Tito
by Neil Barnett
Haus ₤10.99, 175 page
When Montenegrins go to vote this weekend on dissolving their republic’s loose union with Serbia, pro-independence campaigners hope to achieve a dignified burial for the remains of Yugoslavia.
The late “land of the South Slavs” broke up in the 1990s. Though formed as a Serb-led monarchy after the first world war, it became inseparable from the man who reconstituted it after the second: Josip Broz, better known as Tito.
Neil Barnett’s Tito, though a slim 175 pages, is entertaining and timely. Apart from Montenegro’s referendum, we are in the middle of Kosovo’s final status negotiations. A decade on from the Bosnian war, Barnett provides a blunt reassessment of the limits of holding a state together by force of personality. Like the country he led, Tito had multiple identities: the communist who carved out a separate path from Stalin’s Soviet Union; the Slovene-Croat who imposed “brotherhood and unity” ruthlessly; the dictator who kept most of his people happy with relative wealth, backed up by international loans.
Where he failed spectacularly, of course, was in calculating how Yugoslavia would work without him. The former country’s 1974 constitution - the longest in the world at the time - provided no clear plan for life after the Old Man. Though it devolved some authority away from Belgrade, the 406-article document was shamefully ambiguous about each republic’s right to secede.
The main reason for these shortcomings may have been the leader’s egotism. By some accounts, he never recognised his own mortality, even as he lay dying in 1980, at the age of 87. However, according to this new addition to the Haus “Life & Times” biography series, Tito knew he should appoint a successor - yet he despaired that no one had both “the charisma and the wisdom” for his job.
Barnett makes good use of Tito’s official memoirs and recorded recollections, which reveal, for example, the young apprentice metalworker’s early fondness for “a nice new suit”, just like the later, luxury-loving president. While allowing the regime to speak with its own voice, Barnett also points out the fabrications, where ideological lessons upstaged factual accuracy.
Political biographies often leave an unexplained gap between early, formative years and later heights of fame and power. Tito, however, maintains a smooth flow from Broz’s youth and murky early communist career to his better-documented rise as guerrilla leader and president for life.
Tito also illuminates the inner circle, especially Tito’s Montenegrin adviser Milovan Djilas, eventually sacrificed in a deal with the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. But Barnett never quite tells us how the young Josip Broz, who served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Serbian front in the first world war, grew into such an ardent pan-Yugoslavist. Hatred for his drill sergeant, a fellow Croat, may have been a factor. Perhaps a fuller answer will come from Ivo Banac, the US-based Croatian historian whose forthcoming Tito biography, Barnett says, “could well become the definitive work”.
In the meantime, Barnett’s book serves well as a stopgap; all the more so if you can supplement it with Anja Drulovic’s Titov Kuvar (Tito’s Cookbook), both a recipe book and a photo essay on “the communist with style”, as viewed through his state dinners and picnics with Hollywood movie stars. (Dinner with John Kennedy - goose-liver stuffed mushrooms; lunch with Egypt’s President Nasser - rolls of sour cabbage; hosting Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - steak tartare.)
Here and there in former Yugoslav countries, moves are afoot to convert Tito’s legacy into tourism revenues. Yet some ex-Yugoslavs would just as soon forget about him - especially in Croatia, where plans this month for an auction of his yacht, the Galeb, have stirred up debate. While the mayor of Rijeka suggested restoring the rusting boat as a tourist attraction, other officials called for it to be carved up as scrap metal.
Neil MacDonald is the FT’s Belgrade correspondent.
