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From International Socialism, No.79, June 1975, p.40.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Tito
Phyllis Auty
Pelican, £1.
THIS IS not a Marxist analysis of the Yugoslav leader but it deserves to be bought as a very readable and comprehensive biography. The author traces Tito’s colourful, larger-than-life, career from early childhood poverty to his present position as the aged figurehead of the Yugoslav state.
She describes how Tito was conscripted into the Austrian army in the first world war, nearly killed in battle and taken to Russia as a prisoner of war. After repeated escapes he found his way to St Petersburg in 1917, joined the Red Army and saw action in the Russian Civil War. Returning to the newly independent Yugoslavia as a convinced communist he became a professional revolutionary. After seven years of imprisonment he went to Russia to be trained by the Comintern in 1935. In the years that followed he escaped notice during the Stalinist purges by adopting a low profile and slavishly following every change in the party line. By 1939 his opportunism paid off and he became party secretary. When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia he ignored Moscow’s instructions and began to build up a partisan organisation for armed resistance. Even after the German invasion of Russia he had to contend with constant criticisms from Russia for failing to co-operate with the largely collaborationist royalist partisans. Despite the unbelievable heroism and suffering of the partisans, Stalin did not give any significant material support until urged to do so by the British in 1943. By the end of the war only Tito and his partisans had the strength or the popular support to rule.
If hardship and sacrifice were the criteria the Yugoslav people deserved to have socialism in 1945. That they got Stalinist bureaucracy and a police state instead was a tragedy determined by historical circumstances. Firstly the working class had not seized power through industrial struggle but by the success of a highly centralised and authoritarian armed resistance movement. The Yugoslav workers had no experience of proletarian, or even bourgeois, democracy and the Communist Party was a military rather than a democratic centralist institution. Secondly, despite the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Stalinist bloc in 1948, there was no prospect of a genuinely socialist Yugoslavia in a world divided between Stalinist and Capitalist states. Experiments with ‘workers’ councils’ notwithstanding. Yugoslavia remains a class society with great inequalities of wealth and the apparatus of a police state.
The author is an excellent biographer, but has no real grasp of revolutionary Marxism. She has an exaggeratedly adulatory regard for Tito and she is least satisfactory when she discusses the contradictions in present-day Yugoslavia. There is no account of the continued spirited class struggle by Yugoslav workers or the police repression of radical intellectuals, Moscow sympathisers and others. Nevertheless, this is a readable and informative historical work which is cheap at the price.
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