The Later Years 419
Pelagiia died in 1968, before Žarko managed to bring her to Yugoslavia. Tito,
who took care to assure her a modest pension for her party work before the war,
asked his ambassador to send a wreath to her grave. Otherwise, he erased her
from his life and did not try to get in touch with her in the fifties and sixties
when he began visiting Moscow again, even forbidding any mention of her.
Before the beginning of the war, Kardelj advised Djilas never to ask about
her, as she was an unpleasant and hurtful topic for Tito. Nevertheless, when he
died, a photo of Pelagiia was found in his usual daily briefcase.^141
Tito nurtured sentiments of affection for his son Žarko, who, thanks partially
to his bizarre character and partially due to repressive Soviet pedagogical meth-
ods, became an absolute hooligan and caused his father a great deal of trouble
after they reconnected. Until the beginning of the war, Tito had little to do with
him, since the boy continued to live in various children’s homes or with tutors,
in quite difficult financial conditions. They were so difficult that the secretary
general of the Comintern, Dimitrov, was moved to assign him a monthly allow-
ance of an additional 100 rubles, since the 250 that he got was not enough.^142
During the war, Tito thought of his son often and was very proud when in-
formed that Žarko, who at seventeen had volunteered for the Red Army, was
proclaimed a hero of the Soviet Union when he lost a hand during the Battle
of Moscow. This was not exactly accurate: he was awarded only a medal for
defense of the country, but this did not diminish Tito’s love for him.^143
At the end of the war, the boy returned to Yugoslavia and began to cause his
father a great deal of trouble. He drank too much and behaved licentiously.
Žarko and a Russian officer engaged in a duel over a ballerina, provoking a scan-
dal. The following day, when Tito’s secretary Gustav Vlahov (whom Tito had
assigned to watch over his son) told him about the incident, Tito exclaimed with
outrage: “You should have shot him!”^144 Žarko ended up under house arrest but
did not come to his senses. Shortly afterward, he wounded himself “by accident”
in the center of Belgrade so seriously that Stalin decided that given the complex-
ity of the surgery, he would send him his personal doctor. But this was not the
last of Žarko’s wicked deeds. In 1966 he nearly killed Lazar Koliševski, the Mace-
donian politician, who was taking a walk at Brioni with his wife and daughter.
Žarko was attempting to shoot crows from the window of his apartment and
narrowly missed his father’s guests. When Koliševski, upset over the incident,
hurried to Tito to complain about him, the marshal replied in a resigned tone:
“Go on, what happened, happened. You know what kind of guy Žarko is.”^145
Elsa Johanna König/Lucia BauerOn 13 October 1936, Tito married a twenty-two-year-old German woman, Elsa
Johanna König, who lived under the name Lucia Bauer and worked as a radio