One might think that the period that has passed since Tito's death on May 4, 1980 is enough for some kind of distance. In theory, passions should subside. It turns out that the myths about the evil Bolshevik or the good father of the Yugoslav non-aligned, self-righteous, fraternal-united community are the face and the reverse of the same phenomenon.
Tito's orphans
Let's start from that May 1980. In Split, at the Poljud stadium, Radio-television Belgrade reporter Milomir Jasnić records with his camera a few minutes that will reach all the world's televisions: At the news from the stadium loudspeaker that "Comrade Tito has died", the players of Zvezda and Hajduk as well as 50 the people in the stands were shaken to the core. Then a vow song was heard from thousands of throats: "Comrade Tito, we swear to you, not to deviate from your path!"
The entire Yugoslav nation, which its ethnic component parts will later claim by the majority never existed, is united in the sense of loss. Did we know then who we were grieving for? I, I admit - I didn't. Millions of citizens were kept in a state of political infantility. Official historiography and biographies kept silent about important details from Tito's life. But the tears of those people, of which some are ashamed today, were not fake.
There are 15 different data on the date of birth of Josip Broz, with May 7, 1892 being the most common. The family came to Zagorje in the 16th century from today's Trento district in northern Italy. That area then belonged to Austria and had a mixed German and Italian population. Thus, according to his father Franja, Josip Broz is a Croat of Italian-German roots, and according to his mother Maria, a Slovenian.
Biographical thorns
He finished his locksmith trade in Sisak, and his work took him all the way to the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria. In 1910, Broz joined the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slavonia. In 1913, he went to military service and as an Austro-Hungarian soldier welcomed the First World War - he excelled as a skier and swordsman, he had the rank of sergeant.
Both Tito and the Yugoslav communist biographers were happy to keep silent about the fact that Sergeant Broz fought as an artillery non-commissioned officer in Serbia and that in 1914 he was even promoted. Today, this part of the biography is happily quoted as proof that Broz took an anti-Serb position very early on. The thesis can hardly be proven. Broz was reassigned to the east, where he was seriously wounded by a Circassian's spear and fell into Russian captivity. Before that, in 1915, he was nominated for the Austro-Hungarian Silver Medal for Courage, because he single-handedly captured a bunch of Russian soldiers. He could not receive the medal in captivity. Tito visited Vienna in 1967. The hosts wanted to please him by presenting him with the old award, but he refused.
Yet, all his biographers confirm that after his stay in Russia as a prisoner of war and then in the Red Army, he remained emotionally attached to that country for life. Therefore, there is no automaticity according to which you have to hate the country and the people who were your war opponents.
Tito as a "Russian agent"
I will not recount Broz's biography. I'm just pointing out a few bizarre details from it. They include one piece of information from German websites. Allegedly, Broz's illegitimate son Hans Studer fell as a Wehrmacht soldier in the fight against the Yugoslav partisans. True or not, this is already serious stuff from which Hollywood makes shocking movie stories.
The most spectacular is the story about Tito that came from the United States of America, the country to which Josip Broz wanted to emigrate twice. For the first time in 1907, but he could not raise money for travel. The second time ten years later, from revolutionary Petrovgrad, but they did not let him cross the Finnish border.
The story was told in 1955 to agents of the American Secret Service by Marian John Markul. And we know it because in 2016 the CIA removed the "confidential" mark from numerous documents from the 1909s. Mikul was born in Livno in 1936 and lived in America from 1928. He claimed that he met Josip Broz in 1935 and that he then seen twice in Paris, 1936 and XNUMX.
After the war, he met with Tito in 1953 and made sure that it was not the same person. Apparently, the height didn't match either, the original Broz was missing two fingers, and the one from fifty-three had ten, he even played the piano. According to him, it is about a Russian agent who stole his identity in 1937, when the real Tito disappeared in Russia. The man who told Stalin the historic "no" was allegedly Russian general Nikolai Lebedev, who was posing as Josip Broz.
A guerrilla in the woods, a marshal from the woods
Whoever British Brigadier General Fitzroy McClain, a man of Churchill's confidence, met in 1943 - a Russian general or a locksmith from Zagorje - he was fascinated. Churchill sent McClain to Yugoslavia "to find out who is killing the most Germans in order to help them kill them even more".
McLane, having met the communist guerrilla leader in action, was surprised by Tito's willingness to look at every problem from all sides, his humor and a series of traits that said that this man in the midst of so much death - loves life. The conservative British intelligence officer never forgot that he was dealing with an ideological opponent. But he understood very well what was really happening on the field. And that Tito's army with or without the British will win. The rest can be read in the chronicles of the anti-fascist struggle in the world.
Tito's break with Stalin only three years after the war had essential consequences for the modernization of Yugoslavia, which took on a hybrid, Western-Eastern form. Stalin tried to liquidate Tito, but his killers could not get through the Yugoslav security network. Tito sent a message to Stalin: "If you don't stop sending murderers, I will send one to Moscow, and there will be no need to send another".
The losers won?
Tito's troops were persecuted like beasts for years, so at the end of the war they committed atrocities. The spiritual and physical heirs of the defeated armies therefore call Tito a war criminal. After Tito's break with Stalin, tens of thousands of Stalinists, as well as people who were found to be innocent, went through torture on Goli Otok. There are publicists who therefore compare Broz with various other dark men from the XNUMXth century who packed people into camps. I can understand the condemnation of the crime. But Tito's historical role cannot be reduced to that.
Ever since the wars of the nineties, in which there were no partisans, the revisionists have been trying to win the lost Second World War. The immorality of their actions is not only reflected in the fact that they blame the then winner - Tito and socialist Yugoslavia as his child - for a series of sins. There were some. The immorality is that they draw the conclusion that anti-fascism is a sin. And that various shades of collaboration and fascism - were a national virtue.
Another problem with Tito is of a cultural nature - the democracies they established on the ruins of Yugoslavia failed to reach the level of civilization of Tito's "plush dictatorship" - not even in the economic sense, let alone in the cultural sense. Not to mention the geopolitical significance of the Non-Aligned Movement.
"If it's true…”
And some Western critics, less discerning than McClain, and more pumped up by the ideological hormone of anti-communism, see in Tito the same thing they saw in Ceausescu or even Stalin.
Summarizing the life work of the popular Yugoslav autocrat New York Times on May 5, 1980, confirmed something else - that thanks to Tito's policy of equidistance towards the blocs and experimentation with freedom within the one-party system, Yugoslavia became "a bright spot in the general gray of Eastern Europe".
That bright spot will turn into a smear of congealed blood without him. That is why Josip Broz can really be blamed for not finding a way to ensure economic and political sustainability for his project - federal Yugoslavia. Although he was pragmatic, he remained limited by the given ideological horizon.
Towards the end, he sensed that things could go wrong. He told Croatian journalist Dara Janeković in 1976: "If everything you say about the situation in our society, in the country and in the Union of Communists is true, then I have wasted my life." Bitter knowledge.
The highly anti-communist 34th president of the USA, General Dwight Eisenhower, said of Tito that he was the greatest hero of the Second World War, and Orson Welles that he was the greatest man in the world at that time. Estimates at that time may seem like exaggerations, but today they cannot be reconciled by denying the historical importance of this man, even if he "wasted his life".
Bonus video:
