Foreword xi
himself; Noah Charney played a significant role in editing the manuscript. The
book integrates numerous archival sources, an extensive secondary literature in
Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, German, Russian, and English, and local
anecdotes to present the most comprehensive and circumspect English-lan-
guage history of Tito to date. Pirjevec does not take sides, nor does he ask his
readers to do so.
Pirjevec portrays Tito in his many venerable roles: political strategist, valiant
marshal, global leader. Tito is the mastermind of the Yugoslav Partisan army,
the man who mobilized the most extensive and successful resistance army dur-
ing the Second World War. He is also the heretic who defied Stalin in 1948,
breaking from the Eastern bloc and creating a different path to socialism. He is
the visionary who modernized Yugoslavia, rebuffed Cold War divisions, and
empowered smaller countries across the globe.
But, Pirjevec reminds us throughout the story, there were other Titos as well.
Tito was a dogmatic ideologue driven by an unflinching faith in Marxist revo-
lution. He was an outcast in the interwar Yugoslav Communist party, viewed
at times as shady, untrustworthy, or precarious. Under his military command in
the Second World War, the Partisans killed tens of thousands of enemy soldiers
and their families during and after the war. As a communist dictator, Tito per-
secuted civilians who opposed him and deported political opponents to the in-
famous Yugoslav gulag of Goli Otok, a work camp perched on a barren, windy
island in the Adriatic. He suppressed religious dissent with targeted executions
and imprisonments, and he crushed nationalist opposition.
Unlike most biographies of Tito, which gloss over his formative years, Pir-
jevec analyzes Tito’s life from his impoverished childhood in late Habsburg
Croatia to his global leadership at the height of the Cold War. Set against the
backdrop of European state-building and a global communist movement, the
biography shows how Tito’s ideology formed in response to his personal experi-
ences in the Russian Revolution and civil war, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and author-
itarian interwar Yugoslavia. Pirjevec also draws connections between global
political shifts and Tito’s ideological development, so readers see how he came
to understand the relationship between Yugoslav communism and other mani-
festations of socialism around the world, notably in the Third World. This back-
ground helps us to understand why Tito did not flinch when abandoned by
Stalin and left to his own devices in 1948, and to make sense of the way Tito
balanced authoritarianism with a more flexible approach to communist eco-
nomic structures and culture. Rather than shy away from Tito’s association with
communism, Pirjevec embraces it, allowing this biography of Yugoslavia’s leader
to serve also as a reckoning with the Yugoslav state, its sociopolitical victories
and failures, and its relationship to the international communist movement.