Two Views of Tito

...the movers and shakers take more risks than most of us, and their lives are more susceptible to abbreviation...

...But the author, having lived through the tense days of Soviet economic blockade and threat of military takeover, admires Tito almost to a fault—as, indeed, do most Yugoslavs, who revere the Marshal today because of his courage and leadership in those dangerous times...

...as a biographer, she is also given to greater thoroughness and balance...

...The audacious and brilliant political game Tito played to keep Yugoslavia outside either the Soviet or American spheres during the 1950s also tends to displace a hard judgment of his methods and purposes...

...It was the British who first saw that Tito's Partisans --not Dragolub Mihailovic's Chetniks, the Serbian nationalists allied with the exiled royal government--were the only effective Yugoslav opposition to the Germans, and they supplied the bulk of the war materiel received by the Partisans...

...Yet it is interesting that like Dedijer's earlier study of Tito, hers develops two parallel themes--the unrelenting persistence and stamina that thrust the man into a position of leadership, and his sheer luck...

...He sought by authoritarian, sometimes brutal, techniques to create a Socialist state and to forge Yugoslavia's separate ethnic groups into one nation...

...Almost no one who gets close to him comes away dispassionate, as one can in the case of Aleksei Kosygin or Edward Heath or Eisaku Sato...

...It matured slowly during World War II...

...Tito's resistance to Stalin's designs is common knowledge...

...He served two tours in Moscow, one in 1935-36, the second in 1938-39, each time putting up in the Lux Hotel, famous as the residence of foreign Communists on duty in Comintern headquarters...

...Yugoslavia has not been so used very often since then...

...Maintaining greater detachment than Dedijer, she still admires the man to the point of making him a legendary figure...

...The secret police (udba), labor camps, political surveillance, rule by a Party elite, lip service to democratic and legal processes--all these were part of Titoism in its Stalinist period...

...Yugoslavia is portrayed as a small, beleagured, idealistic nation struggling for freedom and independence against the massive, impersonal, unfeeling Stalinist Russia...

...The fighting in Yugoslavia was incredibly confusing...

...A large section is devoted to Tito's adolescence and young adulthood...

...Yet the fact is that at the same time he implanted a Stalinist-like system in Yugoslavia...

...When war broke out, Tito was First Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist party...

...the old Europe was coming apart...

...Driving the Partisans through harrowing combat and incredible suffering (Yugoslavia ranks third among nations in percentage of population lost in the War), Tito repeatedly appealed in vain to Stalin for arms...

...To say this does not detract, in my opinion, from the many good things Tito has done for his people, or from the place of Titoism in history...

...Born in May 1892, Josip Broz grew up in an era of disintegrating monarchies...

...Readers familiar with Dedijer's earlier work--published in 1952 under the same title now being used by Miss Auty, Tito: A Biography--will know what to expect...

...Of course, Tito has been around a long time—a quarter of a century as Yugoslavia's leader, and longer if one includes his World War II career as commander of the ultimately victorious Yugoslav Partisans...

...Since more than 100 Yugoslav Communists were imprisoned during the height of Stalin's purges, it remains a mystery how Tito escaped arrest and possibly death...

...While serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army against the Russians, he was wounded and almost died...

...World War I interrupted Josip Broz' career as a young mechanic...

...Whatever the explanations or rationales for his actions, Tito brooked little opposition from the rank and file...

...Considering everything we know about him now, however, it seems possible to attempt a more critical appraisal...

...This is significant evidence that the antagonism between the equally strong-willed Tito and Stalin had already begun to make itself felt...

...Nonetheless, the mass of materials she has drawn together affords insight into Tito's character...

...Even now, at 78, Tito can be alternately authoritarian and permissive, dogmatic and flexible, a politician of precinclevel narrowness and a statesman of global vision...

...Of course, the same can be said for almost every world figure...

...When finally released in 1934, he was nearly 42 years old...

...But Dedijer only mentions in passing, for example, the island Goli Otok, "a miniature model of Siberian camps under Stalin," where Yugoslav political prisoners were sent...

...One quotation from a speech Tito made in 1945 serves as a touchstone: "We do not wish," he declared, "to be used as small change in international bargaining...

...Croatian and Serbian elements battled Tito's Communists when they were not taking on the Germans and Italians...

...Anyone with such staying power in precarious circumstances has to be a compelling figure...

...That Tito came out on top was a testament to his organizational talents, his skill as a politician and military commander, and to the positive causes--unity, national independence and social reform--that he propounded to his followers...

...It is too easy, for instance, to take the present-day Tito--a somewhat mellow, grandfatherly statesman of a relatively free, prosperous and independent country--and project him backward in history...

...Reviewed by Mark Hopkins Soviet and East European specialist, Milwaukee Journal Josip Broz Tito is the sort of man who engages the mind and emotions...

...In this new book he deals chiefly with the heady, dramatic contest between Stalin and Tito that erupted in 1948 when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Comintern, thus complementing Milovan Djilas' Conversations with Stalin...

...He has always identified himself with the hungry proletarian masses, but has never apologized for his private extravagances--expensive tailoring, handsome women, opulent tables, luxurious villas...

...He left his native Slovenian village for the city, first Zagreb, then finally Vienna, where at age 20 "he got a whiff of the glamour that he had dreamed his training would bring him" and where "he took up fencing and went to dancing classes to learn the fashionable ballroom dances...

...This assesment of roles is essentially valid...

...After all, right up to his break with Stalin, Dedijer and Auty agree, Tito retained a rather mystical adulation of the Soviet Union and Stalin as the wellsprings of the socialist revolution...

...A generation or two from now, Tito may remain a national hero...

...His subsequent falling out, which made Stalin anathema in Yugoslavia, now tends to overshadow his earlier uncritical subservience...

...There is little to argue about Dedijer's assertion that in 1948, "Stalin felt that the time was ripe to liquidate Yugoslavia as an independent state and through its subjugation to bring the whole of Eastern Europe to heel...

...Divided by ancient hatreds, several nationalities contended for power...

...Both Vladimir Dedijer and Phyllis Auty agree that, no matter what one may think of Tito's social philosophy, he ranks among the major political figures of the mid-century...

...He was elected secretary of the Zagreb Communist party organization in 1928, and very shortly thereafter was arrested, tried and imprisoned...

...Then there was Tito's amazing luck: his recovery from severe wounds on several occasions, his survival of Stalin's purges, his numerous escapes from arrest...

...The details of how Tito redirected Yugoslavia toward the West to gain economic and military aid, how he established the coalition of nonaligned nations, and finally, how he formed Yugoslavia's present social structure--all these merit more space than Miss Auty gives them...

...From then until Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Tito (an underground name first used in 1934, but one of many) gradually worked his way into the Comintern apparatus...

...Miss Auty is more judicious than Dedijer in balancing the conflicting characteristics and deeds of Tito, but it seems to me that she slights the postwar era when, as everyone knows, Titoism worked its way into the dictionary...

...Miss Auty emphasizes that the fifth Congress of the Yugoslav party in 1940 was conducted by its own national leadership, without any representative from the Comintern...

...Moreover, Tito possesses an intriguing and paradoxical personality...

...In retracing all of this, Miss Auty reveals her fascination with Tito...

...And here Dedijer's memoirs add some private, if hardly startling, information about postwar Yugoslavia...

...Dedijer, an old compatriot of Tito's, is naturally sympathetic to Titoism...

...He is an accomplished political journalist who writes well and kept up his notebooks...

...Although there is some question about the exact date, Josip Broz registered as a member of the Communist party in Omsk, Russia, in 1919 at the age of 27...

...Held captive for two years, he was freed when Tsar Nicolas II abdicated in Petrograd...

...That side of Tito--the totalitarian face--never quite receives the attention it deserves...

...But Dedijer, who was not privy to as much as Djilas and is less critical, constructs what strikes me as predictable history...

...It would be fascinating to read an insider's description of what went on in Belgrade during this time...

...Dedijer is weakest, though, in his analysis of the domestic politics accompanying the Yugoslav-Soviet rupture...

...Tito did not become an active revolutionist until the late 1920s...

...Miss Auty attributes it to a combination of luck and political astuteness, but not betrayal of comrades...

...At any of these junctures in his career Tito might have disappeared from history...

...Phyllis Auty approaches Tito with less emotional involvement...

...A Marxist-Leninist revolutionist of the early mold, tempered hard in the Stalinist era, he nonetheless preserved a humanist bent...

...His preoccupation is with foreign intrigues directed against Yugoslavia, and Tito's countertac-tics...

...Miss Auty, a longtime student of Yugoslavia who has talked personally with Tito in recent years, is--like many other foreigners--captivated by his life and legend...