TITO'S HERESY

Raymond, Jack

Tito's Heresy The Heretic, by Fitzroy Maclean,; Harper. 436 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Jack Raymond FITZROY MACLEAN'S The Heretic is a book of broader scope than the brilliant sketches and political...

...After he returned to Yugoslavia, Tito joined the Communist Party...
...In addition, Maclean has drawn heavily from Dedijer's wartime diary and biographical notes...
...One day a priest boxed his , ears and he never returned to church...
...We are Tito's and Tito is ours...
...He also developed closer relations with the West, highlighted by a visit to Queen Elizabeth of England...
...Maclean asked Tito one cloud-darkened wartime night as they sat under a tree, by the light of a flickering lamp...
...In the break of 1948, Tito made clear that it was his and not Stalin's regime...
...In an almost melodramatic scene, Stalin's successors came to Belgrade, begging forgiveness for the past, conceding the "Leninist principle" of many roads to socialism...
...As a consequence, The Heretic suffers from the same wide-eyed appreciation of the Yugoslav leader that marked the effort of the official biographer...
...And will your new Yugoslavia be an independent state or part of the Soviet...
...Not all the executions and jailings of potential Titoists in other satellite countries could shake the determination of the Yugoslav dictator and his aides not to submit to rule from Moscow...
...He is still today a key personality in the critical evolutions of post-Stalin Europe, not only by example but by intervention...
...Stalin, not Tito, had been the heretic...
...Tito became head of the Yugoslav Communists on the eve of World War II...
...Many foreigners and some Yugoslavs confused Titoism with democratization...
...This is not to impute Maclean's objectivity...
...He worked in Comintern headquarters in Moscow...
...The Djilas case was only one illustration...
...He saw the Bolshevik triumph in Leningrad and became greatly enthusiastic oyer the prospect of workers becoming rulers...
...But Tito was a man who felt obligated to no one...
...He traveled across Europe on various assignments under many pseudonyms...
...The indignant Churchill, who had been supplying Tito with most of his arms, said Tito had "levanted...
...The story has the sweep of a great novel...
...The new volume is perhaps th( best full biography of the Yugoslav Communist leader now available...
...His approval of the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolt, on the grounds that a return to "Horthyism" was threatened, was another illustration of Tito's political orientation...
...The author, who has a knowledge of Tito on terms more intimate and revealing than most Westerners, owes us the personal judgment he evades in this book...
...You must remember," replied Tito, as reported in the earlier book, "the sacrifices which we are making in this struggle for our independence . . . You need not suppose that w« shall lightly cast aside a prize whicl has been won at such cost...
...But there is such a thing as being too objective...
...Next he kept a rendezvous with Churchill in Italy...
...In World War I, Tito's Croation regiment, fighting listlessly under the Austrian flag, was captured on the Russian Carpathian front...
...He did this despite Stalin's repeated cautions that Tito must not show his Communist hand to the West too soon...
...Hamilton Fish Armstrong's Tito and Goliath, published in 1951, offers a more satisfying discussion of Marshal Tito's Communist heresy...
...As leader of the Partisans he displayed not only great courage and military ability...
...Another great event was Tito's triumphant return visit to Moscow...
...After all, Marshal Tito is not merely a vigorous, 65-year-old hero-politician whose life requires little more than a recital of exciting facts...
...Tito, a common name in his home district, stuck with him the longest...
...In this case the cool recital of facts is often made tepid by the warmth of Maclean's sympathy for his subject...
...His dramatic story of this war gave us exciting insights to Marshal Tito as a man and leader...
...Stalin wanted to set up his own puppets in the postwar Communist countries...
...For the anecdotal material of Tito's life, including the titanic contacts between Tito and Stalin, Maclean's book is irksomely dependent upon the authorized biography written by Vladimir Dedijer, who later fell into disgrace...
...Reviewed by Jack Raymond FITZROY MACLEAN'S The Heretic is a book of broader scope than the brilliant sketches and political assessments of Tito at war and revolution that the author included in Escape to Adventure, published in 1949...
...He became a metal worker in Zagreb and Vienna...
...At the same time, a man like Tito would show up well in anyone's biography...
...He infused it with a new spirit of belligerence...
...M One wishes also that Maclean had exploited the ramifications of the book's title to a much greater extent...
...By the time Stalin died, Tito's successful resistance had become assured...
...He was not for "democracy for the sake of democracy," Tito reminded his ousted heir-apparent when the latter publicly suggested an end to one-party rule...
...But meanwhile, to prove Yugoslavia's distinctive road and to win a greater degree of popular acceptance, Tito had allowed the relaxation of many Communist restraints in his own country...
...It is at this concluding point in the narrative by Maclean that the author fails to tie in with his own point of view...
...Tito was set free by revolutionists and then lived with nomad herdsmen...
...He created the Communist regime at the same time that he ousted the Nazis...
...As head of the Allied Mission to Tito, Maclean, now a Conservative member of Parliament, parachuted to Partisan headquarters in the Bosnian hills during the guerrilla campaign against the Nazis...
...This was a mistake...
...He married a Russian—the first of three wives...
...Yugoslavia, they said, would find its "own road" to socialism...
...Triumph was not long in following...
...At the same time, it is true, as Maclean quotes Tito: "Remember, there may be more to come...
...Yet it is a disappointing book...
...Tito was one of fourteen children of a devout Catholic peasant couple in a tiny village in Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
...But shortly after that, without prior warning, he flew to Moscow to meet Stalin...
...shouted the Communist-led crowds after the victory...
...His new camaraderie with the West did not keep him from threatening to go to war to satisfy nationalist claims on Trieste...
...Marshal Tito barely escaped death or capture as the enraged Nazis located his headquarters cave behind a waterfall and pumped it full of bullets and bombs...
...he proved a superb organizer...
...But the domestic relaxation such as the abandonment of forced collectivization and the Western contacts produced an inevitable impression...
...And Maclean, whose fine writing ability is demonstrated once again, makes full use of the extraordinary dramatic life of the man who saved his country from Hitler and Stalin...

Vol. 21 • December 1957 • No. 12


 
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