Conversations with Stalin Read Free Page A

my land again? Would it find joy and tranquillity after all this hatred and death?
    Our first stop was Bari, in Italy, where there was a sizable base of Yugoslav Partisans—hospitals and warehouses, food and equipment. From there we flew toward Tunis. We had to travel circuitously because of the German bases on Crete and in Greece. We stopped in Malta on the way, as guests of the British Commander, and arrived in Tobruk for the night just in time to see the whole sky licked by a murky fire which rose from the ruddy rocky desert below.
    The next day we arrived in Cairo. The British lodged us discreetly in a hotel and placed a car at our disposal. The merchants and the help took us for Russians because ef the five-pointed stars on our caps, but it was pleasant to learn, as soon as we fleetingly mentioned that we were Yugoslav or spoke Tito’s name, that they knew of our struggle. In one shop we were also greeted in our tongue with profanity, which the salesgirl had innocently learned from émigré officers. A group of these same officers, carried away by the longing to fight and homesickness for their suffering land, declared themselves for Tito.
    Upon learning that the chief of UNRRA, Lehman, was in Cairo, I requested the Soviet Minister to take me to him that I might present him with our requests. The American received me without delay, but coldly, declaring that our requests would be taken into consideration at the following meeting of UNRRA and that UNRRA dealt only with legal governments as a matter of principle.
    My primitive and catechismal conception of Western capitalism as the irreconcilable enemy of all progress and of the small and oppressed found justification even in my first encounter with its representatives: I noted that Mr. Lehman received us lying down, for he had his leg in a cast and was obviously troubled by this and the heat, which I mistook for annoyance at our visit, while his Russian interpreter—a hairy giant of a man with crude features—was for me the very image of a badman from a cowboy movie. Yet I had no reason to be dissatisfied with this visit to the obliging Lehman; our request was submitted and we were promised that it would be considered.
    We took advantage of our three-day sojourn in Cairo to see the historic sights, and because the first chief of the British Mission in Yugoslavia, Major Deakin, was staying in Cairo, we were also his guests at an intimate dinner.
    From Cairo we went to the British base at Habbaniya, near Baghdad. The British Command refused to drive us to Baghdad on the grounds that it was not quite safe, which we took for concealment of a colonial terrorism we thought to be no less drastic than the German occupation of our country. Instead of this, the British invited us to a sports event put on by their soldiers. We went, and had seats next to the Commander. We looked funny even to ourselves, let alone to the polite and easygoing English, trussed up as we were in belts and buttoned up to the Adam’s apple.
    We were accompanied by a major, a merry and goodhearted old fellow who kept apologizing for his poor knowledge of Russian—he had learned it at the time the British intervened at Archangel during the Russian Revolution. He was enthusiastic about the Russians (their delegations too had stopped at Habbaniya), not about their social system but about their simplicity and, above all, their ability to down huge glasses of vodka or whisky at one gulp “for Stalin, for Churchill!”
    The Major spoke calmly, but not without pride, of battles with natives incited by German agents, and indeed, the hangars were riddled with bullets. In our doctrinaire way we could not understand how it was possible, much less rational, to sacrifice oneself “for imperialism”—for so we regarded the West’s struggle—but to ourselves we marveled at the heroism and boldness of the British, who had ventured forth and triumphed in distant and