418 The Later Years
whose personality I respected and appreciated. But when the lionesses started
to bite, I was forced to tame them, which was not easy and caused a lot of
misunderstandings.”^135 When, in 1920, he returned home from his time as a
prisoner in Russia, he brought Pelagiia with him. They had five children but
only one, their son Žarko, survived childhood. The marriage began to crumble
in the mid-twenties, but Tito never revealed the motive. Evidently the memory
of that failure was painful for him. In any case, after he was sentenced to many
years in prison in 1928, Pelagiia returned home in Russia to avoid being ban-
ished to her husband’s village (a common punishment for a spouse) or arrested.
She was convinced that she would lose her life in Yugoslavia and that Josip
would be killed if he persevered in his ideas and activities.^136
When settled in Moscow, she enrolled in the KUNMZ and sent Žarko to
a home for children of Comintern agents, being unable or unwilling to keep
him with her and her new partner. When Tito appeared in Moscow in 1935,
she could not even tell him where the eleven-year-old boy was, having lost
track of him. This unmotherly disinterest moved Tito to tears when he told the
story to his friend, Kopinič. Probably for this reason, after a short attempt to
live together again in April 1936, he decided to divorce Pelagiia. “I guess she was
not Tito’s great love,” opined Zdenka Kidrič, who was a friend during their
time in Moscow.^137
There is, however, another story about this episode, as told by the Croat,
Ante Ciliga, who later argued and broke with the Communist Party after living
in Moscow in the mid-thirties. After her return from Zagreb, Pelagiia con-
sorted with a group of Yugoslavs who were critical of Stalin’s dictatorship. For
this reason she was arrested as a “Trotskyist.” This happened during the night,
at the Hotel Lux, in the presence of Tito, who did nothing to help her. Because
of his connection to her, he was in a life-threatening situation, as he was like-
wise suspected of Trotskyism. Pelagiia was expelled from the party and exiled
for ten years to Central Asia. In Moscow the rumor circulated that she had
died in jail.^138 It seems that Tito believed it, considering that he mentioned the
death of his first wife when conversing with Louis Adamic in 1949.^139 Actually,
“Polka” returned to Moscow from exile before the war but was sentenced again
to ten years’ banishment when the split between Stalin and Tito happened,
although by that time she had another family. The KGB made her a deal: she
could leave for Yugoslavia as an agent, but Polka refused this offer, even though
she was told that Tito had killed Žarko, suspecting him of being a Stalinist. In
1956, once rehabilitated, she moved to Istra, a small town near Moscow, where
she lived very modestly as a primary school teacher. There she was discovered
by a Croatian historian, Ivan Očak, who told her the truth about her son and
helped her to renew contact with him.^140