The Later Years 417
came in the seventies, when he returned from abroad on his plane. On landing
at Belgrade airport he noticed Stevan Doronjski from the window, a represen-
tative of the Presidium of the LCY, waiting to receive him. Tito joked drily:
“OK, they are here. The regime is still strong, we can disembark.”^129 He was not
so in love with himself as to accept every scrap of flattery and to deny every
false step. For instance, he could not bear the popular song that compared him
to a “white violet,” and he was ashamed of his first photo with Churchill during
their meeting in Naples, where he appears stiff in a pompous uniform that had
been sent him by Stalin. “I am in a pose, as if I’d just hiked down from a moun-
tain,” he said.^130
Tito knew how to fascinate even those who were not under the influence of
his charisma. In 1973, during a visit to Kiev, at the intermission of an opera,
Brezhnev began reciting a Russian ballad. To everyone’s surprise, Tito also
began to recite Pushkin, poem after poem, for at least twenty minutes. The
Russians were stu pefied and enthusiastic. Brezhnev, already tipsy and prone to
emotion, cried the entire time.^131
Tito loved women “more than Suleiman the Magnificent,” to quote his last
wife, and was a sexual enthusiast, even during the most rigidly clandestine
life, the heaviest Partisan struggle, and into his old age. He liked to remember
a countess from Styria who was so fond of young revolutionaries that she gave
them shelter in her Viennese home. Her male protégés, not at all grateful, called
her Parteistrohsack, the “party’s straw mattress,” for her favoritism of lovers. “You
know how we were, we illegals... ,” Tito told Jovanka, not without merry self-
complacency. “Surely we were not monks.”^132 He claimed to have learned eti-
quette during the sub-officer course in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army,
but it is quite probable that the noblewoman from Graz was also his teacher.
Tito married three times, but had two partners with whom he lived out of
wedlock.
His first wife was Pelagiia Denisova Belousova, “Polka,” whom he married
in a church in 1918 and in a civil ceremony two years later, since the Bolsheviks
did not recognize religious weddings.^133 Pelagiia was the daughter of a Saint
Petersburg worker exiled to Siberia at the time of the tsar because of his leftist
leanings. In Omsk he found a job as a master builder in a railway workshop,
as Tito later did. And it seems that he learned the first rudiments of Marxism
from his future father-in-law. When she married young Josip, Pelagiia was only
fourteen, much younger than he, and a beautiful girl.^134
Tito’s women ran the gamut from beautiful to pretty, but were also quite
aggressive. He once confessed: “Every one of my wives was a virgin when I knew
them, and a naive little lamb. During the marriage they all became lionesses,