THE NATIONS: Proletarian Proconsul

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The symbols of the Soviet Union’s sudden greatness are powered (as befits a state whose philosophy is materialism in flux) by twin motors, and airborne on the wings of mighty, pulsing transport planes. Fanaticism, like the air, knows no frontiers, and Moscow’s big, drab airport (once the Imperial Field of Mars) is now the visible focus of Communism’s pretentions to world dominion.

Never before in history, except possibly at the court of Genghis Khan at Karakorum, has there been such a coming & going of representatives of races from all the ends of the earth. Chinese statesmen, a British archbishop, American generals, Azerbaijanian revolutionists, Indian conspirators, Mongolian ministers, Poles, Persians, Rumanians, Finns, Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, Turks, Koreans, Australians, Canadians, Norwegians and many more have been received on this field in public panoply while the band struck up the Soviet anthem.

Or they have settled down, conspicuously unheralded, their surreptitious coming noticed, if at all, like the flight of birds at night when some stir betrays their passage. On this airfield have been glimpsed, for tantalizing moments, the sinews which move the mighty Soviet hand whose political fingers probe, by diplomacy or conspiracy, into every cranny of the world—the back alleys of Buenos Aires, the palaces of Paris, the bottle-towered temples of Burma.

The Kalmuck peasant, who yesterday guided a primitive plough hitched to a camel, is picked up as by zhar ptitsa, the legendary firebird, and deposited for some revolutionary anniversary on this field. He knows with a naked realism sometimes denied to Europeans, with their insulating layers of sophistication, that he is in physical contact with a new magnitude of power —vlast, sovyetskaya vlast: Soviet power.

For this airport is the antechamber of the Third Rome, as Russian Orthodox theologians, with a diametrically opposite meaning, used to call Moscow the Golden.* Through it is entered the doctrinal capital of Communism, the fanatical modern faith which holds that man can assert the ultimate potential of his humanity only by denying God and yielding himself wholly to Reason and its instrument, Science.

That is why, when seasoned Communists of every nationality say joyfully: “I am going home,” they do not mean to their native lands, they mean to Moscow. Thence, if Moscow has not purged them for their sins (and by conversion, they unreservedly admit its right to do so), it will send them forth again in partes infidelium, with renewed clarity of purpose, on their implacable Marxist mission.

Out of the Night. Of all the foreign Communist commuters who ever descended from the clouds on Moscow airport, by far the most important was a short (5 ft. 8 in.), stocky, blue-eyed man known to the world as Tito.

In 1946, he wielded more personal power than any other man in Europe except Joseph Stalin, and, with the same exception, he was perhaps the world’s most successful proletarian statesman. He ruled a country which, by virtue of its position on ancient highroads of empire, was a key territory in the strategy of present peace or future war. His army had caused the first major shooting incident, the first ultimatum and the first wild rumors of imminent war of the world’s uneasy armistice.

Last week, he sent an impenitent note to the U.S. referring to the five unarmed U.S. fliers his planes had shot down and killed over Yugoslavia (TIME, Sept. 2). Tito claimed that U.S. air forces had violated Yugoslav sovereignty 32 times in one week. The State Department replied with a stiff, 3,000-word note which added up to a simple: “Not so.” Most Americans began to realize that Tito, long billed as the paladin of Yugoslav democracy, was no democrat, and that he bore watching. What they did not know about him would fill several police archives, and perhaps did.

Rumors about Tito’s origin were fantastic, but scarcely more so than the mystery enveloping him. According to various accounts, he was:

¶ A Russian general named S. Lebedev who assumed the part after the original Tito had been liquidated in a Russian purge.

¶ A Ukrainian Jew.

¶ A U.S. citizen of Croat extraction who had once been a district organizer of the U.S. Communist Party.

According to the most coherent (or least sensational) report, Tito’s mystery began in the village of Kmrovec, Klanjec county, on the border of Slovenia and Croatia. Klanjec is situated in a region famed chiefly for plump wheat, fat geese, burgeoning plum trees (essential to the manufacture of rakija, Tito’s favorite drink), and a sprinkling of minor middle-class watering places (where, presumably, Tito got his first glimpse of the class enemy).

He was born, according to conflicting versions, on March 6, May 7 or May 25, 1892, the son of Franjo Broz, a Croat blacksmith, and his wife Maria. He was christened Josip at the Kmrovec Catholic church, and entered the parish school. According to some authorities, Tito was “a bad, violent schoolboy,” who soon left his father’s house, became a locksmith’s apprentice.

The Convert. Various tatters in the blanket of secrecy reveal Josip Broz as an Austro-Hungarian Army private during World War I. Destiny, in the anonymous guise of a War Office bureaucrat, sent him to the eastern front. There, he was captured by (or deserted to) the Russians, was packed off to Siberia. In 1917, Tito entered the Red Army, fought in the Russian civil war, was chosen for special training as a Communist foreign agent, became indelibly indoctrinated with the century’s great new faith. During his novitiate, he found time to marry a Russian girl who bore him a son, Zharko (today one of Belgrade’s gayest problem-playboys).

In 1924, the proud father returned to his homeland which by then had become Yugoslavia. His chief baggage was Communist fanaticism. He promptly put it to use as a union organizer among the metal workers of Zagreb and Kraljevica. In 1929, Tito was arrested by the Yugoslav Royal Police and remained in jail until 1934. At this point, the biographical barometer registers ceiling zero.

Conflicting reports have Tito: 1) in Spain as a “trusted man” with the International Brigade; 2) in Vienna, Prague and Paris as a member of the Communist International’s roving undercover political bureau; 3) in Vienna as a university student (Tito still speaks German with Vienna’s sloppy accent); 4) in Switzerland; 5) in Moscow and Leningrad taking courses in partisan warfare at revolutionary finishing schools; 6) in Moscow, as Comintern representative of the Yugoslav Communists.

Out of the Fog. Then, after Hitler’s fateful invasion of Russia in 1941, Josip Broz suddenly emerged from the fog as Tito the Partisan, who fiercely fought Germans (as well as non-Communist Yugoslavs who followed the late General Draja Mihailovich).* His new revolutionary nom de guerre is variously explained as derived from: 1) the initials of Tajna Internacionalna Terroristicka Organizacija (Secret International Terrorist Organization); 2) St. Titus, a convert from paganism who, it is believed, also did missionary work in the Balkans; 3) a legendary 13th-Century Slav warrior called Tito, who is reported to have killed more Mongols than anyone else in his time.

The 20th-century Tito quickly attained similar distinction: Winston Churchill himself reported that Tito was killing more Germans than anyone else in Yugoslavia. So Allied support switched from Mihailovich to Tito. After a brief period of misty enthusiasm—he was presented as charming, kindly, courageous, only incidentally Communist and a self-made marshal—the fog of mystery lifted for good. Marshal Tito emerged as one of the Kremlin’s most faithful, fanatical, and efficient proletarian proconsuls.

Protection of the People. After the defeat of Germany, Tito, the proletarian proconsul, completely supplanted the pseudodemocrat. On the numerous new holidays he decreed, peasants in rich, fertile Croatia, villagers in hot, dry Dalmatia or highlanders in the barren Karst Mountains assembled in the public squares (under rigorous orders to display “sincere devotion”) and chanted: “Tito belongs to us, we belong to Tito.”

Behind the thin camouflage of a pseudo-liberal constitution and a National Front Government, Proconsul Tito shaped the government of the South Slav lands into a model Communist police state. His NKVD-trained secret police force, OZNA (Committee for the Protection of the People), together with the Partisans, has liquidated an estimated 200,000 people and imprisoned an estimated 100,000. It has established agents in all Balkan countries and Italy. OZNA is headed by able, notoriously cruel Lieut. General Alexander (“Marko”) Rankovich, 35, former journeyman tailor and veteran Communist (see cut).

The new police is supplemented by new, lay-staffed people’s courts (“daggers in the hands of the people,” according to Communist Minister Milovan Djilas*) and by a nationwide network of Soviet-like “people’s councils” whose secretaries usually double as local Communist Party secretaries. The councils issue a secret karakteristika (character reference) for each citizen, which is sent on to his superior or employer. The slightest hint of disloyalty toward the Government in the karakteristika is sufficient to bar its subject from getting a job or food. (Recently, a U.S. official living in Belgrade was informed by his maid that she had to quit and go to work for the Government without pay, as “punishment.” Reason: she had declared she felt sorry for the condemned Mihailovich because he reminded her of her dead father.)

Tito maintains a standing army of approximately 800,000 men, trained and supervised by Red Army officers, armed with Red Army guns and decorated with Red Army insignia. So deeply ingrained are its conspiratorial habits that it still hides large stores of weapons in the hills against possible counter-revolutionary surprises.

Hillbilly Government. But surprises are unlikely. The Proconsul has summarily silenced dissenters. Sporadic stabs of opposition still come from Yugoslavia’s new Partisans (mostly followers of exiled Croatian Peasant Leader Vladimir Macek), who have taken to the hills. But the mass of anti-Communist Yugoslavs are leaderless. The middle class is being systematically liquidated, since ration cards are issued only to workers (says the model Constitution: “He who does not contribute to the community may not receive from it”). Almost all businesses are confiscated by the simple device of convicting the owners of collaboration with the Germans. The Catholic Church remains Tito’s strongest potential opposition. So far, he has not dared to tamper with it seriously.

Belgrade intellectuals jeer that Tito heads a government of hillbillies, because the new civil service (carefully purged of nonCommunists) includes many a Partisan who can barely read & write. Actually, the Government is well-stocked with Communist theoreticians. Tito’s chief adviser is meticulous, humorless Vice Premier Edvard Kardelj, 36, a former schoolmaster with a Goebbels limp and a Molotov mustache, who spent six years in Yugoslav prisons for writing Communist pamphlets. Later, he fled to Russia where he headed Odessa’s Revolutionary School for the Balkans. Currently he writes most of Tito’s prolific legislation and heads the Yugoslav delegation at the Paris Peace Conference.

Another braintruster is Mosha Pijade, 55, Jewish Vice President of Yugoslavia’s powerless Parliament. He is a greying, walrus-mustached, hunchbacked little man (when he sits at his desk, his legs do not reach the floor), who used to be a journalist, modernist painter and a Belgrade drawing-room lion until Communists were taken seriously. Then he was jailed, spent years studying Chinese, lecturing his jailmates, and translating Das Kapital into Serbo-Croatian.

White Violet. Tito and his paladins have chalked up some notable achievements in the physical reconstruction of Yugoslavia. In many villages, men still wear sackcloth trousers, and women cannot leave their houses for lack of clothes. But things are a lot better in Yugoslavia than in other war-torn countries (UNRRA aid to Yugoslavia has amounted to over 327 million dollars since April 1945). Tito has managed to keep most people ignorant of the fact that UNRRA supplies are free. In Belgrade recently, Yugoslavs in G.I. shirts and British army boots demonstrated in trucks, shouting: “Give us arms. We want to fight America and Britain!”

Tito carefully fosters this jingoism. Sound trucks in every village spout nationalist propaganda. Grade-school readers contain pictures of rifles, tanks, and airplanes. All young Yugoslavs are compulsory members of Tito’s National Youth Organization, where they get technical and military training. Ascetic discipline is rigidly preached and enforced (sexual promiscuity is almost as serious an offense as a weakness for capitalism). Martial virtues are also inculcated. For months after the German surrender, female partisans were allowed to carry hand grenades at their sides (until one exploded during a jitterbug session).

When Tito drives through the streets of Belgrade in a bullet-proof car, accompanied by tanks and four truckloads of soldiers, crowds yell: “Tito, Ti-to!” (to the familiar rhythm of “Duce, Du-ce!”). Children chant: “Kral se zenio, Tito se borio” (“The King married, Tito fought”). Ancient ballads praising ex-King Peter’s ancestor (Kara George, a prominent Serbian hero and hog farmer) are changed to fit Tito. Sample:

Tito is our white violet

And our hearts must make him grow.

The Fare of Power. Tito has obliged. Since the lean days of mountain fighting, his girth has increased considerably on the rich fare of power (and on sweets). He likes good eating. At official banquets, he serves whole roast boars, huge Polish hams, gallons of Dalmatian wine. Like his master, Tito’s favorite Alsatian dog Tiger has also put on weight.

Tito’s face has changed too: his features, once deeply gullied, have become smoother with well being. His permanent frown has become heavier; the permanent smile on his wide lips has become more cunning, and is now flanked by deeper furrows of cynicism. Even in his guerrilla days, Tito insisted on daily shaves and neat dress. Now, as Yugoslavia’s first marshal, he gleefully indulges his fancy for uniforms (his latest number: dress blues with four-inch red trouser stripes, gleaming ebony boots, visored cap with gold braid and a red star, immaculate white doeskin gloves). But sometimes his public relations men ask him to pose in civilian clothes to seem closer to the masses. After long indecision, Tito finally chose his marshal’s insignia (made of felt): a star wreathed in gold laurel. It was designed by a Belgrade tailor who made himself a pair of scarce bedroom slippers from the rejected samples.

Tito, whose first wife is dead, is currently married to a thirtyish, pretty graduate of Belgrade’s School of Business Administration, but she is kept in the background (he is rumored to have a mistress). He has chosen ex-King Peter’s palace at Bled for his summer residence, ex-Regent Paul’s Bell Dvor (White Palace) on Belgrade’s Dedinje Hill for his town house (it has Belgrade’s only good air-raid shelter).

The Proconsul has done well for himself and for his masters. But his task is not finished. The task reaches far beyond the borders of Yugoslavia. Its scope is determined, in all its crushing simplicity, by geography and by the inexorable pulse of power which conditions the lives of nations.

For centuries, the plains and mountains of southeastern Europe were furrowed by the human erosion of migrating peoples and shifting empires. Greeks, Macedonians, Romans, Huns, Goths, Turks, Slavs contested the Balkan salient. Today, it is once more contested in a struggle potentially as ferocious as and probably more important in its consequences to the world than any of the earlier ones. Russia (through Tito) is pressing to federate all the Balkans under her tutelage (see map). Would she be able to fuse the blots and splashes of conflicting races and nationalities that constitute the Balkans’ chaotic map? The answer was awesome with meaning far beyond the confines of the proposed federation.

Iron Grasp. Inside Yugoslavia Tito had succeeded in suppressing the traditional differences between half a dozen ethnic enemies. What worked in Yugoslavia (which the late Croat peasant leader Stephan Radich called the Balkans in miniature) might work in the Balkans as a whole. The former apprentice locksmith had found a key that could open the tightest nationalist gates: it was the fanatic faith which he had brought back from Russia as a young man.

The prongs of Tito’s functional fanaticism reached out all over the Balkans. They still stabbed at Trieste, where last week U.S. soldiers fired into a mob of rioting Yugoslavs; 20 were wounded. Italians in Venezia Giulia bitterly complained of Yugoslav terror, and in Paris, Delegate Kardelj bluntly declared that Yugoslavia would not accept the Big Four Trieste settlement (TIME, July 29).

The Tito iron grasp also reached out, across the troubled border, to Greek Macedonia, a wild, rocky land which no one would covet (says an old Balkan proverb: “Better a gypsy wife or a boat at sea than a home in Macedonia”) were it not for its strategic position on the Aegean Sea. Greek Macedonians, supported by Greek Communists and Yugoslav agents constantly seeping across the border, were noisily agitating to join Yugoslav Macedonians in an “autonomous” Yugoslav-sponsored state.

The prongs reached across other frontiers, into Bulgaria and Albania, offering and demanding friendship. A good and understanding friend, Bulgaria in turn reached out across the frontier into Greece for Thrace (right next to Macedonia). Albania, a satellite’s satellite, was no less understanding, it was quarreling with Greece over North Epirus. (Albania’s handsome, histrionic dictator Enver Hoxha, a former schoolteacher and cigaret vendor, emulates Tito’s taste in uniforms; but with a keen sense for the niceties of hierarchy, he has proclaimed himself only a Colonel General.)

To the north also Tito has reached across the Austrian border for a large slice of Carinthia, including Klagenfurt. At the same time, Tito has violently fought internationalization of the Danube. (Cracked one Belgrade Foreign Ministry official: “Are we asking for shipping rights on the Hudson or the Thames?”)

Iron Hand. These scattered points of pressure and conflict outlined the pattern of Russia’s (and Tito’s) ultimate Balkan objective: a Communist federation including Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Albania and as much of Greece as could be torn from the British. The federation’s bulk would eventually choke off all of Greece, engulf the Dardanelles for Russia, threaten Turkey and poise menacingly over the whole Middle East.

It was not a new idea. In 1876, before pan-Slavic fanaticism found Communist fanaticism as its deadly ally, Serbia’s Russian commander in chief, General Mikhail Chernaiev, shouted: “We are fighting for the sacred idea of Slavdom. . . . We are fighting for freedom . . . and civilization. Behind us stands Russia. . . . If we . . . are unable to open the doors to freedom . . . the iron hand of Russia will break them open. . . .”

Tito’s Partisans put it more simply: “Comrades, together with the Russians we are 200,000,000.”

*Rome No. 1: the Eternal City; Rome No. 2: Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, from which Russia received its Orthodox religion. Moscow was to have been the Third Rome of an all-Christian world.

* In The Incredible Tito—Man of the Hour, U.S. leftist novelist Howard Fast (Freedom Road) commented recently on Tito’s reappearance: “The J.A.F.R.C. [Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee] provided funds and means to return Tito to Yugoslavia.” This was an embarrassing slip: J.A.F.R.C., headed inter alios by Vincent Sheean, Herman Shumlin, John T. McManus and Fast (and originally formed by the Communists to aid Stalinist refugees from Spain), is chartered only to raise U.S. funds for “relief causes.”

*Sample use of the dagger: during the war, a hospital run by four nuns (harboring many wounded Partisans) was raided by pro-German Ustashi, who massacred 20 of the wounded and forced the nuns to retreat with them. Last year, after a one-day trial during which the court-appointed defense attorneys themselves asked for the maximum penalty, the nuns were sentenced to death for aiding the Ustashi.