Phil Murphy

At the Taras Shevchenko National Opera House in Kiev in 1973, a member of the audience training his glasses on the Presidential box during the interval would have witnessed a baffling spectacle: Soviet Union President Leonid Brezhnev, sitting next to Yugoslavia’s President Tito, with tears streaming down his face.  The Presidents’ entourages would have been able to explain.  Brezhnev had sought to impress by reciting by heart a Russian ballad; but, when he had finished, Tito began reciting a poem by Pushkin, and another, and another, holding the attention of his ‘audience’ for a full 20 minutes, the poetry moving the flint-hearted Soviet President to tears, with a little help from significant amounts of alcohol that tended to make him maudlin.

It is a story that captures neatly some of Tito’s characteristic features: a measure of risk-taking (was it wise to outdo a Soviet President in erudition and sensitivity on his own patch?); the feat of recollection, suggestive of a mind capable of filing and retaining large amounts of information; but, perhaps most importantly, his reading of individuals and his ability to manipulate them.

At every stage, until his final years, Tito’s story was one of implausible achievement.  It would be difficult to refute the statement that no other individual would have been able – or even tried – to have carved for Yugoslavia an independent space between Western Europe and the Eastern bloc and sustain it for 35 years.  He saw off the threats of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, even if his tactic was often to play West off against East and vice-versa, swinging between them, as former US Ambassador to Belgrade Lawrence Silberman put it, ‘like the Fiddler on the Roof”.

No-one who had seen him as a child in the Croatian village of Kumrovec, in what is now part of Slovenia, could have envisaged his becoming an international figure, who would hold his own with the likes of Churchill and Roosevelt, Nasser and Nehru.  His Croatian father and Slovenian mother had 15 children, eight of whom died young.  They were so poor that none of the children had shoes.  So, Josip Broz, as Tito was then, and his brothers would step into cow-pats in the winter to warm their feet, then, once the dung had set somewhat, go about their business, sporting crusty, dung ‘shoes’.

The course that 20^th century European history took could have been disrupted on multiple occasions.  Tito’s biographer, Jože Pirjevec, speculates that, had he been born a few miles east, closer to his mother’s birth-place, it is likely that the well-organised Slovenian Catholic regime would have identified his intelligence and earmarked him for the priesthood or a place at University.  From there, a professional career would have been the most likely outcome.  Tito himself had aspired to emigrate to the USA, where he predicted he would become a millionaire.

In the event, he took up a series of dreary jobs before being called up to the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to the Russian front in 1914.  After demonstrating considerable bravery and being mentioned in dispatches, he was captured and injured so badly by a lancer that he spent 10 months in a military hospital in Sviyazhsk, in what is now the Republic of Tartarstan, the red ribbon tied round his bedpost an indication that his doctors did not expect him to pull through.

As uncertainty swirled around the outcome of the February 1917 Revolution, Tito nailed his colours to the red mast, even participating in the Bolshevik demonstrations in St Petersburg in July at which police fired live rounds at protestors.  By that time, he had attended a rally which Lenin addressed, the start of what Pirjevec calls a lifelong veneration.  A photo of the father of the Russian Revolution hung in Tito’s office till his death, a bronze bust on a shelf in his library.

If Tito was fortunate to escape from Russia with his life, Serbian writer Živorad Mihajlović-Šilja estimated that between 21 and 25 attempts were subsequently made on his life.  These included an episode in 1948 in which one of a team of Stalin’s best surgeons, sent to carry out a minor operation relating to hernia surgery the previous year, claimed to have left a medical instrument inside Tito and wanted to open him up again.  Tito’s personal secretary, Gustav Vlahov, revealed that the surgeon’s request was resisted, not least because he was drunk.  The discovery that the nurse accompanying the surgeons was carrying vials of poison raised further suspicions – one of several assassination attempts by Stalin, according to Tito himself.  As late as 1972, Italian authorities revealed plans by extreme Croatian nationalists to land by helicopter on Tito’s Adriatic island of Brioni and kidnap him.

If Tito was fearful in 1972, throughout his life a combination of extraordinary bravery, Soviet training, cunning, and a strong sense of intuition kept him alive and led him to a place from which he convinced himself and his comrades that he could create a thriving Yugoslavia beyond the Soviet bloc.

Britain’s principal agent in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, Fitzroy Maclean, spoke admiringly of his calm and collected decision-making, always after hearing both sides of the argument, “his surprisingly broad outlook, his never-failing sense of humour…a natural diffidence in human relationships, giving way to a natural friendliness; a violent temper, flaring up in sudden rages; a considerateness and a generosity constantly manifesting themselves in a dozen small ways…  These were human qualities, hard to reconcile with the usual conception of a Communist puppet”¹.

However, Maclean was acutely conscious that, as Tito would openly admit, the ends justified the means and that, in their dealings, he was sitting across the table from a killer.  His limited involvement in the Spanish Civil War seems to have involved not so much assassinations of Nationalists but a role in the liquidation of Communist adversaries of the Soviet secret service, including some leading Yugoslav Communists, on Spanish soil.

The 30,000 Yugoslavs who passed through Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur Islands’ concentration camps during his rule, the 70,000 purged in a rout of Croat liberals, the 5,000-12,000 Serb political, economic and cultural figures hounded from office in a similar cull of Serbian liberals would all attest to Tito’s ruthlessness.  A misplaced quip in a bar could lead to incarceration on Goli Otok, a regime which one survivor claimed had no equal in its torments: “Not in the German nor Soviet camps, nor in the American ones in Korea, not in the French ones in Algeria.  Nowhere.”  

Yet it was in some senses Tito’s very ruthlessness that saw him prevail during World War II, when the Allies might have been expected to have backed the government led by the Yugoslav Royal Family and their ‘Četnik’ supporters.  The Četniks were right-wing, Serbian nationalists, named after čete - the companies that fought the Turks in the Middle Ages.  They would re-emerge as a political and military force with tragic consequences in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

As the Germans, Italians and the newly coined Independent State of Croatia moved into Yugoslavia, Tito initially attempted to work with the Četniks, led by Draža Mihailović, but the alliance only ever reached the level of both sides agreeing not to shoot each other.  As early as the end of 1941 even that deal lapsed, leaving Tito facing attack from both the Axis forces and the Četniks.

Although pushed to the mountainous regions of Montenegro and Bosnia, Tito proved to be an outstanding organiser of his Partisan forces.  His would be a guerrilla-style approach, ideally suited to the hills and dense forests of Bosnia in particular.  Under a central Supreme Staff, liberation committees were set up in all towns and villages under Partisan control.

Where the Četniks found the price of resisting the Axis forces too high – the inhabitants of villages showing hostility to the Germans and Croatians would simply be massacred – Tito felt that the slaughter of innocent civilians in Partisan areas was an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of his need to resist.

The Partisans engaged in no pitched battles with the invading forces.  Bands of them would launch unexpected attacks and then melt back into the woods and hills.

“Long before the Allies, the Germans and Italians came to realise the Partisans constituted a military factor of first-rate importance against which a modern army was in many respects powerless,” said Fitzroy Maclean.

The Axis forces launched seven full-scale offensives across the parts of Yugoslavia not under their total control, deploying more than ten divisions.  Each time the Partisans succeeded in extricating themselves, though – at times – Tito himself escaped by the skin of his teeth.  On one occasion in June 1943, in the Piva Canyon where Montenegro borders Bosnia, Tito was saved only by his loyal dog, Lux, who insisted on lying on his master’s head, as shells and bullets flew.  The dog died, taking a piece of shrapnel that would certainly have killed Tito outright.

But, by this time, British agents had been dropped into Bosnia and Montenegro and were witnessing the Partisans’ bravery at first hand.  This led to a reassessment as to which side Alliance support should be directed.

“The Partisans were more numerous, better organised, better disciplined and better led than the Četniks,” said Maclean.

The British agent played an important role in persuading Churchill to back the Partisans.  Churchill then persuaded Stalin and Roosevelt that full support for the Partisans was the right decision.  The Četniks’ Mihailović was to be given one last chance to help fight the Germans or be cut off from military support.

Nevertheless, Maclean did want to warn Churchill that there would be a risk that, in a post-war world, Yugoslavia might come under Soviet control or, at the very least, become a Communist state.

“Do you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?” Churchill asked Maclean.

“No, sir,” said Maclean.

“Neither do I,” said Churchill.  “And that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of government they set up, the better.  That is for them to decide.  What interests us is which of them (Partisans or Četniks) is doing most harm to the Germans.”

Maclean may have had an inkling that Tito would seek to ensure that Yugoslavia would not be swallowed up into the Soviet Union or become a client state, like several other Eastern European countries.  Not only had he identified an independence of thinking in Tito that was atypical of Soviet puppet leaders; he had also had Tito confide in him, saying: “You need not suppose that we shall lightly cast aside a prize, which has been won at such cost.”

The success of the Partisans meant that Tito had bought himself considerable credit with the Yugoslav people by 1945, many believing his leadership would bring them a better life.  It gave him the authority to overrule what was initially an administration including some members of the pre-war government.  The electoral law that was passed in 1945 effectively banned opposition parties from participating in elections.  Tito’s ‘Popular Front’ won with a landslide – hardly surprising because the choice was to place one’s ballot in a PF box or in an alternative black box, marked ‘no party’.

¹Maclean tells one of three versions of how Josip Broz acquired his nickname.  Maclean claims that, in organising his men, Tito so often said ‘You’ (‘ti’ in Serbo-Croat) do ‘that’ (‘to’) that the name stuck.  Another version is that he became TT because of his favourite Tulski-Tokarev pistol, which he kept close to him right up to his death.  Tito himself claimed it had no special meaning but that he had taken it on in 1934, as it was a common nickname in the Zagorje region of Croatia, where he was living.

Click here to read part 2 "How did Tito carve out Yugoslav independence after World War II?"

Phil Murphy – August 2024

Reading List

• Tito and His Comrades, Jože Pirjevec, The University of Wisconsin Press
• Tito’s Secret Empire, How the Maharaja of the Balkans Fooled the World, William Klinger and Denis Kuljiš, C.Hurst and Co (Publishers Ltd)
• The Fall of Yugoslavia, by Misha Glenny, Penguin Books
• The War is Dead, Long Live the War - Bosnia: The Reckoning, by Ed Vulliamy, The Bodley Head, London
• Serpent in the Bosom - The Rise and Fall of Slobadan Milošević, by Lenard J. Cohen, Westview Press, Perseus Books Group
• Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy Maclean, Penguin World War II Collection
• They Would Never Hurt a Fly, War Criminals on Trial in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić, Abacus
• Bosnian Chronicle, Ivo Andrić, Apollo, Head of Zeus