Citation: 74 Foreign Aff. 116 1995

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Review Essay

Tito's Last SecretHow Did He Keep the Yugoslavs Together?

Aleksa Djilas

Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia. BY

RICHARD WEST. NewYork: Carroll &Graf, 1995, 436 pp. $27.5o.

When Marshal Tito, president of Yugo-slavia, died on May 4, 198o, the represen-tatives of 122 states, including animpressive array of world leaders, attend-ed his funeral. He was almost universallyhailed as the last great World War IIleader, the first communist to successfullychallenge Stalin, and the founder of"national communism." Above all else,Tito was praised as the creator of modernYugoslavia, the leader whose wisdom andstatesmanship had united Yugoslavia'shistorically antagonistic national groupsin a stable federation.

In his excellent book, Tito and the Riseand Fall of Yugoslavia, Richard West pro-vides us with a biography, travelogue, andpopular history of Yugoslavia and ananalysis of the personalities and events

that brought about the country's disin-tegration and civil war. West loves Yugo-slavia and has a native's feel for local colorand anecdotes. He writes so admirablythat one enjoys his book even when itsconclusions are questionable. This is cer-tainly one of the most readable booksever written about Yugoslavia.

Tito as unifier of Yugoslavia is one ofthe author's main themes. The Commu-nist Party came to power in Yugoslavia atthe end of World War II after its Partisanarmy fought not only German, Italian,and other occupiers but also fellowYugoslavs in rival, often quisling, militaryunits. The Partisans were a multinationalgroup (although Serbs predominated inthe first half of the war), as was the Com-munist Party. They advocated nationalequality and a federal Yugoslavia in theirpropaganda. This helped them win thecivil war since their opponents weremostly nationalists who had followings

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ALEKSA DjI LAS is the author of The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity andCommunist Revolution, 1919-1953. From 1987 to 1994 he was a Fellow at theRussian Research Center, Harvard University.

Tito's Last Secret

only inside their own national groups andwhose extremism alienated large seg-ments of the population.

After the war and throughout the ColdWar, a triumphant Communist Party,with Tito at its helm, claimed that it hadonce and for all solved the nationalitiesproblem. Because Yugoslavia collapsedafter Tito's death, many-includingWest-believe that it was his genius thatkept it together. Nothing could be furtherfrom the truth.

RISE OF A COMMUNIST

Josip Broz "Tito" (the last name being analias he adopted in the 1930s for illegalparty work) was born in 1892 in Croatia,then a part of Austria-Hungary.1 Hisfather was Croatian and his motherSlovene, and they were among the better-off peasants in their village. At the age of15, Tito left home and, frequently switch-ing jobs, wandered from one industrialcity of central Europe to another.

As a young locksmith's assistant, Titohad some sympathy for the social demo-cratic movement, but was not politicallyactive. Nor did he get involved with theyoung revolutionary Croats and Serbs ofAustria-Hungary who wanted the disso-lution of the Hapsburg monarchy and theunification of its South Slav lands withSerbia and Montenegro to form a newstate, Yugoslavia (meaning "the land ofSouth Slavs"). When Austria-Hungaryattacked Serbia in 1914, Tito was sent as asergeant to the Serbian front. Today's

Serbian nationalists interpret this as asign of his early anti-Serbian attitude,but many other Hapsburg Croats andSerbs fought loyally for the monarchy onall its World War I fronts.

Transferred to the Russian front, Titowas wounded and captured. After recov-ering, he escaped in 1917 to Petrograd(the Russified name for St. Petersburg),but did not participate in the OctoberRevolution. He thought of emigrating tothe United States, but the vicissitudes offate brought him to Omsk, Siberia,where the Bolsheviks were in power. Hebecame a member of the party in 1919.

When Tito returned home in 1920,Austria-Hungary was no more, andCroatia had become a part of the newlyfounded Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats,and Slovenes (the name "Yugoslavia" wasofficially adopted in 1929). However, thestate ideology of Yugoslav unity was soonchallenged by national conflicts, in par-ticular between the Serbs, who favoredcentralism and predominated in the gov-ernment and the military, and Croats,who favored federalism or the creation ofa separate Croatian state. The Commu-nist Party of Yugoslavia, created in 1919,initially attracted a considerable follow-ing, but was more revolutionary inrhetoric than in action. Even so, it wasoutlawed in 1921.

The party had not prepared its cadresfor an underground struggle, and most ofits activities ceased. Nor was Tito a fer-vent militant at the time. But he eventu-

1 More than 9oo books have been published in Yugoslavia on Tito and his life, and there areover 350 books and major articles in English. The overwhelming majority are uncritical and prop-agandistic. A reader tempted to study Tito's life in more detail could begin with: Stephen Clis-sold, WhirlwindAn Account ofMarshal Tito's Rise to Power, London: Cresset Press, 1949; MilovanDjilas, Tito: The Storyfrom Inside, London: Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 1981; Stevan K. Pavlowitch,Tito: Yugoslavia's Great Dictator--A Reassessment, London: C. Hurst & Company, 1992.

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Aleksa Djilas

ally became one and in 1927 was appoint-ed secretary of the important Zagrebparty committee. As a communist leaderTito blossomed, showing initiative andresourcefulness. He opposed factionalstruggles within the party and was proudand defiant during his police interroga-tions, trial, and more than five years ofimprisonment for party activity.

CONVERSION TO FEDERALISM

In the 192os and early 193os, the mainquarrel inside the Communist Party ofYugoslavia was between moderates (whowere mostly in power) and radicals (mostlyin opposition). The former were usuallymiddle-class, middle-aged intellectualswho preferred legal action and engaged inendless intellectually stimulating but polit-ically unproductive polemics. They keptthe party, in the name of "pure class strug-gle," away from nationalistic quarrels. Thelatter were mostly younger intellectualsand workers who favored undergroundwork, though usually not terrorism, andthe energetic recruitment of the young.Following Lenin, who during the RussianRevolution sought the support of non-Russian nations dissatisfied with tsarismand Russification, they wanted the partyto side with non-Serbian nations against"Serbian hegemony." Neither the moder-ates nor the radicals, however, werenationalists.

The government's persecution ofcommunists indirectly favored the radi-cals; the Communist Party had no choicebut to concentrate on illegal work. The"dictatorship of King Alexander" had thesame effect. In 1929 the king suspendedparliamentary rule, established his per-sonal regime, and increased Serbian cen-tralism. National dissatisfaction,

especially among the Croats, soared, andit became obvious that the CommunistParty could not remain detached.

The Comintern-the organizationfounded in 1919 to give Russian commu-nists control of communist movementsthroughout the world-was almost fromits start hostile to Yugoslavia, since thecountry was allied with anti-Bolshevik"imperialists" Britain and France. Oblivi-ous to the many ethnic, linguistic, andcultural similarities among the SouthSlavs and their powerful nineteenth-cen-tury aspirations toward a common state,the international communist leadershipsaw Yugoslavia as a kind of Serbian mini-empire based on military conquest. TheComintern, therefore, demanded theimmediate dissolution of the "prison ofthe peoples" and showed more sympathyfor Yugoslav radicals than for moderates.

The demand to split Yugoslavia intosmaller states went further than evenmost radicals wanted, but, obedient tothe Comintern, Yugoslav communistsincluded it in their program. In the mid-1930s, however, the Comintern began toperceive Yugoslavia differently, as a bar-rier to fascism and Nazism (both Mus-solini and Hitler wanted to destroy thecountry). Meanwhile, the CommunistParty of Yugoslavia felt increasingly un-comfortable advocating separatism, sincethe separatist parties were mostly right-wing, clerical, pro-fascist, and aggres-sively anticommunist.

At that time, a new generation ofcommunist activists, young but withmuch experience in illegal work and inenduring police interrogation andimprisonment, had come into party lead-ership positions vacated by Alexander'spersecution and Stalin's purges. They

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wholeheartedlyembraced the Com-intern's new policy,which tried to unite all"progressive forces" inan antifascist PopularFront, and in thatspirit they fashioned anew policy toward thenational question inYugoslavia. "Serbianhegemony" was stillthe enemy and na-tional equality themain goal, but sepa-ratist movements werealso condemned fortheir right-wing andpro-fascist affinities.The preservation of areorganized, commu-nist Yugoslavia wasadvocated. Within thezealously "internation-alist" CommunistParty of Yugoslavia, loyal to the SovietUnion and worshipful of Stalin, Yugoslavpatriotism began to grow.

The Comintern appointed Tito secre-tary-general of the Communist Party ofYugoslavia, probably in 1937.2 From 1944-45, when the communists came to powerin Yugoslavia, until his death, Tito wasfor much of the time simultaneously headof the party, marshal of Yugoslavia, headof government, commander in chief, andpresident of the country. He was a sea-soned politician who had survived thepurges (and according to some accountsparticipated in them), and much olderthan most of his closest collaborators,

who called him"Stari"-the old man.While definitely not aCroatian nationalist,as many Serbs nowportray him, he didnot share the youngcommunists' strongfeeling of being Yugo-slav. For Tito, Yugo-slavia remainedprimarily a politicalidea, a tactic for therevolutionary conquestof power. DuringWorld War II, andespecially during theconflict with Stalinthat broke out in 1948,Tito's patriotism andconcern for Yugo-slavia's unity wouldincrease, but would

UPIBETTMANN always remain subor-dinate to political

expediency and personal power.

TITO'S REAL SECRET

West portrays Tito as a moderate andmild dictator. In comparison to sometwentieth-century dictators, this isundoubtedly true. West also sees Tito asa reluctant autocrat who opposed democ-racy and attempts at liberalizationprimarily because they would unleashnationalist passions and endanger theunity of the country. But if the conflictbetween Croats and Serbs had somehowmiraculously disappeared, there is noevidence that Tito-who, as West him-self notices, "was always inclined to resist

2 Pero Simiz, Kad, kako i za~toje Titopostavljen za sekretara CKKPJ, Beigrad: Akvarijus, 1989.

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Aleksa Djilas

reform or any weakening of the centralpower"-would have allowed, let aloneencouraged, democratization. Tito was adogmatic autocrat who never consideredabandoning either the basic tenets ofMarxist-Leninist ideology or the one-party system of government based on it.

On the larger issue of Yugoslav unity,West thinks that Tito was indispensable:"Supporters of Tito felt that [Yugoslavia]needed many more years of his strongand paternal rule to heal the wounds ofthe war. Such people valued the conceptof Yugoslavia more than abstract -ismsand -ocracies." But Tito ruled for overthree and a half decades. No one can saythat he did not have enough time tostrengthen Yugoslavia's unity.

Yet the country ultimately disinte-grated in a bloody civil war. And thisbreakup was not as much of a surprise asis often suggested. During the 198os,Western statesmen and diplomats ex-pressed continuing faith in Yugoslavia'sfuture and unity. They were not naive.They simply thought it prudent to hidetheir fears, since an open discussion ofYugoslavia's slow disintegration mighthave sped it up. By then, many in theWest began noticing the powerful sepa-ratist tendencies among the Croats andthe Albanian minority, as well as theweakness of the central government inBelgrade, where the state and the partywere headed by collective presidencies.The presidencies, moreover, were merecollections of the delegates of the six re-publics (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, andSlovenia) and two autonomous provinces(Vojvodina and Kosovo, both inside Ser-bia). Indeed, it was no secret that the ero-sion of federal authority was such that

politicians from the republics andprovinces avoided long stretches in officein Belgrade, since it removed them fromtrue political power.

Far from being the great unifier, Titopursued many policies that eroded unity.In a simplistic, Marxist-Leninist manner,Tito saw nationalism as "bourgeois ideol-ogy" and national conflicts as caused by"capitalism." So after the war, with the"bourgeoisie" defeated, he did little tocombat nationalism and forge unity.While a common Yugoslav school pro-gram was created, cultural exchangesamong Yugoslavia's six republics were notintense and with time became rare. Nouniversity for all nationalities was created,nor was there a policy of encouraging stu-dents to study outside their republics. Itwas rare for a Croatian professor to teachin Belgrade or a Serbian one in Zagreb.When the media did advocate all-Yugoslav ideas, it was an exception to therule. This cultural and intellectual autarkyof republics helped preserve the tradi-tional nationalisms of various groups.

Tito was among the more conservativeYugoslav communists when it came totolerance of free expression of ideas andartistic creativity. Yet he was interested inattracting famous intellectuals and artistswho would support the communistregime and exalt him personally. If theyobliged, and in most cases they did, theirprewar views and activities, which wereoften nationalistic, were erased fromofficial memory, and thereafter no onewas permitted to criticize them publicly.They became esteemed members of theestablishment and adopted a veneer ofMarxism-Leninism, but beneath it theycontinued to propagate nationalism. Thiswas particularly true of historians, lin-

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Tito's Last Secret

guists, writers, and artists, whose workteemed with national pride, self-pity, andnegative stereotypes. And new genera-tions of intellectuals followed their teach-ers and elders.

As time went on, the official conceptof Yugoslav unity became more and moreemptied of the ethnic, linguistic, and his-torical traditions common to all Yugo-slavia's national groups. By the late 196os,it was almost completely vacuous. Titoistideology was dispensed as a substitute,and schoolchildren, students, and soldiershad to learn about workers' sef-manage-ment and Yugoslavia's foreign policy ofnonalignment as values that held thecountry together. Tito's personality cultwas a corollary.

Reforms in 1965 dealt centralized plan-ning a decisive blow and stimulated eco-nomic development. But because theybegan to threaten the party's control overthe economy they were drastically sloweddown, mostly on Tito's initiative. So in-stead of a modern, integrated Yugoslavmarket economy, with the movement ofcapital, goods, and workers from one re-public to another, regional interests in-creasingly asserted themselves. Republicsand autonomous provinces began develop-ing their own autarkic economies, dupli-cating each other's industrial enterprises,and inefficiently employing large foreigncredits and loans. Since Tito's main con-cern was always to prevent any kind of all-Yugoslav opposition to his rule-andmodern Yugoslav management and workforces might have become that-he wel-comed the' disastrous fragmentation.

In the early 197os, Tito removed both

the Croatian party leadership, which wasnationalist but also liberal-reformist, andthe Serbian party leadership, which wasantinationalist and liberal-reformist. Hehad difficulty getting a majority of Ser-bian communists to support him and,true to form, responded in dictatorialfashion: "I wish to say here that when aparty's line, results, and weaknesses arebeing discussed, then the number ofspeakers for or against a certain view isnot the decisive factor in revolutionarychoice and assessment of which path totake and what is to be done."3

After the purges, Tito advocated rein-troduction of party centralism and rein-yoked Lenin. Yugoslavia's economic,social, and political life was not suffi-ciently advanced to resist the dictator,and reforms were discontinued. Still, thesociety was too Westernized, the com-munist party too tired and ideologicallyuncertain, and the ordinary people toosophisticated for the country to bepushed back into the party centralism ofthe immediate post-World War II years,as some inside the party desired andmany outside it feared.

Tito's antidemocratic and anti-mod-ernizing measures engendered furtherfragmentation. The adoption of the 1974

constitution-perhaps the world'slongest, and definitely the most complex,cumbersome, and difficult to read-almost turned Yugoslavia into a confed-eration. From that time until thedisintegration of Yugoslavia in 199o, theeight locally based communist oligarchiesresisted any form of reintegration. Thisanti-Yugoslavism (including firm opposi-

FOREIGN AFFAIRS .Ju/y/August9 9S

3 This was said on October 16, 1972. Quoted in Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experi-ment, 1948-1974, London: C. Hurst & Company, 1977.

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Aleksa Djilastion to anyone declaring himself to beYugoslav, rather than Croat, Serb, etc.)became a central tenet of their ideology.

After the purges of the early 197os,Tito surpassed himself in "negative selec-tion."4 Docility and sycophancy were al-most the only criteria he used for fillingstate and party leadership positions. InSerbia, for example, he stocked the partyleadership with such weak, colorless, andinsignificant individuals that it is not sur-prising Slobodan Milo~evid met so littleopposition to his rise to power in the sec-ond half of the 198os.

Tito's Yugoslavia was undoubtedlynot a totalitarian state of mass terror, butmerely a moderately authoritarian, semi-efficient, corrupt, and somewhat farcicalstate, similar to many others in theworld. The main guarantors of Yugo-slavia's unity were the communist policeand army. No force in the country couldchallenge them, and Tito always hadcomplete control of both. So he did notneed great political skills to neutralizeany opposition, including nationalistsand separatists. After all, the SovietUnion and Czechoslovakia, the othertwo multinational countries in EasternEurope, also were never threatened withdisintegration so long as communistsand their repressive police and armyruled them.

To resolve its national conflicts andovercome its sorrowful history, Yugoslaviawould have had to be exceptional. Itneeded a dynamic economy and modernpolitical institutions. Tito's political"genius" consisted of hindering and elimi-nating creative and reformist leaders,

either within the communist party or out-side it. What the West called "Titoism"turned out to be nothing more than Tito'sskill in muddling through and avoidingthe moment of truth. His talent was fornonsolutions that partly worked, providedhe was at the center of the polycentricYugoslav federation and the West pro-vided huge credits. Tito, therefore, leftnothing enduring. Neither workers' self-management, nor a foreign policy of non-alignment, nor Yugoslavia itself survived.

On May 4, 1995, the i5th anniversaryof Tito's death, there were no officialcommemorations in any part of the for-mer Yugoslavia. The media made fewcomments, almost all of which were neg-ative and sarcastic. Up to 199o, around 14million people had visited Tito's mau-soleum. But for the anniversary onlyfamily members, representatives of thesmall and politically marginal League ofCommunists, and a few others came tohis grave, which is no longer protected bythe presidential guard of honor. Themyth of Tito had vanished.

Alan Bullock ended his Hitler.'AStudy in Tyranny with the conclusionthat Hitler had completely succeeded inhis deepest purpose, which was to de-stroy "the liberal bourgeois order" and"the old Europe." He wrote, "Si monu-mentum requiris, circumspice," whichtranslates as, "If you seek his monument,look around." Tito was no Hitler, norwas it ever his goal to destroy Yugoslavia.But since his dictatorial misrule enor-mously contributed to Yugoslavia'sbloody disintegration, its ruins are amonument he deserves.0

FOREIGN AFFAIRS* Volume7No.4

4 Aleksa Djilas, "Tito and the Independence of Yugoslavia," Review of the Study Centre forYugoslav Affairs, vol. 2, no. 4 (198o), PP. 399-400.

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