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TITO and His Comrades
Jože Pirjevec
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The Young Broz: World War One, Imprisonment, and His Rise in
the Yugoslav Communist Party, 1892–1939
Notes
Index
Foreword
EMILY GREBLE
For this edition of my book I have many to thank. First of all, Noah
Charney, who took my own English translation and improved it,
editing it with patience and skill. I would also like to thank Gwen
Walker and her formidable team at the University of Wisconsin
Press. Many thanks to Emily Greble, who agreed to write the
foreword, and to Karolyn Close, who reread and bettered the text
with intelligent care. Last but not least, Sabrina Ramet, who
although busy with her own writing dedicated a great deal of
attention to the manuscript and gave me some vital suggestions out
of sheer kindness. After such an experience life is brighter.
Abbreviations
Nothing is more to be desired than that the people who were at the head of
the active party, whether before the revolution in the secret societies or the
press, or afterwards in official positions, should at long last be portrayed in
the stark colours of a Rembrandt, in the full flush of life. Hitherto these
personalities have never been depicted as they really were, but only in their
official guise, with buskins on their feet and halos around their heads. All
verisimilitude is lost in these idealised, Raphaelesque pictures.1
So wrote Marx and Engels, optimists who did not imagine that the
revolution could fail, or that its protagonists could finish on the
infamous column. Something similar happened to Tito, flattered
during his lifetime and, after the disappearance of Yugoslavia, often
demonized.
Let us try to depict him à la Rembrandt.
TITO’S EYES
From the moment he stepped onto the historical stage in 1928 due
to his bold behavior in a courthouse in Zagreb that ended with him
being thrown in jail as a communist, Tito’s contemporaries, friends
and enemies alike, would comment on his expressive eyes.
Reporting on his 1928 trial, the Croatian newspaper Novosti wrote,
“The features of his face call to mind steel. Through the pince-nez
he wears, he stares with clear, cold eyes, but with energy and
calm.”2
In his short essay “Tito’s Return in 1937,” Miroslav Krleža, the
Croatian poet, writer, and chronicler of provincial Yugoslavia and
Croatia, recalled:
I was seated in the twilight of my room, looking at the clouds . . . in this
stillness, the bell rings . . . I get up and cross the flat . . . in front of the
glass door there is a foreigner. . . . After nine years, Tito was like a shadow
from the past. At the very beginning, I had the impression that he had not
changed at all, but at the same time, that he had changed a lot. Six years
of prison and three of exile have erased that ingenuous and immediate
freshness from his face. Instead of a smiling youth, I saw a serious
foreigner whose eyes, behind that pince-nez, seemed dark and stern.
Tito spent the entire night catching up with Krleža, the comrade who
sensed in Tito an old friend, and someone who had been reborn,
cast anew. Their dialogue lasted until dawn, as Krleža learned some
of the details of Tito’s adventurous life and revolutionary ideas. Tito
told him of his homesickness, which one night after his return from
Moscow compelled him to visit his native village, though he knew
the risk he took in doing so, since he was an outlaw at the time.
When he reached his father’s home, he had the impression that
nothing had changed in that faraway place since his last visit so
many years ago, despite the great events that had changed the
world in the meantime. “In the silent closeness of this lyrical
monologue,” Krleža continued, “Tito’s voice changed and his blue,
pigeon-like eyes darkened into an intense, metallic blue. ‘Kumrovec
is snoring, God damn it, but since when does everyone in this
country snore!?’ asked Tito with the rage, the violence with which, in
our language, all the higher and lower divinities are thrown from the
skies.”3
Tito’s eyes likewise impressed Milovan Djilas, one of his most
fervent followers (and later opponents), when they met for the first
time. “He was a man of mid-size, rather strong, lean. Lively, slightly
nervous, but in control of himself. His face was hard, calm, but
gentle, the eyes blue and benevolent.”4 The Serbian doctor and
veteran of the Spanish Civil War (and later chief of the Partisan
Sanitary Service), Gojko Nikoliš, wrote in his diary of his first
meeting with Tito, in November 1941: “We met in a large and simply
furnished room. . . . After my salute and report, I sized him up,
immediately observing some of his traits, this man for whom we had
waited so long and who would shape the fate of our fight. The first
thing I noted were his blue, slightly veiled eyes, then his sculpted
face, the face of an ideal worker, a worker who seemed to have
stepped out of a Russian proletarian poster.”5 It is all well and good
that Tito’s collaborators and followers should find him charming, for
his countrymen were already primed to admire him. Foreign
politicians were likewise impressed, and similarly commented on his
eyes with distinctive frequency. Fitzroy Maclean, chief of the British
Military Mission to the Supreme Staff, described his first impression
when he met Tito in 1943: “Tito was an imposing personality: he
was fifty-two years old, physically strong—hair iron silver. His regular
face, as sculptured in stone, was serious and tanned, wrinkles—
resolute without appeal. Beneath the glare of his light blue eyes,
nothing remained hidden. In him was concentrated the energy of a
tiger ready to attack.”6 The ambassador of the Federal Republic of
Germany, during his first meeting with Tito on the shores of
Slovenia’s Lake Bled in 1951, stressed in a dispatch back home that
Tito was not physically similar to Hermann Göring at all, contrary to
what Tito’s detractors would have people believe. “He is mid-sized,
not fat, but corpulent and very tough, nearly monolithic. His face is
severe, not sallow at all, energetic without being brutal. Most
impressive are his light blue eyes. They are very luminous, in
contrast to his skin, which has been deeply tanned by the Brioni
sun.”7
Ten years later, during a journey to Africa, Tito’s eyes troubled the
Serbian writer Dobrica Ćosić, who accompanied him as a chronicler
of his tour. “Rich expression of face,” Ćosić wrote, “very sentimental,
thoughtful, introverted. Sometimes menacing, serious, dangerous,
sometimes joyful and benevolent, sometimes somnolent, as if
thinking nostalgically of times past. But suddenly, in his green-blue
eyes, there is menace, obstinacy, self-confidence. He does not show
the fatigue that should accompany his age. I have never seen eyes
like his.”8
A member of a French delegation visiting Tito late in his career
noted that Marshal Tito appeared quite old: “He was still in good
physical shape, with a lively sense of humor. He ate and drank like
Gargantua, and was always ready to smile. But as he is elderly, he
was prone to forget things or to repeat them and to be somewhat
oblivious. . . . He has elusive eyes, like all the Communists of the old
generation. At the beginning, he looked down, in any case never at
his interlocutor. But sometimes there came a direct look, and I would
not like to be the enemy of a man with such eyes.”9 The first to
observe just how dangerous Tito’s eyes could seem was Louis
Adamic, an American writer of Slovene origin who returned to his
homeland in 1949 and described his numerous conversations with
Tito in his book The Eagle and the Roots. Altogether they spoke for
thirty hours, developing a friendly relationship that allowed Adamic
to say many things that no one in Tito’s entourage would have dared
to mention. For example, he did not hide his critical attitude toward
the marshal’s “Bonapartism” and his penchant for uniforms. After a
political meeting that ended in a thunderous applause, Adamic could
not suppress his reservations. When Tito was leaving, he noticed
that he was being observed. “Suddenly, with a flash in his eyes that
wasn’t all humor, he said: ‘You know, gospodine Adamicu [Mister
Adamic], I happen to be Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.’
So this is his retort to my criticism of his marshal’s uniform.”10
And finally there is the impression of Henry Kissinger, secretary of
state to President Nixon: “Tito was a man whose eyes did not always
smile with his face.”11 Did Kissinger know that the same had been
said of Stalin?12 Stalin instinctively felt how similar they were, and
offered him a word of advice: “Why do you have eyes like a lynx?
That is not good. You have to smile with your eyes. And then you
drive a knife into their back.”13
1
PRISONER OF WAR
While his name appeared in the list of war casualties suffered by the
Habsburg army between 10 and 12 April 1915, it was the beginning
of a new chapter in the life of Josip Broz. He was one of two million
Austro-Hungarian prisoners scattered throughout the far-flung
territory of the tsarist empire. For nearly a year, between May 1915
and March 1916, he was under treatment in a hospital that had been
hurriedly opened in the Uspenskii Monastery on the Volga River. He
was later transferred to a camp among Chuvash, near the city of
Alatyr on the Sura River. There he became acquainted with the
daughter of a local doctor and her friend, who used to pay visits to
the prisoners of war. They brought him books and often invited him
to their homes: “They kept insisting I should play the piano.” So he
learned.20 He would have been freed had he enlisted in the
volunteer corps organized by the Serbs among their Austro-
Hungarian “compatriots” for the Dobrudja front, but he refused to
return to combat along with seventy other comrades. As an officer,
according to the Hague Convention, he was not obligated to do
manual labor. Even so, he accepted the offer of a rich peasant in the
village of Kalashevo, near Ardatov, to work in his flour mill. In the
autumn of 1916 he was transferred with other prisoners to the Urals,
and the town of Alatyr, not far from Ekaterinburg. There he worked
on the railway as an interpreter and “elder” prisoner, or supervisor.
In May of the following year, he was sent to the small station of
Ergach, near Perm. After a run-in with the commander of the prison
camp, he was arrested and beaten by three Cossacks with a knout
(an event which he never forgot), prompting his escape.21
In the disorder following the February Revolution of 1917, he
managed to reach Petrograd in early summer, traveling mostly on
foot. Once there he hoped to find a job in the Putilov factories. He
actually worked there for two or three days, and even had the
chance to hear Lenin at a rally and to see the famous left-wing
writer Maxim Gorky. He felt a deep veneration for Lenin throughout
his lifetime, keeping his photo in his Belgrade office and a bronze
bust on a shelf of his library.22 When the Bolsheviks attempted to
seize power on 13 July 1917, Broz took part in the demonstrations.
When the police sent to quell the uprisings opened fire, luck was on
his side: he first found shelter under the bridges of the Neva and
later escaped to Finland, an autonomous principality of the former
Russian Empire. However, he was arrested as a “dangerous
Bolshevik” near Oulu and sent back to Petrograd, where he
languished for three weeks in the dank cells of the Petropavlovsk
Fortress.23 Only when the local authorities established his identity
did they decide to send him back to the Urals, but he managed to
escape again before reaching Kungur, jumping from the train as it
stopped at a station. Although one of his former guards, whom he
met by chance, recognized him, he was able to hop onto a train for
Siberia without a ticket and slip away. He was fortunate to choose a
day when the conductors had other things on their mind—the day
before, Lenin had taken power in Petrograd. It was an eventful
journey, full of violence, since the soldiers traveling in the same
direction rebelled against their officers, throwing them off the
train.24 When Broz reached Omsk, he joined the International Red
Guard there and worked as a mechanic from autumn 1917 until
summer 1918. It was still not clear who would win the civil war
raging in Russia between the Reds and the Whites. In the village of
Mikhailovka, not far from Omsk, where he was again working in a
steam mill, he met Pelagiia D. Belousova (also known as Polka), a
girl of thirteen or fourteen, who became his wife. This was the first
of his five marriages, none of which featured a storybook ending.25
In 1918, he applied for Soviet citizenship and for membership in
the Communist Party, but received neither. His personal dossier in
the Comintern archives suggests that he was not accepted into the
party because at the time there was no Yugoslav section. Shortly
thereafter, Omsk was occupied by General Aleksander V. Kolchak’s
White Guards, who imprisoned all potential political adversaries. Broz
found refuge in a Kirghiz aul (a fortified steppe village) fifty or sixty
miles from the city, finding work on the farm of a rich peasant, Isaia
Diaksenbaev. But Czech legionnaires, former Russian prisoners who
collaborated with Kolchak, reached even these remote places. They
wanted to arrest Broz, suspecting that he was in contact with the
Omsk communists. It is not clear whether Diaksenbaev hid him or
whether the villagers came to his aid by testifying that he was not a
deserter but had been among them since 1915 as a prisoner of war.
In any case, he succeeded in avoiding imprisonment as well as more
fatal possibilities. The fact is that the Kirghiz liked him and
considered him a brave young man, quick in his decisions and with
an extraordinary feeling for animals.26 This latter characteristic
would remain with him throughout his life. The following episode is
revealing: some friends gave him a gift of a falcon. He cared for it,
fed and stroked it lovingly, and the bird learned to perch on his
shoulder. When it grew up and spread its wings, Josip decided to
free it. Two days later, the falcon returned and settled on his
shoulder, calmly waiting to be fed. When sated, it flew away, to
return once more two days later. It was only after the fourth time
that the bird was not seen again. All those who heard this story said:
“Every living being has to love a man like Broz.”27
When the Red Army drove Kolchak’s bands from Omsk in 1919,
reestablishing rail communications with Petrograd, Josip decided to
leave with Pelagiia, his wife. In Petrograd, where he remained for
approximately three weeks, he received news of the creation of the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after the collapse of the
Habsburg monarchy. When he read a newspaper article reporting
that a revolution had broken out there—the news was false—he felt
he had to participate. The Soviet authorities placed him at the head
of the group of war prisoners from the former Austrian territories,
now part of Yugoslavia, who were to be repatriated.28 He returned
home with them in September 1920, crossing the Baltic, but not
without a serious incident in Vienna. Some Serb fellow travelers
denounced him to the local Yugoslav diplomatic representatives as a
communist. At the Austrian-Slovenian border in Maribor he was
detained with his pregnant wife and kept in quarantine for a week.
After this they were allowed to return to Broz’s native village.29
Russia, and particularly Siberia, with its taigas (forested regions),
moonshine, and horses, remained forever in his heart. He would
come to know the land of the Soviets intimately, in all its enormous
industrial and military might, and would retain a sentimental
attachment to it even in his old age. In spite of disillusionment,
doubts and conflicts, Tito was always convinced that “the socialist
continent really exists, that it embraces one-sixth of the globe, that
it represents the start of an unstoppable process.”30 When in 1952,
at the very height of the conflict with Stalin, one of his generals
began cursing the Soviet Union in vulgar terms, he reacted irritably:
“Every wolf has his den that he never abandons. It is the same with
me.”31 As Veljko Mićunović, one of his most important diplomats,
said at the beginning of the seventies, Tito filed his last will and
testament in Moscow since he had no faith in the people who
surrounded him.32
PARTY AGITATOR
Returning home, tragic news awaited Josip Broz. His mother, whom
he loved dearly in spite of the fact that she was a stern and austere
woman, had been carried away by the Spanish flu two years earlier,
a devastating epidemic that struck throughout Europe shortly after
the First World War. As Polka remembered, he cried and later
confessed, “It was the saddest day of my life.”33
The country he returned to was completely different from the one
he had left. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy had vanished, and a
strange chimera had been created in its place: the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, in which the South Slavs were united
under the scepter of the Karadjordjević Dynasty, regardless of their
different cultural and historical heritage and their different economic
and social development: the Serbs were Levantine and Orthodox,
the Croats and Slovenes Central European and Catholic. Together
with these three major ethnic groups, at least seventeen lesser
minorities (Albanians, Hungarians, Germans, and others) lived in the
Kingdom SHS (Kraljevina Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev; Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), as it was known, along with
Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Bosnian Muslims (whose ethnic
identity was not recognized by Belgrade), making it the most
heterogeneous state in Europe. At least 80 percent of the population
lived in the countryside, where the conditions were often similar to if
not worse than they had been under Turkish rule because of the
terrible poverty in the wake of the war.34
For the ruling classes in Belgrade, it was obvious that such a
complex and potentially conflict-ridden society could be dominated
only with an iron fist, a policy they soon started to practice,
banishing the recently founded Yugoslav Communist Party (CPY) in
December 1920. It was a heavy blow for the party, pushed as it was
into illegality: in 1920 it had sixty-five thousand members, in 1924
just 688.35 Josip Broz was one of them, although he remained aloof
from the factional fights initiated by the troopless generals who
made up the CPY leadership. He was involved in trade union activity,
in which the communists also participated. Although he was not very
active politically, he was unable to avoid persecution, discrimination
at work, even arrest and ill-treatment.36 As before the war, he did
not like to stay in the same place for too long. From Zagreb, he
moved to Bjelovar in central Croatia, to the shipyards of Kraljevica
on the Adriatic coast, to Veliko Trojstvo in Bilagora County, and to
Serbia, where he found employment in the railway wagon factory at
Smederovska Palanka. He even returned briefly to his first job, that
of a waiter, which he soon lost because he spread communist
propaganda among his colleagues.37
In 1926, he tried to join the local party cell in Belgrade. The left-
wing faction, which was strong in the capital, rejected him, for its
leaders were highly suspicious of his critical attitude with regard to
internecine party quarrels. As Tito later noted, “This infighting
reached such dimensions that the honest communists were
prevented from joining the party organizations. The leaders were
interested only in retaining their positions . . . and the Comintern’s
financial aid. Actually, it was more than that, as it involved a regular
monthly salary, much higher than the salary of ranking State
bureaucrats. This too compelled me to enter the fight against the
factions.”38 When he returned to Zagreb, Broz began working as the
secretary of the Metallurgical Workers Union, as well as of the Union
of Tanners and Leather Dressers. Later he joined the leadership of
the Civic Committee of the CPY, in which he represented the middle
line, hostile to both the left- and the right-wing factions. The former
favored a federal organization of society and state, the latter a single
centralized one, expressions of the different political cultures of
Zagreb and Belgrade, which were tainted by a hostile antagonism
between Serbs and Croats. As Miroslav Krleža wrote later, the
discussion was entangled in the vicious circle of opposite beliefs: “It
is impossible to solve the national question without democracy,” or
“Without the solution of the national question there is no real
democracy.”39
From the middle of the twenties, the Executive Committee of the
Comintern (Ispolnitel’nyi komitet Kommunisticheskogo
internationala; IKKI), controlled by Moscow, considered the Kingdom
SHS an “artificial creature of Versailles” and a possible imperialist
springboard for an attack against the Soviet Union. It had to be
dismembered so that a Federation of Socialist Republics could be
created on its ruins. In a resolution published in spring 1925, the
CPY received the following instructions: “The party has to convince
the working masses with all propaganda means at its disposal that
the destruction of such a State is the only way to solve the national
question. . . . As long as Yugoslavia does not disappear, no serious
communist activity is possible. Hence, Yugoslavia has to be
destroyed, with the help of all separatist forces present within it.”40
This is why the IKKI attacked the right-wing faction and its leader,
Serb secretary general of the party Sima Marković, who was
criticized by Stalin himself for his adverse stance toward Lenin’s
doctrine of national self-determination. He was expelled from the
CPY in 1929. But the IKKI was also opposed to the left-wing faction,
led by Rajko Ivanić, who considered peasants inevitable allies of the
bourgeoisie and therefore enemies of the working class. In 1928, in
an open letter to the members of the CPY, the Comintern described
the conflict raging between both groups in these terms: “The vital
questions of the proletarian struggle have been relegated to the last
place; first place has been taken by a scholastic dispute that only
nurtures the clashes between factions.”41
Moscow’s interference in the internal quarrels of the CPY
exacerbated things. In this atmosphere the so-called “Zagreb line”
prevailed, which asserted that it was necessary to go beyond the
factions, since they were nothing but the skirmishes of intellectuals
who should be replaced by workers at the head of the party. Tito
remembered later, “We tried to find a way out of a difficult situation
that the communist movement in Yugoslavia had to face. We knew
that it was necessary above all to repair the party and to achieve its
unity.” Naturally, this proposition was risky, considering that the
leadership was prone to inflict heavy sanctions on its critics, quickly
claiming that they were “anti-party elements.”42
In the midst of these discussions, Josip Broz succeeded—not
without mocking opposition from those who considered him
intellectually inferior—in attaining the post of secretary of the City
Committee in Zagreb at the end of February 1928. The main
candidate for this office had been Andrija Hebrang, a young Croat
Jew employed in a bank, but he stepped down in favor of Broz,
claiming that the secretary should be a laborer and not a clerk. The
City Committee of Zagreb numbered approximately 180 members
and was the most important communist group in the country; so
prominent, in fact, that two months later its decisions were blessed
even by the Comintern, which provided a morale boost for Broz. The
emergence of the “Bolshevik line,” aimed at creating a Leninist unity
in the party and saving it from the “nightmare of the factions,” called
Broz and Hebrang to the attention of the police.43 In 1927, Comrade
Georgijević, as Broz was known in the party at the time, had already
been jailed for seven months as a result of his revolutionary activity,
and on 1 May 1928 he was arrested again because of a
demonstration organized by communists in the Apollo cinema that
was designed to disturb a social-democratic gathering there. He was
particularly conspicuous among those shouting: “Death to social-
patriots! Death to the servants of capitalism!” Along with several
comrades, he was arrested and detained for fourteen days. At the
time, the following notations were made to his personal file: “Height:
170 cm, Eyes: gray, Teeth: some lacking, Far-sighted, Wears
glasses” and “Until now his behavior has been impeccable.”44
Obviously, they did not know much about him from the police in
Zagreb. The following July and August he was arrested again, and
this time charged with seditious activity against the regime. In fact,
during that period the communists engaged in strikes, mass
demonstrations, and riots in Zagreb, some of which cost human
lives.45
The time for revolution seemed ripe after 20 June 1928, when the
Belgrade Parliament was the site of a shooting by a Serb nationalist,
a member of the ruling party. His victims were five Croat deputies,
among them Stjepan Radić, the charismatic leader of the Croat
Peasant Party, who died after several weeks of suffering. Following
the directives of the Comintern, the CPY chose this critical period as
suitable for action. Josip Broz and his comrades adhered to the party
line with blind fanaticism, although they had little or no support
among the masses.46 Thanks to a tip from an informer, the police
organized ambushes and on-the-spot investigations. Five days
before Radić’s death, on 4 August 1928, they arrested Broz, who
was carrying a Browning revolver for which he had no license. In his
“illegal” apartment they also found a basket full of ammunition and
four WWI German bombs stashed beneath a pile of Marxist
brochures under his bed (during the trial he declared that they had
been planted there to frame him, but this was not true). “If I had
had a 1 percent chance,” Broz later told a friend, “I would have
escaped and started shooting.”47
He was arrested and beaten to force him to testify falsely against
his comrades. He kept his mouth shut and decided to start a hunger
strike in protest as he had done during an earlier detention in the
rural town of Ogulin. His letter from the jail, in which he exaggerated
the “tortures” to which he was subjected, was published on 24
August 1928 by the Comintern magazine International Press
Correspondence under the title “A Cry from the Hell of Yugoslav
Prisons.”48 At the beginning of November, he appeared before the
court and was sentenced to five years imprisonment on the basis of
a law prohibiting “all communist propaganda,” after a trial known as
the “bomb case.” During the trial, Broz behaved as the Comintern
expected of its members: “You have to aim for one thing only. Not
the minimum penalty, but the prestige of the party, which you must
strengthen in the eyes of the working masses.”49
According to instructions, Broz bravely proclaimed himself not
guilty, maintaining that he did not recognize the “bourgeois” tribunal,
since it was an instrument of reactionary forces. “Long live the
Communist Party! Long live the world revolution!” he shouted.50 The
local press, but also the Comintern, took note of his defiant attitude.
Not everyone approved, however, for shortly afterward Avgust
Cesarec, one of the most important left-wing intellectuals in Croatia,
wrote in the party’s illegally published paper Proleter: “If this young
and morbidly ambitious communist becomes leader of the CPY, it will
be a disaster.”51
IN JAIL
After the trial, Broz remained in the Zagreb prison for several days.
His comrades tried to arrange his escape with the help of a guard,
sending him a metal file hidden in a round loaf of bread. Unnoticed,
he succeeded in sawing through five of the six iron bars of the
window of his cell. Just as he was beginning on the last bar, he was
transferred to another cell and sent shortly afterwards to Lepoglava,
in the Zagorje region—the site, since 1854, of the most important
penitentiary in Croatia. The fate of the guard who had helped him
was more tragic. Suspected by the authorities for his pro-communist
sympathies, he escaped to the Soviet Union, where some years later
he was accused of being a Yugoslav agent and condemned to
death.52 Broz’s correct behavior and discipline soon earned him the
esteem and affection of the comrades he met behind bars, first at
Lepoglava, later in Maribor (“King Aleksandar’s toughest pen”) and in
Ogulin.53 There he began to study the Marxist and Leninist classics
that the authorities were forced to tolerate as result of hunger
strikes by the political convicts. With the help of their “criminal”
mates they smuggled in the necessary literature, transforming the
jails into Party schools. In this way, a new generation of
revolutionary leaders was formed in these and other prisons of the
Yugoslav kingdom. Josip Broz, Moša Pijade, Aleksandar Ranković,
Milovan Djilas, and Edvard Kardelj all seriously studied the ideology,
politics, economics, and military tactics that they considered
necessary for the future revolution.54 During the years spent in jail,
which he remembered with amused levity, Broz became a
professional revolutionary, as the authorities in Maribor noted. Under
the blank space for his profession they wrote in his file: “criminal,
communist.”55
In spite of its obvious hardships, the prison probably saved Broz’s
life. On 6 January 1929, only a few days after he was sentenced,
King Aleksandar dissolved parliament, abolished the constitution,
and created a dictatorial regime under the premiership of General
Petar Živković, one of his henchmen. The king and the prime
minister were of the opinion that Yugoslavia (as the state was
renamed) should be governed with an iron fist, without any pretense
of parliamentary democracy. They acted accordingly, abolishing all
political parties and declaring war on all forces of the opposition:
Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonian separatists, Croat nationalists, both
moderates and extremists (like the newly formed Ustaša), and,
naturally, communists. During the years 1929 to 1931, the enemies
of the regime were arrested en masse. Some hundred members of
the CPY, the most staunch and pugnacious, were tortured to death
in the terrible “Glavnjača” in Belgrade, or in other police stations
scattered throughout the country, while the prisons of Lepoglava,
Mitrovica, Maribor, Zenica, Niš, Požarevac, and Skopje bulged with
their comrades, sentenced to prison terms with varying degrees of
severity. Those who managed to survive the interrogations and were
not simply shot in the back by policemen during an “attempt at
escape” were lucky, since at least behind the bars they were
comparatively safe.56
IN EXILE
In March 1934 Josip Broz, aged forty-two, was set free. He returned
to his native Kumrovec, as the law required former prisoners to do,
but shortly afterward he resumed his underground activities in
Zagreb and Belovar. By order of the party, he emigrated in June to
Austria with the task of improving contacts between the communists
in Croatia and the Central Committee, which had been operating in
Vienna since 1929 to keep clear of King Aleksandar’s persecution.
There the Austrian communists were still able to offer assistance to
Yugoslav comrades. Under the guise of a tourist and carrying a card
of the Croatian Alpine Club in his wallet, Broz illegally crossed the
frontier near Tržič in north Slovenia. Once in Carinthia, he
immediately found himself in trouble, because it was just then that
the Nazis were attempting a putsch against the clero-fascist regime
of Engelbert Dollfuss. When Broz finally managed to reach Vienna
from Klagenfurt, he was beset upon by his comrades, “like bees to a
honey pot,” eager for news from the fatherland. In a coffeehouse, he
met a bunch of grim-looking men who shocked him because of their
aggressiveness and mutual hostility. He told them without mincing
words that no real communist, of those he had met in or outside of
prison, had any faith in the Central Committee of the CPY. Gorkić,
the secretary general of the party, twirled his red moustache. “It did
not become him,” Tito later said, remembering the episode, “since it
only set out his pallor.” He assaulted Broz with vulgar insults.57
In spite of this less-than-friendly reception, on 1 August 1934 the
“comrades” brought him into the Politburo, the party’s executive
body. At its Fourth Conference, organized in Ljubljana the following
December, he was elected to the Central Committee (CC), although
the reverse procedure would have been more logical.58 He was
sponsored by a young Croatian communist, Ivan Krajačić, nicknamed
Stevo, with whom Broz would remain closely linked for life.59 At the
time, the leader of the party was Josip Čižinski, known under the
pseudonym of Milan Gorkić, or Sommer, a thirty-year-old man of
Slovak-Polish origin, born in Bosnia. He knew very little of the
Yugoslav reality, since he had left the country in 1922 at the age of
nineteen for Moscow, where he had worked in different Comintern
offices. Being well connected with the NKVD (Narodnyi kommissariat
vnutrennykh del; People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) and
those in “high Soviet circles” closed to ordinary mortals, he married
a woman from this privileged class, the director of Moscow’s famous
Central Park of Culture and Leisure (later Gorky Park). Inevitably,
Gorkić became a senior bureaucrat, being appointed secretary
general of the CPY in 1932. Infatuated with himself and convinced
that the communist movement in Yugoslavia was a “mess,” he
decided it needed a new leader able to impose order. He found
himself at the head of a party with only three thousand enlisted
members, the majority of whom were in prison or in exile. Among
them there was no lack of provocateurs, spies, and police agents.
This transformed the CPY into a viper’s nest, where everybody
suspected everybody else and denounced each other to the
Cominform, knowing that in Moscow ears were attuned to every
malevolent insinuation. Not surprisingly in the Comintern a joke
circulated that two Yugoslavs represent three fractions, whose
adherents hate and attack each other so much that they forget
about the class enemy.60
Broz, aware that the internal life of the party had to be healed,
wrote a report to the CC on 2 August 1934, stressing the need to
overcome abstract ideological quarrels, strengthen ties with the
working masses, and move on to action. This was the first document
he signed with “Tito,” a name not unusual in his native region.61
Broz did not wish to stay in Vienna but hoped to move to Moscow,
enroll in Lenin University, and meet up with his wife and son Žarko,
born in 1924, who had fled to the Soviet Union after his arrest.
Gorkić, however, had other plans for him. Two weeks after the
report, he sent Broz home with the task of organizing the Party
Congress for the region of Slovenia and the Fourth National
Conference. The first conference took place in September, at the
summer residence of the bishop of Ljubljana, whose half-brother
was a “fellow traveler” (a term widely used for Communist Party
sympathizers).62 The second, convened in December in the
Slovenian capital and headed by Gorkić, was attended by eleven
delegates but not by Broz. Gorkić used the explanation that for
security reasons the organizers of the gathering should be banned
from it. Tito would later consider this a hollow excuse used by the
secretary general to get rid of him.63 Both were important occasions,
intended to overcome the sectarian policy of the past and to renew
the party, linking it more organically with the environment in which it
operated. To this end, the Central Committee made the decision,
with the blessing of Moscow of course, to create autonomous parties
in Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia under the aegis of the CPY.64
In September, Broz returned to Vienna, but Gorkić immediately
sent him to Zagreb to discuss the organization of the Party
Conference with Croat comrades. From the beginning, these
assignments raised doubts in his mind, as he suspected that the
secretary general was purposely exposing him to danger by
entrusting him with clandestine tasks, even though he had only
recently been released from prison. Although he could not criticize
Gorkić’s lifestyle, Broz considered him too confident toward the
members of his entourage and, therefore, not suitable for this
complicated position. Furthermore, the secretary general had no use
for those who had grown up and become communists in Yugoslavia,
confining them to bottom-rung positions to prevent them from
getting access to the funds the Comintern assigned to the CPY. “I
was truly disgusted,” Tito said.65 Wisely, however, he kept his mouth
shut and at least outwardly maintained proper relations with the
secretary general. Only years later did he confess to Louis Adamic
what he really thought about Gorkić, observing that “his red hair and
mustache were the reddest parts of him.”66
At the end of 1934, in the wake of a continuing devastating
economic crisis and a new shattering tragedy, Broz sent instructions
from the Politburo to all Party cells and to the Union of Communist
Youth of Yugoslavia (Savez Komunističke Omladine Jugoslavije;
SKOJ) to organize an armed uprising in Yugoslavia. On 9 October,
King Aleksandar I had been assassinated in Marseilles, at the very
beginning of his official visit to France. He had just disembarked
from his yacht when he was shot down by a Bulgaro-Macedonian
assassin sent by Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Ustaša, the terrorist
group that fought for a free Croatia and hoped that killing the
monarch would also kill Yugoslavia. Convinced that the elimination of
the hated Aleksandar was the beginning of the end of the despised
Karadjordjević Dynasty, Broz had no qualms about recommending
that the party’s armed units join all other organizations that were
also hostile to the regime, including the right-wing extremists. This
was the only way in which the monarchy could be overthrown.67
However, these proposals bore no fruit, since after the violent death
of his cousin Aleksandar, Prince Paul assumed the regency in the
name of the new king, Petar II, who was only ten years old at the
time, and managed to take control of the situation. The ill-conceived
revolutionary proposal failed, demonstrating its hollowness, since the
masses were not behind either the left- or the right-wing extremists.
At the end of February 1935, Broz finally received permission to go
to Moscow. He left on the advice of comrades in Zagreb, who
thought that in the coming years the situation in Yugoslavia would
become extremely dangerous, even more so than it had been during
the years 1929–31. They therefore recommended that the best of
their men who were not in prison should leave the country and go to
the Soviet Union to be ideologically groomed for the inevitable
upheaval.68
On the eve of his departure, Broz nearly fell into the hands of the
Viennese police. He lived illegally in the apartment of an elderly
Jewish landlady, whose daughter tried to commit suicide with gas.
Broz saved her at the last moment, but when the gendarmes
arrived, he barely managed to get away by taking advantage of the
general chaos.69
IN MOSCOW
Broz came to the country of the victorious proletariat where, he
believed, “love, solidarity and sincerity”70 reigned, with a
presentation letter from Gorkić addressed to Vladimir Čopić, one of
the founders of the CPY who worked as its representative at the
Comintern. As Gorkić said, “He represents the best of our movement
and shortly, in six or seven months, he will be called to cover leading
positions in the CC.”71 Although Čopić saw a possible competitor in
the newcomer, he found Broz a room in the Russian art nouveau
Hotel Lux. Only the name still hinted at its former splendor; it was
crowded with foreign communists seeking refuge in Moscow and was
infested with rats, to say nothing of the stench from the common
kitchens situated on every floor.72 Broz’s first task was to write his
autobiography, as was the custom in the Comintern. He had to write
it several times, so that the officials of the Cadre Department could
compare the various versions and verify his trustworthiness.73 Later,
a certain Iakubovich, who was a representative of the OGPU
(Ob’edinennoe gosudarstvennoe politicheskoe upravlenie; the
Unified State Political Directorate, or security police), and a Bulgarian
communist called Ivan Karaivanov had him write about the
“characteristics” of the seven most important members of the CPY,
including Gorkić. He carried out this assignment commendably,
making an effort to be sincere, praising but also criticizing his
comrades. He had no critique of Čopić, of course (although to tell
the truth he considered him like a “gossipy old woman”).74 The latter
rewarded him by proposing to send him for a short time to a
“sanatorium” (what would today be called a spa) for party
functionaries in Crimea. According to Nikita Bondarev, the historian
who studied Broz’s Moscow years, the sanatorium could also have
been the Lubianka, the infamous seat of the Soviet secret police,
where its agents tried to recruit promising new collaborators (or
cadres, as officials were often called) by hook or by crook.75
On 21 May 1935, after Broz had returned, Karaivanov certified
that “from the political point of view, Broz deserves trust.”76 This was
also confirmed by Čopić and by the powerful director of the Cadre
Department, the Bulgarian Georgi Damianov, alias Belov, although
from the very beginning he did not like him. Later on, the Executive
Committee of the Comintern suggested that the CC CPY propose the
candidature of “Comrade Walter Friedrich”—Broz’s new code name—
as a “political referee” to the Balkan Department, led by the German
communist Wilhelm Pieck. The CC CPY unanimously approved the
proposal.77
At that time, the Comintern was headed by the legendary Georgi
Dimitrov, the Bulgarian revolutionary who had been implicated in the
arson of the Reichstag in Berlin but had been acquitted by German
judges thanks to his brave and efficient defense. The newcomer
soon entered his good graces. Although Broz did not excel in Marxist
theory, he was considered a faithful communist, and one of the few
Yugoslavs capable of practical work.78 In spite of his lack of
education, Broz (now known as Walter) was occasionally called to
lecture at the Yugoslav section of the International Leninist School
(Medžunarodnaja Leninskaja Škola) and at the Communist University
for the Ethnic Minorities of the West (Kommunisticheskij Univerzitet
Nacional’nyh Men’shinstv Zapada; KUNMZ). His experience at
Lepoglava and in other prisons led him to believe that the CPY would
be unable to overcome the crises that plagued it unless it succeeded
in eliminating its internal struggles. But the situation he found in the
Yugoslav colony in Moscow, which numbered around nine hundred
persons, was similar to the one at home.79 As he said later, he tried
to avoid the “comrades” as much as possible, in part because he
loved solitude, to which he had grown accustomed while behind
bars, in part because he soon realized that in Moscow silence was
golden, “Especially in rooms with a telephone.”80 It was taken for
granted that telephones were bugged, so the less said, the better.
He completely dedicated himself to his work, attending courses in
management and conspiracy techniques as well as the famous
Frunze Military Academy.81 As he later wrote, “As far as possible I
used this period for study; I went only from the Hotel Lux to the
Comintern building and back. This is probably what saved me from
Stalin’s knife.”82 His cautious behavior is likewise noted in the
memoirs of Ruth von Mayenburg, the wife of the Austrian
communist, Ernst Fischer, about her stay at the Hotel Lux. “Tito
moved along the long corridors like an invisible mouse. None of the
neighbors paid attention to the silent comrade, who exchanged a
word with hardly anybody, and went his own way. The Yugoslavs
were in a conspiratorial world unto themselves, one that rarely
allowed the foreign comrades to glance inside; even the Balkan
section of the Comintern building, on the Mokhovaia, worked behind
closed doors.”83
Broz arrived in Moscow only three months after the assassination
of Sergei M. Kirov (1 December 1934), leader of the Leningrad
Communist Party, which offered Stalin a pretext for his purges of all
possible “conspirators,” especially the old Bolsheviks. It is not clear
whether he was as naïve as his younger comrades in Yugoslavia
who, from their domestic safety, believed every word proffered
against these “traitors” by Andrei Vyshinskii, general prosecutor at
the Moscow show trials, and considered everybody who dared to
doubt a “class enemy” and a Trotskyist.84 In any case, Walter
managed to survive, although some of the things he wrote about his
comrades were not in tune with information in possession of the
NKVD (the secret police department that had absorbed the OGPU).85
In the shadow of Stalin’s terror Broz learned a great deal, especially
about the mechanisms of revolution and power. In accepting Stalin’s
brutal practices (arbitrary arrests, torture, deportations, slave labor,
murder) as a necessary tool for achieving the new social order, Broz
compromised himself morally, at the same time drawing up the main
guidelines of his life to come. This is how Milovan Djilas described
Walter’s metamorphosis at the beginning of his stay in Moscow:
“The revolutionary Josip Broz . . . understood at that time that the
institutions and revolutionary methods, although inseparable from
the ideology, are even more important than the revolution.”86 His
modest intellectual background kept Tito free from doubts, from
skepticism, and from the need to confront problems critically. Savka
Dabčević-Kučar, a prominent Croat communist and later Tito’s
opponent, even affirmed in her memoirs that he abandoned
traditional values such as honesty, fidelity, friendship, and fair play,
considering them just bourgeois “tinsel,” in the name of communist
morale, in its Machiavellian sense, in which the end justifies the
means.87 It is only fair, however, to counter this severe judgment
with Tito’s declaration, published in the monthly Komunist on 15
April 1959, that through the Comintern Stalin had done enormous
damage to communism and “destroyed the revolutionary
physiognomy of the Communists and created a kind of Communist-
weakling.”88 The testimony of Edvard Kardelj, who in the mid-thirties
collaborated with Walter in Moscow, is also pertinent, as it shows
that the latter was not completely in tune with the Stalinist regime.
According to Kardelj, during the Great Terror Broz did everything in
his power to save as many Yugoslav émigrés as possible, sending
them home to work underground or to Spain, where the Civil War
broke out in July 1936.89 The Soviet Union decided to help the
republican government against the right-wing generals, led by
Francisco Franco, who had organized an armed revolt. Walter
embraced this policy, convinced that Spain could be an excellent
school for future Yugoslav military and political cadres, which indeed
turned out to be the case. During WWII, no communist party had as
many “Spaniards” in its ranks as the CPY. They were the ones who
took the lead in the Partisan struggle.90
In July and August 1935 Walter participated in the Seventh World
Congress of the Comintern, as secretary of the Yugoslav delegation
and as a delegate with a consultative vote—a vote without full value,
but merely an opportunity to express his opinion. In the multilingual
form he had to compile on that occasion, he gave two names, “Tito”
and “Rudi,” in answer to the question about which pseudonym he
was using in the party. With regards to the code name under which
he was taking part in the congress, he answered “Walter Friedrich.”
Of the more than seventy pseudonyms he used during his life, Tito
and Walter were the most important and frequent. He also gave his
birth date as 1893 instead of 1892, and slightly stretched the truth
when he said that his education was “primary, partially secondary.”
Describing himself as a “mechanic” from 1910 on was also an
exaggeration. The photo attached to the questionnaire bears witness
to the fact that he had not set foot in a factory for a long time,
showing a young bespectacled man who looked more like a
university lecturer than a manual laborer. At the congress he saw
Stalin for the first time, but from afar and only briefly. He caught a
glimpse of him when Stalin came to the sessions once or twice and
stood behind a marble column: “Now you see me, now you don’t,”
Tito later remembered mockingly.91
The Seventh Congress was important specifically because it
changed the Comintern’s political strategy. It was decided that the
international revolutionary movement should abandon the belief that
the communists had no political friends, not even among Western
socialists and social democrats (accused of being “Social Fascists”
because of their adherence to parliamentary democracy).
Considering the Nazi threat, which began in Germany with Hitler’s
accession to power in 1933, the Soviet Union realized that it was no
longer possible to march toward the splendid goals of communism
without allies, who must be sought not only among the social
democrats but also among Christian or even nationalist and
conservative parties. Consequently, the Comintern implemented the
policy of a “popular front,” which encouraged the creation of a
united bloc of anti-Fascist forces, in the hope that the Soviet Union
would be preserved from the “reactionary” danger. In this
perspective, Yugoslavia was also necessary for the defense of the
proletariat’s fatherland. No longer considered a link in the cordon
sanitaire that the imperialists created to contain Bolshevism,
Yugoslavia was thought of as a possible bulwark of the Soviet Union,
together with other Central European and Balkan states, united
against Hitler. Although the idea that the Karadjordjević Dynasty
should be destroyed was still being discussed at the Fourth CPY
Conference in December 1934, the Yugoslav communists
immediately adopted the new political line. Their CC stated that
while in principle it was in favor of national self-determination and
the right of different South Slav nations to secede, “in view of the
contemporary international situation” Yugoslavia should be kept
alive. Any other policy would help “Fascism” with its war-mongering
plans. The Politburo stressed this radical change in a circular letter
sent to all the principal CPY organizations without causing any
adverse reactions.92 Nevertheless, many “comrades” continued to
have reservations regarding Yugoslavia because of its centralistic
structure based on Serb dominance. They would have preferred a
federation or confederation of Southern Slav or Balkan Soviet
republics.93
During the Seventh Congress, Walter was implicated in an
unpleasant incident. In mid-August, the question arose as to who
the new CPY representative in the Executive Committee of
Comintern was to be. A group of delegates who arrived
unexpectedly from Yugoslavia proposed Josip Broz for this
prestigious post, even though he was a junior member of the CC.
There was a heated discussion at the party summit, ending with the
unanimous decision to back him. It was, however, only a maneuver,
for Gorkić and his followers immediately protested to Dmitrii
Manuilskii, Stalin’s man at the Comintern, asserting that the election
of Broz would strengthen “sectarianism” in the party. An angry
Manuilskii, Gorkić’s close friend, decided not to accept the decision of
the Yugoslav delegation: “Since you have not chosen Gorkić, the
only one trusted by the Comintern, we will not allow you to have a
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