Review: Tito by Neil Barnett

Tito defeated Nazis, faced down Stalin

Tito has received surprisingly little attention from English-language biographers despite his stature as a leader in the Second World War, in the Communist world and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Whatever your feelings about Communism, Tito’s achievements are undeniable: successfully leading the partisan resistance against the occupying Nazis, defying Stalin and living to tell the tale, and helping establish the Non-Aligned Movement. But his principal success – or so it seemed during his lifetime – was building a Communist state with an unprecedented level of prosperity and personal freedom.

Iron fist

Tito was admired even by his enemies, as a quote at the beginning of Neil Barnett’s book illustrates. Whilst Tito was masterfully leading the guerrilla war of his partisans in the face of vicious reprisals by occupying German forces, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, said of him: “I wish we had a dozen Titos in Germany, leaders with such determination and such good nerves, that even though they were forever encircled, they would never give in.”

Inevitably, he had his dark side, which Barnett skilfully reveals. For all his relatively liberal image, he used typically nasty Communist methods to rule, ordered the assassination of dissidents living in the west, and was implicated in extensive massacres of opponents after the war, which the author argues would now be viewed as war crimes. Tito, the proletarian leader, commandeered numerous palaces for his personal use and wore ever more self-aggrandising uniforms. This list of his sins is far from exhaustive.

Mr. Personality

But Tito got away with it all because he had the one thing that so many cloned Communist leaders so conspicuously lacked: charisma. He used it to great effect in the war leading the partisans, and in persuading the Allies to begin supporting them and not the previously favoured royalist Chetniks, who all too often preferred drinking to fighting Germans. He also made use of it in his prodigious womanising. A book of this length could easily have been written on his many relationships and numerous children.

Fearless

Despite the independent line that Tito followed for Yugoslavia and the relatively liberal state (by Communist standards) it became, he was once an orthodox Stalinist. Later he fell out with the diminutive Georgian over the issue of who would determine the path Yugoslavia took towards Communism – Stalin or Tito. Since Yugoslav forces liberated the country with only minimal help from the Red Army, the Soviet Union was not able to impose its form of Communism as it had in most of the rest of the region. Tito was in no mood to take orders from the Soviet leader. Stalin sent several hitmen after Tito to try to settle the dispute. After the great tyrant died in March 1953, a letter from Tito was found in his desk. It read: “Stalin: stop sending people to kill me. We’ve already captured five of them… If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow and I won’t have to send a second.”

Unravelled after death

While he was alive, Tito kept Yugoslavia together with his charisma and a lot of muscle from the security forces that all Communist regimes depended on. After his death in 1980, it all began to unravel. The exact degree of Tito’s personal responsibility for the horrors that followed is a fascinating question, but one which the book does not deal with very fully. The “solution” he came up with for his succession – the cumbersome collective presidency – was certainly inadequate for the task that faced it.

Unfinished work

Unfortunately, the book does have its flaws. There are numerous typos and the repeated misspelling of Hitler’s title as Fürher instead of the correct spelling Führer grates. At the price of GBP 10.99 (EUR 16) for the paperback edition, readers are entitled to expect rather more assiduous work from the publisher.

The book is part of Haus Publishing’s Life&Times series, short biographies (under 160 pages) which tell the stories of key historical and cultural figures who have shaped our lives. Other titles include biographies of Nasser, Churchill, Trotsky and De Gaulle.

Tito by Neil Barnett

Haus Publishing ( London)

GBP 10.99