Tito and His Comrades

3

Introduction

Nothing is more to be desired than that the people who were at the head of the

active party, whether before the revolution in the secret societies or the press, or

afterwards in official positions, should at long last be portrayed in the stark colours

of a Rembrandt, in the full flush of life. Hitherto these personalities have never

been depicted as they really were, but only in their official guise, with buskins on

their feet and halos around their heads. All verisimilitude is lost in these idealised,

Raphaelesque pictures.^1

So wrote Marx and Engels, optimists who did not imagine that the revolution
could fail, or that its protagonists could finish on the infamous column. Some-
thing similar happened to Tito, flattered during his lifetime and, after the dis-
appearance of Yugoslavia, often demonized.
Let us try to depict him à la Rembrandt.

Tito’s Eyes

From the moment he stepped onto the historical stage in 1928 due to his bold
behavior in a courthouse in Zagreb that ended with him being thrown in jail
as a communist, Tito’s contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, would com-
ment on his expressive eyes. Reporting on his 1928 trial, the Croatian news-
paper Novosti wrote, “The features of his face call to mind steel. Through the
pince-nez he wears, he stares with clear, cold eyes, but with energy and calm.”^2
In his short essay “Tito’s Return in 1937,” Miroslav Krleža, the Croatian poet,
writer, and chronicler of provincial Yugoslavia and Croatia, recalled:

I was seated in the twilight of my room, looking at the clouds... in this stillness,

the bell rings... I get up and cross the flat... in front of the glass door there is

a foreigner.... After nine years, Tito was like a shadow from the past. At the