Marshal Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia (1892–1980). See what “Broz Tito, Josip” is in other dictionaries Attempts to develop a plan for reforming the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev were made with a clear eye on the experience of the Yugoslav comrades
One of the most elegant men who ever stood at the helm of a state, Josip Broz Tito married five times and was married three times. One of his first chosen ones was a Russian woman, Pelageya Belousova, who gave birth to his first child. No less than expensive suits and an aura of mystery, the leader of the Yugoslav communists loved young and beautiful women.
The son of a rural Croatian blacksmith named Franjo Broz and Slovenian Maria Javersek, the future Marshal of Yugoslavia Tito, was distinguished from childhood by his love of beautiful costumes. The author of the only biography of Broz Tito written in Russian at the moment, Evgeniy Matonin, quotes his hero: “When I was a little boy, I really wanted to become a tailor. Every Zagorsk peasant dreamed of beautiful clothes.” After leaving his father's house in Kumrovec, the young man went to the city of Sisak to become a waiter. Partly because they are always well dressed, well-fed and move among decent people.
However, he did not like the work of the Chaldean and he got a job as an apprentice in the workshop of a Czech mechanic. Later he moved to a larger city - Zagreb. Although 18-year-old Josip stayed there for only two and a half months, he managed to join the Union of Metalworkers and the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slavonia. “Broz wanted to return home, to Kumrovac, in a new, fashionable and beautiful suit, bought with the money he himself had earned,” writes Evgeniy Matonin. “The suit cost at least 20 crowns. He earned 2 crowns 30 hellers a day. He paid 20 for housing crowns a month, and food cost 7 crowns a week. He still managed to save some money."
Tito himself later told how he chose and purchased a beautiful suit for crowns. He took it to his apartment and went to say goodbye to his comrades. “When I returned home,” Tito recalled, “the doors of the room were wide open, and there was no trace of my new suit. I was forced to go to the junk dealer and buy an old, worn suit for 4 crowns, just so as not to return home to Zagorje in the same clothes in which I worked as an apprentice."
In the spring of 1915, a subject of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Josip Broz, found himself in Russian captivity. The Circassian lance of a cavalryman from the Wild Division hit Broz under the left shoulder blade and he ended up in the hospital. There he began to study Russian and read Russian classics. After the February Revolution, he managed to travel across the expanses of the former tsarist empire. One day he found himself in Omsk. They themselves never talked about how 25-year-old Tito met the 14-year-old Russian peasant girl Pelageya, whom he called Polina or Polka.
“I married Pelageya Denisovna Belousova in the church of the city of Omsk, when Kolchak was in power there,” Tito said during interrogation by the Zagreb police in 1928. “Then, since this marriage was not recognized by the Bolsheviks, I registered a civil marriage with her in Omsk in 1920." This event took place on September 7, 1920, which was recorded in the acts of the Bogolyubsky District Executive Committee of the Omsk Region. The marriage certificate states that Joseph Brozovich, an electrician, and Pelageya Belousova, a peasant woman who expressed a desire to take the surname Brozovich, are getting married. One of the bride's witnesses was her brother Ivan Belousov. Broz Tito did not enter into his first marriage under his real name.
Upon returning from Russia, Josip lived with Pelageya in the village of Veliko Troystvo, where he worked at the mill of Samuel Polyak. A few days later their first child died, and so did the second. Then Pelageya gave birth to a son, Khinko, and a daughter, Zlatitsa. They also did not live long. At the top of the Catholic cross, Josip ordered the inscription to be engraved: “Here rest in the peace of God Zlatica Broz, age 2 years, and her brother Hinko, age 3 days.” The only surviving child they had together was their son Zharko, born on February 2, 1924.
A couple of months after Kirov’s murder, a train brought Josip Broz to the capital of Soviet Russia. And already in the fall of 1935, Tito became interested in the 21-year-old wife of one of the leaders of the German Komsomol, Ernst Wohlweber, who was sentenced in Germany to 15 years of hard labor. Pretty Johanna Koenig worked in Moscow under the pseudonym Elsa Lucia Bauer. An employee of the Comintern apparatus, she, like Tito, lived in the Lux Hotel, where they met.
A year later, on October 13, 1936, they signed at the registry office of the Oktyabrsky district of Moscow - the same one that divorced Tito and Pelageya. And this time Tito married under a false name. A certain Friedrich Walter took Lucia Bauer as his wife. The newlyweds stayed together for only three days. On October 16, 1936, Tito, with a Yugoslav passport in the name of Ivan Kisic, went abroad on the next assignment of the Comintern. Next, Josip could perform Kolya Rezanov’s aria from “Juno and Avos” - “I will never see you.”
Tito himself explained his divorce from Pelageya and his new marriage with Lucia by saying that the Russian wife “is the main culprit for the fact that my son Zharko became a hooligan and a lost child” and that she herself “behaves immorally in everyday life,” and Lucia “agreed become the mother of a boy and take care of him."
Tito received incorrect information about the fate of his Russian son Zarko only in the winter of 1942. At the age of 17, he volunteered for the front, took part in the battles near Moscow and lost his arm near the village of Kryukovo, sung in a song. The current biographer writes: “At the end of March, one of the Moscow Radio programs in the Serbo-Croatian language reported that Zarko Broz was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for his military merits and heroism. Tito enthusiastically wrote to Moshe Piade: “He is now in Moscow, released from the hospital. As you can see, this is the only Yugoslav who has achieved this highest award. My God, children are outperforming their parents."
On March 31, Dimitrov informed Tito that Zharko lived in Moscow, at the Lux Hotel, and “sends greetings to you.” True, the situation with the awarding of Zarko Broz was not very clear. He did not receive the Hero Star. Zharko was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, II degree, but, judging by the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, only on April 14, 1944. Zharko then lived in Moscow and studied at the Higher Military School under the General Staff of the Red Army."
Papa Tito had already lived for several years not with his mother, but with another woman - with his personal secretary Davorjanka Paunovic, secret name - Zdenka Horvat. The 20-year-old student of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade and Komsomol member was 30 years younger than Tito, but their age difference did not bother them at all.
Tito’s comrade-in-arms and exposer of Stalinism Milovan Djilas recalled: “Zdenka had such a disposition that she even snapped at Tito himself. During enemy offensives, she behaved as if the main task of the Axis countries (Germany, Italy, Japan - ed.) was the destruction of her first. One day she threw such a tantrum that Tito, ashamed, asked me in confusion: “Damn it, what’s going on with her?” Zdenka's greatest fear was air raids. Many were surprised - after all, earlier, in the underground, she showed herself at her best."
Zdenka constantly argued with her lover’s entourage and with himself. Once the partisan chieftain Tito could not stand the criticism of his comrades and, clutching his head, said: “I am ashamed of this, but what can I do if I cannot live even a minute without this woman.”
It should be noted that in the summer of 1937, the Comintern envoy, the restless man Tito, in Paris met 25-year-old Slovenian Herta Haas, the future courier of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and his common-law wife. At that time, she came to the capital of France on a secret mission as part of a student delegation. There are lines about her written in Tito’s own hand: “She is very kind and cares a lot about me. She wants us to get married. I’ll probably do just that, stop being unmarried.”
Tito had not seen his legal wife Herta Haas since May 1941. He did not see his son Michaud either. According to Evgeniy Matonin, “Gerta remained in Zagreb, underground, but was arrested. True, the Ustasha did not know who exactly they had managed to capture, otherwise her fate could have turned out differently. The Ustasha were misled by her name and surname - similar to German. And this saved Gerta's life. As for her and Tito's son Misha, the party organization in Zagreb was able to place him in one of the families of the local "Volksdeutsche" - Croatian Germans. He lived in it almost until the end of the war."
During another partisan raid, Tito's fighters captured the commander of one of the battalions of the 718th Wehrmacht division, Major Arthur Strecker. We agreed on an exchange of prisoners. Tito urgently asked his envoys to ensure that his wife Herta Haas was included in the exchange list. The exchange took place. Gerta came home to Tito, but found only Davoryanka there, who threw in her face: “You know, dear, there is no room in this room for two women!” When the indignant Gerta asked Tito what this meant in relation to his legal wife, he embarrassedly squeezed out: “Well, agree…”
“They said that after Davorianka’s death in 1946, Tito wrote Herta a long letter, asking her to return to him,” writes biographer Evgeniy Matonin. “Her answer consisted of one sentence: “My dear, Herta Haas suffers humiliation from a man only once!” After the war, she lived a closed life, refused to participate in ceremonial events and accept state awards. She married and gave birth to two more daughters. In one of her rare interviews, she said: “The war separated us. Without the war, everything could have been different." On March 9, 2010, all newspapers, radio stations and television channels in the former Yugoslavia reported the death of Hertha Haas. She was 96 years old."
The rest of the women of Marshal Josip Broz Tito should be told separately. The former mechanic skillfully turned out details and then, as a leader, successfully built a system of a multinational state, but was completely confused in his relationships with the weaker sex.
Yugoslavia was torn apart by regional economic imbalances that 45 years of experimentation with a mixed economy had failed to resolve. Perhaps the federal republic was doomed from the very beginning, and in 1991 the process that began with the collapse of Austria-Hungary simply ended.
ELENA CHIRKOVA
The economic policies of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito have been compared to those of Francisco Franco. One liberalized the planned economy, the other seriously limited the market. Both built a mixed economy, both are considered dictators, and both countries had strong separatist tendencies. Franco and Tito died almost at the same time - the first in 1975, the second in 1980, when global economic realities were approximately the same. Franco left behind a prosperous and united Spain. At the time of Tito's death, his country was at the end of its economic prosperity and soon collapsed.
The war in Europe officially ended in May 1945, but the liberation of Yugoslavia was completed only in October. Resistance leader Josip Broz Tito came to power in the country. At first, he was guided by the Soviet economic model.
Already in 1946, almost all industry was in the hands of the state. Nationalization was easy for the government, which consisted of members of the partisan movement - Tito's comrades-in-arms: many enterprises belonged to Italian and German capital and collaborators.
In 1949, the authorities set a course for collectivization of agriculture. In 1950, about 7 thousand peasant labor cooperatives were opened, each of which received more than two hectares of land. Attempts to create collective farms met fierce resistance from the peasants, even leading to uprisings. Tito did not take extreme measures; as a result, agriculture remained private, but the plot could not be more than 10 hectares. In addition, there were serious limitations in terms of mechanization. As a result, peasants had almost no equipment until the second half of the 1960s.
The planned economic system, copied from the Soviet one, operated in Yugoslavia until the late 1940s. In 1948, Tito broke up with Stalin. He wanted to remain independent from Moscow. In the Soviet Union, Josip Broz Tito was declared a revisionist, but Stalin did not fight his departure from the “general party line” through a military invasion. Evgeniy Matonin, the author of a biography of Tito in the ZhZL series, names among the possible reasons that the USSR did not invade Yugoslavia, the relatively small role of the Red Army in the liberation of Yugoslavia - the lack of "moral right", plus Stalin's attention was diverted by the war that began in Korea in 1950
Due to the threat of invasion, Tito eliminated the army's dependence on Soviet military supplies. Already in 1949, the Yugoslavs began producing their own fighter-bomber, the Ikarus S-49A, which was powered first by Soviet and then French engines, and by the mid-1950s, Yugoslav factories could fully supply the army with small arms, artillery and ammunition. The United States helped build the military-industrial complex of Yugoslavia, both with money and personnel. Subsequently, Josip Broz Tito will create the Non-Aligned Movement and will sell Yugoslav-made military products to member states, which will become one of the two “pillars” of the Yugoslav economic miracle of the 1960s. The second “whale”—Western loans—will be discussed below.
Between East and West
Soon, reforms began in the country aimed at strengthening the role of market relations in the economy. We started with self-government at enterprises. In 1950, a procedure was introduced whereby directors were elected by workers, but only from a list previously proposed to them. Workers were also allowed to set hiring rules, divide the small part of the profit that remained at the enterprise between the “investment” and “salary” items, and distribute the centrally established wage fund among categories of workers. Different sources give different shares of profit remaining at the disposal of enterprises, but in any case it was insignificant - from 5% to 20%. However, these measures also led to significant differentiation in wages.
The workers did not own any shares. All ownership of the companies' tangible and intangible assets remained state-owned. This meant that when fired, the worker lost his rights to everything. Economic science argues that theoretically this leads to underinvestment: the employee will prefer money today rather than investment and growth in the value of the company tomorrow. In practice, this was overcome precisely by the fact that the state itself allocated previously seized profits for investment purposes. The funds remaining with enterprises for capital investments were spent ineffectively: under the constant threat of confiscation of accumulated surpluses, they spent the money on anything and everything. Another consequence of self-management was workers' attempts to reduce staff numbers, which were criticized as anti-social actions.
Since 1952, state planning has been replaced by a regulated market and horizontal links between enterprises. In other words, enterprises themselves had to look for partners.
In the early 1950s, the card system still existed in Yugoslavia. In 1952, cards were abolished, and salaries began to be paid in cash. Prices were partially liberalized (and increased). They could be established by directive from the center, local authorities, be contractual, limited or free. Up to 80% of prices were regulated in one form or another, and approximately 65% of the textile industry - a seemingly ideal candidate for liberalization - fell under such control. The reforms also affected foreign trade: about 5% of enterprises received the right to freely trade with foreign countries, but they could not manage foreign currency earnings. Several dinar rates were introduced. Commercial law was gradually introduced, which even contained rules regulating the bankruptcy of enterprises.
The reforms involved a change in orientation from heavy industry to light industry; the main directions were housing construction and improving living standards. For example, an agreement was signed with Fiat on the creation of a car assembly plant in Yugoslavia. Several hundred construction projects of heavy industrial facilities were frozen.
The state retained centralized distribution of investment resources. The share of investment in GDP was high - about 34%, approximately equal to the level of the USSR. This article was financed by high taxes on businesses. Private business was allowed only small-scale - no more than five hired workers. Private could be, for example, a taxi or a restaurant.
Reforms accelerated in the mid-1960s. Enterprises sharply increased the share of profits remaining at their disposal, which led to a further increase in differentiation in wages. The role of the state in financing capital investments has been reduced. It was decided that banks would become the main source of investment resources, and their share in investment financing increased from 3% in 1960 to 50% in 1970. Interest rates were very low, negative in real terms in most cases. But negative interest rates create the wrong incentives: resources are wasted on ineffective projects. A situation that provokes a non-market distribution of credit funds gives rise to corruption. At the same time, there is an economic explanation for negative interest rates - reformers came up with the idea that banks should have the legal form of credit unions and be controlled by debtors. This system of ownership of the country's banking sector is one of the causes of inflation.
During the pricing reform of 1965, domestic prices were brought up to world prices, but then, however, they were frozen. Foreign trade was significantly liberalized and import tariffs were reduced.
From success to collapse
The Yugoslav economy showed impressive growth until the late 1970s. From 1952 to 1979, GDP increased by 6% per year, and per capita consumption by 4.5%. Between 1956 and 1970, living standards tripled. Yugoslavia has become a consumer society.
However, half-hearted and contradictory reforms led to the accumulation of imbalances. Thus, in 1953-1960 the trade deficit was 3% of GDP. The situation improved due to transfers from Yugoslavs who went to work abroad. For example, $1.3 billion in 1971 and $2.1 billion in 1972.
During Tito's time, people were allowed to emigrate and also to travel freely. In total, more than a million Yugoslavs went abroad to work; unemployment contributed to the outflow of labor. In the 1960s, the post-war baby boom generation began to enter the market, but the economy was unable to absorb such a volume of labor. Unemployment increased from 6-9% in the 1960s and early 1970s to 12-14% by the late 1970s. And if previously it was mostly observed among unskilled workers in rural areas, now qualified personnel in cities, including people with a university degree, have become closely acquainted with unemployment. In 1980, the national average was 13.8%, while in Slovenia - 1.4%, Bosnia and Herzegovina - 16.6%, Kosovo - 39.4%. By 1990, unemployment in Slovenia reached 4.7%, Bosnia and Herzegovina - 20.6%, in Kosovo it decreased slightly (see graph), and ten years later in Slovenia it was 7%, in Bosnia and Herzegovina - 40.1 %.
Self-government at enterprises created distortions in the labor market: workers in successful enterprises with high wages resisted accepting labor from unfavorable industries. This has led to wage gaps for the same professions in different industries, which are not typical even for Western countries. For example, in the scientific literature you can find the following data: the ratio of wages for workers with the same qualifications was 1.5 to 1 for the richest and poorest industries in the 1950s and 2.3 after the 1965 reform, despite the fact that the standard ratio in a market economy, approximately 1.6 to 1. The dispersion of wages within the sector was also large: in 30% of industries it exceeded 3 to 1, while the Western standard is 1.5 to 1.
Almost no new businesses opened. A private owner could not do this by law, and the state focused on developing and maintaining what exists. Bankruptcies were theoretically possible, but the government supported unprofitable production by diverting resources to them. It is believed that in the late 1970s, approximately 20-30% of enterprises were unprofitable and employed 10% of the country's labor force.
There was always inflation in Yugoslavia, but under Tito it was kept under control. In the 1950s it was no more than 3% per year, in the 1960s - about 10%, in the 1970s - slightly less than 20%. Price growth accelerated sharply after the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 - up to 40% per year until 1983, and then became completely uncontrollable. In 1987 and 1988, inflation reached triple digits, and in 1989 it developed into four-digit hyperinflation.
Yugoslav socialism was special also because it did not rely 100% on the bayonets of the Red Army
Although transfers from Yugoslav guest workers grew very quickly, they were no longer enough to plug the hole in the balance of payments. They started borrowing. Since 1961, external debt began to increase. It grew from almost zero base, but at a high average rate of about 18% per year for 30 years. At first, the loan was given willingly, including for political reasons: Tito deftly maneuvered between capitalist countries and the Eastern Bloc - Western leaders believed that Yugoslavia could be broken away from the socialist camp.
In 1991, Yugoslavia's external debt reached $20 billion (about $56 billion in today's terms) with a GDP of $120 billion. Debt as a percentage of GDP was small, but the import-intensive economy depended on increasing volumes of credit. In the early 1980s, the river of credit began to lose strength. It became difficult to take out debt; creditors understood that the loan was being “consumed”: it was used not so much for the development of export-oriented industries, but for maintaining the standard of living. Of course, industrial goods were also purchased, but the main share was in energy and raw materials, that is, in those material resources whose use cannot increase labor productivity.
In the 1970s, a shift away from the reforms of the 1950s and 1960s began. One of the reasons is considered to be the strengthening of the influence of “business executives” as a result of reforms - they opposed the party elite, which wanted to return power. In particular, the share of income that remained at the enterprise decreased again, prices began to be regulated more strictly: in 1970, prices for two-thirds of all goods and services were free, and in 1974 - only for a third. The departure from a market economy was accompanied by the consequences of the oil shock.
The imbalance between exports and imports, which also existed in the 1950s and 1960s, grew: the trade deficit grew from about 10% of GDP in 1971 to almost 50% in 1980. The country did not have stable sources of foreign exchange earnings, except for tourism and arms export/re-export, that is, there were not enough sources for loan repayment. In addition, in the early 1980s, economic growth stopped, and in 1986, GDP began to fall.
The IMF called on the federal government to change economic policy taking into account external debt, in particular to cut wages and reduce public consumption. But there was no leader of Tito’s caliber in the country who could decide to take such unpopular steps. Instead, the government chose non-market measures: they devalued the dinar by a quarter (in 1982), introduced restrictions on imports, taxes on travel abroad, limited the withdrawal of currency from bank accounts, and began to regulate fuel consumption. They decided to stimulate exports through loans, that is, emissions and accelerating inflation. The rejection of market reforms led to economic collapse and the collapse of the country.
Attempts to develop a plan for reforming the Soviet economy under Nikita Khrushchev were made with a clear eye on the experience of the Yugoslav comrades
Poor vs rich
Let's look at the expenses of the federal budget of Yugoslavia in 1990: financing the army - 45.5% (in 1991 - 49.5%), economic transfers (subsidizing agriculture, covering losses in case of bank failure and tax refunds) - 24%, pensions for World War II veterans - 8%, federal administration - 9%, financing of backward republics - 4.6%, social programs - 1.7%.
Almost half of the federal budget was spent on the army. In other words, economically strong republics (Slovenia and Croatia) paid the federal center to suppress separatist sentiments in them, and also sponsor backward regions. The official doctrine stated that after the collapse of the Warsaw bloc, aggression from Western countries was possible, but, as history has shown, the army became an instrument to pacify the rebellious republics.
Slovenia and Croatia were the first to declare independence, in June 1991. The economic motives are clear. Slovenia was a republic with full employment and even a labor shortage (only recently the standard of living there began to decline). For her, the costs of liberalization and technological modernization were the lowest.
The Yugoslav Federal Army attacked Slovenia the day after independence, an attack called the Ten Day War. Ten days later the army left Slovenia and entered Croatia. The war ended with a political victory for Slovenia and Croatia - they officially gained independence, and Slovenia did so even without serious bloodshed. The President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, quickly agreed to its secession, because he himself was going to build Greater Serbia, and few Serbs lived in Slovenia. Milosevic was ready to let Croatia go if it abandoned Slavonia and Krajina, populated predominantly by Serbs, and here the conflict became protracted. In 1992, the federal army supported the Bosnian Serbs in a conflict with Bosnian Muslims, leading to an even bloodier scenario than in Croatia. It is believed that the war ended completely only in 1995. 100 thousand people were killed, 2.5 million lost their homes.
By 1997, all former Yugoslav republics showed a decline in GDP per capita relative to the last peaceful year, except Slovenia, where GDP grew by 5%. The biggest disadvantage, almost twice as large, came from Serbia and Montenegro. In Bosnia and Herzegovina the decline was “only” 26%, partly due to strong population outflows. As Evgeniy Matonin writes in his biography of Tito, “after the collapse of Yugoslavia, inscriptions appeared more than once on the walls of houses: “The mechanic was better!” (a mechanic was Tito’s first profession).”
Slovenia, long a part of Austria-Hungary and accustomed to the German order, turned out to be the most economically successful among the republics of the former Yugoslavia. It lost most of the Yugoslav market, but was able to redirect exports to Germany and other EU countries. Slovenia's per capita GDP in 2013, according to the IMF, amounted to $28.5 thousand, here it overtook Greece and Portugal. According to the Forbes rating, Slovenia ranks first in the world in terms of personal freedom. Croatia is also quite successful, despite starting from a lower position due to the three-year war. GDP per capita in 2013 - $20.2 thousand.
In 2013, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, GDP per capita was $9.6 thousand, in Kosovo - $8.9 thousand. So, the rich republics failed to get ahead in terms of GDP growth: now GDP per capita in Bosnia is 33.7 % of the level of Slovenia, in 1990 the ratio was almost the same - 34.5%.
But that's not where the rich win. Developed regions have been feeding backward ones for almost 40 years: for example, in the first half of the 1970s, Slovenia received a transfer from the federal development fund amounting to less than 1% of its GDP, and Kosovo received approximately 50% of its own. Croatia provided 40% of the country's foreign exchange earnings, but could only keep 7% for itself. This did not equalize the level of economic development; it was only possible to smooth out current consumption. For example, the gap between Kosovo and Slovenia in terms of GDP per capita was fivefold in 1955, but became eightfold by the end of the 1980s. With the collapse of the country, GDP ceased to be redistributed, which was reflected in the standard of living and consumption. Rich regions no longer feed poor ones.
This is how the collapse of Yugoslavia differed from the history of the USSR: in Yugoslavia, the most developed regions wanted to secede so as not to feed the backward ones. Economic rationalism still prevailed over nationalism, although the latter was in abundance. In Belovezhskaya Pushcha, the collapse of the USSR was also supported by the poorest republics, although from the standpoint of economic rationalism they should have spoken out against it. Another illogical feature of the collapse of the USSR is that it passed quietly. Yegor Gaidar in his book “The Death of an Empire” noted that territorially integrated empires, where the colonies are not separated from the metropolis by sea (such as Austria-Hungary), do not disintegrate peacefully. The collapse of Austria-Hungary was accompanied by the First World War. The collapse of Yugoslavia and the subsequent separation of Kosovo into a separate state can be considered a kind of pre-disintegration of Austria-Hungary.
May 7 marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of the long-time leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito. He skillfully maneuvered between the USSR and the West, resisting Stalin's wrath and building his own version of socialism. He united very different peoples, sometimes hating each other, in one country. He held Yugoslavia with an iron fist, and without him it collapsed with a roar.
He, the seventh child in the family, was born on May 7, 1892 in the village of Kumrowiec in Austria-Hungary. Today it stands on the very border of Croatia and Slovenia. As a matter of fact, the politician’s mother was Slovenian, her father was Croatian. True, there is a version that he was in fact a baptized Jew. Some argue that he was Czech on his father's side. Legends and rumors about the origin often haunt great personalities. What's there to be surprised about?
His name at birth was Josip Broz. Tito is a pseudonym that he received at the age of 42. Rumor has it that the origin of the nickname was this. He loved to lead too much. I told one: “you do it”! To the other - “you do this”! "You are that." It sounds like this in both Russian and Serbo-Croatian. Under this nickname he entered world history, becoming one of the brightest figures of the twentieth century and a living symbol of a united socialist Yugoslavia.
But it was later that he became the leader. Before that I had a very poor youth. He graduated from only five classes, in 1907-1913 he worked as a mechanic, first at factories in Zagreb and Ljubljana, then at automobile factories in Austria and Germany. He was a mechanic from God - he was even invited to take part in auto racing. Who knows - if he had not gotten into the whirlpool of political events, he would have developed a career as a racing driver. And so fate brought him to a completely different steppe.
Probably, the need that he experienced in his youth turned into his craving for luxury. In the relatively small area of Yugoslavia, he had over 30 residences - some by the sea, some in the mountains. Emperor Haile Selissie of Ethiopia, visiting Tito on the island of Brijuni in the Adriatic Sea, exclaimed: “They live like royalty here!” World cinema stars also came to see him there - Gina Lollobrigida, Elizabeth Taylor. He had an affair with some actresses - for example, with the Soviet screen star Tatyana Okunevskaya.
Tito's personal life is the stuff of legends. He was a professional seducer; no one has accurately calculated the number of his women. He was married three times. His first wife was the Russian noblewoman Pelageya Denisovna Belousova. The second (albeit with a common-law wife) is half-German, half-Slovenian Bertha Haas. His third and last wife, Serbian Jovanka Budisavljevic, has lived with him for the last 38 years, trying to actively participate in politics. Tito had three children - two sons and a daughter.
But the real main love, the real main business of Tito’s life was still politics. At the age of 18, he joined the ranks of the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slavonia. In 1914, as a non-commissioned officer in the army of Austria-Hungary, Josip Broz went to the First World War. A year later he was captured by Russians. Subsequently, it was in Russia that he finally became interested in the communist idea, even fighting as part of the Red Army on the fronts of the Civil War in 1918-1920.
In 1920, he returned to his homeland, and even marrying a Russian noblewoman did not shake his communist beliefs. The Communist Party in Yugoslavia (until 1929 - in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; SHS) was banned, and Broz, working at various enterprises in Croatia, created underground organizations there. He was arrested several times and in 1929 he was sentenced to more than five years in prison.
But among his fellow fighters he quickly became an unquestioned authority. In the hierarchy of the still underground Communist Party of Yugoslavia, by 1927 he had risen to the position of secretary of the city organization in the largest city of Croatia, Zagreb. Upon his release, he joined the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. In 1935-1936. he worked in the Yugoslav section of the Comintern in Moscow, and in 1937 he returned to his homeland and headed the party instead of Milan Gorkić, who fell into the millstone of Stalin’s repressions. And until his death he did not let go of the reins of the party.
We must give Tito his due: he was not an armchair, but quite a combat leader of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the Second World War. There were several attempts on his life, but he survived. In the spring of 1941, German, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian occupiers entered the country. In his native Croatia, a puppet Independent State of Croatia (ISC) allied with Hitler appeared. And already in the summer of 1941 he managed to raise the first mass uprising in Europe against the Nazis.
People of various nationalities gathered around Tito. And this was his advantage over other anti-fascists - primarily the Chetniks, who relied on the Serbian national idea. Entire regions continually came under the control of communist partisans. Germany was forced to maintain dozens of divisions in Yugoslavia. In the end, it was Tito, and not bourgeois figures, who were recognized by both the USSR, the USA and Great Britain as the leading political force in Yugoslavia.
The fighters of the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (NOLA) led by him, together with the Red Army, liberated Belgrade and Zagreb, but other cities and villages were liberated without Soviet help. This circumstance made Tito more independent from the USSR than other communist leaders. He independently won the right to lead the revived country. The leaders of other future socialist countries could not boast of this. That’s why he didn’t fawn over Joseph Stalin.
Ultimately, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, things came to an open confrontation between the USSR and Yugoslavia. Stalin did not tolerate the obstinate Tito, made attempts to remove him, but could not shake his power. As a result, Yugoslavia became “not a completely socialist country” that maintains good relations with the West, although it is not its ally. And from this intermediate position between socialism and capitalism, Tito derived many benefits.
The "intermediate" position of Yugoslavia manifested itself in a variety of areas. In economics, this consisted in the fact that there were no collective farms in the country, and enterprises had workers’ self-government. True, this self-government was very limited. Real power was in the hands of the secretaries of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (as Tito called his party in defiance of the USSR). So there is no need to talk about capitalism. True, since the 60s, Yugoslavs have had the opportunity to travel to Western Europe to work and have savings in freely convertible currency.
In the field of foreign policy, Yugoslavia was one of the pillars of the Non-Aligned Movement. In some cases it was in solidarity with the West, in others - with the USSR. Thus, Tito condemned the aggression of England, France and Israel against Egypt in 1956, but at the same time spoke out sharply against the introduction of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia 12 years later. Relations with the Soviet Union ceased to be hostile, but Tito retained freedom of maneuver and was not a member of either the Warsaw Pact or the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.
The phrase “We will never again live well as we lived under Tito! popular throughout the former Yugoslavia. The permanent leader of the now defunct country in 1945-1980 was a Croatian by nationality, but is still terribly popular among residents of all the republics that were once part of the SFRY. In any ex-Yugoslav new state, which sometimes very bloodily achieved independence, it is easy to meet on the street a person wearing a souvenir T-shirt with the slogan: “Comrade Tito, come back! Muslims, Serbs and Croats love you. You gave us everything and stole nothing. And now they steal everything and give nothing!” Quite recently, in Bosnia (where the sad anniversary of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the civil war, which caused the death of 200 thousand people is being celebrated), a sociological survey was conducted, and it turned out that in the presidential elections, if Tito had been alive, 60 (!) percent of the population would have voted for him. Even teenagers born after the collapse of Yugoslavia told me: “But Tito is a fucking cool dude!” Both in Bosnia, and even in the Albanian-populated region of Kosovo, they say: if “comrade” Yugoslavia were ruled now, no one would even think of separating.
Celebrating the birthday of Josip Broz Tito in his home village of Kumrovec (Croatia). Photo: www.globallookpress.com
“Now Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia are poor countries,” explains political scientist Alex Vadisevich. - Montenegro lives a little better, Croatia and Slovenia - although not bad, but in terms of economic development they are like the moon compared to the countries of Western Europe. And, of course, these states do not mean anything at all; they are considered either as puppets or as parasites who are constantly begging for loans and subsidies from the EU. Under Tito's rule, the economy of Yugoslavia was considered the best in the “socialist bloc”: young families were given free apartments, wages were stable and constantly increasing. It was in the Soviet Union that you had socialism that was harsh morally and financially, but here everything was simpler. Films with explicit erotic scenes were shown freely in cinemas, beaches were opened for nudists, anyone could travel to Germany or France without a visa, private shops and hairdressers operated: only large factories were state-owned. So people wonder why they swapped fudge for soap.”
Participants in events marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Josip Broz Tito. Belgrade, May 4, 2010. Photo: www.globallookpress.com
A merchant in Mostar is trying to persuade you to buy a portrait of Tito with the inscription: “Iosip Broz - dobar skroz” (loosely translated: “Josip Broz - with him even in the cold”). “He, you know, was as simple as the rest of us,” the store owner sighs dreamily. — He smoked like a locomotive, loved women: he married five times, and got divorced with scandals. He put his last wife under house arrest: he accused him of preparing a coup d'etat, but in reality, according to rumors, he was jealous. Hot guy, a real Yugoslav. Today's politicians are trying to be American: with tense smiles, like castrated cats, in expensive suits, with hairstyles from the best stylists for three hundred euros. This same one was of our blood, a native of the people: he worked in Russia as a mechanic. Under him, our country was powerful and strong. Now it’s a dumping ground for the poor.”
Josip Broz Tito and his fifth wife Jovanka, 1962. Photo: www.globallookpress.com
It feels like he is persuading himself, and not a tourist, to buy. Every resident of Bosnia and Herzegovina, having learned that the guest is from Moscow, will definitely tell: so, Tito fought in the First World War for Austria-Hungary, he was captured, taken to Siberia, there he married a Russian, and fell in love with Russia with all his soul, then returned to Yugoslavia to make a socialist revolution. About Tito's quarrel with Stalin they try not to mention it: it spoils the overall good picture of the wonderful friendship between the SFRY and the USSR.
It seems that if another 25 years pass at this standard of living, the dead president will become more popular in the Balkans than Jesus Christ. In fact, let's be honest: the citizens of Bosnia miss the collapsed Yugoslavia, but they are simply unpleasant to admit it. Otherwise, why did hundreds of thousands of people fight and die? It is much more convenient to be nostalgic for Josip Broz Tito.
The leader of the Yugoslav communists, one of the founders and leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, Marshal Josip Broz Tito died on May 4, 1980 in one of the elite clinics in Ljubljana. In the last years of his life he suffered from a severe form of diabetes. Death occurred at 15:05.
This time of day remained for a long time in the consciousness of middle-aged and older people, since over the next ten years this mournful moment was commemorated throughout the former Yugoslavia with a minute of silence. His funeral was attended by more than two hundred foreign delegations, four kings and about thirty presidents. The Soviet Union was represented at the funeral ceremony by the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev...
The early political biography of Tito, who was born in 1892 in the Croatian village of Kumrovac into a large peasant family, was marked by one prison term, one exile and one hard labor. As a sergeant in the Austro-Hungarian army, he was slightly wounded, captured by the Russians on the Carpathian front in 1915, and spent about two years behind bars. Having been freed, 25-year-old Josip Broz - then he did not yet bear his party pseudonym Tito - joined the Red Army, where he carried out agitation work against the Provisional Government, and as a result was exiled to Siberia. Here he married for the first time - to a peasant girl from near Omsk, Pelageya Belousova. He was able to return to his homeland only in 1920. But here, a few years later, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor for underground communist propaganda. Pelageya was also arrested, but was soon released, and she and her son Zharko returned to the USSR.
From 1935 to 1937, Tito was in Moscow as an employee of the Comintern apparatus, where he was delegated as a member of the Politburo of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Then he finally broke up with Pelageya and began to frantically court the star of Soviet cinema and theater Tatyana Okunevskaya. These two years played almost a decisive role in his further political biography.
In 1939, he became the head of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, later renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. Moreover, not without the help of Stalin, who dealt with Tito’s main party competitors who were in the USSR. Historians claim that their liquidation as enemies of the international communist movement occurred at the “initiation” of Josip Broz himself. And although the organization he led numbered only 10-12 thousand people at the beginning of World War II, Tito skillfully used his party post and his rich leadership abilities to lead the partisan movement in Yugoslavia occupied by the Germans and Italians.
By the end of the war, the partisans were recognized as allies in the anti-fascist coalition as the people's liberation army, which at that time included about 900 thousand soldiers and commanders. She received military assistance from the Soviet Union, England and the USA. The command of the Yugoslav partisans awarded Josip Broz the rank of marshal, which he wore until the end of his days. Already as President of Yugoslavia - and he was elected to this post for life in 1953 - the “son of all nations” often appeared at official events in a white marshal’s uniform.
Who are you, Comrade Tito?
It is difficult to find another person in recent history about whom so much has been written, but so little is known in reality, as Josip Broz Tito. Citizens of Yugoslavia knew the names of his dogs, riding horses and poultry very well, but they never knew the exact date of his birth - according to various sources, there are at least thirteen of them!
For example, according to one of the parish books, Josip Broz was baptized according to the Catholic rite a few weeks earlier than he was born. In the end, they decided to settle on the date established in 1945: May 25, and subsequently this day was also celebrated as Yugoslav Youth Day. Everyone knew the names of his favorite films, books, songs and pieces of music, but it remained a mystery when and under what circumstances he was accepted into the Yugoslav Communist Party, through which he ruled the country unchallenged for three and a half decades.
At least a dozen versions - including those belonging to Tito himself - exist regarding who and when the final decision was made to appoint him to the post of head of the Communist Party. Tito took to another world another, much more important secret, namely: his plan for the defense and protection of the sovereignty of a state that was complex in national structure, and, therefore, rich in hidden contradictions on an interethnic basis. It can hardly be said that this plan was able to prevent the disintegration of Yugoslavia into six independent states that began ten years after Tito’s death - this happened with the “blessing” of the West, which did not want to have a strong European power in the image of Yugoslavia. It is equally unlikely that he could have prevented the bloody war in the Balkans of 1992-1995, but both of these events, one way or another, were associated with the imperfection of the state and political structure of Yugoslavia.
Even the principle of collective leadership, legalized in 1971, which gave a certain degree of independence to the republics of the SFRY, in fact, remained only on paper, or rather, under the dictates of Tito.
But the most “sensational” mystery of Josip Broz’s life is connected with the assumption that he was not the person he claimed to be. Allegedly, the role of the Yugoslav president for many years was played by a specially trained NKVD officer who came from a Russified German aristocratic family. He became so deeply accustomed to the image of the ruler of one of the leading Balkan states that he even entered into a violent conflict with Stalin in the second half of the forties.
In the book “Who are you, Comrade President?” published in Belgrade? Tito's personal physician Aleksandar Matunovich gave several arguments in favor of the version that the real Josip Broz was replaced by a Soviet intelligence officer during Tito's stay in Moscow.
First of all, a young man who was educated in a rural school could not be so well versed in world literature and classical music, know a dozen foreign languages - and at the same time make mistakes in Serbo-Croatian, have brilliant social manners, and, in addition, understand the best varieties wines and cigars, know a lot about precious stones.
Another argument in favor of the “double theory” was the fact that Tito’s fellow villagers did not recognize him when, after the war, he visited his native village for a short time. After that, he stubbornly avoided meeting his friends from childhood and youth.
Dr. Matunovich's sensational assumptions did not cause the effect of a bomb exploding in any of the Yugoslav republics. This is not to say that no one paid attention to them at all; rather, they simply were not taken seriously.
Doctors were unable to “help”...
Tito fell out of favor with Stalin in 1948. The essence of the conflict between the two leaders, which emerged a year earlier, is well known. The Soviet leader demanded that the Yugoslav leadership unite with Bulgaria into a single federal state, with which Belgrade categorically disagreed. It was believed here that with the help of Sofia, where Moscow’s influence was quite large, the Soviet Union would begin to dictate to Yugoslavia its terms on the post-war economic and political structure of the country.
In addition, severe discontent in Moscow was caused by Tito’s intention to send his troops to Albania due to the danger of an invasion of the southern part of this country by military units of the monarchical government of Athens to defeat the Greek partisans hiding here. According to Stalin, the decision of Belgrade, which was not agreed with Moscow, could be regarded in the West as Yugoslav military aggression against Albania, and it is not a fact that England and the United States would not have intervened in this conflict. But Stalin did not need such a “hot spot”.
Be that as it may, already in March 1948, all Soviet specialists, including the military, were returned to their homeland from Yugoslavia. Diplomatic relations were formally maintained, but the ambassadors were recalled. Moscow unleashed a barrage of criticism unprecedented in its scale and severity on the disobedient Tito. Not a day passed without cartoons appearing in Soviet newspapers and magazines depicting the Yugoslav leader in the most unflattering way. And in newspaper materials expressions like “The bandit Tito has a card forever” appeared every now and then; the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was called nothing more than “a group of political assassins and spies.” Methods of economic “retribution” were also used: since 1949, supplies of Soviet goods to Yugoslavia have decreased by 8 times, and the CMEA member states have stopped issuing loans to Belgrade.
The Yugoslav leader, like Yugoslavia itself, remained a thorn in the side of the Kremlin leadership until the death of Stalin and the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw.
Nikita Khrushchev more than once recalled that Stalin publicly threatened Tito with physical violence and first tried to carry out his threat in February 1947, choosing a very cunning plan for this.
When Tito needed rectal surgery, which was planned to be performed in Slovenia by the Marshal’s personal doctors, Stalin offered him the services of the most experienced Soviet doctors, which Tito agreed to, seeing this as a gesture of reconciliation on the part of Moscow.
According to the version of the head of Tito’s personal guard, General Žeželj, set out in the book of retired general Marian Kranjic, “Conspiracies and Attempts on Tito,” published in Slovenia, two Soviet surgeons and a nurse anesthetist flew to Ljubljana on a special plane. It was she, as Zhezhel argued, who should have given the marshal a lethal injection. On the first night after the operation, Tito felt unwell, the wound became inflamed, and Moscow surgeons decided to repeat the operation. But at the very last moment, security did not allow them into the operating room on the pretext that one of the surgeons was clearly drunk. Thus, Tito's life was saved.
Soon, one of the doctors, allegedly realizing that he had not completed the most important task of the Kremlin, committed suicide, and the second died of a heart attack in the entrance of his house.
As Marian Kranjic writes in his memoirs, at least three dozen facts of organizing an assassination attempt on Josip Broz Tito are known - both on the territory of Yugoslavia itself and during his numerous trips abroad, mainly by the forces of nationalist emigration. If we strictly adhere to the facts, then the first attempt to eliminate Tito was made back in 1943 on Hitler’s personal order. The Nazis sent huge forces, including aviation, to “get” a partisan commander in one of the mountainous regions of Bosnia. But the entire headquarters of the People's Liberation Army, led by Tito, managed to escape underground.
Twice, in 1948 and 1952, it was planned to eliminate Tito in completely unconventional ways. In the first case, on one of the Belgrade streets, an empty tram accelerating from a mountain was supposed to crash into his car - this assassination attempt was planned by pro-Soviet officers of the Yugoslav People's Army. And in the second, organized by Croatian nationalists, a ladle of molten metal was supposed to fall on Tito and those accompanying him during his visit to one of the metallurgical plants in Bosnia. It is interesting that the crane operator, who agreed to drop the bucket for 10 thousand German marks, was later tried not for an attempt on the leader’s life, but for preparing technical sabotage at an industrial facility...
Wonderful Life on Borrow
Belgrade's fundamental reluctance to live under the dictation of Moscow and to go its own way, albeit under communist banners, could not but arouse sympathy in the West. The capitals of the leading Western powers quickly saw in Yugoslavia, with its “market socialism,” an alternative to Soviet-style socialism. It is clear that moral and ideological support was accompanied by material support. According to some reports, from the end of World War II to 1961, Belgrade received assistance in various forms amounting to $5.5 billion. Cash loans in the early 1960s amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes reaching half the annual budget of a country with a population of 24 million people. During the years of economic prosperity - in fact, it was a life on borrowed time - an ordinary employee of the institution could receive a monthly salary equivalent to two thousand West German marks. The Yugoslav passport was called an “all-terrain vehicle” - it allowed free access to all developed countries, and a weekend car trip to, say, Italy or Austria was considered commonplace.
Of course, the Yugoslavs associated their material well-being exclusively with the personality of Tito, and it is not surprising that he enjoyed truly popular gratitude and love. He became one of the world leaders of the “first echelon” after, on his initiative, which was joined in 1956 by the leader of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser and the leader of India Jawaharlal Nehru, the Non-Aligned Movement was formed. At the first founding conference of the Movement, held in Belgrade in 1961, 25 countries united on the principles of non-participation in military and political blocs, thereby forming world opposition to both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Unlike many other leaders of the past and present, including Stalin, Josip Broz Tito knew how to live, as they say, in grand style, and never hid it. He always dressed superbly, loved to eat and drink deliciously, and smoked the most expensive Havana cigars.
At his disposal were at least thirty luxurious villas, several luxury yachts, about a dozen of the most expensive cars at that time, and even the entire island of Brijuni in the Adriatic Sea, where Tito built a zoo of rare animals and birds donated to him and where he invited the world to relax famous movie stars. And this is not counting the precious gifts that the Yugoslav president received from foreign delegations. There were so many of them that they occupied several halls in the leader’s memorial museum.
His third and now living wife Jovanka Budisavljevic, a former Serbian partisan who was 32 years younger than her husband (Tito’s second marriage to Herta Haas, half Slovenian, half Austrian, remained civil), inherited only a small fraction of this wealth, sharing it with the sons of Tito from Pelageya Belousova and Hertha Haas. It is clear that during the division of property it was not about villas, yachts and cars - all this turned out to be the property of the former Yugoslav republics - but only about Tito’s personal belongings. Actually, this circumstance allowed Jovanka Broz to consider the manuscript of her own memoirs, which she valued at two million dollars and deposited in a Swiss bank, to be her greatest asset.
Tito is buried in a majestic tomb built in one of the elite areas of Belgrade and called the “House of Flowers”. Dozens of bouquets and wreaths still appear here every year on May 4 and 25. According to the staff of the memorial museum, “the folk trail will never be overgrown here.” There are still many people in all the former Yugoslav republics who sincerely believe that under Tito, what happened to the largest state in the Balkans would never have happened. For them, he still remains an idol, including as a military hero. Senior citizens proudly mention the fact that Marshal Tito was the only commander-in-chief of an army, albeit a volunteer one, in recent history to be wounded in battle.
Well, in the former Yugoslav republics the attitude towards the memory of the marshal is different. The house-museum where the future Yugoslav leader was born remains virtually unnoticed by the Croatian authorities. For several years, the Montenegrin government has been putting up for sale the yachts on which Tito traveled the seas and oceans almost the entire globe - they decided that converting them into museums and maintaining them at the pier would be too expensive for the treasury. Perhaps only in Serbia is respect for the history of Tito’s Yugoslavia and for him personally maintained at the proper level.
In 2007, an exhibition of unique archival documents reflecting Tito’s complex relationship with Stalin, including their personal correspondence, was sold out in Belgrade.
And, although this may not seem like a small thing, the issue of a pension for Jovanka Broz has finally been resolved. She has been seeking decent housing and retirement benefits for many years. Now she deserves it.
