The Young Broz 15
a young Croat Jew employed in a bank, but he stepped down in favor of
Broz, claiming that the secretary should be a laborer and not a clerk. The City
Committee of Zagreb numbered approximately 180 members and was the
most important communist group in the country; so prominent, in fact, that
two months later its decisions were blessed even by the Comintern, which pro-
vided a morale boost for Broz. The emergence of the “Bolshevik line,” aimed
at creating a Leninist unity in the party and saving it from the “nightmare
of the factions,” called Broz and Hebrang to the attention of the police.^43 In
1927, Comrade Georgijević, as Broz was known in the party at the time, had
already been jailed for seven months as a result of his revolutionary activity,
and on 1 May 1928 he was arrested again because of a demonstration organized
by communists in the Apollo cinema that was designed to disturb a social-
democratic gathering there. He was particularly conspicuous among those
shouting: “Death to social-patriots! Death to the servants of capitalism!” Along
with several comrades, he was arrested and detained for fourteen days. At the
time, the following notations were made to his personal file: “Height: 170 cm,
Eyes: gray, Teeth: some lacking, Far-sighted, Wears glasses” and “Until now his
behavior has been impeccable.”^44 Obviously, they did not know much about
him from the police in Zagreb. The following July and August he was arrested
again, and this time charged with seditious activity against the regime. In fact,
during that period the communists engaged in strikes, mass demonstrations,
and riots in Zagreb, some of which cost human lives.^45
The time for revolution seemed ripe after 20 June 1928, when the Belgrade
Parliament was the site of a shooting by a Serb nationalist, a member of the
ruling party. His victims were five Croat deputies, among them Stjepan Radić,
the charismatic leader of the Croat Peasant Party, who died after several weeks
of suffering. Following the directives of the Comintern, the CPY chose this
critical period as suitable for action. Josip Broz and his comrades adhered to the
party line with blind fanaticism, although they had little or no support among
the masses.^46 Thanks to a tip from an informer, the police organized ambushes
and on-the-spot investigations. Five days before Radić’s death, on 4 August
1928, they arrested Broz, who was carrying a Browning revolver for which he
had no license. In his “illegal” apartment they also found a basket full of ammu-
nition and four WWI German bombs stashed beneath a pile of Marxist bro-
chures under his bed (during the trial he declared that they had been planted
there to frame him, but this was not true). “If I had had a 1 percent chance,”
Broz later told a friend, “I would have escaped and started shooting.”^47
He was arrested and beaten to force him to testify falsely against his com-
rades. He kept his mouth shut and decided to start a hunger strike in protest as
he had done during an earlier detention in the rural town of Ogulin. His letter