12 The Young Broz
When the Red Army drove Kolchak’s bands from Omsk in 1919, reestablish-
ing rail communications with Petrograd, Josip decided to leave with Pelagiia,
his wife. In Petrograd, where he remained for approximately three weeks, he
received news of the creation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes
after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. When he read a newspaper arti-
cle reporting that a revolution had broken out there—the news was false—
he felt he had to participate. The Soviet authorities placed him at the head of
the group of war prisoners from the former Austrian territories, now part of
Yugoslavia, who were to be repatriated.^28 He returned home with them in Sep-
tember 1920, crossing the Baltic, but not without a serious incident in Vienna.
Some Serb fellow travelers denounced him to the local Yugoslav diplomatic
representatives as a communist. At the Austrian-Slovenian border in Maribor
he was detained with his pregnant wife and kept in quarantine for a week. After
this they were allowed to return to Broz’s native village.^29
Russia, and particularly Siberia, with its taigas (forested regions), moonshine,
and horses, remained forever in his heart. He would come to know the land of
the Soviets intimately, in all its enormous industrial and military might, and
would retain a sentimental attachment to it even in his old age. In spite of dis-
illusionment, doubts and conflicts, Tito was always convinced that “the socialist
continent really exists, that it embraces one-sixth of the globe, that it represents
the start of an unstoppable process.”^30 When in 1952, at the very height of the
conflict with Stalin, one of his generals began cursing the Soviet Union in vulgar
terms, he reacted irritably: “Every wolf has his den that he never abandons. It
is the same with me.”^31 As Veljko Mićunović, one of his most important diplo-
mats, said at the beginning of the seventies, Tito filed his last will and testament
in Moscow since he had no faith in the people who surrounded him.^32
Party AgitatorReturning home, tragic news awaited Josip Broz. His mother, whom he loved
dearly in spite of the fact that she was a stern and austere woman, had been
carried away by the Spanish flu two years earlier, a devastating epidemic that
struck throughout Europe shortly after the First World War. As Polka remem-
bered, he cried and later confessed, “It was the saddest day of my life.”^33
The country he returned to was completely different from the one he had
left. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy had vanished, and a strange chimera
had been created in its place: the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, in
which the South Slavs were united under the scepter of the Karadjordjević
Dynasty, regardless of their different cultural and historical heritage and their
different economic and social development: the Serbs were Levantine and
Orthodox, the Croats and Slovenes Central European and Catholic. Together