x Foreword
which Tito’s regime had prosecuted—or persecuted—alleged Fascist collabo-
rators. In post-Yugoslav countries, anti-communism became the new moral
high ground, with many politicians and historians seeking to draw moral
equivalencies between the crimes of Tito and the crimes of the Fascists.^15 They
believed that history had to be rewritten to serve their new national myths,
and they employed the same tools as their socialist predecessors—propaganda,
mythology, and public shaming—to do so.
In the late 1990s, as the wars ended and the archives opened, we began to
see innovative new approaches to thinking about Yugoslavia as a twentieth-
century phenomenon. Pirjevec was among the first of a group of prominent
international scholars of Yugoslavia who grappled with Yugoslav history in
toto.^16 But even more so than survey histories of Yugoslavia, new, rigorously
researched monographs have provided critical foundations for the reexamina-
tion of Tito’s biography. From detailed studies on politics and policing in inter-
war Yugoslavia to innovative histories on the complexities of the Second World
War and the messy solidification of the socialist state, historians began to artic-
ulate a much more dynamic understanding of the context in which Tito came
to political maturity, built a movement, and founded a state.^17 Recent works on
everyday life in Tito’s Yugoslavia and on Yugoslavia in the international system
also shed new light on the connections between Tito the leader and the broader
history of socialist Yugoslavia.^18
In the shifting historiographical landscape of the 1990s and the first decade
of the twenty-first century, a balanced biography of Tito proved elusive, and
attempts tended to swing between hero-worship and vituperation.^19 In part,
this may be due to the expansive topic and the number of archives involved in
any thorough investigation of a political life that spanned from the Habsburg
era to the late Cold War. But more than anything, the absence of critical analy-
sis of Tito’s story speaks to his colossal stature. Consider the profound chal-
lenge of revising the history and memory of not merely the founding father
of one’s late country, but of a myth, a hero, the closest thing to an embodied
state.^20 Slowly, historians of the region have begun to excavate newly opened
archives in an effort to map Tito’s complex biography onto the region’s con-
tested history. The results are mixed: some avoid hyperbole by settling into
quasi-encyclopedic accounts; others situate Tito in the nationalist narratives
that have emerged since the fall of Yugoslavia.^21
In Tito and His Comrades, Jože Pirjevec skillfully navigates the complex terrain
of history and memory that Tito evokes, composing a biography that is both
respectful to Tito’s complicated legacy and sensitive to the emotionally charged
questions of history that have fueled discord in the region. Originally written
in Slovene, the book has been adeptly translated into English by the author