Tito

Geoffrey Swain has written a sympathetic biography of Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz, ‘Tito’, for an English language readership. Tito, of course, is not short of English language biographies, sympathetic or otherwise. In praise of Tito and his achievements there is the early Tito Speaks: His Self Portrait and Struggle with Stalin (1953), a translated work by Vladimir Dedijer; the important Tito: A Biography (1970), by Phyllis Auty (the Yugoslav Communists’ court historian), based on the author’s numerous interviews with her subject; and, more recently, two readable accounts by non-specialists, Jasper Ridley’s Tito (1994) and Richard West’s Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1994). Tito’s notable detractors include Socialist Yugoslavia’s insider-turned-naysayer, Milovan Djilas, and his Tito: The Story from Inside (1980); Nora Beloff with Tito’s Flawed Legacy (1985); and Steven K. Pavlowitch with his essay Tito: A Reassessment (1992). Swain’s book is a welcome addition to this slightly crowded field. Breaking with a convention of Tito’s Anglophone sympathisers, Swain’s emphasis falls not on the Partisan war (1941–5) but on Tito’s early Communist years and his time at the head of Socialist Yugoslavia after 1945. In the first half of the book, Swain looks at Tito’s politically formative period in the trades union movement in inter-war Yugoslavia, and his perilous years as a Comintern functionary, in and out of Moscow. The latter half of the book looks at the departures from Socialist orthodoxy taken by Tito and the Yugoslav Communists after the break with Stalin. Unlike many commentators, Swain is willing to treat Tito’s experiments in political economy as, by and large, coherent and substantial. Long discussions of Socialist workers’ self-management and party reform make this a book as much about Titoism as about Tito himself. This is not to say that Swain does not have clear ideas about his subject’s traits and his personal influence on Communism in Yugoslavia—he does. Tito is shown to be a figure ‘instinctively on the left’ (p. 20) of Yugoslav Communism. Swain also detects an air of self-reliance in the pre-1945 Tito, evidenced by his ability to find alternative resources and support when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was out of favour with the Comintern during the 1930s (p. 26). Yet with these credentials established, and as the book progresses to the post-1945 period, Tito the man fades out in favour of Titoism the system. In the sections on Socialist Yugoslavia, analysis of party and economic reform are favoured over analysis of Tito’s personal style of leadership or, say, the cultivation and reception of his public image and personality cult. Swain tends to use memoir literature from Tito’s inner circle (Milovan Djilas, Svetozar Vukmanović, et al.) for what it tells us about policy decisions rather than for insights into the man himself. Each of Tito’s four wives receives little more than a paragraph of text. Biographical titbits are absent from this account in favour of an assessment of Titoism as a viable organisational alternative to the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies

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