Review: Tito and His Comrades by Joze Pirjevec

What is remembered of Yugoslavia? The West – as selective in its memory as any socialist mythology – generally has little inclination to remember that curious state, except as a novelty. Not when the horrors that followed its dissolution are so impossible to forget.

To this day, the Yugoslav wars are cheapened by those who use the conflicts as an excuse to make historically illiterate observations about ‘balkanisation’, or wheel out risible, hand-me-down endorsements for ‘humanitarian’ intervention. If they consider what came before at all, the vast strangeness of its history is often condensed into a single name: ‘Tito’.

The so-called ‘Great Man’ theory, popularised by Victorians like Thomas Carlyle, is now widely disdained, yet the idea that history hinges upon extraordinary individuals is by no means dead. For many, to remember Yugoslavia is to remember the president who appeared to hold the Frankenstein-stitching of his republic together by sheer force of will and personality.

In his brilliant, monumental biography - now available in English through the author’s own excellent translation - Joze Pirjevec’s task is to ascertain where the communist leader ended and the communist republic began. A professor of history at Slovenia’s University of Primorska, whose career saw him work on both sides of the Cold War divide, Pirjevec understandably shuns the simplifications common among Western appraisals, and has the bravery to acknowledge complexity, along with the moral questions it presents.

One of fifteen children, few of whom survived to see adolescence, the man who would be Tito was born Josip Broz, in a sclerotic kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian empire. He had an alcoholic father and a mother whose harshness matched that of the world she knew. Tito saw more of that world during the First World War, and set out to change it the first chance he got. His formative years were those of a professional revolutionary – organising, conspiracy, jail, exile. Upon his first imprisonment, his file with the local authorities read simply: ‘criminal, communist.’

Like many of his comrades, Tito undertook pilgrimages to Russia, to observe and learn from Bolshevism in action. For all his later condemnations of Stalin, when Tito first saw the realities of Soviet purges – the arbitrary arrests, show-trials, slave labour and executions – he did not find his conscience troubled. Working within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia – a tragicomic nest of personal vendettas, inflated egos and backbiting – Tito was perfectly willing to accept that such bloody methodology was a necessary component of revolution. Pirjevec does not shy from describing how he would later put this view into practice.

Tito’s role during the Second World War is perhaps his most famous, and it remains fascinating in Pirjevec’s telling. Whereas Charles De Gaulle spent his life shamelessly propagating the idea that he had saved France from Nazi Germany almost single-handedly, Tito had a far greater claim to being the mastermind behind the Yugoslav victory over fascism.

The Partisans are still commonly regarded as the most effective European resistance effort, and in leading their struggle against the Nazis, largely unsupported by foreign assistance, Tito demonstrated that his leadership of Yugoslavia was not just a likelihood, but an unquestionable reality, formalised by a landslide postwar election victory.

Prior to the war, Tito, a man who crushed dissident resistance without afterthought, found one of his most troublesome critics in Miroslav Krle?a, then Croatia’s most famous writer. Even after seeing his homeland transformed into a Nazi puppet-state, Krle?a refused to ally with Tito’s Soviet-aligned Partisans – he had lost too many friends in the purges. Resignedly, Tito told him: “We have no other protector than the USSR, whether we like it or not.” Such grim realism not only repulsed Krle?a, it would, as history records, eventually become unacceptable to Tito himself.

The split between Tito and Stalin defined the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the eyes of the world; its very existence violated the USSR’s unshakeable contention that there was no viable socialist alternative to the Soviet model, particularly for small, defiant nations unwilling to yield to geopolitical pressure.

As it turned out, many such nations, often freshly liberated by anti-colonialist struggle, resented being the pawns of Cold War power-blocs. Neither NATO nor the Soviets wanted those states they bought off or subjugated to realise that their apocalyptic game of brinksmanship was something from which you could opt out. As a result, Tito’s role in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement was arguably the most significant achievement of his life.

Despite the present-day NAM being somewhat reduced in influence, the feelings that surrounded its uncompromising necessity persist, whether in the desperation of once-and-former superpowers deludedly clinging to old certainties, or in those insurgent nations pondering what national independence means in a chaotic, multipolar world.

The socialist republic which seemed intertwined with the man who led it did not survive without him for long: following his death in 1980, economic crisis choked Yugoslavia, until the typically brutal ‘adjustments’ of the IMF made it unsustainable.

Yet today, ‘Yugonostalgia’ persists in unexpected quarters – not merely amongst the elderly who remember an authoritarian but prosperous multinational state more favourably than the civil war that followed, but also among the young, some of whom have idealised what lay before the nightmare of the 1990s many of them were born into.

Unsurprisingly, Tito is an avatar of this view, which – though sufficiently rose-tinted not to see the blood – is not as unnuanced as it might seem. Tito’s legacy was to demonstrate that, when the masters of the world demand allegiance, there is always refusal; and when they say there is no alternative, there is no reason to believe them.