How does one assess the fruits of failure? Until Yugoslavia collapsed in a shower of bloodletting, Tito’s biographers managed to remain upbeat. After all, most of them were journalists or sidekicks, not professional historians, and they usually had an agenda. In any case, the archives were closed or only partially open even to the trusted hagiographers. The post-Yugoslav phase presented new problems. No restriction has been obtained on any part of Tito’s archival legacy, at least in the ex-Yugoslav countries, for more than 18 years, but the biographical situation has not much improved. It is a challenge to contemplate reading literally 2,404 feet of Tito’s Belgrade papers alone, particularly if you have language issues. As a result, recent biographical attempts turned out to be no improvement over the old ones, opening the field to the biography by Jože Pirjevec (b. 1940, in Sežana, then in Italy), an Italian-Slovenian historian, who has lived in Slovenia since the early 1990s.

The result is not compelling. However well-positioned, Pirjevec fell far short of the mark. The main reason is the plodding, gossipy, and small-minded narrative, overflowing with unnecessary detail. The scope is frequently so narrow that amidst the breathless force-feeding with still more facts, rumors, anecdotes, and intrigue, we are most often denied a sober analysis of Yugoslav politics, communist or otherwise. The phenomenon of national communists avant la lettre—that of Andrija Hebrang in Croatia, the Slovenian Liberation Front (OF), and issues of Macedonia and Kosovo—is dealt with in a condescending way, without a meaningful attempt to assess Tito’s own wavering on the issues of struggle against the Great Serbian hegemony and federalism (107–111). The implied interpretation that Tito won because of his “Yugoslavist” credentials has been long discredited, making Pirjevec’s claims to the contrary simply anachronistic. In fact, there is much evidence that Pirjevec does not understand the dynamics of the national question in Yugoslavia and hence the core of Yugoslav politics. This is obvious in his interpretations of many key developments (such as a total misreading of the Tito-Šubašić Agreement [127–128], which is practically ignored; near silence on the persecution of religious communities and various political opponents, especially among the minorities; disinterest in practically every ideological and cultural issue from the intellectual origins of various revisionist trends to the nature of “nationalist” demands from the 1960s to the end of the Tito era). Although there are many references to the various ups and downs in Soviet–Yugoslav relations, there is no political or doctrinal analysis of the differences. This is not surprising, since Pirjevec did not use the minutes of the key meetings from either the Tito archives or from Moscow. True, the diary of Veljko Mićunović is the only source for the Brioni meeting with Khrushchev and Malenkov of November 2–3, 1956, but important portions were excluded in the printed versions. The key sections on the Croatian national movement (Pirjevec uses the condescending regime term Maspok) and its liberal-technocratic Serbian equivalent amount to no more than sardonic caricatures (“nationalism”) of actual issues and politics in these last-ditch reform measures.

The absence of politics is actually subsidiary to Pirjevec’s apologetics—sometimes backhanded, sometimes in plain view. No previous biographer of Tito has packed so much negative evidence against the thrice-awarded people’s hero of Yugoslavia: Pirjevec highlights the liquidations of “Trotskyites” in Spain, including Blagoje Parović, member of the KPJ CC, in tandem with the NKVD’s Fourth Section (36–37). He notes that Tito approved patricide, “death sentences, burning of villages, everything dirty and bad,” but did not personally participate in atrocities; others had to undersign and authorize such acts (82). There is Tito’s revealing order from October 1944 on the “cleansing” of Vršac (in the Banat) of its German population (138), examples of his participation in the theft of royal property, and taste for luxury and extravagance (145–149). Indeed, “thousands of collaborators” (an understatement) were executed in the “great butchery” after the war, which “Tito never regretted” (150–152). He also “made the decision” to isolate the pro-Soviet Cominformists in a brutal island-camp of Goli Otok, which, according to one victim, surpassed Nazi and Soviet camps (198–199) and, too, the murder of imprisoned Hebrang, with a lethal injection (188). Moreover, “excessively radical measures” were applied in the postwar collectivization campaign (199–201), and Tito’s character, as described by Aleksandar Ranković (337) and others, is simply gruesome. Yet, the most damning evidence of Tito’s crimes and corruption is used in his favor. These are “initial hardships” (456) that ultimately produced a modicum of prosperity: “One in four households had a car, to say nothing of ‘weekend’ houses that sprouted like mushrooms—a sign of reasonable affluence.… Yugoslavia enjoyed every freedom, apart [!] from the freedom of thought and speech” (451).

Pirjevec is more adroit than most of his predecessors in creating the impression that he left no stone unturned in tracking every aspect of his hero’s life. But this is only make believe. There are snippets of archival collections everywhere, but not from those that really matter. In the key chapters on The Postwar Period (1945–1953), Presidential Years (1953–1973), and The Later Years (1973–1980), out of the total of 1,338 footnotes only 31 are from the Tito archives in Belgrade. Instead, Pirjevec is overdependent on dubious primary sources, notably the Vladimir Dedijer collection in Ljubljana, which is really a catty high nomenklatura oral history. It includes various ludicrous tales, such as how the Croat Communists consulted with the Ustaša regime on the suitability of creating an independent Croatian CP (71), including gossip on Tito’s women (416ff). Pirjevec’s command of secondary sources is distinct, making the numerous slights of hand almost imperceptible. In fact, his politics of quotation are so canny that one can almost overlook various slights to better authors. Alternatively, Pirjevec demonstrates remarkable ineptness when he makes excessive use of biased and amateurish authors such as Dobrica Ćosić, Vjenceslav Čenčić, and Aleksander Bajt. Nor are matters improved by the frequent lifting of quotes from secondary sources, often together with the accompanying text.

Pirjevec is listed as the translator of his book. If so, it is important to note that the translation in many ways does not correspond to the original. Among the major sections that were abandoned are the separate biographical chapters on Milovan Djilas, Edvard Kardelj, and Aleksandar Ranković. These changes, together with numerous minor omissions, as well as further explanatory additions, are understandable, but others are not so easy to justify. Why was it necessary to excise a very important section, which should have been included on page 66, in which Tito’s revolutionary aims are countered to Soviet non-revolutionary and defensist wartime strategy, moreover with evidence on how Moscow tried to neutralize Tito with the help of Mustafa Golubić, an operative of the Red Army’s Fourth Directorate? Why are entirely different citations from the same CIA source (from 1966) used for notably different emphasis (in the original to underscore the brittleness of Yugoslavia, the primacy of its separate identities over the Yugoslav identity, with attention to the secessionist sentiments among the Slovenes and Croats; in the translation, through use of a blander selection [340], to suggest that decentralization will be rough and contested)? Matters are not improved by an anachronistic organizational scheme whereby foreign affairs are always separated from domestic developments. The book is also marred by numerous errors and infelicities.Footnote ¹

Pirjevec’s book is not the worst of all the biographies on Tito. It might even be among the better of them. But due to the predisposition and limited imagination of the author, there is no exit from Pirjevec’s Titoist cul-de-sac. In a revealing concluding passage, Pirjevec tells us that it will not be forgotten “that in the early fifties [Tito] was able to resist the siren song of the West, instead putting himself at the head of the ‘humiliated’ and ‘offended’ of the Third World” (456). This places him at the center of the contemporary Tito revival, which is blind to the fact that Tito never permitted any exit to pluralist democracy. Still more revealing is the concluding sentence, a well-known adage, which Pirjevec mistranslates and misunderstands: “U džamiji bio, klanjao nisam” (“I was in a mosque, I did not worship”), meaning, roughly, I got something for nothing. If that was a saying that Tito “preferred above all others,” it tells us more about Tito than Pirjevec likely intended.