The History of Yugoslavia - Part 2
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Hi Janina. Hi Ema.

How you doing? I'm not bad, how are you? I'm alright. I'm being very much stomped on by Livia at the moment, so that noise you can hear is Livia purring very violently, as she likes to do, but that means that my day is going well, because I like being stomped on by Livia, so all is well. Yeah, there are much worse things to be stomped on than Livia, I think. She's very small, so...

It's not much of a, like, it's, you know, being stomped on by a literal three kilogram cat is not arable at all. Yeah. Yeah. But are you ready to talk about some more Yugoslavian history? Yes, absolutely. I'm excited. I'm going to warn you and everybody else that if you thought the last one was atrocity heavy...

This one contains the Holocaust, which makes it the most atrocity heavy. Virtually every period of Yugoslavian history is punctuated by either...

Yeah. Yeah.

We can do better than that. Hold my beer. Exactly. Like a mere million people dead. How about 40 million people dead? Like a real attempt at one-upmanship in the 20th century that we definitely could have lived without. Yeah. And the...

area of Yugoslavia very much felt this. Yeah. So today, I think that this is now going to be a four part. I thought it would be three, but I now am deeper into Tito and I think that this is definitely going to be four parts. So today we're going to do 1935 to 1945. So the fun years of the 20th century. Yeah.

Because a lot happens during that period, like a lot happens. And we're also going to do the rise of Tito, where Tito comes from and how he ends up taking control of the country during the Second World War, basically. And what his actual name really is, because it's not Tito. It's not Tito at all? No. So that's what we're going to talk about this time. And then we will do...

So a kind of Soviet and then Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. And then we will do the breakup of Yugoslavia. And then you'll know just about everything there is to know, at least to pass off yourself as someone who knows things about the world at the dinner party. And that's all we really need in life. And you'll know more about Yugoslavia than you did previously. And I think that that is good. Yeah, it's always nice to know a little bit more.

Yeah, a little bit more about the world. You can't just absorb everything by osmosis all the time sometimes. No, because the thing...

that I rapidly learned from kind of doing this is that you think that you might be absorbing a lot of information but actually you're absorbing a lot of information about kind of very specific places like what I know a lot more I feel about Florida than I do about like the whole of Yugoslavia or like pretty much the entirety of Malaysia and so I know a lot about like this very

you know, specific places in the world and very little about other places in the world. This has always been what stresses me out about history is that like you learn a lot about one little thing and then you realize that you don't know anything about anything else, which means that you don't know anything about the little thing that you know a lot about because everything is connected to everything else and the context isn't there unless you know all of it, which you can't actually know because it's too much to go into. I don't even, I can't even grasp

the current events that are happening in my neighborhood, let alone all of history. I had a real existential panic about it when I was at university and I told one of my history friends

And he just said, yeah, that never goes away. It doesn't. I think that's the kind of joy of it, though, because it means you're never finished. There's never a point when you're like, I know all the things now. So because there's always something new that can shift your understanding of the world and or even things that you thought you knew really, really well, you can suddenly learn something and be like, no.

Never knew that. Now I get why XYZ happened instead of ABC. Which is a real problem for someone like me who really just wants to be right immediately. There's no being right in history. There is no being right. No, it's mostly fighting. And declaring with great...

with great confidence that you were right sometimes but while being at least partly wrong all of the time yeah but that's the kind of thing I like about it's why I never like maths because people could tell me I was wrong whereas if I can fight my corner in history you can't tell me I'm wrong yeah that is fair

Yeah. So to Yugoslavia, which is still Yugoslavia. And we left it off last time with the assassination of King Alexander, who was shot in France by some Italian backed fascists. And the belief generally was that if

Alexander died, Yugoslavia would die, and the fascist powers of Europe would be able to kind of sweep in and scoop up all of the delicious Slavic nations and have all of their lovely resources and labour.

That did not happen. It turned out that people vastly underestimated the genuine belief in Yugoslav unity that existed in Yugoslavia. And pretty peacefully, very peacefully for Yugoslavia, what happened was that his son, his

Peter II became king, but Peter was 11 years old. So they pulled in Alexander's younger brother, who was a guy called Paul, who was living at the time...

prancing around Western Europe, basically. He grew up in Geneva. He went to university in Oxford. He spent most of his life having a lovely time in Western Europe and going to parties and being the younger brother of the king. So nobody really expects anything of you. You just get to be a dilettante and charm ladies at parties in the 1920s, which is what he had been doing for most of his life. And then all of a sudden he was kind of pulled back and

and made to be regent for this 11-year-old. And he seems to have understood his position to be to change nothing. Mm-hmm.

And do as little as possible. Until Peter became old enough to be king, at which point he could presumably go back to his delightful life. He's got a nice Greek wife. He's got a nice life in England. He is very happy wandering around and gambling in Monaco and that kind of thing. So his plan is do nothing. Yeah. Ride it out for like seven years.

Ride it out for seven years. He's like the William IV approach to monarchy. We can do this. Do nothing. Let Victoria be the queen. Also, it feels like he didn't have... Like Alexander had some very strong ideas about what Yugoslavia meant. It feels like Paul didn't. He's just like, all right. Yeah, he's like Yugoslavia's chill. He's not trying to impose any kind of specific ideology on anyone. He's just...

We're just going to keep things running. He's like, just keep things running. Let's try not to have a war. Yep.

And he is like, technically, he has all of the power because of the 1931 constitution, which put basically all of the power in the hands of the king, which Alexander had used very happily to like kind of poke everybody in the eye and be like, you're a Yugoslav now. Yeah. And he basically is like, I'm not really going to use any of my powers. I'm going to appoint a prime minister and then I'm just going to lie back and hope that nothing goes too badly wrong.

What happens, obviously, is that the 1930s happen. So this does not work out great. About as badly wrong as things can go until you hit the 1940s.

Yes. So he appoints a guy called, and this is where the pronunciations of names are going to become a bit staccato, but his name is Milan Stojanovic. I think that J is pronounced like a Y. Almost certainly is, yes. It's a very Eastern European name.

Stojanovic. Yes. Stojanovic. I'm not going to try that again. I'm going to call him Milan. Yeah.

It's fair. Sorry. I'm so sorry. He becomes prime minister. He's made prime minister. He's a guy who's been finance minister for ages. He's like a kind of stable Serbian guy. And he puts together a coalition called, and they still all have these names, he's called the Yugoslav Radical Union, which is kind of the least radical thing that could be. It's actually a very conservative coalition.

of his own Serbian party, the Slovene People's Party and the Yugoslav Muslim Organization. It doesn't have any Croats in it, which comes to be a problem, but they basically are pretty conservative in terms of Alexander's ideas. They still maintain a lot of control over media and political propaganda and what you're allowed to say.

about nationalism within the country and they do things like employ folk singers to write songs about how great the prime minister is but they are less authoritarian than alexander was and they're a bit more flexible but they also don't really seem to have like any kind of great plan except largely

continue what alexander was doing and let's try not to fuck this up too badly and so like change nothing so they remain very authoritarian very centralized very anti-nationalist so trying to repress all nationalist sentiment in all kinds of all of the various ethnic and religious groups around yugoslavia and very very anti-communist which

which is going to come up again. They are constantly kind of disappearing people, jailing people, arresting people for doing things that are considered to be against the government, like being a communist or being a nationalist or writing things that they don't want you to write. But they are kind of pleasingly for the era. And this is how great the 1930s are. You're like, well, at least they weren't a fascist government. Yeah, yeah.

They were authoritarian and repressive. Yeah. But hey, it could have been worse. It feels like the Yugoslavian identity in the 30s was looking at Italy and Germany and going, no, thank you. But also looking at Russia and going, no, thank you to that too. Kind of, yeah.

you know with with people on either side who would like that who were arguing in favor but the base level mass agreement was like none of this seems good to us yeah and they do allow for quite a lot of um different groups to exist like there is a huge amount of like

like little opposition parties and they do become kind of gradually more radicalized and more militarized as the whole of Europe was doing at the time basically with everybody becoming furious at each other and having little battles in the streets and

And the Communist Party does grow quite significantly during this time. It is very much in contact with the Soviets and is very much in contact with...

like kind of people traveling back and forth from Vienna in particular, which is obviously a hotbed of kind of revolutionary activity between the wars and always was. But there are lots of these little parties and they all have fun names like totalitarian Yugoslavs, Yugoslav action. The Croatian peasants party is still around. You'll remember that their leader was murdered in parliament, but they're still going. The,

green shirts, Yugoslav radical green shirts, the young Muslims, the Chetnik, who are ultra-nationalist Serbs. There are all kinds of little parties around, many of whom are starting their own little paramilitary wings, because sure, why not? Yeah, everyone else is doing it. Yes. And so for about three or four years, everything is kind of like...

Chill by Yugoslavian standards. Chill by European standards at this stage. Like it's the mid-1930s. Everything is occurring, you know, in Germany. We've got Hitler rising. We've got fascists in Spain. We've got fascists in Italy. We've got fascists in Hungary. We've got all kinds of things occurring. This is also when there'd been...

starting to recover from the depression and there was there was government investment in kick-starting businesses and they forgave a bunch of loans and so I think it is also that era when we've talked about this before and talking about revolutions and that big social change and big social movements that don't happen when everyone is miserable and everything's at its worst because no one has the energy and no one has the optimism it's when things start to get better that

things get really, really to kick off. Yes. And things were gradually starting to get a little bit better. That was kind of the main thing that Mulan was asked to do, which is fix the depression. Mm.

Like, do something because this is bad. Which it was. 1938 is when things start to kind of wobble pretty badly because obviously in March 1938 you have the annexation of Austria by the Nazis and everything

everybody is like, oh, no. And then kind of goes, okay, well, maybe the Austrians wanted that. I don't know. Maybe if we don't do anything about this, it'll be fine. In September 1938 is the handing over of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany and the kind of complete capitulation of the Western powers to the Nazis and the Munich Agreement. And they're kind of like, ooh, okay, but promise not to do it again.

Yeah. We don't really want a war, but just if you could stop it, that would be amazing. Yeah.

And Yugoslavia is watching this occur and Yugoslavia is very close to Austria and Yugoslavia can see Italy like they are in between these fascist states that very clearly have eyeballs on Yugoslavia. Sturjanovic doesn't dislike Hitler, but there is kind of very limited fascism

fascist undercurrents in Yugoslavia itself. It is not a country that has gone into fascism in a popular way at all. He does, however, quite like Hitler. He seems to think that Hitler is definitely telling him the truth and he kind of wants to be a sort of strong man in that way in Yugoslavia, but he doesn't really have it in him at all. And so he is...

voted out in December 1938 for basically being a bit too close to Hitler and nobody likes him. Sure. So he is kind of thrown out by Prince Paul and a guy called Svetkovich is put in place instead, Dragisa Svetkovich. And he...

makes what is probably a good idea but not at the time a huge, huge change. In 1939, on 26th of August, he agrees that Yugoslavia can be federalised and initiates this by creating the Banovina of Croatia, which is an autonomous Croatian state within Yugoslavia, basically. This all seems good to me. Like, make Yugoslavia more,

more like the US or more like the EU even, you know. Or even like Germany, yeah. Yeah, preserve individual identity of all of these different regions under an umbrella. It seems fine. This seems like a very sensible and chill decision. Yes, it probably would have been fine if this had happened almost any other time.

I mean, I feel like that's like the creation of Yugoslavia. Probably would have been fine if it hadn't been another century. I feel like maybe if they had federalized at the beginning, if Alexander hadn't been so much of a centralized authoritarian, then federalization might have worked and Yugoslavia might have been slightly less chaotic for most of its history. But it...

It is agreed that this will happen on the 26th of August 1939. And the Croatians are kind of, well, the nationalist Croatians, the Croatian Peasant Party are thrilled. They also absorbed Bosnia-Herzegovina. So Bosnians and Bosnian Muslims are kind of less thrilled. Mm-hmm.

And there are a lot of people who think that this is kind of a capitulation to Croats that mean that everybody else is kind of left behind and that they're going to split off or that they're going to want to kind of take over the rest of the country. So it's not like a great time. But thankfully, the fight only really lasts for about four days because on the 1st of September 1939, Germany invades Poland. And on the 3rd of September, World War II starts. Yeah, kind of takes the wind out of your sails. Yeah.

of them focusing on that, which is a long time in politics, but a short time in Yugoslavian politics. And immediately Yugoslavia announces that it is neutral in the war. It will not side with anybody and it would like to stay out of the whole thing, please. And that is what they kind of managed to do. And so they're focused on their own fighting with regards to the creation of the borderline

Banovena of Croatia because the Muslims of Bosnia were like why are we here everyone else is like I want one how come he gets a thing I want a thing and so they kind of focused on that but

But they are geographically much closer to the fascist side than they are to anybody else. And as a result, when the war is ongoing, although they won't let anybody cross their land, that's basically how they stay militarily neutral. They won't let Hitler move troops across his land to invade Berlin.

They won't let Mussolini cross to invade Greece. So everybody has to kind of go around them. But in 1940, they do start to initiate anti-Semitic laws of exclusion in order to stay sort of friends with Hitler.

Sure. And in 1941, Mussolini invaded Greece and kind of forcibly kind of initiated both Hungary and Romania into what was called the Tripartite Pact, which was the agreement between Germany, Italy and Japan that they were all on the same side and that they would fight for each other. And Hungary and Romania were brought into this pact in 1941 and proactively

Prince Regent Paul, who was not a man who did well for anything under pressure and who would much rather not be involved at all and who has found himself kind of engaged in a nightmare, decides that he is going to basically end the neutrality agreement.

And he is going to join the tripartite pact. He is going to sign up to be technically on the side of Germany and Italy and Japan as part of the Axis on the condition that they don't have to be combatants. They won't be kind of militarily involved that much. And they won't be occupied. Yeah.

one of those decisions that like yeah you're kind of desperate just to keep yourself and your country safe and you're in a very dangerous geographical position but also why on earth would you assume that that would remain true that you wouldn't then be forced to conscript soldiers and that you wouldn't then be occupied by the italian army like that's definitely going to happen immediately

Yes. And it is putting an enormous amount of trust in, particularly in Hiller, a man who has shown that he would just lie to your face. Absolutely. And he will sign any agreement in front of the world's media and then do whatever he wants because he thinks you're an idiot. Yeah.

And if you know anything about Nazi ideology, you remember that they also do consider the Slavs to be effectively subhuman. The Aryan ideology does not consider Slavs to be Aryans or to be members of ethnic groups that they consider to be worthy of respect. And so there is absolutely no reason to believe that he would

think this is kind of what happens when you go to school in England and you come away with a kind of jolly idea that everybody who shakes hands with you is definitely going to like would never ever betray you I mean that's why politics in this country is deranged

Yes. Always, like, whenever I hear about these things and whenever I think about, like, appeasement and stuff, I always think, you know when you're reading Poirot books and, like, Poirot does something like read the letters that are open on someone's desk and then Hastings is like, Poirot, how could you? And he's like, well, there's clues in there. It says, gonna say who the murderer is. And Hastings is like, I could, the honour amongst men and, oh, yes.

You could never read a man's private letters and then Poirot's again like, once again, Hastings, the clues are right there. I don't give a fuck about your honour. I just, I need to solve the murder. Of course, Hastings also is incapable of considering the fact that a beautiful woman might lie. He is, especially if they've got red hair.

Spishids have got real here, whereas Poirot is always there going, everyone lies. We just have to figure out which people are lying to cover up murder. It's not who's telling the truth. No one is telling the truth. Everyone is telling you a lie, Hastings. God bless him. But every time he's shocked that Poirot opened a drawer, it's just like, this is why Beesman happened.

Poor Hastings. He never had a chance. Poor Hastings. He didn't. But at least he gets a nice wife and then goes and does something presumably god-awful in South America. He has a ranch. He has a ranch in Argentina. He has a ranch. Yeah, sure, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine, it's fine. Anyway...

This decision to like, Paul plagemibly thinks that this is brilliant, that he has kind of agreed that they will be left alone and they will be kind of notionally fascist, but definitely Hitler will leave them alone and Mussolini will leave them alone, notoriously leave her alone as of history. Yeah. Yeah.

Unfortunately, literally the rest of the country thinks that what he's done is an appalling act of treason. Yeah, which it is. That they were quite dedicated to being neutral. And so that day, like he agrees this in the morning, it's announced by evening, he has been overthrown by his own people. Which again, the most sensible and chill overthrowing of a leader I've ever heard of. Look it.

100% correct to do. Yes. They are helped by the British who are kind of always around but basically they go to Peter and be like nah and then go to Peter II who is now 17 and say to him congratulations sir you're the king. Yeah.

And a guy called Simovich becomes prime minister and they try very hard to remain neutral. Unfortunately, Hitler, because he wants this territory very badly and he will take anything as an excuse because he can now look like he's perfectly reasonable in doing what he does, takes the coup seriously.

as a betrayal of the treaty that had existed for up to six hours and therefore considered it to be an enemy action and on the 6th of april he initiated operation retribution and started bombing the living out of belgrade he bombed so hard that they could only withstand it for 11 days and

On the 17th of April 1941, Yugoslavia surrendered and immediately ceased to exist. So this is the first separation of Yugoslavia. This is the initiation of Yugoslavia into the Second World War. And this is the beginning of kind of true horror in the region. Like everything that came before it kind of feels like a lead up to what happens during the... They're not in the war for very long. They're in the war officially for four years.

And they are fighting very hard for that entire period for resistance and liberation. But what occurs in Yugoslavia is total war. And all of the books are like every aspect of life was war.

torn apart. Every kind of value, everything that you thought you could rely on in life was torn into shreds. And there was no part of life that was safe or comfortable or normal for those four years. Because what Yugoslavia experienced and all of the many people experienced was just a totality of atrocity, basically, for every moment. So...

Hitler and Mussolini got together and politically they separated it into a series of occupied and quasi-independent territories. Peter got out and he went to, he ended up in London after kind of bouncing around for a year. He ended up in London to set up the world's most half-hearted government in exile. Yeah.

Paul ended up living in Kenya for the war. Sure. And then became really good friends with Jan Smuts and was inexplicably involved in South African politics for ages. Yeah.

So that's good. But in Yugoslavia, northern Slovenia was kind of annexed off into Germany. Southern Slovenia, Dalmatia and Montenegro were occupied by Italy. Kosovo, western Macedonia were handed over to Albania, which was a protectorate of Italy. So they also came under Italian fascist control. Eastern Macedonia was taken by Bulgaria, which was

Also under fascist control. And then two independent or semi-independent states were created. So the independent state of Croatia was formed out of what was the very short-lived Banavina of Croatia. And so that's Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

And they installed a fascist government there, which was notionally independent. And Serbia, the area of Serbia, was directly occupied by the German military. And it was considered to be... It has loads of different names. It never really had an official name, but it was directly occupied by the Germans with an overtly puppet government that was put into place.

Every single place was under occupation and

Every place had collaborators and every place suffered genocides in the terms of concentration camps and forced labour, starvation, mass imprisonment, huge displacement of people. And the entire place was both put under the occupation of wildly racist laws of exclusion. Mm-hmm.

And the region was also stripped as much as possible by both the Italians and the Germans of labor and food. So there were also huge amounts of starvation going on. There were, as far as anybody can tell, there was a book by Adam Tooze about the Nazi ideology of economics that basically argues that there was no plan for Yugoslavia more than use it,

to feed everyone else. Yeah. And to feed the war machine, basically. Yeah. So when they made their original agreement with Paul, they were never looking for an ally. No, they were not interested. They were looking for a subject. Yeah. This was almost certainly always going to happen. Like, it's hard to imagine a situation where Paul was able to negotiate or hold firm on any situation that keeps these allies

two people out of yeah especially croatia because if you remember the guy who killed alexander was a guy from the attache who were an ultra nationalist ultra right-wing fascist organization that were being supported by mussolini led by the guy who fled fled yugoslavia in the 1920s and went and hid over in italy his name was ante pavlovic uh

Sorry, Olivia just stuttered on me. Ante Pavelic. And he then comes back and is...

returned to Croatia as the dictator. So he had been working with Mussolini for about a decade in order to build up Croatian fascism and to move in and align Croatia with the fascists all along. So that kind of was, I feel like there's no

no situation where that doesn't happen yeah the rest of it again like there's just they're not they don't have the military and they don't have a leader that can keep this from happening they have an idiot man

who is their king and a child and neither of those two people. And like, I feel kind of bad for Peter because he never actually manages to achieve anything. And spoiler alert, but he never comes back. He's never allowed to return. And he eventually died at 47 from alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis of the liver because he just was a depressed man with no purpose in life. Yeah. And someone who never really had a chance to be

No, he didn't. Yeah. But being a kind of sad king is kind of nothing compared to what happened to...

the rest of the country and all of the various countries. Croatia suffers very badly. Fully 50% of the population are non-Croat and pretty much every single one of them is subjected to a systematic campaign of eradication. So Jews, Roma and Serbs in particular, but also Muslims and Orthodox Christians of all kinds are considered to be eternal enemies and enemies

that even the Germans thought that the Croats and the Tasha were a bit much. In Germany, in both 1942 and 1943, they were called arrogant, despotic, greedy and corrupt. And their constant, quote, cleansing activities were considered to be a bit too constant for the Germans. And if you're a bit much for the Nazis, then... Yeah. Yeah.

They managed to, within a year, set up 22 concentration camps, of which two were exclusively for children. And basically that was their only focus for the years that they were there, was eradicating people and doing nothing else with everything that that implies.

Yeah.

German policy, however, was that Serbs could not be trusted to govern themselves. So they were always German officials overseeing what they were up to. And they also engaged in

mass deportations, mass ethnic cleansing. They attempted to remove everybody who was a Serb out of the area and then everybody else into a concentration camp. So again, mass forced labour, forced displacement and an enormous amount of execution and extermination of people who are just trying to live their lives. All of this means that

Of the 72,000 Jews living in Yugoslavia in 1940, 60,000 were murdered by 1945. Yeah.

During the same time, roughly 80,000 Roma were murdered and another 215,000 Serbs were murdered in Croatia and Bosnia. That doesn't include all of the Croats, Muslims and people of various other ethnicities that were also ruthlessly murdered during this time. So this was a period of, as I say, total and complete devastation.

And there was nobody who was untouched by it, either as a perpetrator or as somebody who experienced it. And it is something that isn't, I think, in the background of all our lives. We live in the shadow of World War II. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And there is this very good book by Keith Lowe about how World War Two shaped culture afterwards. But confronting it and thinking about it is not something that people do. I think on a people talk about World War Two a lot and they like to talk about planes. They like to talk about it as like the one moral war and the greatness of the victory. And they don't actually like to think about the reality in the war.

Yeah, or detail and industrialize it away. Yeah. There's a lot of talking about how many rivets were on a tank and not so much about what happens when a tank runs over a body. Yeah. But yeah, so that is what Yugoslavia suffered and it is a kind of trauma, doesn't it? Like trauma is such an overused word these days, I think.

Yeah.

The other thing that is important, I think, is how resistant Yugoslavians were to this from the get-go. There were absolutely collaborators and the way they were dealt with was not amazing. But one of the incredibly impressive things about reading about this has been how hard...

Every single part of Yugoslavia was just like, at least, you know, a good chunk of the population was just like, no. There were people who did it, but there were a lot of people who didn't. And the resistance was one of the most, it was the only country other than the Soviet Union to lead a real guerrilla war against the occupiers and against the fascists and against the people and to actually liberate places and

on the ground without the help of other nations. And I think that that is incredibly impressive in the face of what they were liberating from. Yeah. And the kind of grinding horror machine that they were facing. Yeah. And the vast disparity of just like,

Power and infrastructure. You know, is ants against a boot? It is ants against a boot. And the ants won. Yeah. In the end, which is amazing. And there are really astonishing stories of personal heroism as well that come out of these stories. Like there is a woman called Diana Budisavljevic.

who single-handedly saved 10,000 children from Bustasa camps. But there are also stories of unimaginable... One of the camps, which was exclusively for Serbian children, was run by nuns. Huh.

And so both these things exist at once and the world is horrible and beautiful. But the resistance is kind of as much of the story of Yugoslavia during the war as it is the story of Holocaust and genocide and like astonishing violence. Because immediately in Yugoslavia,

every area there sprung up resistance movements but very very quickly those resistance movements were like resistance is not enough like sabotage and interrupting this is not enough we need to

This used to be a war of liberation. Yeah. And there are two main groups which emerge very quickly. The first is the Chetniks, who are Serbian nationalists. They are led by a guy called Draza Mihailovic, who is actually a member of the collaboration government. Yeah.

And he is commander in chief, technically, of the Serbian collaborative puppet government. But he is also running a kind of slightly chaotic guerrilla army across Croatia and Serbia. Their focus is mostly...

on resistance rather than liberation and they do come into they are heavily nationalist like they do not want a liberated Yugoslavia they want a ethnically homogenous Serbia sure they're not necessarily against the kind of

of Slovenes and Muslims and Croats and they're not don't necessarily care that much about what's happening elsewhere but they are very good at protecting various areas and at sabotaging the particular the other group that emerges immediately and with the kind of speed that I have to say is spectacularly impressive is

were the communist partisans led by a guy whose birth name is Yosef Brov and is known to the world as Tito. Okay, I'm going to tell you about Tito because he's fascinating. He is fascinating and it is like really, you know, you can't really argue with someone becoming a leader simply by being the best in their country at throwing out the Nazis. Yeah.

He's incredibly good at what he does and he has a life of revolutionary dedication. So that is the kind of thing that genuinely is impressive and kind of gets ruined by politics and government, really, because once you become a leader, you can only really go downhill from there.

Yeah. But Josip Broz, a.k.a. Tito, he is born on the kind of border between Croatia and Slovenia. He is born in this village called Komrovec, which is in the... When he's born in 1892, he's in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And his mum is from a village that's 10 miles away, but is in...

technically in Slovenia so she is a Slovene and she is technically part of the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so he has this kind of mixed heritage already and he grows up as a basically a kind of decent peasant like his parents own their own farms but he has no real interest in being a farmer and he really wants to go to school and he has this joke that he tells when he's older that he used to play truant from home to go to school but

Because his parents were not really into him going to school, but he really wanted to. And he has this kind of love of reading that follows him for the rest of his life. But specifically, he really likes reading communist literature. So he leaves school at 12 and then at 15 leaves home and goes and becomes an apprentice metal worker in a nearby town.

When he finishes his apprenticeship, at one point he is fired from his apprenticeship for reading on the job, which is profoundly relatable. It's extremely relatable. He manages to get back and finishes his apprenticeship as a metalworker.

He then at 18 moves to Zagreb and joined the metal workers union and becomes immediately kind of enamored by trade unionism and by the power of labor demonstration and the power of the worker. And this kind of becomes his great love really. He has a whole bunch of wives and he doesn't love any of them as much as he loves labor organizing.

He kind of moves around a lot, moving around labor movements, being a member of the union, kind of being a vocal labor organizer for years. He goes to Vienna, he moves around in various places in Slovenia. In 1913, he has to finally do his military service, however, and he is recalled back to Zagreb to do two years military service.

Turns out he's quite good at being in the military and within a year he's been made a sergeant major, which is a great time to be made a sergeant major because the year after 1913 is 1914 and 1914 World War I breaks out. Mm-hmm.

He is put to work as a scout on the Eastern Front and experiences that specific grinding horror of being on the Eastern Front in World War I. And he is very, very badly wounded while he is across the border in Russia. And he is wounded enough that he spends 13 months in hospital in Russia, where...

where he learns Russian. And when he's well enough after that year, he has moved to a prisoner of war camp and is set to work as a laborer repairing the Trans-Siberian Railway. He is still there learning Russian, talking to people and meeting locals who he gets on very well with. And he befriends Dostoevsky.

Bolsheviks and so when the revolution starts like the great strikes and the revolution starts to kind of break out across Russia a local helps him to escape and takes him to Petrograd and

And he is thus in Petrograd in July 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown and the provisional government were put in place and the Bolsheviks and Lenin start making noises about the fact that they should be allowed to have a socialist government.

He is captured. This is one of these bizarre incidents. He's captured again. He's recognized as an escaped POW and is put back on a train and sent back to Siberia, but

He escapes from the train, which stops it. He's caught, put back on the train. But before they get going, a load of people get on the train and say, oh, yo, Lennon's taken over and we need volunteers for the International Red Guard. And so he volunteers.

and is enrolled into the International Red Army and then spends a year or two years fighting as a member of the Red Army in the civil war, the Russian civil war, protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway in Siberia.

During this time, he gets married and he lives in Siberia as a member of the Russian army until 1920 when there was a kind of a big push to repatriate a load of prisoners of war. And he decided that it would be nice maybe to be warm again in Croatia, which is lovely and warm. Yeah.

His beautiful beaches. Yeah. And he is a man who is not used to having his tits absolutely frozen off. So he is repatriated back to Croatia. He takes his wife and he is now a member of the brand new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which he finds delightful. Yeah.

He moves around a lot, has some kids and becomes a dedicated communist. Like his experiences in Russia have, he's read a lot of communist literature. He has become a dedicated Leninist specifically. So he does very strongly believe in communism.

armed revolution. He is therefore doing something that is very illegal in Yugoslavia. Communism is outlawed. Technically, he can be put to death for being a member of the party. And what he does is constantly tell people that he's a member of the party, constantly tries to recruit people. He successfully organizes worker strikes everywhere.

Constantly in 1925 and 1926, he organizes massive worker strikes and he kind of like works his way up through the ranks just by being very vocal, very unafraid of anything and very, very dedicated to labor rights.

He's arrested and technically is sentenced to five months in prison, but he decides he doesn't want to do that. So he just runs away. And at this point, the book that I was reading, which was a biography of him, said that this was the beginning of his career as a professional revolutionary, which is a great job. It is a great job.

It is. 1928, after Stefan Radic was murdered in parliament, he led massive protests that went on for three days in Zagreb and called for kind of general strikes and things like this. He believed that people should reply with arms to the murder of Radic and told them so. So he's very much an armed revolutionary. And for that, he was imprisoned. He was arrested and

for being a communist and saying they should overthrow the government very illegal and was imprisoned for five years which he served in its entirety first two years he was in a low security prison where he formed a communist reading circle

Which is, again, it's a real thing that he does for a long time, just starts a reading circle wherever he is. And for that, because he was unrepentantly communist, he was then put in a high security hellhole in solitary confinement for at least a year. He completed his five-year term, left prison, and this had kind of made him... He had used his trial to, like, whenever they said, do you have anything to say? He was like, yes, the people should rise up for a communist day. Yeah.

And he was absolutely unbowed by anything. He used his platform that he was given in the dock to basically agitate for communism. So this kind of made him a bit famous. And as a result, he returned immediately to his activities as a member of the party. And within six months of his return, he was nominated to the Balkan Department of the Comintern, which is the...

international committee in Moscow who were kind of representatives of their respective countries in the center of the Soviet system. So he got to go off to Moscow where he lived in Hotel Luck

which is where all the cool people lived. A friend of mine has just written a book about Hotel Lux, which I highly recommend. Okay. Morris Casey. It's a cool place to be. It's got lesbians in it. Great. Yes. A plus recommend. Where basically he was in and out of Moscow for a couple of years as a representative doing lots of communism stuff. But he was there during the period of the Great Purge.

So Stalin's great purge where he killed something between 700,000 and 1.2 million people were either put in a gulag or executed by Stalin for kind of imaginary reasons in the mind of a man who's gone mad with power. Mm-hmm.

One of which was Tito's former wife had stayed in Moscow and had ended up being caught up in her purge. One of the people who was also caught up in this was the leader of the Yugoslav Communist Party. He was called Gorkich, who he didn't really like. And as a result, he became the leader of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1937. And what he saw was,

As a result, he was there at the beginning. He saw the revolution break out and occur. He saw Lenin become the leader of Soviet Russia. He saw Soviet Russia transform. And he saw Stalin come and he saw Stalin go wrong. And he learned a lot from that time. And as a result, he was kind of never really in awe of Soviet Russia like a lot of other people were. Yeah.

He liked the system. He did not like the specific government. He liked the ideology, but he did not think... And something that he does when he becomes a statesman is straight off, he's one of the few people who will say no directly to Stalin's face. Yeah.

Which is impressive. So when World War II breaks out, he has already been a soldier for two armies. He's an organizer to his core. He is a very, very strong believer in Leninist communism. He has already been a politician because he has been working in Moscow, in Vienna, and in Zagreb as a member of the Communist Party. And he's

He has personally managed to boost Communist Party membership from 1,500 people in like 1937 to 8,000 by 1941. And he is also a genuine believer in Yugoslavia. His mantra, which he repeats constantly, is unity and brotherhood, brotherhood and unity.

He considers himself to be Yugoslavian and he wants everybody else to be a Yugoslavian as well. So he has kind of no time for...

nationalist politics that much. And so as soon as the war started, he's in Zagreb when it is being bombed by the Germans in 1941. He moves immediately to Belgrade. The war began in April and in June 1941, he said, this needs to be a war for liberation. We are partisans fighting for liberation. This is not, guerrilla warfare is not enough for me. Mm-hmm.

By July, he had a small army that he was leading like skirmishes and paramilitary activity in Serbia. So you have these two pretty strong resistance fighters. They fucking hate each other quite a lot. Oh.

They both disagree fundamentally with each other's politics. They will fight each other regularly and they both refuse pretty much to compromise with one another. They often do an atrocity against each other because they don't care

don't believe that the other is necessarily fighting for the right reasons. Sure. But both have successes and both undermine the power of fascism in Yugoslavia, which is good. Yeah. And they do manage to... There's this kind of very sweet story about the Chetniks in Serbia in a village called Miokovcii.

basically allowing them to opt out of the state. So they just refuse to obey any orders that come through. Like when, if anybody's like, oh, we need to conscript all your men. They're like, no, no,

And if anybody like demands any kind of food or any kind of taxes, they're just like, no, I don't think so. And they instead provide food and supplies to the Chetnik fighters who are in the mountains around them. And the Chetnik fighters prevent anybody getting near them. So if anybody comes and says, we're going to conscript you, they go, no. And if they say, yes, you are, they say, okay, well, my friend over here with a very big gun says we're not. Yeah.

You really can't argue with that as a tactic. As a tactic, it's incredible. Yeah. Meanwhile, it is a brutal kind of nasty war, the resistance war. There are huge numbers of civilian deaths. Hitler is unhappy about how successful both sides are, especially the communists who have become very, very popular quite quickly. Yeah.

Hitler orders something called Operation Weiss, which is to basically destroy the place as much as is humanly possible in order to make it hard to live. But as always, and I don't know why humans are so poor at learning this, but bombing people and killing them just creates more enemies. Yeah, it does not achieve the desired effect. Yeah. Almost ever at all. Really ever. Really ever. Yeah.

Instead, over 300,000 people had joined the Communist Partisans by 1943. And there are a lot of kind of people who talk about why communism was so much more attractive than potential nationalist movements. And there's a guy called Stefan Pavlovich who wrote a book about Hitler in. It kind of seems to be the book on Hitler in Germany.

And Mussolini in Yugoslavia, who basically said that as far as the people of Yugoslavia were concerned, their past had been destroyed. Everything in their present was catastrophic and nothing in the German-dominated future or a nationalist future looked like it had any hope in it. Yeah. Whereas communism said...

we can do this together this is a new vision of something that we can fight for and offer people something that wasn't just horror but you know and you read this stuff like i read a whole bunch of their writings during this period and they are all from our perspective they look like the nightmare writings of soviets like they're all just like leaden monstrosity like just

just sounds so uninspiring because you've read so much of it. Yeah. But it is something so different from what anybody else was offering that it felt like something. And also they were so successful. Like they managed to clear out a lot of Bosnia by 1942. Yeah. And 1943. It's really, really genuinely an impressive, if someone can fight back that hard against the literal Nazis. Yes.

And they really did liberate large chunks of Bosnia to the extent that in 1943, they were able to convene a meeting of what would become the government. It's called the AVNOJ, which in English is the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia, which to be fair, sounds like the name of a lot of groups that I have been in over the years doing anti-fascism work. Yeah.

And he was able to have 142 delegates from every part of the country in Bosnia as an open meeting. And they officially basically declared themselves to be the ruling government, like the official government of and the executive authority of Yugoslavia. And they basically said, we don't want Peter. That caused some problems, but...

It takes another year to get everybody out, but they do liberate everywhere. So in 1944, Tito meets first with Churchill, then with Peter, then with Stalin, and basically gets everybody to agree that he has control everywhere.

And he could have some help. How he gets out actually is also a hell of a story. So on his birthday, he's one of these guys who has a birthday and an official birthday. Yeah.

It's not his like actual legal birthday. It's his official birthday. But on his official birthday of the 25th of May 1944, the Germans tried incredibly hard to capture him and very, very nearly did. He was in a kind of compound in a cave where he was living and kind of running Bosnia from basically. They bombed the hell out of it and then parachuted a bunch of guys in kind of like James Bond villain style. Yeah.

and had got so close to him that they captured his Jeep. Like they had his car, they had a load of his soldiers, they had some of his guys.

He cut a hole in the floor of the cave and rappelled out of it down a rope into a mountain stream where he then kind of ran through the stream and managed to get far enough away that he could get hold of the British for help. And the British helicoptered in and evacuated him. Great. That's iconic. Yep. It's a hell of a story. Yeah.

He then is evacuated to Italy and is put on an island in the Adriatic called Vis. And there he meets Churchill, negotiates with everybody. It's basically like he doesn't trust Churchill at all. Very good. He thinks that Churchill is going to like...

stab him in the back the second that he's not looking and try and put the king back in charge which he doesn't want so he's very careful with Churchill he then flies to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin and get Stalin to agree to finally send some help and put the Red Army into basically he's been asking for help from the Red Army for ages and they keep saying oh no we couldn't possibly we don't have any way to get people there and also all of our people are dying but he does manage to get some help and they

They finally managed to liberate Belgrade in October 1944. They lose almost 20,000 people. And the descriptions of that are old school, Roman era horrific. Because it's proper fighting in the streets. Then the next year Sarajevo was liberated in April and Zagreb was liberated in May 1945. And on the 15th of May 1945, with virtually no help from...

most of the allies and a little bit of like...

thumbs up help from the british and some last minute help from the russians he basically single-handedly did a very successful communist revolution from the ground up and instituted a the socialist republic under his own leadership as the prime minister of the reformulated yugoslavia

He then did probably the worst stain on his entire career and also the most Leninist of all things, I would say. Some mass executions. Yeah, that is pretty Leninist. Yes. This is one of those things where you're kind of like... So what happened is that as the partisans and the Soviets were kind of...

Moving across Yugoslavia towards Zagreb, towards Croatia, all of the collaborators, the people who had been committing atrocities for four years, basically started fleeing in their wake. And a lot of them fled to Austria because they knew that

if they were caught by the Soviets or caught by the communists, they would get shot immediately. And they hoped that if they got to Austria and got to the British, that the British would put them on trial or whatever.

Unfortunately, the British had just didn't want to deal with it and had kind of signed a treaty that said that they wouldn't deal with other people's prisoners. And so they just said no. And they forcibly repatriated all of the fleeing fascists back to Yugoslavia and basically were like, you deal with this. Um,

This is a Yugoslavian problem. We haven't really had much to do with Yugoslavia when we've got enough Nazis on our hands over here. And the response of the Tito government was to shoot them all.

Right, yeah. And so mass graves are still only just being excavated. There is another Keith Lowe book called Prisoners of History, which has some details about the Hudayama mine graves, if you want to read about mass graves. But basically, and they were pretty open about it. They basically said, so his right-hand man, who wrote a load of books and also gave lots and lots of interviews, who's called Milovan Dielas,

In 1979, literally said to a guy from like the BBC, we didn't have any courts. We didn't really have a country. We had been split up. We would have had to investigate something like 30,000 people to see how involved they were. We didn't have really the time or inclination to do that. So, and this is a direct quote, the easy way out was to have them all shot and be done with the problem.

That is the easy way out. You can't, that's, that is accurate. It's very hard to get people due process. It's complicated and expensive and takes a long time to actually give people the trials they deserve.

It is. And it is very, very hard to be willing to do that when you are reconstituting a country and these people are fascist genociders. And, you know, the term crimes against humanity was invented in this period for this reason, because of the things these people did. As a general rule, I will say shooting 30,000 people and dumping them in mine shafts is a very bad plan. And it does come back to cause problems. Yes.

This is one of those times where I'm like, I do see how the idea came up. Yes. Yes. If you're going to shoot anyone and throw them in a mineshaft, fascists is like better than alternatives. Yeah. People who did the Holocaust are people that it's very, very hard for me to...

feel bad about but these people do have families and it does you know inflict more trauma on a country that has uh had its own experience of trauma quite badly but that is pretty much the first thing that he does and it is a stain on the country from the very start because it's not a way that you want to like it's not necessarily the thing that anybody wants is the first thing that they did yeah no it is very short it is you can understand it seeming like the simplest thing

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely the simplest. It is only the simplest in the short term. Yeah, people very rarely think about the long-term consequences. But then the thing is, I have also been listening recently to Rachel Maddow's Ultra, which is about how the spectacular failure in the US to prosecute American Nazis. Yes. And...

Like, some consequence is better than the no consequence the US did. I think neither of these were the right way to go.

Yes. And I do think that, you know, one of the great successes of the post-war period, I think, is the Nuremberg trials. Absolutely. You know, to put people on trial and have the world look at them in kind of glaring forensic detail and say, this is what you did. And it does take away, therefore, the ability to say, oh, you did an atrocity as well. Yeah. Like...

To be able to say, no, we didn't. We did this. We had due process. We tried them. We looked at the evidence. They were able to present their case. And we said, no, you did a crime against humanity. It does mean that you maintain a moral high ground that shooting everybody and putting them in the mineshaft loses. But that is pretty much the first...

The first action of the newly reformed Yugoslavia, which is now a socialist state led by Prime Minister Josep Broz. He...

technically there is an election. They have an election over a new constitution. They have a kind of election that says, do you want the monarchy back or would you like to have Tito as the prime minister? In another one of these things, you might remember that this happened with the Federalists where they were like, oh, we're going to boycott the election over whether we're allowed to do a Federalist Yugoslavia. The monarchists boycotted the election and as a result, nobody voted for the monarchy. And

So they won 89% of the vote for the People's Front vote.

And that is what happens when you don't vote. Nobody registers your distress. Like nobody registers your disagreement if you don't turn up. But anyway, so they boycotted, which was dumb. And Yugoslavia becomes officially led by the People's Front and is now able to start putting itself back together and thinking about what Yugoslavia can be in the aftermath of the...

the horrors of the war and the previous kind of 10 years of nightmares and that is where we will pick back up next week and we will do the two communist regimes of Tito and see how far we get into post Tito yeah and yeah what he's like as a leader as opposed to a labor organizer

Yeah, which is a different thing. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot. It is. It is. And I think everybody probably needs a nice lie down now. Yeah. Even Livia has left me because it was too upsetting for her. She can only deal with so much genocide before she has to leave the room. I mean, it's fair. She's very small. Yeah. I did once... I was...

went out to dinner with my 21 year old nephew recently it was on his 21st birthday and he was like oh hey do you remember when I was like 7 and you told me what genocide was so I do have history in I do remember this and in my defence it's because he was in a school that

was doing its best to be kind of diverse and international and so named all of their classes after countries and so he went from being in hedgehogs class in year four to being in cambodia class in year five oh wow and i was like what and then i asked him if they taught him about pol pot and he was like no and i was like not about the genocide or anything and he was like what's a genocide and that's when i told him about genocide and this is a formative memory for him

Please, Auntie Emma, explain the Camille Rouge. Yeah. Yep. But... That's basically what this podcast is now. I think that's probably where it started. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. So next time, less heavy. Hopefully. Yes. It will definitely be less heavy than this. This was tough work. And then

And then the one after that will be also a bit heavy. Also quite heavy. Yeah, quite a heavy area. Yeah. I'm also going to take this opportunity to recommend a podcast I've been listening to for most of this week, which is called The Remembering Yugoslavia Project, which is not by a Yugoslavian. It is by a guy who was born in Czechoslovakia and still likes to refer to Czechoslovakia called Bukovic.

Pieter Kornecek and he has a really good podcast about various parts of remembering Yugoslavia and how we think about Yugoslavia that I have been enjoying very much. So this is my recommendation for that. I also read an interesting little article about the Spominiks in Yugoslavia, which are a collection of commemorative monuments that are often misattributed to Tito

So that was very interesting and we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And does have cool pictures of them. They are the kind of art that I like very much. Yeah, they're very, very fucking cool. I will put all of these in the show notes so that you can read them. And

If you would like to get the next episode early or get a sticker from my very own fair hands, then you can support us on Patreon where we will release, we release our episodes a week early. And also if you support us at the three or five pound level, you also get a sticker, which some of which have been trodden on by Livia. Yeah.

so they're extra special for their extra special also these stickers might be limited edition because yes we might get they might they may change this may they may change they may change because i only order them like 50 at a time so yeah maybe we'll do different ones next time yeah so you can support us at patreon you can see the show notes you can buy merch you can if you just want to give us three quid for a cup of coffee you can do that all at

the website which is historyofsexy.com and is there anything else Janina other than let's all have a drink oh I have a book out I feel like I should be remembering to talk about stuff like that on this I have a book that came out at the beginning of August called The Horses which is a weird little post-apocalyptic novel

Yeah, like fun literary poem inspired sci-fi. Actually very ideal for kind of curling up as it's getting chilly. Yeah.

It is a very wintry feeling book. Yeah, it's kind of a nice autumnal book, I think, to be under a blanket with. So as it's getting dark in the evenings now, it's a good time to be reading, yeah, spooky post-apocalyptic stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So buy Janina's book. I'll put that in the show notes as well. Oh, thanks. Thanks. Okay. Until next time, Janina. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

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