Two Views of Tito
THE career of Josip Broz is perhaps the most interesting political career of this century, the man himself a symbol of the times—a peasant boy, half-Croat, half-Slovene, who became a skilled mechanic working in Bohemia, Western Germany, Vienna in the years which led up to the first great war, and who then, as a prisoner in Russia, was caught up in the Bolshevik revolution. Later he refounded the Communist Party of Yugoslavia; then for four years led a brilliantly successful guerrilla war against the German occupation. After this he became the head of a new Communist regime in Yugoslavia, only to revolt—hitherto with impunity—alkainst the domination of the U.S.S.R.; thereafter he attempted to work out a humaner, perhaps more European, form of Communism, Socialist rather than imperi- alist. With all this Tito combines good looks, a splendid physique, a sense of fun and the Pimpernel trick, politically inverted, of having slipped through hostile hands by being so well turned out that the royal Yugoslav authorities could not believe he was a Red.
Given this theme, Mr. Zilliacus is nevertheless disappointing. His hero is too flawless; his political message too shrill. Certain obvious inaccuracies shake one's faith in his account, of which in any case too considerable a portion is taken—with acknowledgments— either from Brigadier Maclean or from Vladimir Dedijer or from Tito's own report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1948. All those who concern themselves seriously with the subject of modern Yugoslavia are bound to -have read Eastern Approaches, Dedijer's Diary, and the 1948 report, all of them available in English. Of course Mr. Zilliacus has been able to add many pleasing details, yet on the whole one puts the book down with the feeling that one has not learnt very much.
The facility with which Marxist doctrine ignores established facts is alarmingly well illustrated by Mr. Zilliacus' biography of Tito. The doctrine, for instance, proclaims that the Western Allies and their enemy Hitler both supported the Fascist traitor Mihailovie against the Yugoslav Partisans until these latter had proved themselves invincible. The facts are that when Mr. Churchill became convinced that the Partisans were fighting the Germans more seriously than Mihailovie, he switched British support to Tito; it is true that the Americans showed more reluctance to do this. Meanwhile the Italians and some German officers helped the Cetniki associated with Mihailovie rather than the General himself. But this aroused Hitler's fury. He intervened personally in the spring of 1943, rebuking Mussolini as on no other occasion, and insisting that the followers of Mihailovie and the man himself must be as sternly suppres- sed as the Partisans. Meanwhile it was Stalin who refused to break with Mihailovie until the last moment. Later Mr. Zilliacus disap- proves of Mr. Churchill's suspicions of Russian policy at the end of the war, but sympathises with Marshal Tito when similar suspicions come to dominate his policy. The Marshal himself seems to be much less afraid of British conservatives than Mr. Zilliacus is, or so his recent reception of Mr. Eden would suggest.
Mr. Newman's account of Tito's Yugoslavia is preceded by a list of books "by the same author" long enough to destroy the confidence of the stoutest-hearted reader as to the possibility of his exactitude. Deliberately discursive as his book is, it none the less contains a good deal of accurate information and not much to mislead. From a historian's point of view it seems remarkably confused, but it is written as a travel-book and not for historians. Of Mr. Newman's book, too, those who are versed in things Yugoslav may well complain that he has very little to tell them which they did not know before, but again he would be justified in replying that they were not the people to whom his book was addressed. Rather he set out to provide the background for travellers to Yugoslavia in the sixth decade of this century.
Mr. Newman is really more interested in Yugoslavia's past than in Tito's Yugoslavia ; to that extent his title is misleading. But of course he neither could, nor wished to, avoid the glaring evidence of Tito's revolution. On the whole he feels that it is Tito who has succeeded and is loved, rather than the revolution which he has brought about. Perhaps the most striking feature of Mr. Newman's book is the extent to which it illustrates Mr. Zilliacus' insistence upon the liberalisation of Communism in Yugoslavia since the break with the Cominform. Wherever Mr. Newman went, people did not hesitate to express the most heterodox views to him, although they had mostly never nett him before, and although he was an obvious foreigner, not like Mr. Zilliacus able to speak fluent Serbo-Croat. How different from Nazi Germany; how different from Soviet Russia. Some of the ideas now current in Yugoslavia, Mr. Newman remarks, "would cause no concern even to a Glad- stonian." Whether he says that in his slightly tedious vein of facetiousness or not, it is always too readily forgotten that Eastern Europe has to some extent been driven to dogmatic leftism without much liberty thanks to the illiberal practices of former regimes of the right Liberal aspirants were forced into the revolutionary ranks.
ELIZABETH WISKEMANN.
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