Tito's Flawed Legacy

Yugoslavia And The West Since 1939

Nora Beloff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000612271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is written in the belief that the time has come to reassess Titoism: from its Western-sponsored seizure of power and its Western-assisted development since 1939, to its present and resented dependence on Westerners who call themselves the "Friends of Yugoslavia".

Chapter 1
Tito the Latter-Day Patriot

JOSIP (CROAT FOR Joseph) Broz, better known in the world as Marshal Tito, was unquestionably a most remarkable man. He came to prominence, during the Second World War, as the leader of what all historians agree was Europe's most effective resistance movement. He managed to preserve the essentials of the Communist system: collective ownership and one-party rule, even after Stalin had disavowed and tried to get rid of him. He carved out for Yugoslavia an international role disproportionately great for such a small and relatively backward country. And he so much over-shadowed his compatriots that, several years after his death, hardly anyone abroad, and probably not too many at home, could name any other Yugoslav leader.

Indeed this was the way he would have wanted it. The proclamation "The King is dead. Long live the King!" traditionally announces to the populace that a successor has inherited the kingship. Josip Broz had no successor. He had arranged that, when he died, both the role of President and the rank of Marshal would disappear with him.

The general view of Tito, nurtured by his own party, which has had a 40-year monopoly of the Yugoslav media, and widely shared by the outside world, is that the man, who dominated his country for so long, whatever his faults or errors, was a great Yugoslav patriot and political visionary. A closer look at his life suggests that he was neither. Indeed, until he was forty-three years old, there is no evidence that he ever identified with Yugoslavia at all. His first military experience was as an NCO in the Austro-Hungarian army which invaded Serbia in 1914 when the idea of Yugoslavia was already widely propagated: the first people he killed must certainly have been those who, had they survived, might have become his compatriots.

Later in life, he became a paid agent of the Soviet-controlled Comintern which, until its shift of policy in 1935, required its Yugoslav employees to engage in agitation and propaganda directed towards dismantling the Yugoslav state. In obedience to Stalin's orders, the Yugoslav Communist Party, of which Tito was a member, declared itself at its 1928 Fourth Congress to be in favour of the creation of independent states of Croatia and Slovenia and of the unification, as well as the independence, of Macedonia and Albania. This would have included the territories now an integral part of Yugoslavia, which are inhabited mainly by Macedonians or Albanians. And so, unlike General de Gaulle, who could affirm of his country: "All my life I have had a certain conception of France", Tito not only had no conception of Yugoslavia, he was actively committed to wiping it off the map.

As for being a visionary, the record of his speeches and conversations suggests, on the contrary, a sharp but down-to-earth political shrewdness accompanied by a marked lack of interest in general ideas. His intellectual baggage included little more than Marxist-Leninist belief in the concept of class war and a single-minded adherence to the principle of "the dictatorship of the proletariat": with the proletariat incarnated in the communist party, and the party incarnated, first in the person of Stalin and, after 1948, in Tito himself. The job of working out a different theoretical version of Marxism–Leninism to distinguish the eras of the two Josephs (Stalin and Tito) was left to Edvard Kardelj and other subordinates (see Chapter 7).

There was, of course, an element of chance in the dazzling ascent of this grandson of a serf, born in 1892 in a farmstead in a backward province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and escorted to his grave, 88 years later, by kings, presidents and prime ministers, representing 120 different countries, and mourned by millions of compatriots along the way.

In reassessing history, there will always be arguments about the respective importance, on the one hand, of the qualities of an individual and, on the other, of the circumstances which, at that particular moment, carried someone of his or her special traits to international pre-eminence. Most historians would agree, for example, that if Germany had not been defeated and demoralized during the First World War, Hitler would have remained a no doubt troublesome but despised outcast. Churchill did his utmost to avert the Second World War: its occurrence nevertheless assured him a place in the Pantheon of British heroes. Tito, like Hitler and Churchill, was both the creature and creator of his unquiet times; his glory too was partly fortuitous.

The details of his early life are hard to come by. Most of the many biographies and studies depend on his own testimony. Personal recollections are always an inadequate source: partly because of the human memory's fallibility and partly, too, because people normally reveal only the part of themselves by which they wish to be remembered. But in Tito's case, a distinct streak of mythomania added to the difficulty. For many practising politicians, deception is a rational choice. Such eminent leaders as President Roosevelt, Harold Macmillan (later Earl of Stockton) and Charles de Gaulle were virtuosos at concealing their thoughts. Indeed they often practised precisely the opposite of what they preached. But many of Tito's tales had no political motivation at all. He was a good story-teller and enjoyed romanticizing his past. The most famous of his stories, and the most frequently retold, relates to his faithful dog Tiger, to whom he said he owed his life. According to Tito, during one enemy offensive in the last war, Tiger threw himself over his master's body and protected him from enemy fire.

According to Tito's former friend and later critic, Milovan Djilas, who was very close to Tito throughout the war, "everyone, except his most slavish toadies, took Tito's self-mythologizing as harmless fun".¹ Aside from "the slavish toadies" however, there were quite a few Western admirers, wartime associates, historians and journalists, who enjoyed what they assumed were his confidences and who circulated the legends around the world.

Vladimir Dedijer, also a wartime associate, who became Tito's official biographer, mentions another problem: Tito was an irascible man and one way he vented his anger was by destroying documents he disapproved of. Dedijer claims that Tito's last wife, Jovanka, was specially good "at getting Tito worked up" and Dedijer attributes to her responsibility for the fact that Tito tore up some valuable reports from his former Ambassador to Moscow, Veljko Mićunović. Tito, says his biographer, would only have destroyed material of this kind "in a burst of rage" and did not behave like this except when he lost his temper. Dedijer asserts that Jovanka, who had keys to all Tito's private safes, goaded him on by accusing the ex-Ambassador of being anti-Soviet.²

What we do have, on record, are the broad outlines of Tito's youth. On both sides the future incarnation of the proletariat came from sound kulak stock: the families were poor but one notch better off than the landless labourers who worked in the big estates. His father inherited a half of what was generally thought to be the best farmhouse in the little village of Kumrovec on the Croatian side of the border between Croatia and Slovenia. It had solid foundations, a tiled roof and plastered walls and has now been transformed into a museum and a shrine.

Father Broz had none of his son's stamina, failed to make good, and later in life took to drink. The mother came from a more prosperous family across the Sutla river in Slovenia. When her parents married off their fifteen-year-old daughter, they could afford to provide food and drink for family and friends on both sides for a traditional wedding which lasted several days. But the girl—a pious Catholic—had little to look forward to when she joined the Kumrovec household. She bore fifteen children, of whom eight survived infancy and only four reached adulthood. Josip was the second son and there was no way of telling from which ancestor he may have inherited the genes which so singled him out.

The Broz children spent a good deal of time with their mother's parents and Tito recalled those visits as the happiest times of his childhood: better food, greater comfort, kindlier behaviour. Crossing the river imposed no language problems: literary Croat and Slovene are quite different but in this border area, in the province known as Zagorje, they merged into a curious mongrel dialect. Later, when Tito was in prison in Serbia, he learnt to make Serb his first language. But during the time he was working for Moscow, some of his Serb associates hearing his accent took him for a Russian agent. The truth was that, even at the pinnacle of power, he never lost the Zagorje twang.

Though on both sides of the River Sutla they spoke the same language, the Slovene side was richer and culturally more advanced. When Tito later remembered a gentler form of life, this may have been due as much to the higher Slovene level of development as to his personal preference for his mother's family.

Both Croatia and Slovenia were, of course, still parts of the Habsburg Empire and both were Roman Catholic. But Croatia had belonged to Hungary for some 800 years and at that time formed part of the Hungarian side of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that serfdom was abolished in the region (Tito's grandfather was one of the beneficiaries).

Slovenian lands, on the other hand, were part of the hereditary Austrian territories and in the eighteenth century the peasants were already benefiting from Joseph II's enlightened despotism. To this day, Slovenia remains the most prosperous and the least corrupt part of Yugoslavia (some degree of corruption being inseparable from the present political system).

In the Zagorje, in which Tito grew up, most people were illiterate, though reform was spreading and, since 1890, elementary schooling had become compulsory. Not that attendance was ever severely enforced: many peasants needed their children to work on the farms. Tito's mother, however, saw to it that between the ages of eight and twelve, Josip did go to class and thanks to the Habsburg tradition of preserving administrative records, Tito's biographers have managed to trace his scholastic record. His teachers noted frequent absences which he said later were caused by illness, including one nearly-fatal attack of diphtheria. In the Broz family, in common to that era, only the fittest survived. As Tito was to show the world, his staying power was remarkable; he was a born survivor.

"When he did come to school, he showed himself a good pupil. In his last report, his behaviour was marked excellent and his catechism, reading and arithmetic very good. (He must have retained a happy memory of those days, as he revisited the school with a train of journalists in 1946, by which time he was Yugoslavia's top man. When he learnt that space was inadequate and that teaching had to be in morning and afternoon shifts, he demonstrated princely benevolence by donating the equivalent of £500 from his now bottomless purse.)

His mother also made sure that he was prepared for Confirmation, and he laughingly confessed later that he kept back some of the money she sent to pay the priest. He also served as an acolyte and told biographers that, after being slapped for inattention, he stood on his dignity and withdrew his services. Despite his mother's influence, religion played very little part in his later life, though it was not until he was instructed in Marxism–Leninism that he turned against the church. Later, when he took power, atheism became the established orthodoxy—though he took a little time to get used to it. On 2 June, 1945, when receiving a delegation of Catholic priests in order to complain about their anti-régime attitudes, he let slip the words, "I, as a Catholic . . ." . Milovan Djilas, who was at the Borba newspaper offices at the time, consulted Edvard Kardelj about how to handle the remark, who exclaimed: "The Secretary of the Party is a Catholic!" "After which", wrote Djilas, "we immediately plucked up courage to remove the word 'Catholic' and replace it by Croat."³

The story of Tito's early life shows that, unlike some of his wartime associates, notably the young Montenegrin student, Djilas, he was not a born revolutionary. He did not grow up champing against social injustice nor, as a young man, show himself eager to change society. His career suggests that it was less a rebellious disposition than an accident of history that harnessed his driving ambition to the Communist movement and gave him the pluck to climb to power up the slippery slope of the Communist International. The boy from Kumrovec may have snatched a few pennies from the local priest or had himself slapped in church, but his energies were primarily engaged in breaking out of the vicious circle of poverty and disease.

Indeed, while Tito was making his way through school, Croatia's peasant society was going through rough times. In all of Eastern Europe, the early phases of the industrial revolution were accompanied by the familiar population boom and, in Croatia, there was not enough food to feed growing families. Tito's father, like many of his compatriots, tried to raise enough money to send his brightest son to America to make his own and his family's fortune. When he was about twenty years old he had another chance: a cousin suggested going and Tito told Dedijer that he "agonized" before deciding to stay in Europe. Later in life, he amused himself by imagining the kind of life he might have led in the States. Answering a question from a visiting journalist he joked: "I would have become President of General Motors instead of Yugoslavia."

Indeed, as Tito grew up, he did demonstrate many of the qualities of a successful tycoon: willingness to take risks, unscrupulousness in eliminating rivals, sharpness in negotiations, and an unusual capacity to inspire personal loyalty—a vital attribute before, during and after the war in the fight for power inside the communist party. Further, despite his Marxist–Leninist creed, he was highly acquisitive, coveting property and enjoying luxury. Even though he never emigrated to America, his chosen career in Yugoslavia offered a lavish opportunity to satisfy these cravings. Before he became party leader, he had virtually no personal property. But in 1939, when the Yugoslav communist party, by then under his direction, ceased to depend on Russian subsidies and managed to finance itself out of local contributions, he drew on party funds to buy himself a vineyard. With characteristic stamina and willingness to turn his hand to anything, he proceeded to learn how to make wine: a technique which he later enjoyed describing to his immediate entourage when they were whiling away time during the long interruptions between guerrilla activities.

But the era of grandiose acquisitions started only after the war. By the time he died, he had accumulated countless residences: castles, palaces, villas and hunting lodges, each of them was full of personal gifts of every imaginable kind, given to him by the vast number of people who wanted—or needed—to please him. When he travelled within the country, as he often did, he let it be known that he preferred to stay at places he owned. Yet unlike his friend Ceau§escu in Romania, he was never a family man and never built up a dynasty or concerned himself about what would happen to his accumulated wealth after he died. Like most of the world's most successful businessmen his work was more important to him than his relatives. The nurses who tended him during his final illness in Ljubljana said that, apart from official visits from family and followers, at the time of his death, he was singularly alone.

If he had emigrated, Tito's taste for conspicuous consumption might have served to improve his credit-rating. In the Balkans, it was a tribute which most of his compatriots were resigned to paying those with political power. Tito never allowed his Marxist beliefs to interfere with his desire to impress not only his country-men but also foreign dignitaries. As he saw it, the proletariat won the class war and, as its rightful representative, he should be seen to be enjoying the same trappings of power as hereditary kings or barons.

Even though his father's insolvency closed the American option, Josip turned his back on the farm. For four years he served his apprenticeship to a locksmith in the town of Sisak, and by the time he qualified, he had earned just enough money to buy himself a smart suit with a tie and handkerchief to match. Unluckily, the new fineries were stolen in his lodgings and he had to wait for better times before his own village (now the location of the High School for Communist Studies) witnessed his splendour.

The story of his first purchases, and the fact he remembered the incident so well, illustrates his lifelong preoccupation with his appearance. He was a strikingly handsome man (though slightly overweight) with considerable sex-appeal and a narcissistic concern about how he looked and what he wore. People, who knew him before, during and after the last war, agreed that, even in the most unpromising situations and in the hardships of guerrilla war, he was always immaculately groomed. He told his associates that the diamond ring, that always flashed from his hand, had been paid for with the money he earned in Moscow in 1938, when he and a colleague, Vladimir Ćopić (later liquidated in the Stalinist purges) jointly translated Stalin's History of the Soviet Communist Party. According to Djilas, the original ring was lost during the war but Moscow gave Tito another.

Tito enjoyed not only diamonds, uniforms, medals and the outward show of sartorial splendour but also its more intimate aspects. By the end of the Second World War, his reputation for magnificence was already internationally known, The Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, later recalled that, having been summoned to Belgrade by Tito in 1946, he realized at once that he would not be able to face up to his host without a ceremonial uniform, non-existent in the Albanian army. As Albania was then short of textiles, material was generously donated by the Soviet Military Attaché at Tirana and Hoxha had himselffitted by the local tailor.

In his book The Titoists Hoxha described how, despite these precautions, he felt seif-conscious in Tito's regal court and recalled his excruciating embarrassment when he muddied the bottom of his trousers, after being taken out to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: Tito and Seven Myths
• 1 Tito the Latter-Day Patriot
• 2 The Legend of the Liberation
• 3 How Churchill was Hoodwinked
• 4 Tito's Rupture and Reconciliation with Moscow
• 5 Non-Aligned against the West
• 6 Neither Brotherhood nor Unity
• 7 The Holy Grail of Self-Management
• Conclusion: Pickled Falsehoods
• Notes and References
• Select Bibliography
• Index