Tito’s Death and His Political Legacy, 1980 455
Yugoslav colors at the head of the procession. Together with the great of the
world, there were communists, socialists, representatives of liberation move-
ments from everywhere. I remember the roar of machine guns, with which the
workers’ militia fired blanks, to pay their last respects, and the rising to their
feet of kings and emirs, Thatcher and Brezhnev, the Chinese representative,
heads of every state, ministers, generals from every army. All stood listening to
[proletarian anthem] the Internationale.”^131
Like Stalin, Tito, too, was buried in a mausoleum, although not as gloomy as
the one that the Boss shared with Lenin before his body was expelled from it.
As the place of his final rest, Tito chose the “House of Flowers” at Dedinje,
built after his separation from Jovanka. During one of his last meetings with
General Ljubičić, he said: “When I die, I wish to be buried there... from there,
there is a beautiful view of Belgrade.”^132 In contrast to Lenin and Stalin, he was
not embalmed, since he abhorred the practice. If the testimony of an old UDBA
member, Marko Lopušina, is to be believed, there was a plan for his corpse to
be preserved in this way against his wishes but because of the therapy he had to
endure his body decomposed rapidly. For hygienic reasons, Dolanc and others
who supervised the burial ceremony decided that the coffin should be empty
during the ceremony.^133 These allegations have been authoritatively refuted,
however, by Ivan Dolničar, secretary general of the presidency at the time, who
was in charge of the funeral. He adds that before his death Tito requested in
writing to be buried with his diamond ring, to which many moments of his life
were connected, and so it was done.^134
In spite of thirty-five years of dictatorship, it would be unjust to finish Tito’s
story by saying that he was merely a tyrant, as Stalin was. On the contrary,
because he rebelled against the Stalinist terror, establishing in Yugoslavia self-
managed socialism with its human face, Tito remained in the memory of many
of his “subjects” as a man to whom they should be grateful. The Yugoslavia
that he left at his death was decidedly different from that of 1945. It had passed
from a centralized totalitarian regime to “market socialism” and had known
rapid industrialization, thanks to which the popular masses had experienced a
constant increase in their standard of living—although this was mostly due to
foreign aid or international loans. Even though power was in the hands of the
LCY, the self-managed system allowed citizens, at least on the local level, to
exercise some influence on political life. Opposition of every kind was prohib-
ited, but intellectual life and literature were not subjected to preventive censor-
ship and, more important, the borders were wide open, not only to the passage
of people but also to the passage of ideas.
Without Tito, the split with Stalin would not have occurred. “That was his
own doing,” Kardelj and Bakarić affirmed.^135 His epic rebellion against Hitler