Foreword ix
encouraging critiques of Tito and the Yugoslav socialist project.^5 Even Tito’s
official biographer, Vladimir Dedijer, published a controversial volume that
acknowledged the communists’ darker past.^6 A renewed focus on human rights
in Eastern Europe, inspired by the Helsinki Accords in 1975, placed Tito’s leg-
acy under a more critical international lens as well.^7
Several prominent historians of Yugoslavia in the United States and the
United Kingdom also rigorously reassessed key parts of Tito’s narrative and
Yugoslavia’s foundational moment in the Second World War. Among the ear-
liest works were Denison Rusinow and Sabrina Ramet’s influential studies
on the socialist Yugoslav state, which introduced readers to Tito’s dilemmas of
state-building and provided a nuanced analysis of the socialist political proj-
ect.^8 Ivo Banac’s seminal work on the Tito-Stalin split clarified the vicious fac-
tionalism in Yugoslavia’s Communist Party and the ways that Tito, like other
communist dictators, used purges, camps, and repression to solidify control.^9
Stevan K. Pavlowitch’s biography of Tito, published just as the Yugoslav state
collapsed, presented a more nuanced account of Tito’s accomplishments and
failures, introducing new questions for historians to consider when investigat-
ing Tito.^10 But the majority of Communist Party and secret police archives
remained closed to foreign researchers well into the 1990s, leaving historians
without the essential tools for answering these questions and providing revi-
sions of the historical record. Many Western historians interested in Tito’s life
and career thus relied heavily on Allied documents; their prevailing interest, it
seems, was to investigate Yugoslavia’s place in the global history of the Second
World War and the Cold War, rather than to understand the country’s leader.^11
Within the region, the unearthing of repressed histories took on a new char-
acter with the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia in 1991 and the subsequent foun-
dation of seven new countries.^12 National leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia revised the
stories of the Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia. Constructive his-
torical reevaluations unfortunately served as components in new, uncompro-
mising nationalist frameworks.^13 Whereas Yugoslav histories had emphasized
how the Partisans crushed foreign Fascists and their domestic collaborators for
the sake of unifying Yugoslavia, nationalists sought to reclaim the Second
World War experience as a fight against communism. In these new national
histories, Yugoslavia—and by extension, Tito—had foiled their national self-
determination and sovereignty through harsh repression. Politicians actively
engaged in the practice of historical rehabilitation. People who had been con-
demned by the Tito regime as war criminals were recast as popular national
heroes.^14 The new states played a central role in this process, with courts over-
turning socialist courts’ judgments and publicly condemning the process by