The Maverick Who Defied Moscow

Josip Broz Tito: 1892-1980

It was a moment for which all Yugoslavs, as well as many foreign political leaders, had been preparing for weeks. On Sunday, Belgrade's official news agency, Tanjug, announced the death of Josip Broz Tito, 87, Yugoslavia's President-for-Life and Supreme Chairman of the Yugoslav League of Communists. In accordance with a succession plan that Tito had arranged and approved, his titles devolved automatically on two little-known party functionaries who had been carrying out his duties since January: Party Chairman Stevan Doronjski and President Lazar Kolisevski.

The end had come slowly, but not before a remarkable final display of Tito's legendary physical resistance. Stricken with a dangerous blockage in his circulatory system, Tito was admitted on Jan. 12 to a clinic in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. Within eight days, he underwent two high-risk operations: an arterial bypass to circumvent his circulation blockages, and then, after that had failed and gangrene set in, the amputation of his left leg. Tito at first appeared to make a strong recovery from these operations, which he had been given only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving. In February, however, he suffered a relapse. A "weakening of the heart" was followed by an array of other ailments: kidney failure, liver damage, internal hemorrhaging, pneumonia, infection and high fever. Tito nonetheless managed to hang on, with the help of kidney dialysis, an external pacemaker and an experimental American antibiotic called Moxalactam. Two weeks ago, he sank into a coma that signaled the onset of the final crisis.

A few weeks before Tito's death, a member of Yugoslavia's new collective leadership observed that "we will not look for a new Tito, because there isn't one, and there will be none for a long time to come." Indeed, it was hard to imagine any lesser mortal replacing the gregarious and vital Tito, who, almost without challenge, had ruled Yugoslavia for nearly 35 years and his country's Communist Party for 41. He was, for many years, the Kremlin's least favorite Marxist--a maverick who wrested Yugoslavia from Moscow's grasp in 1948 to create an unorthodox Communism incorporating traces of free enterprise. He was also a defiant co-founder of the nonaligned movement that has become the dominant force in the Third World. In the year before his death he visited Cuba, where delegates to the Sixth Conference of the Nonaligned Countries paid him fitting homage.

Tito reveled in the applause, just as he relished a number of decidedly unproletarian luxuries. He dressed in stylishly tailored suits, as well as bemedaled uniforms that Churchill once called Tito's "gold-lace straitjacket." He traveled in a Mercedes-Benz limousine, a lavish yacht and a special train; among his other perks of office were half a dozen residences, several hunting lodges and a villa on the Adriatic isle of Brioni. He savored good food and drink and had an appreciative eye for pretty women. In 1977 Tito and his third wife Jovanka, 55, had a falling out, and last year there were rumors that he had become involved with a 35-year-old opera singer named Gertruda Munitic.

When he came to international attention during World War II, the mysterious leader of Yugoslavia's anti-Nazi partisan forces was rumored to be a Russian general or even a woman, and there was some question as to whether he existed at all. In fact, he was born Josip Broz, in the Croatian village of Kumrovec. His father was a Croat, his mother a Slovene, and he was the seventh of their 15 children.

In 1907 he left the village to become first a waiter, then an apprentice metalworker. He joined the Metal Workers' Union in Zagreb. His native Croatia was at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Conscripted into the Emperor's army in 1913, he was sent to the eastern front early in World War I. During a Russian attack in 1915, a Circassian cavalryman impaled Tito with his lance, nearly killing him; he spent 13 months in a Russian prison hospital. He was an inmate of the Kungur prison camp near Perm in 1917 when the news arrived of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication; citizens promptly freed Kungur's prisoners.

Tito spent the next three years in the Soviet Union before returning to the new country that had been carved out of the old Habsburg Empire after World War I--the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia.

In 1924 he became an organizer for the illegal Yugoslav Communist Party. Arrested and brought to trial in 1928, he defiantly admitted his Communist activities and was still shouting "Long live the Communist Party of Yugoslavia!" as he was led away to serve a five-year prison sentence. He did more organizing work for the party after his release, traveling about Europe with forged credentials. In the mid-'30s he began using the alias "Tito," a common name in his home district. (It was one of many pseudonyms: in correspondence with Moscow, he was always "Valter," and it was by that name that Stalin knew him.)

He was summoned to Moscow in 1935 for training as an agent of the Comintern, the international Communist umbrella organization founded in 1919; but he ignored a call to return there in 1937, when Stalin's bloodthirsty purges were at their height. This may have saved his life. He later said: "When I went to Moscow, I never knew whether I would come back alive." In 1939 the Comintern confirmed him as general secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party.

That year Tito proved his loyalty by swallowing without a qualm the Nonaggression Pact between Berlin and Moscow. As Tito explained: "We accepted the pact like disciplined Communists, considering it necessary for the security of the Soviet Union, at that time the only socialist state in the world." When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Moscow issued orders for all-out resistance to the Germans, who two months earlier had conquered Yugoslavia. Within days, Tito had established the General Headquarters of National Liberation Partisans' Detachments--taking the name "partisans" from the irregulars who had operated behind the lines during Napoleon's campaigns in Spain and Russia.

From the start, the partisans were opposed by the Cetniks--Serbian royalists loyal to the exiled King Peter II--who were led by Colonel Dragoljub Mihailovic. Tito initially offered to join forces with the Cetniks and put his troops under Mihailovic's command. More fearful of the Communists than of the Germans, Mihailovic demurred and his Cetniks were soon engaged in civil war against the partisans. (He was tried after the war and executed.)

The partisans, who ultimately numbered 300,000, had a broader national appeal than the chauvinistically Serbian Cetniks, and they were far more active in launching guerrilla attacks against German divisions (up to 26 at one point) tied down in occupying Yugoslavia. As the Nazi troops retreated northward in 1944, Tito moved to consolidate his power. In the process, he violated an apparent promise to Winston Churchill. (Tito had told Britain's Prime Minister in 1944, "That is our basic principle: democracy and freedom of the individual.") Tito ruthlessly intimidated, imprisoned and even murdered his opponents; when general elections were held in 1945, the people had only one choice: to accept or reject the Communist slate. The party won 90% of the vote; ironically, Tito was so popular that he would probably have won easily without resorting to terror.

The new government in Belgrade staunchly backed Soviet foreign policy, installed a Stalinist regime at home and refused Marshall Plan aid offered by the U.S. But behind the scenes, Stalin and Tito feuded bitterly over Tito's determination to maintain his independence. On June 28, 1948, the world was startled by the announcement that Yugoslavia had been expelled from the new international Communist organization, the Cominform.

In the Soviet lexicon, "Titoism" became a synonym for treason. But Tito did not buckle, even in the face of an economic boycott and Moscow's invasion threats. With Party Theoretican Edvard Kardelj and other close associates, he began mapping out a new form of Communism, vastly different from the Soviet model. Tito and his colleagues lifted harsh police controls on the population and reversed the policy of forced collectivization of farm land. They formulated the "self-management" system, under which factory employees and managers came to share in management decisions, decide on promotions and set their own wages.

Tito also began taking whatever aid he could get, including that offered by the West, but always with the proviso that no strings be attached. This foreshadowed the new foreign policy of nonalignment --normal relations with the two superpowers, alliance with neither--that he developed further during the 1950s. With the backing of India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser and Indonesia's Sukarno, the Nonaligned Movement was formally inaugurated in Belgrade in 1961.

Tito alternately loosened and tightened his hold over Yugoslav politics. When his close comrade Milovan Djilas began arguing for democratic reforms and criticizing the Communist Party elite in the mid-1950s, Tito had him jailed. After Croatian nationalism flared up during a period of liberalization in the late 1960s, he came down hard on the Croats and in 1971 forced their leaders to resign. He also launched a purge of liberals, which reminded the world that Yugoslavia was still a Communist nation run by a dictator. Yet by 1977 the trend was again away from the hard line, and the atmosphere was becoming relaxed.

If the country does indeed face an immediate external threat or an internal threat of subversion, Yugoslavs have no illusions about its source. True, Belgrade's relations with Moscow have much improved since 1948. Seven years later Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev partly made up for the animosities of the Stalin era by flying to the Yugoslav capital. There, after an apparently amicable meeting with Tito, he publicly acknowledged that "different forms of socialist development are solely the concern of individual [Communist] countries." Tito's relationship with Leonid Brezhnev was edgy but cordial.

Still, the Soviets never stopped trying to infiltrate the Yugoslav party and the military, and any sign of weakness by the new leadership might tempt them to reinstate Moscow's sway over a satellite that got away. If an invasion were to come, there was every prospect that Yugoslav would live up to Tito's promise, first voiced at a press conference in 1951: "Every foot of our land is saturated in blood but if it is necessary, we will saturate it again, and it will remain ours. Yugoslavia will never again be conquered, except over the dead bodies of its peoples."

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