might put me at great risk in Yugoslavia. I was certain that he had considered everything carefully and had had good reasons for entrusting particular tasks to me. Of course, he was wrong often enough, as everyone is who takes a political stand and cannot evade the necessity of making fateful decisions. Nonetheless, I believe to this day that he was an uncommonly prudent politician, at once impassioned and skeptical. Devoted to the cause from his earliest youth on, he refused until the end to make the sacrifictum intellectus, and for this he paid with his life in Moscow.
In October 1933, or in November at the latest, both of us, each in his own way, became convinced that in the near future, by the end of the winter, there would be, or would have to be, an uprising by the Austrian Socialist party and its subsidiary organizations, particularly the Republikanischer Schutzbund, which was still ready for action, because the chiefs of the civil-war associations were methodically forcing this showdown upon the Socialists.
Around that time, nine months after Hitler’s accession to power, the Communists and their sympathizers were still denouncing the Socialists as Fascists or their henchmen and most dangerous accomplices, and fighting them, at least verbally, as though they continued to be the main enemy. For this reason we decided to draw Moscow’s attention immediately to the impending events and issue an urgent warning against a misinterpretation of the true situation and the mood in the Socialist camp. For hours on end we debated through what channels and with what arguments we could present our views effectively. A report that Djuka had submitted in his capacity as foreign observer of the Tass agency was answered with a sharp rebuke, and letters to Béla Kun, who occupied an important position in the Comintern, and to Manuilski and some other comrades respected in the Kremlin went unanswered for a long time. Finally we received instructions to pay no attention to such café gossip and stop bothering the Comintern with it.
Djuka, however, refused to give up, and he wrote a report that he sent not to a Communist organization but to the Narkomindel, the foreign office of the Soviet Union. He was convinced that there were enough people in that place who would at least seriously consider whether, why, and under what circumstances such an uprising might occur.
As we know, Moscow, which does not believe in tears and which led the German Communists to defeat without a fight, continued to have the Communist pen pushers incite against the Socialists. Soon thereafter, on February 12, 1934, the Austrian Socialists started a fight that they were bound to lose, but it was they and not the German Communists who decided to offer armed resistance.
Djuka proved to be right, and this, too, sealed his fate. Some time later he was summoned to Moscow and murdered by the GPU without a trial as one of the first Yugoslavian Communists. I never got word from him and no one brought me any message from Moscow, and so I was bound to conclude from these facts alone that he had been liquidated.
When I broke with Communism, it was for his sake, too, for the thought of remaining on the side of his murderers had become unbearable to me. When I began to write The Burned Bramble, I felt Djuka’s nearness almost physically, and I gave many of his features to Vasso Militsch, one of the main figures in that novel. In his prison cell Vasso mentally drafts letters that he will never write; one of them contains these thoughts: “When I am dead, your life will stop. Your survival [Uberleben] will begin, and I shall be included in it. . . My life will be justified only if you give my death some meaning.”
