THE BALKANS: Area of Decision

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Russia’s Red Army lunged last week across the Danube into Yugoslavia. British forces landed on the coasts of Albania, on the islands of Dalmatia, inched into Greece. From two sides of the Balkan massif, Europe’s two greatest powers were approaching a junction in the Balkans. Waiting at this mountainous meeting place of empires was a man who had newly risen into political history after a cryptic lifetime in the political underground: Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Tossed up suddenly in the slipstream of military and political movements, he was as little familiar to most of the western world as the lands he defended. But his two years of constant guerrilla warfare with the Germans had made one fact clear: in an area of decision, he was a man of decision.

The Man. The details of Tito’s life history were obscure, but the results were plowed deep in Tito’s gullied face. But before the plowing began, before he was even Tito, he was plain Josip Broz. His father was a Croat blacksmith in the village of Klanjec, near Zagreb. He had scarcely begun to learn his father’s trade when the shot with which the Serbian nationalist, Govirlo Princip, killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, shot young Josip Broz into the Austrian Army.

He was sent to the Eastern Front. Then, like Bela Kun, the future head of Soviet Hungary, and Tibor Szamuely, the future head of Hungary’s Red Terror, Josip Broz was captured by the Russians, or deserted to them. It was 1915. He was 19. The Russians packed him off to Omsk, in Siberia.

Two years later, Russia’s war front collapsed like a dynamited wall. Most Russian soldiers were peasants and they had heard that inland the peasants were dividing the land. They surged homewards. In Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks were preparing to seize power. The greatest revolution in history had begun.

In Omsk Josip Broz saw the mass execution of 1,600 striking railroad workers by Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. When the Red Army reached Omsk, Josip Broz joined up. The young Croat who didn’t want to fight for the Habsburgs fought through the hard, bitter years of Russia’s civil wars.

When they were over, Broz entered a school in Moscow. It was probably the West School, where foreign Communists were trained for ticklish work in foreign countries. For in Moscow the blacksmith’s son from Klanjec had acquired a philosophy of life and action (Marxism), a party (the Communists) for which to work, conspire,* live and if necessary die, a Russian wife and son Zharko, who was decorated last year by Marshal Stalin for heroic service in the Red Army. Like most Russian-trained Communists, Broz soon acquired a dangerous mission also.

Mission from Moscow. Just a decade after he marched away from the smithy, Josip Broz returned to Croatia, but not to blacksmithing. His job was to organize a metal-trades union. He had left Austria. He returned to the crazy-quilt kingdom of the South Slavs whose Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians would presently be held together in uneasy union by a tight little dictatorship headed by King Alexander II. Under the dictatorship only the Serbs supported the dynasty. Only tractable parties were legal. Trade unions were outlawed. As a Croat, a Communist and a trade-union organizer, Josip Broz soon found himself in jail. He stayed there five years. He was tortured. But to Communists, jail is a commonplace, torture an annealing experience.

Marx had written: the philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world. What busy Comrade Broz was doing to change the world between his release from jail circa 1930 and his sudden emergence in Yugoslavia in 1941 is mostly his secret.

Tito emerged from underground obscurity for a brief moment during Spain’s Civil War. One fall day in 1936 a group of German International Brigaders drove a band of Moors through the village of Palacete near Madrid. In the village was a unit of Yugoslavs, nearly dead from exhaustion. For days they had been hold ing a gorge in rain, mud, under enemy fire. But when they were ordered to retire for rest, one protested bitterly. That one was Josip Broz. Soon afterward, he was among a hand-picked group of Communists withdrawn by the Red Army’s Military Intelligence to join some anti-Franco guerrilleros behind Franco’s lines. He was next heard of in France, working in the section of the underground whose function was to dispatch men from all over Europe and the U.S. to fight in Spain. He did not reappear again until the fascism he had fought in Franco Spain had overrun Yugoslavia in the form of Naziism.

The Marshal. Yugoslavia got into the war on the Allied side with no premeditation and almost no preparation. The pro-Axis Regency of Prince Paul had been tolerated until March 1941. When it knuckled under to Hitler’s demands that Yugoslavia become a German satellite, the Yugoslavs rebelled. In a bloodless coup détat they tossed out Regent Paul, installed King Peter II, 17. It took the Wehrmacht ten days to overrun the unprepared country. The British, who are believed to have inspired the coup against him, hauled Prince Paul away to South Africa, where they are still paying his Johannesburg nightclub chits. King Peter fled first to Athens, then London. But a Yugoslav colonel, Draja Mihailovich, retired to the hills with a handful of soldiers and kept on fighting. He may or may not have heard about the hard-faced Croat named Tito, who, a month before the German armies invaded Russia, had re appeared in Zagreb and Belgrade.

Tito paid a round of quiet visits to Yugoslav leaders, asked them to forget their political differences and unite against the Germans.

For a time Tito, the Croat, and Colonel Mihailovich, the Serb, worked together. Then the followers of Draja Mihailovich clashed with Tito’s Partisans. Tito accused Mihailovich of collaboration with the Ger mans. What had caused the rift? Was it traditional Yugoslav nationalist differences, subtly played on by the Germans? Had Moscow decided to crowd out the Communists’ only important competitor for control of the Yugoslav resistance? Whatever the cause, though Chetniks and Partisans both continued to fight the Germans, they also began to fight each other.

Tito’s movement attracted the most followers. He struck the Germans at every chance, captured their supplies and arms. His Partisans, dispersed through the hills, ate when they could, which was not often, fought when they could, which was often enough. The Partisan emblem was a red, five-pointed star. For a time a yellow hammer & sickle was used by one brigade, soon was discreetly dropped. Word spread through the hills, towns and cities : a remarkable Croat named Tito was fighting the Germans. Yugoslavs from all classes and political parties joined him, including, last week, a son of Mihailovich. Young, strong women like Stana Tomashevich marched and fought like men. Their favorite weapon was the German Schmeisser machine pistol. Their favorite song was a haunting old air sung to these words :

Hey, Slavs, in vain the depths of hell threaten,

O Slavs, you still are free.

The blacksmith’s boy from Klanjec had become leader of a resistance movement that at one time or another pinned down as many as 18 German divisions in fruit less, fraying warfare in the wild Croatian and Bosnian mountains. But even in the darkest days, when it seemed as if the out side world would never hear the thunder of war reverberating among the beleaguered hills, Tito seldom grew irritable or despondent.

Mission from Britain. At first the outside world heard chiefly the reverberations of the Tito-Mihailovich clashes. In London and Washington the facts of the Yugoslav resistance were obscured in a game of propaganda hide-and-seek. King Peter’s men, through ignorance or fear, or both, would not acknowledge the existence of the Communist leader of the Partisans. They controlled the channels of news coming out of Yugoslavia to the Allied side. For two years the Allied public did not even hear of Tito.

Often the deeds of Tito were ascribed to Mihailovich, whose loyalty to King Peter was unquestioned.

Then Russia took a hand. In Tiflis (Stalin’s old home town), a Free Yugo slavia radio station was set up. From it the news about Tito’s Partisans was broad cast to the world. But Tiflis was three weeks by courier from Yugoslavia. News from Tito was always late.

Inside Yugoslavia, the growing Parti san movement more & more took matters into its own hands. If King Peter was not interested in the Partisans, for their part they saw little reason to be interested in their absentee monarch. This feeling in creased when the King made Mihailovich a General and Minister of War. Slowly but surely the Partisan movement became also a resistance movement against the old Government.

There was another factor. For several months a British Brigadier, Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, had lived with the Parti sans as head of an Allied military mission.

Brigadier Maclean understood the relationship of politics and warfare. He put down what he had observed about Tito in a report that landed, fat, thick, crammed with a story that even yet waits to be published, on the desk of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. That report, and Britain’s need for any fighting ally, convinced Downing Street that its warm smile for Peter’s exiled Government, and its cold shoulder toward Tito, would have to be reversed.

Churchill acted. A shake-up occurred in the Yugoslav Government in Exile. The new Premier was Dr. Ivan Subasich, a Croat, who was in Manhattan when the summons came. In Bari, on the Italian coast, he sat down with Tito, roughed out a working agreement. The exiled Gov ernment recognized Tito as head of his provisional administration inside Yugo slavia. Tito agreed that at war’s end Yugo slavs would get a chance to vote for what ever kind of government they wanted. Meanwhile, the King might continue to call himself King.

Federated Yugoslavia. But he was King of a new Yugoslavia he had never known. Its shadow government, which had never known him, flitted from town to town to avoid the Germans. But while it ran, it also ran a big part of Yugoslavia. And the Allies were doing business with it. It was dominated by a Communist, but it was no Communist government.

It had been brought into existence in 1943 at Jajce, with a program that provided for : 1 ) the creation of a federated Yugoslavia composed of the six states of Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia; 2) establishment of “truly democratic” rights and liberties; 3) inviolability of private property; 4) no revolutionary, economic, or social changes.

This was a program that could rally most Yugoslavs. The federated states, ‘six small countries with equal rights within one country, could remove the traditional frictions that had divided the Yugoslavs. It was the solution a generation of Yugoslavs had dreamed of. It promised 7 million members of the Greek Orthodox Church, 5 million Roman Catholics, 1,500,000 Mohammedans more, rather than less, freedom. It held out to foreign capital, which Yugoslavia would sorely need when reconstruction came, the promise that Yugoslavia would be one place in the world where a man could turn a profit. This year the blacksmith’s boy of Klanjec became Marshal and Provisional President of Yugoslavia.

The new Government, called the National Committee of Liberation, was scarcely more Communist than its program. Out of 17 Cabinet officers, five were Communists. Among the nonCommunists: Foreign Minister Josip Smodlaka, friend of Czechoslovakia’s late, great Thomas Masaryk, onetime Yugoslav Minister to the Vatican; the Rev. Vlado Zecevic, Minister of the Interior (and hence in charge of the police). Minister Zecevic was an Orthodox priest who commanded a detachment of Chetniks until late 1941, when he switched from Mihailovich to Tito.

Federated Balkans. Beyond the hope of a federated Yugoslavia loomed the larger hope of a federated Balkans. If Yugoslavia had been a crazy quilt of related national stocks in precarious cohesion, the Balkans were Europe’s craziest quilt of all. Seas and islands of nationalities as different as Serbs, Rumanians, Germans, Greeks and Turks washed around each other in a confusion that defied the drawing of political frontiers. Through the centuries bigger nations, practicing the policy of divide and rule, had kept the Balkans divided and conquered. But a new spirit was abroad. At last federation seemed feasible. Russia was reported to favor the idea—for it promised peace and security in one of Europe’s most troubled areas.

But what would Britain say? Britain had supported Tito as an expediency of Empire politics. But Tito’s loyalty was to Moscow, not to London. It was sound policy for the Russians to refrain from setting up Communist governments in the Balkan states now occupied by the Red Army. In fact, the Russians were acting with ostentatious correctness. They had even asked Marshal Tito’s permission before sending the Red Army across the Danube. But Britons would be less than empire builders if they were not aware that, in the cold-blooded language of politics, the Balkans had become a Russian sphere of influence. As such, it undid the work of a hundred years of British statecraft, and made Russia a Mediterranean power—poised massively above the artery of Empire at Suez. The area of decision for the eastern Mediterranean had been snatched from the British lion by the blacksmith’s boy from Klanjec.

Britain could not fail to be aware of this development, but she showed no undue concern. Nor was she likely to, so long as she kept her imperial health and Russia kept her political head.

* In his Condition of the Working Classes in England, Communist Founding Father Friedrich Engels lamented that the English workers were so backward that they had never learned to conspire.