What would Tito think today of the anarchy and division into which his former state of Yugoslavia has fallen. He died in 1980, apparently secure in leadership and power, and for 12 years after his death four sentries stood permanently on guard over his grave in Belgrade, but they were withdrawn in 1992 when Yugoslavia ceased to exist as a nation. Born Josip Broz a century before that date, Tito (as he became) was a Croatian subject of the old Habsburg empire and fought for it as a soldier in the Great War. B, trade he was a skilled me chanic, though from a rural background, and in the 1920s he became an active Communist and served a term ink prison for his activism. When the Stalinist Thirties arrived he rose rapidly inside the framework of the Cominterm and the Politburo, showing powers of local leadership and" organisation as well as dogmatic devotion to Marxism. But it was the second World War which really brought Tito on to the world stage, as leader of the Yugoslav resistance against Hitler, and it was probably Churchill's decision to back him militarily and politically which allowed him to become something of a hero figure in the eyes of the West. In 1948 he had the daring to defy Stalin a the de facto imperialism of Communist rule from Moscow, so heading a state which was certainly Marxist, but also virtually sovereign and independent. Tito was married several times and became something of an old Pasha in later life, keeping a luxurious hunting lodge he was a fanatical hunts man and several homes. Far seeing, ruthless, able, a pragmatic patriot as much as an ideologue, politically.
A man of his time, today he is apparently discredited in Serbia, but the civil war is bringing about a gradual reaction in his favour, particularly among the Croats. Jasper Ridley has done justice to a genuine statesman and a remarkable figure in the terrifying jungle of mid century Mitteleuropa "politics.