Tito

...He dismissed with a disdainful wave of his hand all praise of Yugoslavia's achievements...

...But the weak and undistinguished collective leadership has been forced to follow a non-policy of letting everything slide in Yugoslavia...

...What will endure of his glory and his fame...

...Now, many years later, writing about his showdown with Tito, Djilas concludes that the confrontation had been inevitable since the beginning of their close association back in 1937: "I believe that from the very beginning Tito sensed in me an unyielding opponent," who had to be destroyed...

...Ultimately Tito was an autocrat, concerned, above all with his own power, fame, prestige, and majesty...

...I lacked an instinct for subtle, gradual, far-reaching political strategy...

...He told Djilas, obviously alluding to himself, "often the entire course of history depends on one person...

...Now, in his newest book, Tito: The Story from Inside, Djilas admits, "I lacked political sense...

...Djilas's account has the qualities and defects of a timely journalistic piece: it is immediate, anecdotal, gossipy, subjective, personal...

...But in the political wilderness, Djilas forged a new life for himself, which has already proven to be richer and more rewarding and which is likely to endure in time far better-the life of a political thinker, writer, and novelist of world stature.nd novelist of world stature...

...He was accused of liberal ideological heresy...

...Tito resented Yugoslavia's smallness, its poverty, its military weakness, for they limited the scope of his talent...

...And yet Kardelj was second ranking to Tito himself...

...I had the same feeling of Tito's annoyance with Yugoslavia's smallness when I visited him on his favorite island of Vanga, near Brioni...

...Though officially an atheist, Tito once rebuked Djilas for suggesting that physical death is final...

...Not only did Tito eliminate all those who shared his power ("I made no friends," he once told Djilas), but he also got rid of all of the ablest second echelon Yugoslav Communist leaders, notably Leo Mates, Marko Nikezic, Vladimir Popovic, and others...

...All were, one by one, condemned by Tito to "political death," which he once told Djilas"is the most horrible death of all...

...Flawed as the book is in certain details, it is nevertheless extremely interesting and perceptive both of Tito's complex personality and his Machiavellian rule...

...Tito's reward was that he held power for thirty-five years until his death in May, 1980...

...This sense enabled Tito to survive Stalin's bloody purges of the 1930s and to go on to win power in Yugoslavia as the Moscow-chosen leader of the Yugoslav Communist party...

...Djilas wrote his judgment of Tito hastily during the months of Tito's agony and death...

...They know that "only if the top is disunited would such danger filter to the base foundation, the middle ranks and the people...

...Some of Tito's successes were admittedly extraordinary...

...Djilas did not say so explicitly, but I had the distinct feeling that after spending nine years in Tito's prisons for ideological heresy, he regretted that he had not been more cunning in the 1953 confrontation with Tito over the issue of the liberalization of Yugoslav society...

...In 1966, it was the turn of Djilas's closest friend in Tito's inner circle, secret police chief Alexander Rankovic...

...Djilas gives an oblique answer, "Absolute rulers last only as long as their power.'' Tito left behind him a collective leadership of mediocre bureaucrats to handle intractable problems of inflation, unemployment, a huge balance of payments deft-cit, and acrimonious national conflicts...

...Who knows what it is all about anyway, who knows...

...But he had a highly developed sense for politics and power...

...Much of the story was published in installments last summer in the West German weekly Der Spiegel under the title, The Red King...

...Matthew Mestrovic DURING an encounter I had with Djilas in Belgrade some ten years ago, he told me that in the immediate post-World War II period Tito did not wield absolute control in Yugoslavia...

...The English translation, published by Djilas's friend and publisher William Jovanovich, was also done in a great hurry, in order to get the book into the bookstores as soon as possible, and it contains some errors of fact, mistranslations and incorrect dates...

...First to go was the Croat Communist leader Andrija Hebrang who was murdered in prison in 1949, for the crime of "Croat nationalism...

...And he lost...

...But what is Tito's legacy...

...Then his laughter was hearty and true...

...Tito may have been a lackluster military commander...

...Together with Nehru and Nasser he forged the nonaligned movement, gaining international stature beyond the strength, size, population and resources of the second-class Balkan country he ruled...

...This is the quality, too, that enabled Tito to eliminate all of his most powerful political associates in the Yugoslav Communist movement, until he stood absolute and alone at the pinnacle of power...

...He was charged with violations of "socialist legality,'' a euphemism for the arrest and liquidation without judicial procedure, and often on mere suspicion, of thousands of political enemies, real or imagined, of all political hues...

...It cannot be otherwise in a nondemocratic, one-party system...

...If only Tito had been the leader of the Soviet Union, Communist China, or the U.S.A., he could have been the ruler of the world...

...He was certainly a poor orator whose speeches were heavily edited before publication...

...At least in this respect, Tito's heirs have done their homework...

...The same sense enabled Tito to outsmart Churchill during the war and to successfully defy Stalin in 1948...

...Decisions were made by a small inner circle of Communist leaders which included Tito, Djilas, Rankovic and Kardelj...

...Acting together," Djilas told me, "we could have removed Tito...

...He was the first to shatter the monolithic unity of Communism under Kremlin leadership...

...He lacked formal education and his "knowledge of Marxism was meager...

...The next to go was Djilas...

...Tito may have relegated Djilas to "political death" twenty-seven years ago when he was dismissed from the Yugoslav politburo...

...Sometimes Tito was overruled by the unanimity of the others...

...It was written from memory and against a deadline...

...Of Tito's closest associates, only Ed-vard Kardelj survived in power till his death of cancer in 1979...

...Only personal flattery delighted him...

...His views concerning his own role in history were more Carlislean than Marxian...

...said he and cut short all further talk of death...

...He had a "sense of danger and a strong will to live, to survive, and endure...

...He survived politically because he accepted a diminished and subservient relationship with Tito...

...Yugoslavia was too small for Tito," Djilas remarks at one point in the book...

...I remember Tito speaking to Kardelj in my presence and that of other strangers as if he were a valet...

...No decisions are made so that clashes do not threaten to unhinge the collective leadership...

...Djilas believes that Tito established the collective leadership so no one who came after him "would command such power as he held, no one could ever use it to blacken his memory...

...a shrewd and insatiable drive for power...