Cominformist

"Cominformist," in its first English edition, takes the reader through the life of the legendary Yugoslav patriot and internationalist, Comrade 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 reactionary Karadjordjević monarchy, to the Anti-Fascist National Liberation War, to historic 1948, to the jailings, brutality and torture of the pseudo-socialist Titoite regime, and even to a "kidnapping" on foreign soil. No matter what came his way, Vlado put revolutionary work in the centre, and any space he could get to breathe, regardless of who held power, he took up serious communist organizational work in favour of the working class and people. Even in the Titoite fascist jails, which he truthfully describes as more horrible than the camps of the nazis, he organized. When so many would have broken and in fact did, Vlado was imbued with the dialectical materialist spirit -- he knew 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 the greatest depravities, in the face of the wickedest tortures mankind has ever known, and by his former comrades turned renegades no less, he never gave up his principles, and never would.