In all this no help was to be had from the Yugoslav Embassy, which was still royalist, though Ambassador Simić and his small staff had declared themselves for Marshal Tito. Formally respected, they were in fact more insignificant and accordingly more powerless than we. Nor could we accomplish anything through the Yugoslav Party émigrés. They were few in number—decimated by purges. The most distinguished personality among them was Veljko Vlahović. We were the same age, both revolutionaries out of the revolutionary student movement of Belgrade University against the dictatorship of King Alexander.
—Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1962).
I enjoyed this passage for several reasons. I recently put down Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon partly because of her treatment of the assassination of Alexander. One man’s evil assassin is another man’s freedom fighter is today a statue young tourists drinking blended fruit drinks take each other’s photos in front of.
