Tito and His Comrades

vii

Foreword

Emily Greble

For three decades, Josip Broz Tito, the charismatic communist dictator of
Yugoslavia, sailed the world in a majestic yacht, the Galeb (seagull). He enter-
tained a motley crew of international celebrities, from Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton to Nikita Khrushchev and Indira Gandhi. Never one to kow-
tow to the expectations of the bipolar Cold War world, Tito made his boat an
oasis of nonconformity. Under his rule, socialist Yugoslavia did things in its
own way. Today, Tito’s yacht lays abandoned in the port of Rijeka, Croatia.
Its hull is rusted, its deck dilapidated. Much like the tangled legacy of Josip
Broz Tito, the founding father and lifelong ruler of socialist Yugoslavia, locals
have mixed feelings about the abandoned ship. It is a nostalgic vestige of the
greatness of Tito’s Yugoslavia, and yet an unforgiving reminder of the state’s
wrenching collapse in the 1990s and the undoing of his legacy.
It is not easy to write the history of the founding father of one’s lost country.
A prominent historian whose career crisscrossed the Cold War border between
Yugoslavia and Italy, Jože Pirjevec is uniquely suited to do so. He studied in
Trieste and Vienna, held important academic positions in both Italy and Slo-
venia, and is familiar with the region’s many archives and the diverse historio-
graphical approaches to Yugoslav history around the world. A prolific author,
Pirjevec has written many highly regarded works on diverse subjects of Yugo-
slav history and has often been the first to lay the foundations of new avenues
of research.
In crafting Tito’s story, Pirjevec navigates a complex historiographical land-
scape. Tito’s predominating story long belonged under the tutelage of the Yugo-
slav state. Starting in the Second World War, Tito began to actively shape his
own legacy, a process he continued for the next few decades. Through inter-
views and several authorized biographies, he presented himself as a symbol of
unity and strength. Under his military leadership, the multiethnic Partisan army