4 Introduction
very beginning, I had the impression that he had not changed at all, but at the
same time, that he had changed a lot. Six years of prison and three of exile have
erased that ingenuous and immediate freshness from his face. Instead of a smiling
youth, I saw a serious foreigner whose eyes, behind that pince-nez, seemed dark
and stern.Tito spent the entire night catching up with Krleža, the comrade who sensed
in Tito an old friend, and someone who had been reborn, cast anew. Their dia-
logue lasted until dawn, as Krleža learned some of the details of Tito’s adven-
turous life and revolutionary ideas. Tito told him of his homesickness, which
one night after his return from Moscow compelled him to visit his native
village, though he knew the risk he took in doing so, since he was an outlaw at
the time. When he reached his father’s home, he had the impression that noth-
ing had changed in that faraway place since his last visit so many years ago,
despite the great events that had changed the world in the meantime. “In the
silent closeness of this lyrical monologue,” Krleža continued, “Tito’s voice
changed and his blue, pigeon-like eyes darkened into an intense, metallic blue.
‘Kumrovec is snoring, God damn it, but since when does everyone in this coun-
try snore!?’ asked Tito with the rage, the violence with which, in our language,
all the higher and lower divinities are thrown from the skies.”^3
Tito’s eyes likewise impressed Milovan Djilas, one of his most fervent fol-
lowers (and later opponents), when they met for the first time. “He was a man
of mid-size, rather strong, lean. Lively, slightly nervous, but in control of
himself. His face was hard, calm, but gentle, the eyes blue and benevolent.”^4
The Serbian doctor and veteran of the Spanish Civil War (and later chief of
the Partisan Sanitary Service), Gojko Nikoliš, wrote in his diary of his first
meeting with Tito, in November 1941: “We met in a large and simply furnished
room.... After my salute and report, I sized him up, immediately observing
some of his traits, this man for whom we had waited so long and who would
shape the fate of our fight. The first thing I noted were his blue, slightly veiled
eyes, then his sculpted face, the face of an ideal worker, a worker who seemed
to have stepped out of a Russian proletarian poster.”^5 It is all well and good that
Tito’s collaborators and followers should find him charming, for his country-
men were already primed to admire him. Foreign politicians were likewise
impressed, and similarly commented on his eyes with distinctive frequency.
Fitzroy Maclean, chief of the British Military Mission to the Supreme Staff,
described his first impression when he met Tito in 1943: “Tito was an im posing
personality: he was fifty-two years old, physically strong—hair iron silver. His
regular face, as sculptured in stone, was serious and tanned, wrinkles—resolute
without appeal. Beneath the glare of his light blue eyes, nothing remained
hidden. In him was concentrated the energy of a tiger ready to attack.”^6 The