Abstract
Geoffrey Swain, Tito: A Biography, I.B. Tauris: London, 2011; xii + 219 pp.; 9781845117276, £59.50 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Marko Attila Hoare, Kingston University, UK
Geoffrey Swain, in the introduction to his biography of Josip Broz Tito, the former ruler of Yugoslavia, warns his readers that ‘This is a sympathetic biography. It is assumed that Tito’s communist experiment was a worthwhile undertaking … It is therefore suggested here that Tito was “right” until almost at the last moment he got things “wrong”’ (2). Indeed, this account of Tito’s life is almost Titoist, not only in where its sympathies lie, but in its focus on the issues to which sympathetic historians of the Tito era themselves gave priority. This is perhaps inevitable given the choice of sources: the book relies predominantly on secondary sources published before the wars in the former Yugoslavia of the 1990s turned Tito’s legacy upside down. Reference to archival or published documents is mostly limited to the first chapter, and Tito-era BBC and Radio Free Europe reports are relied upon heavily in the later chapters. But no reference is made to Tito’s voluminous published works or to any archival source except in the first chapter, nor to any post-1990 works in any of the Yugoslav languages. Conversely, well-worn sources such as the works of Vladimir Dedijer and Milovan Djilas have been relied upon heavily. This is very much a book in the mould of the pre-1990s English-language historiography, rather than an attempt to re-evaluate Tito in the light of the events of the last two decades, or a synthesis of recent research. Those hoping to find a new or refreshing interpretation of Tito in this book will be disappointed.
The book is essentially an account of the high politics of Tito and his regime. The first chapter focuses on Tito’s life before World War II, tracing his formation as a worker, soldier and Communist activist. Thereafter, Tito the man, as opposed to Tito the leader, essentially drops out of the picture, and the book focuses instead on the series of crises and dilemmas that faced his leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and of the new Yugoslavia that his revolution brought into being. The treatment here is uneven. Perhaps the best chapter of the book is the fifth, which provides a detailed narrative account of Tito’s relations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, yet the 30 pages devoted to this are probably more than is warranted in a 191-page text. By contrast, the Non-Aligned Movement receives only a couple of paragraphs at the end of the book, and other aspects of post-1940s Yugoslav foreign policy under Tito are almost wholly absent.
As for internal Yugoslav affairs, the author also notes in the introduction that ‘in this book there is surprisingly little discussion of the ethnic tensions which ultimately brought down Tito’s state a decade after his death’ (2). That is putting it mildly: the national question has practically been written out of the book, really only surfacing in the section in the final chapter that deals with the Croatian Spring of the early 1970s. There is next to nothing here about the organization of the Yugoslav federation, or of Serbia, Kosovo and the other individual Yugoslav lands. Indeed, Yugoslavia the country features, in this account, as little more than an assumption in the background. This is problematic, given how spectacularly the country collapsed after Tito’s death. Swain’s priorities are the high politics of the Communist leadership and of international Communism, as well as theoretical questions relating to the movement. Some insights relating to these themes are to be found here, but most readers interested in the former Yugoslavia may find these priorities somewhat dated.
That said, the sections dealing with Tito’s relationship to the Communist International in the 1930s, with the dynamics of Balkan regional Communist politics in the 1940s and with the background to the Tito–Stalin split of 1948 are some of the better parts of the book, undoubtedly reflecting the author’s own research background. Swain’s account strongly suggests that this split had major long-term causes that can be traced in part to Tito’s independent-mindedness as a Communist leader since the 1930s – a conclusion that more recent and revisionist scholars of the topic may challenge. All told, this is a book that is likely to appeal to the scholar of international Communism more than to the scholar of Yugoslavia.