242 The Postwar Period
in a telephone conversation with Ranković that he refused to “throw himself at
the monarch’s feet.”^458 On the contrary, he hurried feverishly to publish his text,
convinced that he must accomplish his mission. “With his articles,” said Stane
Kavčič, one of the most prominent Slovene Communists of the postwar gen-
eration, “Djilas firstly and suddenly opened many questions related to socialism
and democracy, but unluckily enough, in a way that did more harm than good.”^459
This is true especially for “Anatomy of a Moral,” written nearly by chance
in order to fill some empty space in the magazine created when Joža Vilfan,
chief of Tito’s secretariat, informed him that he would not contribute a prom-
ised article on state capitalism. In his article Djilas attacked “the false class
morale” of the power elite without pity, reproaching it for having sullied itself
with all possible bourgeois sins. He accused his comrades of having behaved
like an exclusive caste and isolating themselves from those who had “recently
joined the party.” However, his main targets were the wives of the highest lead-
ers, who would not accept a beautiful young woman into their circle, even
though she had recently married a “people’s hero,” the highest honor a Partisan
could receive. In Belgrade, rumor had it that he meant the charming actress
who was married to General Dapčević, although Jovanka, Tito’s consort, was
sure that Djilas had her in mind. The pamphlet was an attack against the
women at the highest level of the party who were too open to be acceptable.
This angered the women who had created an exclusive, although informal, club
of ex-Partisans, who had fought alongside their husbands and considered this
a badge of exclusive merit. They spoke with contempt about younger women
who tried to enter their group through marriage, wondering: “Where were
these girls in short skirts when the trees were bursting because of the cold?”^460
This attitude was denounced with sarcasm by Djilas, who mocked “all those
exalted women [who] came from semi-peasant backgrounds and were semi-
educated,” and who seemed to think that they could “grab and hoard deluxe
furniture and works of art” because of their war-time services. “Tasteless, of
course, but by means of which they satisfied their primitive instincts of greed
and imagined puffed-up notions of their social status, with all the pretentious-
ness and omniscience of the ignorant.”^461 Consequently, protests came from the
powerful Antifascist Women’s Association, and arose in many domestic discus-
sions, which hastened Djilas’s fall. In fact, Tito interpreted the article as trying
to discredit him and his inner group, which Djilas accused of no longer living
up to its revolutionary task. This was not far from the truth, since the marshal
had definitely closed himself off into an environment populated by a select few,
given that among the 135 members of the CC, only five entered the party dur-
ing the war, whereas all the others had been members since the days of the
Comintern.^462