148 World War Two and the Partisan Struggle
unluckily enough, they are mostly peasants, and you know how the cult of the
uniform is widespread in the countryside. Every peasant dreams his son will be
a public servant, especially one that can wear a uniform.”^507 Tito changed his
clothes three or four times a day, and sunbathed regularly to preserve his tan.
Once in power he had dental work to fix his teeth, and at the end of the fifties
he started to dye his hair, to the surprise of his admirers.
He also shook hands in a peculiar way, barely lifting his hand, so that others
were obliged, spontaneously, to bow. As Savka Dabčević-Kučar observed, no-
body could more clearly show you your place—with a mere glance or while
shaking your hand in greeting—than Tito could. He was like this even with his
more intimate colleagues, such as Bakarić and Kardelj.^508 “He communicated
not just with words,” Dabčević-Kučar noted, “but also with his facial expres-
sions, his speech, his look, but mostly in the way he carried himself.”^509 Not for
a moment did he cease to be the secretary general of the party, the president of
the republic, and the marshal, wrote Dobrica Ćosić.^510 From the Karadjordjevićes
he inherited the tradition of becoming godfather to every ninth child born in
a family, and at the racecourses, horses started appearing “from the Marshal’s
stables.”^511 He persisted in the role of godfather for almost twenty years, but
soon abandoned breeding horses: confidential reports he received from the
secret police about his popularity perhaps alerted him to the fact that his show-
ing off had gone too far. “The tendency towards excessive vulgar display shown
by the more highly placed members of the regime is one of their least endear-
ing characteristics,” wrote the American consul in Zagreb in the mid-sixties.
“The gap between the theory and practice of communism in this respect is
perhaps resented more by the general public than any other aspect of the social
system.”^512 The situation was particularly repellent during the first years after
the war, when the authorities introduced meager bonuses for food and clothing
for the majority of the population, allowing a lucky few to obtain goods from
special “diplomatic shops” that in the past they could only have dreamed of. In
May 1944, for instance, Edvard Kardelj longed simply for a fountain pen, which
was unobtainable in the woods. One year later, as one of the strongmen of the
new regime, he was in a position to ask for much more.^513
Tito was often away from Belgrade and regularly stayed near Lake Bled in
Slovenia, where he passed the summer months to escape the oppressive heat
of the capital. From 1947, however, his favorite residence was on the Istrian
archipelago of Brioni, where he occupied the villas of the Habsburg and Italian
aristocracy. At first he settled in the villa of the duke of Spoleto (later ceded
to Kardelj when he decided to build another one that was better equipped
for large receptions). He ordered the afforestation of the islands, transforming
them—as the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany wrote in the