Tito

This new biography offers a straightforward, balanced approach to the man who reigned over Yugoslavia for thirty-five years. Stripping away the myths about Tito and his life. Stevan Pavlowitch places him within a larger perspective as a key twentieth-century European leader. Pavlowitch begins with an examination of the economic, social, and national factors that helped to create Josip Broz Tito. He goes on to consider Tito's role as a national unifier after the chaos of the Second World War, demonstrating how Tito brought Yugoslavia together by offering something to each of the country's constituent ethnic communities. While admitting that Tito remains something of a mystery because the important mechanisms of his regime always functioned behind closed doors, Pavlowitch reconciles the various contradictory versions of Tito's life and policies - as a ruthless revolutionary and an imaginative statesman, as a successfully dogmatic hard-liner and a triumphant heretic, as a good disciple of Soviet Stalinism and the force behind a Yugoslav-style Marxism. According to Pavlowitch, the seeds of Tito's long-term failure lay in his short-term successes, and the style and substance of his regime provided little more than transient unity. This study of one of the most influential leaders of the twentieth century, and one of the least understood, is especially valuable today since the collapse of communism and the breakup of Yugoslavia have called into question Tito's motives, directions, and achievements. General readers and students alike will find it a stimulating guide to the historical continuity of Eastern Europe and the situation there today.

This groundbreaking biography of Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia presents many startling new revelations, among them his role as an international revolutionary leader and his relationship with Winston Churchill. It highlights his early years as a Comintern operative, the context for his later politics as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The authors argue that in the 1940s, between the dissolution of the Comintern and the rise of NAM, Tito's influence and ambition were far wider than has been understood, extending to Italy, France, Greece and Spain via the international Communist networks established during the Spanish Civil War. Klinger and Kulji%s disclose for the first time the connection between Tito's expulsion from the Cominform and the Rome assassination attempt on the Italian Communist Party leader, Palmiro Togliatti--the man who had plotted to overthrow Tito. Tito's Secret Empire offers a pivotal contribution to our understanding of Tito as a figure of real, rather than imagined, global significance. This dazzlingly original book will reward all those who are interested in the history of international Communism, the Cold War and the Non-Aligned Movement, or in Tito the man--one of the most significant leaders of the twentieth century.

This landmark biography, now in English for the first time, reveals the life of one of the most powerful figures of the Cold War era. Josip Broz, nicknamed Tito, led Yugoslavia for nearly four decades with charisma, cunning, and an iron fist. An illuminating, definitive portrait of a complex man in turbulent times, a life as riveting as any John Le Carré plot.

The most powerful autobiographical novel written about the Yugoslav wars. A timely and deeply accessible book that speaks to what it is like to be displaced by war. Hotel Tito is an award-winning autobiographical novel of the Serbo-Croatian War. Author Ivana Bodrožić was born in the Croatian town of Vukovar, just across the Danube from Serbia. In the fall of 1991, Vukovar was besieged by the Yugoslav People's Army for eighty-seven days. When the army broke the siege, people came up out of the basements where they'd been sheltering from bombardment; women and children were allowed out of the besieged city, but the army bused 400 men from the hospital to a farm on the outskirts where soldiers and Serbian paramilitaries massacred them. Bodrožić's father was among those taken and murdered. In Hotel Tito, after fleeing the war zone their town has become, the mother and two children are housed along with other displaced persons at a former communist school in the village of Kumrovec (the birthplace of Josip Tito). For years they share a single room just large enough for their three beds, waiting to hear whether the narrator's father survived and when they'll be granted an apartment of their own. In the meantime life goes on for the teenage protagonist, first loves bloom and burn quickly, new friendships are acquired and lost, new truths emerge, and new emotions. But she never loses her shy, insightful voice, nor her self-deprecating sense of humor. Hotel Tito is a sensitive and forthright coming of age novel in a time of atrocity and loss.

Josip Broz Tito was a remarkable figure in the history of Communism, the Second World War, the Balkans and post-war Eastern Europe. He was the only European besides Lenin to lead a successful Communist revolution and became one of the most renowned Communist leaders of all time. For a certain generation, he was remembered as someone who stood up to both Hitler and Stalin - and won. Tito was above all else a communist, and was devoted to the communist cause until the day he died. What made him different from other communist leaders was that his early experience of Soviet Russia had given him sufficient knowledge of the Soviet experiment to be wary of its spell. In this, the first post-communist biography of Tito, the acclaimed historian Geoffrey Swain paints a new picture of this famous figure, focusing primarily on his Communist years. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in Communist and Eastern European history.

A biography of the charismatic and controversial Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito. The near-mythological figure Josip Broz Tito was a complicated one. An oppressor, a dictator, a reformer, and a playboy, Tito was an inspirational partisan leader and scourge of the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War, a doctrinaire communist, and an ever-present thorn in Moscow’s side. He managed Yugoslavia’s internal tensions through personality, a force of will, and political oppression. It was only after his death in 1980 that the true scale of his influence was understood. At that time, Yugoslavia’s institutions and politicians were revealed as rudderless, and the country created by Tito—a Croat turned Yugoslav—collapsed into a bloody and at times genocidal civil war. These ethnic conflicts were Tito’s nightmare, yet, as Neil Barnett shows in this short but engaging biography, they were in many ways the result of his own myopic egomania.

In 1948 in a series of moves that culminated in the famous Cominform Resolution, Stalin struck at the Communist Party in Yugoslavia, provoking the first split in the Communist state system. With this long-awaited book, Ivo Banac becomes the first scholar to assess the domestic consequences of Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform, and his findings will radically revise some of our most basic assumptions about Tito's revolution. Banac's subject is the nature and fate of those elements in the Yugoslav Communist party who were said to have sided with Moscow against their own country's leadership. He demonstrates that the so-called Cominformists represented as much as twenty-percent of the party membership and had widely divergent aims. He then reconstructs the history of the labrynthine factional struggles that preceded and accompanied the 1948 split and shows that, as always, the national question played the dominant role in Yugoslav politics. After identifying the members of the opposition and mapping its course, Banac recounts the harsh repression of the movement. He provides massive documentation of startling irony: the conflict with Stalin played the same part in the shaping of Yugoslavia's political system as the collectivization and purges of the 1930's did in the history of Soviet communism.