A Fairy Tale Life
MIHAJLOV, MIHAJLO
A Fairy Tale Life Tito: And the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia By Richard West Carroll & Graf. 436pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Mihajlo Mihajlov Senior Fellow, Program on Transitions to Democracy,...
...West further attributes to Tito's personality his comparatively moderate response to pro-Cominform opponents during the conflict with Stalin: "Although these were frightening times for the rank and file of the Party, the persecution of Cominformists never became a witch hunt similar to the smelling out of' Trots-kyists' and 'saboteurs' in the Soviet Union during the 1930s...
...Nevertheless, Titoism was repressive enough, and of course ended in the horrible civil and ethnic wars we see daily on our television screens...
...As for artists: "He liked Renaissance art and, among the later painters, Delacroix and the early Impressionists...
...Of the concentration camps Tito established for his former Party comrades in 1949, West writes: "The horrors of Naked Island did not become known even to senior Communists until 1953...
...The only plausible explanation I could give for this was the general sense of sorrow and tendency to be forgiving upon learning that a former teacher and friend has died, whatever the subsequent relationship...
...Many penologists come here from abroad, and some of them from West Germany say we're too lenient, too humane...
...The paper Rankovic presented to Parliament, entitled "Toward the Further Strengthening of the Judiciary and the Rule of Law," detailed a system that was rotten to the core...
...None of them ever wonders whether the roots of the current disorder may lie in the glorious past, let alone whether comrades Lenin, Stalin, et al...
...In spite of its Communist ideology," West writes, "Yugoslavia was a remarkably free-market state, with only a small bureaucracy and virtual ly no welfare system...
...It is sometimes said," West observes, "that economic necessity forced Tito to make his regime more tolerant, that he introduced reforms in return for help from the West...
...or saying that Franjo Tudjman, the President of Croatia, was sentenced to three years in prison in 1981 for a book he wrote (Tudjman was sentenced for granting interviews to foreign media...
...They carry red flags and portraits of Lenin and Stalin...
...West's story of Tito's life, based largely on Dedijer's biography, is a fairy tale...
...According to West, "history and religion," not the col/apse of Communism or Tito's economic mistakes, are the reasons for the breakup of Yugoslavia...
...There was socialism but not much sociology in Yugoslavia...
...Only the old, such as Milovan Djilas, remembered the time when Yugoslavia was an oppressive Communist state...
...When addressing the execution of Milan Gorkic, Tito's predecessor as General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, he says: "Although Tito rose to power in competition with a man like Gorkic, it would not have been in his character to have innocent people sent to their death, and noevidence against him has been published in recent studies...
...But Ceau$escu got arms and financial aid from the West without relaxing his tyranny...
...He fails to admit, however, that Tito and the Communists stirred interethnic animosities for their own purposes...
...he asked one of them...
...The bloody conflicts we have been witnessing could only have been averted by introducing genuine democracy, not outlawing it...
...West states, too, that the German Army executed 500 Serbs for each German soldier killed and 100 for each wounded...
...All of them are former high-ranking Communists, except for Alija Izet-begovic, the President of Bosnia, and he alone is fighting for a multinational state...
...For readers of this book the answer to these questions remain a mystery, particularly in the light of the author's assurances that fear came to Serbia just recently under the rule of Slobodan Milosevic...
...It was clear that even in 1949-50 Yugoslavia was changing into a different sort of Communist country under a system that came to be known as 'Titoism.'" Noting the judiciary and police reform in 1951 by Minister of Interior Aleksan-dar Rankovic, West expresses amazement: "In what other country would the Minister of the Interior try to diminish rather than add to his power...
...He is simply echoing his countryman, Fitzroy Maclean, a British Army adviser to the Communist Partisans during the War and a strong supporter of the Marshal, as well as many other Englishmen who devoted themselves to building up Tito's cult of personality in the Western world...
...If West's judgments of Tito's character and talents frequently border on the comical, the remarkable number of historical mistakes he makes thoroughly undermine the credibility of his book...
...Tito was still a father figure to the older generation...
...The whole exercise is pure fantasy...
...Why did the same thing not happen in other Communist countries...
...Nobody thought that the State had a right or duty to interfere on behalf of some 'underprivileged' interest group such as the unemployed, the ethnic minorities, working mothers, single parents, orputative victims of child abuse...
...When the Communists finally crumbled, no supranational force existed anywhere in the country...
...It is worth noting that five of the nine are Americans, none are Slavs...
...Tito was a typical Communist, and his main goal was not to unite Yugoslavia...
...Even in the early '50s, says West, he recognized that Tito was the only one who could keep the different nations of Yugoslavia together...
...Our enemies are trying to unite" was the mantra of Tito and the Party Djilas' last book, a series of conversations with Bosnian leader Adil Zulfikar-pasic (written with Nadezda Gace and published last year in Zagreb), describes the unrelenting attempts by Tito's secret service to prevent political cohesion among Yugoslav emigrants in the West...
...The Partisans killed 10 German soldiers and wounded 26...
...It was not, for instance, like Britain, where more than 5 million people work in the public sector and 5 million more depend on the State for 'income support' and other benefits...
...In other words, a three-way religious battle continues to rage in the Balkans...
...West alleges, nobody was afraid to talk freely...
...Unfortunately, the author does not say why Djilas changed his mind and retreated from the position expressed in his famous article for The New Leader ("The Storm in Eastern Europe," November 19...
...He adds that "paradoxically" many of the student demonstrators in Belgrade in March 1992 "were looking back to Tito's Yugoslavia as a more tolerant society...
...may have been responsible for it...
...Reviewed by Mihajlo Mihajlov Senior Fellow, Program on Transitions to Democracy, George Washington University READING Richard West's curious biography of Marshal Josip Broz Tito, I was reminded of the "true believers" who hold forth these days in front of Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow...
...And he concludes that history has confirmed the wisdom of Tito's decision to bar democracy as a dangerous, premature adventure...
...Yugoslavia existed before Tito's Communists took over, and unlike the state he fashioned it did not self-destruct...
...When Tito was alive, Yugoslavia was an example of pure socialism for a particular type of Westerner...
...He says that Yugoslav refugees arriving in Trieste "told of the poverty, the forced collectivization, the futile toil in factories and the overall harshness of life, but they did not complain of living in terror...
...Although Socialist in the sense that most of its enterprises were owned by the workers, Yugoslavia was not 'Left-wing' in the way the term is now used in the West...
...Probably the strangest part of West's book is its comparison of Tito's Yugoslavia with Great Britain...
...Readers are told that as a young man in Vienna Tito "took fencing lessons and learned to waltz but did not manage to master the quadrille and polonaise...
...The rule was 100 Serbs for one German killed and 50 for each German wounded...
...West concedes that interethnic tensions are much worse than in 1941...
...West stresses, "a great many people, if not the majority, came to accept and even admire Tito, and many more now look back on his rule as a golden age...
...Many times West speaks of Tito's kindness and humanity...
...No doubt West made his mistake by trusting the Communists' count of about 7,000 (he once even mentions 8,000) Serbs having been killed in the city of Kragujevac...
...This conviction colored my view of the Djilas affair...
...Much of the information he provides about Yugoslavia's Communist leader, West admits, is drawn from works by Maclean, his cohort Sir William Deakin, and official biographer Vladimir Dedi-jer...
...Tito did not want to lose the sole justification for his monopoly of power: Without the Communists, Yugoslavs would start slaughtering each other...
...Never mind that the country suffered coerced collectivization (which Tito began in 1949, one year after his clash with Stalin), the nationalization of private property, the liquidation of its independent press, and the dread of the concentration camps...
...He also believes "Tito himself never allowed the veneration to turn into idolatry, such as that surrounding Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong...
...Yugoslavia is proof of the observation made by former Polish dissident Adam Michnik...
...Indeed, the biographer seems to find only one small deficiency in Tito: "He had never been interested in running the economy, and as he grew older, he tended to be impatient, running up debts to the international banks...
...Like [Nico-lae] Ceau§escu in Romania and [Ferdinand] Marcos in the Philippines, Tito borrowed extravagantly from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but unlike the others he let the rest of the country share in the spoils" Also: "Djilas is still more unfair when he says that during the War Tito 'had an overwhelming concern for his public safety.' Nobody else who knew him questioned his personal courage...
...the story about 7,000 executed Serbs is accepted...
...His main explanation, though, is that Tito "could shoot [the anti-Communist Draza] Mihailovic but could not stop the Serbs from wanting to drive out the 'Turks.' He could jail [the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije] Stepinac but could not stop the Croats from wanting to 'cleanse' their land of 'Slav-Serbs' and 'schismatics.'" Again and again West takes issue with Djilas, and he reveals why: "In my first published article, written from Sarajevo in 1954,1 argued that only Tito could hold Yugoslavia together...
...1956), which is quoted in the book...
...If West is right, one must conclude that Tito kept his preferences in literature and art a deep secret from the Yugoslav public...
...Their speeches compare the "optimistic" life in the former Soviet Union with the chaos now, "stable rubles" with today's inflation, full employment with the present uncertainty at every work place, peace throughout theUSSRwiththe wars between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Abkhazians and Georgians, Russians and Chechens, and so on and so on...
...The main problem with this notion is that the majority of the people involved in the fighting are not religious at all...
...It is true that after the mid-1950s Tito-ism was less oppressive than Soviet Communism...
...The actor replied that "it was neither...
...To prove his contention, he not only describes his own early experiences and regular visits to Yugoslavia...
...West writes: "Djilas, the puritan, once more voices his disapproval of Tito's elegant life style but this time he loses his sense of proportion...
...I would add that Westerners who supported Tito politically, economically and militarily, without setting any conditions for democratization, also deserve some blame...
...In about 40 volumes of his speeches, articles and State and Party reports, it is impossible to find even a hint that he knew about any of the writers or artists mentioned...
...or giving the name of the 16th-century leader of the Croatian peasants' rebellion, Matija Gubec, as Donja Stubica (which is the name of a Croatian town...
...But it is also true that Tito tried several times to reverse the liberalization...
...Rather than building expensive monuments, Tito attained glory for free by lending his name to selected towns throughout Yugoslavia...
...The author openly praises this old school...
...The same was true inside Yugoslavia for decades...
...During Tito's lifetime people like Richard West wrote books similar to this one—books that have contributed to the slaughter in the Balkans today...
...The first of these was irrelevant in a country that did not encourage immigration...
...At one point West, contradicting his principal analysis of the present situation, contends that the Yugoslavs could live together if their politicians would not incite them to hatred...
...Djilas' Tito was published in 1980, very soon after the dictator's death...
...Burton was surprised that no Yugoslav actor ever spoke ill of Tito...
...The fairy tale turns into a romantic fable about Tito's Yugoslavia...
...West appears particularly confused where the Germans are involved...
...In fact, they were created in 1945 after the Communists took power in Yugoslavia...
...I was asked to do a preface for the Russian edition and recall expressing surprise at his overly sympathetic portrayal of the man who became his enemy, since it sharply contradicted Djilas' other writings on Yugoslav Communism...
...History has proved that Stalin was absolutely correct, they say, in warning that democratization would bring only horrible disaster to a great nation...
...I was in high school at the time, but 1 can testify that even teenage boys knew about the horror in the camps, albeit not in detail (the details first appeared in the Yugoslav press in the last decade...
...But when was Yugoslavia an oppressive Communist state...
...West maintains that the fulsome Tito cult of personality, established by the Communists once they grabbed power and carefully nurtured well past his death, was born spontaneously in the mountains of Bosnia in 1943...
...The author thinks the key to understanding today's events is to be found in Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published almost two centuries ago...
...That could be deemed irrelevant forjudging a leader of the Revolution and President for life of his country...
...Ethnic nationalism prevailed, and was exploited by former Communists as the new basis for their control...
...Nationalism is the last stage of Communism...
...But 15 years later no such feeling can be invoked to justify West's worship of Tito or his polemics against Djilas...
...The other two causes did not take hold in a country enjoying a good relationship between the sexes...
...His view, of course, is not unique...
...West neglects to add that Tito learned about obtaining "glory for free" from his most influential teacher, Stalin...
...The truth is that the Day of Youth, featuring a cross-country relay race, was initiated af ter the War...
...Democracy had no chance because the Communist monopoly turned directly into a nationalistic monopoly...
...The author of this glorification, though, insists that Tito's personality was the main reason why Yugoslavia's variety of Communism was more open and liberal than that of other Communist societies...
...Tito's imprudence was a personal weakness, perhaps inherited from his father...
...He acknowledges that Djilas may have been right in 1954 to press for democracy and free speech, but does so halfheartedly at best...
...In fact, there are very few in Yugoslavia and they are mostly emigres who have been sent from abroad to cause trouble...
...He did not succeed because Yugoslavia occupied a special place in international affairs, balanced between the two world blocs...
...he quotes a diary kept by Richard Burton while playing the role of Tito in a "historical" movie financed by the State...
...The German commander in charge of the Kragujevac massacre told his superiors, in a report available in Tito's Yugoslavia, that he could not find enough Serbs to execute 2,300 as ordered...
...For the first time since I had known Belgrade," he says, "I was warned by friends against careless talk in public places, and still more on the telephone...
...it was to keep a monopoly of power...
...The Marshal not only suppressed ethnic nationalists, he fought more than anyone else against any move toward cooperation among the different ethnic groups...
...What the new Constitution did in 1974 was give these regions almost republican status, except for such rights as secession...
...But forget what the German commander said...
...He claims that because the Day of Youth marking Tito's birthday became so popular during the War, Germany chose the date, May 25, to attack Tito's headquarters in 1944...
...It had almost entirely escaped the three popular Western causes of multiracialism, women's rights and homosexual equality...
...But the author is writing after the Rea-ganite and Thatcherite anti-Socialist reforms...
...Furthermore: "Tito was free of the building mania characteristic of most politicians...
...Even a textile factory in Sarajevo worked much better than plants in Lancaster...
...He calls Tito 'the most extravagant ruler of his time,' although, as has already been pointed out, he was quite content to live off the [previous royal dynasty's] legacy...
...Unti 1 then nobody, except for close friends, knew anything about the leader of the Yugoslav Communists...
...In Tito's time...
...His "favorite foreign authors were Balzac and Stendhal, Goethe, Dreiser, Mark Twain, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and Kipling...
...He was quite content with the houses he took from their previous occupants...
...West obviously believes all the Communist myths...
...Without comment, the author also quotes the governor of the infamous Lepoglava prison: "Now we haven't got a single political prisoner...
...West claims Djilas admitted to him that Tito was correct at least once—when he endorsed the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956...
...It was destroyed in 1941 by the German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian armies...
...West offers many pages of such contrasts, all favoring Titoism...
...Yet West insists that, thanks to Tito's nature, Yugoslavia did not know any terror...
...as Tito did...
...Following Tito's death...
...And, of course, everybody knew that talking about the subject was forbidden...
...when the Partisan general and novelist Dobrica Cosic visited there and came back aghast...
...Some are of minor significance, such as identifying novelist Dobrica Cosic, later president of rump Yugoslavia, as a "Partisan general" (Cosic was never a general, he was a political commissar...
...Was it caution or fear perhaps...
...West, an English journalist whose interest in his subject dates back to his military service in Trieste soon after World War II, assumes a virtually identical posture: Comparing the Tito era with the wars and "ethnic cleansings" that have destroyed what was Yugoslavia, he exhibits a touching warmth for the late dictator...
...so, laughably, he praises Yugoslavia for its minimal socialism...
...So he calculated accordingly and got his numbers wrong...
...Oddly, West tells us that one-time heir apparent Milovan Djilas is Tito's "greatest biographer...
...According to West, Yugoslavia should be a model for his own country...
...Much more serious is West's statement, repeated several times, that the autonomous regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo were established in 1974...
...The answer to that lies partly at least in Tito's will and leadership...
...Tito's successors share his goal?the preservation of monopoly power?within their individual entities...
...The primary responsibility for this—West notwithstanding—lies squarely on the shoulders of Tito and his Party...
...and to the younger generation there had never been any other President...
...and that his memoirs offer "by far the truest, fullest and fairest accounts of Tito and Yugoslavia," yet dismisses his Tito: The Story from Inside for being "hostile...
...They do not really care about the unity of the nation...
...Why does West on several occasions call Tito a dictator...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
