Tito: And the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia

Rating:
Summary: Croatian war crimes of the 1940s exposed
Review: During the recent troubles in former Yugoslavia we learned to hate the Serbs for their policy of ethnic cleansing. But this book explains that the Serbs had ample reason for their hatred of the Croats and for their desire to turn the tables on their former tormenters. The one ray of hope is that many Yugoslavs live in peace with their neighbors and intermarry regardless of ethnicity or religion, not obsessed with prolonging the hatred.

The atrocities against humanity committed by the Croats against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies (500,000 murdered) were more sadistic and horrifying than anything since. The evil Ustasha, the terrorist arm of the Croats, specialized in sadistic torture prior to murder, all in the name of religion.

I picked this book up to learn about Marshall Tito, the fascinating political figure who successfully resisted both Hitler and Stalin, and who kept the tinderbox of Yugoslavia at peace throughout his life. Tito must have been an amazing man. And he didn't do it with terror. It is incredible how he maintained independence in that part of the world surrounded by such aggressive nations. The Tito period was a time of prosperity for Yugoslavia, making even their Italian neighbors envious.

Rating:
Summary: Readable bio on the world's only benevolent dictator
Review: I've racked my brains and the only benevolent dictator I could come up with was Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Richard West writes a favourable, even-handed, and comprehensible account of Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1980. He even provides a background to the South Slavs before talking about Tito, because it is important to understand the dynamics going on under the Ottoman Empire and later the Balkan absorption by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878.

Tito, a Croat, was indeed born during an interesting period, when tensions were growing in Europe between the two alliance blocs, the Entente and Central Powers. He had his brush with Pan-Slavism, as he went to help the Czechs and Slovaks during his military service.

West also takes time to talk about the Independent State of Croatia, the fascist puppet state under Ante Pavelic, the mastermind of Yugoslavian King Alexander's assassination in 1934. That regime was brutal, as Serbs were butchered, bombed while in worship, and hurled off cliffs. Even the Franciscan priests participated in the killing.

Tito's wartime exploits make interesting reading, as he was besieged from all sides, by Germans, Italians, the Ustasha (Croatian fascists), and monarchist Serbs under Draza Mihailovic. It didn't help matters that the Allies saw Mihailovic as the more viable threat against the Germans. Only when Churchill got information from the code-breaking Ultra did he realize that Tito was the greater danger against the Nazis and hence recognized that they had better give Tito higher priority.

His own brand of Communism, Titoism, was freer than Soviet Russia, Maoist China, or Hoxha's Albania, but also tried to make the various nationalities live together in collective brotherhood. That hope would turn out to be unrealistic, but he did try to clamp down on nationalism. True, he did jail some opponents and nationalists, such as future Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, but he didn't carry out large scale massacres like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. He was one of two "good Communists" in the eyes of the West, the other one being Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania.

His role as one of the leaders of the non-aligned third bloc, along with India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser holds relevance today. 11 Sept has made non-alignment a non-option. Unfortunately I haven't seen any countries who have made a firm stance of neutrality.

This book was written before the outbreak of the war in Bosnia despite its publication in 1994. In light of what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo, critics might tear into Tito for keeping the genie of nationalism firmly stoppered. It was a little after a decade when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Like leaders such as Charlemagne and Louis XIV, his death left a leadership vacuum that led to political fragmentation.

Rating:
Summary: A Rational Yugoslav
Review: Mr. West depicts the legendary marshall in a powerful and distinct manner, pointing out throughout most of his book that the unity and stability of Yugoslavia after WWII stemmed from Tito's forward-looking political philosophy, putting aside the wanton carnage of Ustasha and Cetnik militias and focusing in the rebuilding of a nation surrounded by suspicion and devastation.

By overcoming Churchill's Machiavelian realpolitik and Stalin's carnivorous vacuum filler, Tito galvanized a Communist nation into unparalleled prosperity and experimented on a system without precedents. Truly, his death catapulted the land of Southern Slavs into the demise and bloodshed of the 1990s, Yugoslavia lacking leaders with character, vision and charisma to resume his political -if not economic - masterpiece. A book well-written and well-researched recommended for the historian and current affairs hound alike.

Rating:
Summary: 3.5 Stars
Review: Richard West's book on Tito is more than anything, a study of the relationships among the inhabitants of eastern europe rather than a biography. Nevertheless, the book is well written, informative and at many times entertaining. It is crucial to understand the history of the area known to many as the powder keg of europe in order to learn about Tito. West does a good job of depicting the complicated relation between not only Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, etc. but even more importantly - the Muslims, Catholics, Christians, etc. I am glad that West was so staunch in his disapproval of the Ustasha - whose methods repulsed even the Nazis. However, he seems to be one-sided in the sense that Serb extremist atrocities are rarely mentioned and not as detailed. The struggles of Eastern Europes does not have good or bad guys. Both Serb and Croat extremists have performed horrendous acts on their own people and will have to look back on their history with deep sorrow and regret. To be fair, both sides have also had many strong character leaders attempt to end the violence. Many of which paid with their lives. Tito was the only person to unite the region. I wish West had even more access to Tito to provide a better picture but I guess there are other books that are more precise. In the end, the first 3/4 of the book are solid but the last section regarding the state of the Balkans after Tito seems rushed and is rather forgetable.

Rating:
Summary: Almost comically misguided and pro-Serbian
Review: The reader from Zagreb already pointed out some of the many factual errors and erroneous conclusions which this book is rife with. The author seems especially error-prone when straying away from Tito himself to attempt making larger conclusions about the events in the region and their sources and consequences.

Instead of picking on little details, I'll just make some helpful recommendations.

If you want insight into Tito and the wartime Partisans, read Milovan Djilas's "Wartime" and Fitzroy McLean's "Eastern Approaches".

For some further (less flattering) insight into Tito postwar, read Ion Mihai Pacepa's "Red Horizons", which is mostly about Rumania and Causescu, but mentions Tito several times, speaking in some detail about the relationship between the two dictators.

If you want insight into the true Serbian role in WW2, read the excellent "Sebia's secret war" by Philip J. Cohen. The facts are readily available, they've just been obscured by the long-discredited postwar propaganda that the author chooses to repeat in this book, for reasons known only to him.

If you want to know about the massive bloody payback that was extracted right after WW2 for the crimes the Ustasha commited during the war, against both them and anyone else implicated by proxy (and just for not being zealous enough politically), read "Operation Slaughterhouse" by Guldescu and Prcela. It's difficult to find, and is a large volume, but if you really want to know, try to find a copy.

If you want to really know how the wars in the former Yugoslavia started, read Laura Silber and Allan Little's excellent "Yugoslavia: Death of a nation". And no, you won't find old-fashioned platitudes about religion and "all of them being savages, so what can we do?" in there.

I can see from some of the other reviews here that this book has already done damage. But if you are really curious about the region and it's history, read the above volumes, and you'll certainly be far better informed than this sadly deficient volume can provide.

Sadly, the author seems keen on repeating old and tired cliches about the region, dating from WW1 (and that weren't particularly true even then), and his thin attempts at excusing the role of the Serbs in the recent wars with moral relativism are almost upsetting (knowing less informed readers might believe such conclusions). After all, if everyone started extracting payback for historical wrongs, we'd be left with a planet of blind people. Such arguments are no excuse, even with the over-inflated claims the author makes about WW2 war crimes, while ignoring the true extent of the crimes of the Chetniks (and their habitual and consistent cooperation with Nazis and Italian Fascists).

As for his claims about Bosnian "fundamentalism", well, he's clearly never actually met a Bosnian Muslim. Or at least, not before the wars, which understandably somewhat tipped people there in a unfortunate direction. Without a shadow of a doubt, no Bosnian would have tolerated Wahhabi vermin among their midst before the horrors of the recent war there. Trying to project minority postwar attitudes backwards is very ill-informed, and just plain wrong.

The author also mentions postwar Ustasha terrorist acts, however, he absurdly seems to think that problem was not dealt with in-country. In fact, it's well known (among those of us with a clue, at any rate), that all Ustasha attempts at postwar infiltration were met with failure and shooting deaths of the participants. Also, agents of the infamous UDBA (Yugoslav secret police) were famous for hunting down both Ustashe and other dissidents worldwide and assasinating them. This is well known. It puzzles me how the author was unaware of the extent of such activities by Tito's secret police.

All that said, I can agree with the conclusion that Tito was the most benevolent of the recent dictators, and he truly did make Yugoslavia a world player while he was in charge. No small achievement, there. Also, the standard of living and personal freedoms (while certainly not maching, say, those of the United States), were better than in all other communist countries. Then again, that was at the expense of massive debts, that had to be paid eventually. But, it was fun while it lasted.

Either way, don't waste time with this volume. Read the others I mentioned if you want true insight.

Rating:
Summary: West tells the Truth
Review: This book contains absolutely one of the best explanations of the current Balkan fiasco. While dwelling on Tito, West also explains the ethnic disputes that have torn apart Yugoslavia. West's coverage of the Ustasha is particularly accurate and enlightening.

Rating:
Summary: Rather pointless
Review: This book fails both as a history or analysis of Yugoslav politics or as a critical biography of Tito. The first few chapters, which contain an overly compressed "historical" review of the South Slavs from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, contain factual, spelling and interpretative errors so obtrusive and atrocious that they are almost laughable. For example, West claims that the leader of the 1573 Croat peasant revolt was "Donja Stubica" - that was actually the name of the village in which it started. He claims that in 1871 the Croat revolutionary Eugen Kvaternik led an "armed assault on the Serbs," when in fact Kvaternik launched a foolishly bold uprising against the Habsburg Monarchy while many of his fellow rebels were themselves Serbs. He persistently misspells the surname of the great Serbian linguist and writer Vuk Karadzic as `Karadjic' - and there are literally dozens of similar mistakes that riddle the entire text. West basically argues that the problems in Yugoslavia are directly tied to historical events and religious schisms that occurred during the Middle Ages, and reduces the wars which ensued after Yugoslavia's collapse to religious conflicts. He also insists that there are no national nor even ethnic differences between the Serbs, Croats or Bosnian Muslims; rather, he says they are all the same ethnic group with three different religions, thus demonstrating his glaring ignorance of the differences between `nation' and `ethnicity,' among other things. He focuses extensive attention and invective, perhaps rightfully, to the WW2 Croatian Ustasha regime and the often scurrilous role of the Croatian Catholic Church during this period. On the other hand, he downplays or denies the much less extensive but often quite brutal crimes of the Serbian Chetniks during the same period - even to the point of making the ludicrous claim that the Serbian Orthodox Church was "never clearly associated with Great Serb nationalism or with the Chetniks." One of the main flaws of this book is that its primary focus is on World War II - the implication being that this period crucially influenced events in the 1990s. This is only true to a certain extent, but oversimplifies and greatly downplays the even more vital 40+ ensuing years. In fact, at times this book rather eerily resembles texts often seen in Croatian and Serbian newspapers during the late 1980s and early 1990s which speak of events from 50, 150 or even 500 years ago as though they happened yesterday. West's ignorance and lack of objectivity also leads him to (rather outrageously) twice refer to the Kosovo Albanians as `Shiptars' - among non-Albanians, this is a racial epithet, not a neutral descriptive term. Tito, the central figure in this book, fares little better. Although West has a nostalgically favorable view of Tito, he offers no new insights into Yugoslavia's long-time president and strongman, only the reworded observations and conclusions from other biographies, memoirs and histories, both favorable and critical. Often he provides details on completely trivial matters from Tito's life, at one point even citing actor Richard Burton's impressions of Tito and his wife. Aside from a few mildly engaging anecdotes taken from his own travels in Yugoslavia, there is little of interest here. Reading West's book is a colossal waste of time; my recommendation is for readers to check it out of a library, peruse the photographs and then go straight to the bibliography to find more worthwhile books to read on Tito, WW2 and the Ustasha terror and the former Yugoslavia in general.

Rating:
Summary: Great history of the Balkins
Review: This book is very well researched and is one of the only books not to carry any ethnic bias. It is a history review rather than a documentation of Tito the man. It starts just after the Toman Empire collapsed and ends just weeks before the recent fighting of the 1990s.

I have been living in Slovenia for the last 3 years and made some travels into Serbia and Croatia. I learned more from this book that the 3 years living here. It is long and somewhat academic but a reasonably easy recreational read.

Do NOT get the other book about Tito (by Djlias)-- this was written for an audience who is interesting in debating Markist philosophy.

Rating:
Summary: Useful history of Yugoslavia
Review: THIS BOOK sheds some light on the origins of the wars in Yugoslavia. Like all serious studies, it shows that the wars were not the result of ethnic differences. There are no ethnic differences among the Slavs who make up Yugoslavia. Serbs, Croats and Muslims are not separate nations: they are all Slavs.

But why then did this ghastly conflict suddenly erupt when it did? To answer this question, we have to look at Yugoslavia's economic record. In the late 1980s, Yugoslavia suffered a massive economic crisis.

From its inception in 1945, Tito's Government had tried to integrate Yugoslavia into the capitalist system, receiving credits from the US Government. In 1960, the Yugoslav Government gave up the state monopoly of foreign trade; this meant that it could not protect the country's infant industries. It borrowed heavily from Western banks: the resulting debt payments absorbed 30 per cent of export earnings.

By the 1980s, Yugoslavia had the highest level of debt to national income of any country in Europe. The EC and the banks rejected the Yugoslav Government's requests for help with rescheduling their debts. They demanded that the debts be paid, whatever the cost. The ever-increasing debt burden caused economic disaster. Yugoslavia's economy suffered a catastrophic collapse, which led to a social breakdown.

Susan Woodward's book, The Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and dissolution after the Cold War, (Brookings Institution, 1995), "The conflict ... is the result of the politics of transforming a socialist society to a market economy and democracy. A critical element of this failure was economic decline, caused largely by a program intended to resolve a foreign debt crisis. More than a decade of austerity and declining living standards corroded the social fabric and the rights and securities that individuals and families had come to rely on." West's book, like the Guardian/Channel 4 book, Bloody Bosnia, ignores this economic disaster.

In 1983, Yugoslavia placed itself in the International Monetary Fund's hands. The IMF imposed economic measures that as usual worsened the problems. It insisted on cuts in the universal social services and in the programmes that to some extent redistributed wealth to the less developed regions. Devolution of power to the regions also undercut the economic integration so vital to building a united nation.

Yugoslavia stopped being a single market: the South of Yugoslavia lost its Northern markets for primary products. Only a third of its national output and 20 per cent of its capital movements circulated between the regions. This, incidentally, shows how important it is that Britain's workers reintegrate England, Scotland and Wales economically, even under capitalism, to prevent further economic decline.

Between 1980 and 1984, Yugoslavia's standard of living fell by 30 per cent, and unemployment rose to 15 per cent. By 1989, Kosovo's unemployment rate was 50 per cent; in the southern regions, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia, it was between 20 and 30 per cent.

West sheds light on the origins of the wars in Yugoslavia. He shows that it is wrong to blame the whole disaster on Serbian aggression, or indeed on Croat fascism or on Bosnian fundamentalism.

From a 'Right-wing' perspective, West argues, wrongly, that any attempt to build a self-reliant economy must end in disaster. He argues that only international capitalism can bring peace. But the Yugoslav government, as we have seen, relied increasingly on capitalism, creating rivalry between regions and enterprises. This deepened regional inequalities, and increased the pressures towards devolution and break-up. The government imported goods that Yugoslavs could have produced themselves; this created huge debts and increased unemployment.

The people of Yugoslavia, like those of other countries, will have to take responsibility for rebuilding their country. This is a process in which outside forces will have no part.

Rating:
Summary: Very informative and readable
Review: This is an excellent history of Yugoslavia over the past critical fifty years, and sheds light on the roots of Yugoslavia's violent breakup in the 1990's. Reading this book will give insight into the sinister nature of the communist dictator Tito, who like Ceaucescu of Romania was one of the Western powers' favored, "good" communist despots. The chapters on Tito's rise to power during World War 2 and subsequent years of control will let readers in on the reasons for the 1990's Yugoslavian wars. Well worth the cover price.