Svetozar Vukmanović Tempo, a close associate and comrade of Josip Broz Tito, has come full circle in a rich life cycle, with hints of tragedy that happens when politics gets involved in family relationships.
From a difficult life in the village of Crmnica, schooling in Cetinje, then studying law in Belgrade, where he was seduced by the communist resistance movement, so that, thanks to the well-performed important tasks during the Second World War, after the victory he became part of the ruling elite.
And then, at the peak of his career, he retires from political positions, returns to his native Montenegro, and is only occasionally in public, often on unexpected occasions, such as guest appearances in the poem legendary Yugoslav group Bijelo Dugme.
"Even though he was, today we would say, a really cool guy, a high-ranking politician, a friend of Josip Broz Tito, he was enfant terrible (impossible child) in the sense that he could not keep some things quiet and was not a poltron.
"He was often not pragmatic, to assess with whom to enter into conflicts, and criticism, especially when he was unfairly accused, bothered him a lot," says Croatian historian Hrvoje Klasić.
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The memory of Tempo is preserved by a bust and memorial plaque on the house in his native village of Podgora.
His cousin Slavko Vukmanović, in work overalls, deftly opens the crooked white gate dotted with corrosion.
He unlocks the house where next to the fireplace in the corner, there are pictures of Tempo's mother and brother hanging on the white walls, and in the other corner there is another bust of the most famous Vukmanović.
"When they wanted to tear down the bust at the memorial home, I took this one under my arm and said 'come on, Tempo, home,'" says Slavko, who lives in the village and takes care of the houses of his relatives who moved away a long time ago.
From Podgor to the Communist Party
When you go from Podgorica towards Petrovac na Moru and cross the Skadar Lake, a narrow winding road framed by colorful yellow-red canopies branches off on the right.
Road signs at the crossroads lead to a winery with a view of the sea, but also to the village of Podgor and the neighboring, unusual name, Građani.
Up the road is Utrg, a village whose center is dominated by a memorial house, similar to the single-story buildings of former local communities, with metal doors, in front of which busts of national heroes stand proudly.
One of them is Tempo, as the most famous resident of Podgor, in the Crmnica area.
On a clear December day, the air is clean and smells fresh.
Vines and spreading fruit stalks hang over every yard, and in the cellars, almost transparent rosacli grapes are drying, sweet even a month after picking.
Svetozar Vukmanović was born on August 3, 1912, in one of those stone houses, today with modern PVC joinery and antennas on the roofs, in Đura's Karst.
At that time, Montenegro was at war with the Turks, two years later the First World War would begin, in which the Montenegrins would fight with Austria-Hungary, and the following year the occupation had already begun, Tempo wrote in his memoirs "Revolution that flows".
His father Nikola, although illiterate, for a time worked in the mines in America, not knowing English, but determined that his children should get an education.
This skilled mason sends all three sons to Cetinje to high school, and according to the customs of the time, only the daughter remains at home.
The eldest brother, Djuro, later studied philosophy in Paris and became a member of the Communist Party of France in 1925.
The middle brother Luka, a theologian and Orthodox priest, regularly sends money to Tempa for support after he entered the Faculty of Law in Belgrade in 1931, he writes in memoirs.
"Luka was an ideological opponent of communism, who never held a gun, no militant counter-revolutionary.
"And he, as an older brother, educated him, regardless of their ideological differences," says Miodrag Lekić, a Montenegrin politician and professor from Bar, who knew Tempo personally.
However, Đura's influence was stronger and Tempo will join the Communist Party, which was already banned in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the time.
He was arrested several times, and for a time he was imprisoned in a political camp dissidents in Visegrad.
"At that time, being a sympathizer, let alone a member of the Communist Party, was much more than just a political choice or determination, they really put their heads in the bag.
"But that enthusiasm, that ardor of the people who joined the party in those years, they didn't lose until the end of their lives", says Hrvoje Klasić.
Lekić assesses that "there are many examples of people going on adventures from Montenegro directly from the village."
"These are great ideals, quick enthusiasm for a big idea, not to say megalomaniacal... The broader the idea, the more tempting it is," says Lekić.
The first ring around Titus
Tempo was also part of the innermost circle of the party leadership, which on July 4, 1941, was in the house of the Ribnikar family in Belgrade, together with Tito, Aleksandar Ranković, Milovan Đilas and Edvard Kardelj, declared the uprising of the people of Yugoslavia against the occupiers.
That date was later celebrated as Fighter's Day.
"Then he received a special task from Tito to go and start an uprising in Bosnia, and during the war he would be an important figure in a very specific area, the territory of Macedonia and Albania, which was really different from all the other parts of Yugoslavia," describes Klasić.
In September 1941, he was appointed commander of the Main Staff of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from where he would be sent to Macedonia the following year to organize partisan detachments and brigades.
During that period, he also went to Greece and Albania, and established cooperation with the Bulgarian Workers' Party.
A tragic family story
While the war was raging, his mother was left alone - the eldest son Đuro died, as a young communist, in 1927, a year later her husband Nikola, and her daughter Milica at 20, as Tempo writes in her memoirs, from "shame" because she gave birth to a child out of wedlock .
Only the sons Luke, then a priest in Macedonia, and Svetozar, a communist and partisan ready to create a new government after the victory over the occupiers, remained.
He knew that a conflict with his brother would be imminent, Tempo said in an interview in 1988.
That's what he told his mother when he came to the village once during the war.
"Then she asked me in such a frightened way what would happen to our country, to us, and I, not thinking much, but full of what I had read about the revolution, especially the French revolution, snapped at her, 'this country will be Russian.'
"And she asks what will happen with Luka, I am withoutometiculously, quite rudely, I wouldn't do it now, I did it then, I say 'And we will shoot him', and if they win, they will shoot me.
"Then, he says, it's never good for me. That drama of that old woman is actually a drama of revolution." Vukmanović told almost half a century later.
Luka Vukmanović was killed in Slovenia in 1945, together with thousands of those who tried to reach Austria by fleeing from the new communist authorities and reached Austria.
Among them were Chetniks, Ustasha, White Guards, but also civilians and priests who were shot en masse, mostly without trial, by partisan fighters.
Luka Vukmanović's remains were not found, but his grave is located in the same row as Tempov and the monument to their parents, at the village grave in Utrgo, surrounded by a young pine forest.
Zoran Vukmanović, Tempo's son, says that for his father, family was "extremely important, there is no doubt about that."
"I think he carried a scar for the rest of his life, a cut, he didn't have a heart attack, but a mark remained on his heart," says Zoran Vukmanović.
'Symbol of the Revolution'
Historian Zoran Lakić, a member of the Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, describes Tempo as "a top leader in the anti-fascist struggle", whose popularity grew over time.
"Tempo was loved by the communists, but I don't think the anti-communists treated him like the others.
"He enjoyed the trust of both sides," says Lakić to the BBC, who adds that he was friends with Tempo and they often saw each other.
Due to his experience before the war, he was considered one of the "symbols of the revolution", in the new communist state he held a number of ministerial positions at the federal level.
He was known for his quickness and desire to implement reforms as quickly as possible.
Time
In one of the speeches, Svetozar Vukmanović said the word several times time, and after him Tito took the floor and, unable to remember his name, said: "As Comrade Tempo said," and that's how his nickname remained.
Tempo very quickly jumped out of the "overcoat" of managers, he did not go with the others to billiards or hunting, says Zoran Vukmanović.
"I remember him as a versatile man, who had a wide range of interests," says Vukmanović.
He remembers listening to his father's conversations with various interesting people from the corner - writers, painters, artists.
"They were big names from the field of culture, my father did not like to hang out with politicians.
"My father was very modest, he was not intrusive, even from today's perspective I think he was shy."
That he often moved aside, you can see, he says, in the photographs.
"He never pushed himself to be in the foreground."
While Tempo held important political positions after the war, the family lived in a villa in the elite Belgrade neighborhood of Dedinje.
Although their closest neighbors were Tito himself and all important state leaders, they lived modestly, says Tempo's son.
"I ate bread and fat, let's face it.
"In the beginning, we heated clay stoves only in his study in the house and where we all sat, only in two rooms," describes Vukmanović, born in 1946.
Although he was a privileged child, always under special attention, Zoran Vukmanović preferred to spend time with his friends from the basketball club, rather than with the children of generals and managers.
"I didn't like the attention, it bothered me," he says.
He accidentally chose the rival club Crvena zvezda to train there, even though his father was one of the founders of the club Partizan.
He says that it was important for his father to teach his children the right values - when Zora was 12 or 13 years old, he sent him to Sutjeska, where soldiers collected the bones of soldiers killed in the famous battle, to be buried in a common grave.
"As far as I remember, we brought water to that army, he and his friends tried so that we, their children, would gain experience as early as possible and learn what should be respected," says Vukmanović.
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Union leader and student protests
One of the high positions in socialist Yugoslavia was the chairmanship of the Trade Union, in which Vukmanović succeeded the distinguished Đura Salaj in 1958.
"At the end of the fifties, especially in the beginning of the 1960s, Yugoslavia entered a new phase of adaptation to the world market.
"Then the emphasis is no longer on extensive large-scale employment and large companies, but on quality - the laws of the market are also taken into account, and not only on planned undertakings that need to be carried out", explains Hrvoje Klasić.
Tempo, he says, "had interesting ideas that at that moment were even shocking for some, he suggests not to be an equaliser - you have salary classes and everyone gets the same".
"He proposed greater autonomy for companies in the distribution of income," says Klasić, noting that in 1961 a law was passed that made this possible, and the standard of living of workers improved considerably.
The idea was that a company that works well, collects income, when it pays the state all its obligations, can stimulate the best workers with increased wages.
Tempo was still among Tito's closest party comrades.
"One could say intimate, one of the few whom Tito considered a friend and who trusted him," emphasizes Klasić.
One example is the student protests in Belgrade in 1968, when the first decision of the top party leadership was not to react, but to gather information from the field.
Tito received information from the State Security, through party committees, but also from friends whom he sent to universities to see what was going on.
Such a task was also given to Tempo, who is going to the Faculty of Medicine.
"Interestingly, Tempo Tita reports in a significantly different way from the Serbian authorities and the secret service.
"He assures him that there are no hostile slogans, let alone monarchist ones, and all this was tried to be shown to Tito - that the students, the Maltenes, are a counter-revolution," says Klasić.
Tempo's son also studied in Belgrade in those years.
"Tito left the session that was being held and made that statement on television that completely coincided with the assessment of the situation that my father gave," says Vukmanović Jr.
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Miodrag Lekić, however, believes that Tempo in the later years "became a nomenclature, it lost its individuality".
From today's perspective, it seems that his ideas were not elaborated, but only "on the surface", he adds.
"He acted with a temperament, he tried to explain, as if he was trying to return to the original working class and continue the ideas of communism, but with a dose of self-censorship," assesses Lekić.
In important moments, such as the split between Tito and Đilas or when the Prague Spring began, in which certain reforms and democratization of society were demanded, Tempo, like a hard current, was against it.
Only later will he realize that he was wrong and that it is in the case of Djilas turned out to be "non-human".
"He convinced himself that he was a reformer and that's why it was him." A revolution in progress, and it's not that it didn't flow, but it became more and more bureaucratized and wasted, and in the end it became compromised," says Lekić.
In 1970, Tempo left political positions in Belgrade, returned to Montenegro and began writing memoirs in the village of Reževići, widely presented in professional and scientific circles, says historian Zoran Lakić.
The secret of success was, among other things, approval from the very top of the state.
"'Do you know,' Tempo says to me, 'how I escaped the court?'
"'I signed every page of my Memoirs, took it to Tito and Tito signed that he agreed,' and that's why, I believe, he didn't condemn them so fiercely," Lakić remembers.
Klasić says that Tempo "showed in his memoirs that he is not a typical politician, but that he does not shy away from criticizing or receiving criticism, of course, when it is well-argued and justified."
He also cites an example when Serbian politician Dragi Stamenković accused Tempa of publishing an article "against Tito's thoughts" in the newspaper. Vukmanović, despite the evidence to the contrary and the support of his colleagues, went to the room after the meeting and "wept like a little child".
"That one humanity of his was shown and still that enthusiasm, therefore, he did not become a politician who is immune, thick-skinned, and simply doesn't care what is said."
Pension in Reževići
After retiring from political life, Vukmanović went to Reževiće, a small coastal village on the Adriatic coast.
There was no road to the house, on the cliff between Budva and Petrovac, and all the lumber was transported by donkeys, Tempo's son Zoran remembers.
"They laughed at him a little, because Reževići is because he roars, the winds are strong there.
"He built a house on a small hill, then he planted 100 or so conifers and thus protected it," says Vukmanović.
For the next three decades, he wrote books and occasionally talked with friends and colleagues in that sort of refuge.
It was in Reževići that Slobodan Vuković, a journalist and former editor of the Pobjeda daily, spoke to Tempo for NIN 1988.
Tempo left a strong impression on him of "an educated man, open, who did not hesitate to say what he thought".
"A statesman who did not shrug his shoulders," Vuković described him for the BBC.
They talked mostly about the constitutional changes of 1974, the creator of which was the prominent official Edvard Kardelj, which, according to many interpretations, led to the weakening of the federation and the strengthening of the republics.
"Tempo told me that this idea was born ten years earlier, when Kardelj said that in addition to distribution according to work, distribution according to nations should be introduced," says Vuković.
Vukmanović was against that idea, especially because at that time he was the head of the trade union - "he was ahead of the times, he asked for distribution according to work, not according to nations".
"That was the beginning of national economies, and probably the nucleus of the disintegration of Yugoslavia was also there," says Vuković.
"Tempo was a great statesman, a bit of a Crmnik grump, as we say, he held his own," says Vuković with a smile.
He probably paid for that grumpiness with his career.
"There were attempts to send him to prison because of accusations that he was interfering, that he was against constitutional changes," remembers son Zoran Vukmanović.
However, when Tito came to Miločer in 1972 for New Year's Eve, he was greeted by Tempo, Vuković states.
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Love and art
The Vukmanović collection occupies a special part of the Art Gallery in Cetinje.
Only part of the 225 paintings, graphics, sculptures that Tempo and his wife gave to each other during their life together is on display.
Collecting the collection began when Milica Sarić Vukmanović, also a prominent pre-war communist and post-war politician, gave her husband a painting by Milo Milunović, an artist from Cetinje, for his birthday in 1950.
"Later it was found out that Tempo enjoyed it immensely, in the sense that he suddenly recognized some emotions and memories from his early childhood spent in Montenegro," says Mirjana Dabović Pejović, curator of the Cetinje Museum.
The collection is interesting because, "although it was created by people who were not directly involved in the world of art before embarking on this venture, it has the characteristics of a carefully managed collection", he believes.
The Vukmanovićs often socialized with artists whose paintings they later bought, such as Petar Lubarda, Dada Đurić, Eda Murtić, Petar Konjović, Sreten Stojanović and Rist Stijović.
The collection includes a drawing by Diego Rivera that was given to the Vumanović family by his partner and famous painter Frida Kahlo when they were in Mexico.
"It is possible that the Vukmanovićs, and Tempo in particular, helped promote certain authors and establish them on the scene, considering that this was the time when most of them were at the beginning of their careers, as a kind of patron and support.
"They had a keen sense of recognizing quality because a large number of those works have only been confirmed by time," says Dabović Pejović.
How different he was from other communist champions is shown by the interview he saved for the magazine Praktikna žena Jugo paper, where Tempo in 1983 says that "love is the most noble thing".
Many were surprised when Vukmanović, at the invitation of Goran Bregović, recorded a song with children from the "Ljubica Ivezić" orphanage in Sarajevo in 1986. "Violence and injustice fall" on the somewhat prophetic album of Bijelo Dugme "Spit and sing, my Yugoslavia".
Five years later, the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia broke out, and Tempo was a witness to that war as well.
All this affected him very much, as a "destruction of ideals", says his son Zoran.
Svetozar Vukmanović died on December 6, 2000, and was buried at the family cemetery in Podgor.
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Different from others
The one-party system did not imply unanimity within the party, believes Klasić and points out Tempo as one of the best examples.
When the philosophers gathered around the journal Praxis, who were a kind of alternative or criticism from leftist positions, were targeted by party comrades, Vukmanović wanted to see for himself the validity of the attack.
At that time, the party responded to criticism very briskly, dealing with dissenters, with inevitable labeling.
Without going too much into the content, it was important to denigrate the opponents, even if those labels were sometimes contradictory, says the historian, and "the Praxists are American spies at one moment, Chinese at another," recounts Klasić.
Tempo went and bought all the Praxis magazines and read them all.
"And, he says, 'I didn't see anything inside that we condemned them for.'
"He honestly remained a revolutionary, and maybe that cost him his political career in the end," assesses Klasić.
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