In 1941, when the German Wehrmacht and its allies occupied and divided Yugoslavia, the monarchist and Greater Serbian Chetniks began a guerrilla war, followed a few months later—after the Third Reich's attack on the USSR—by the Communists. Milovan Djilas, a central figure in the Yugoslav Communist Party since his student days, served as a unit commander in the partisan struggle, a member of the high command, a propagandist, and a negotiator on important matters. Djilas—who later became one of the most prominent dissidents in the communist world—presented a gripping and unvarnished autobiographical account of the revolutionary war in this second book of his literary memoirs in the 1970s: he seemingly omitted nothing, glossed over nothing, and depicted a life of struggle, deprivation, and terror.