The History of Yugoslavia - Part 3
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Okay, 3, 2, 1. Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? I'm good. That was the third most in-time clap.

that we've had recently like I couldn't hear you clap at all over mine we've perfected the zoom clap we have I think that we might like you know we could probably turn this into some kind of show like our ability to clap perfectly in sync that is now that is an exercise that I used to do at drama school it's like you all stand in a group and try to clap at the same time

And how did that go? Sometimes well, often badly. The idea is that you're trying to be all super aware of each other so that you know you have to be aware of what each actor is doing in space and time while you're on stage. So it's like trying to lock into that. But it's, you know,

Usually just you mess it up. Yeah, normally you're just like a beat off of everybody else. Yeah. But no, now we are perfectly synced in our ability to clap exactly on three. Yeah. And for this, I feel we should be lauded. I agree. Yeah. Anyway, how are you, Janina? Are you doing okay? Yeah, I'm all right. Not too bad. How are you? I'm okay. I'm okay. I managed to run my best ever 10k today, which I was feeling very good about. And then I accidentally kicked Livia. Oh.

And now I feel very bad about it. And so it's been a real kind of a neutral day in the middle, I would say. Yeah, that's... I mean, I guess Livia just played the cost for your good day. Yeah, she did. But then I have the guilt. I think she's forgotten it already, but I will feel bad about it for the rest of the day. Admittedly, I kicked her. You did. Yeah. You can't take that away. No. We just started watching The Sopranos for the first time and...

I didn't realize that Tony Soprano's mother was named after your cat. Yes, she is. Olivia Soprano. And she's an nightmare person. Yeah. Just a real challenge of a human being. Yeah. We're a couple of episodes in and I'm enjoying the therapist having to say every so often, are you sure your mother doesn't just suck? And then he gets really offended about it.

Even though his mother does just suck. She is terrible. Yeah. We rewatched The Sopranos like last year or the year before, a while ago. And it is astonishing for having a lot of episodes, only one of which is bad.

like there is one bad episode okay but only one and that's amazing that's pretty impressive because before that we had re-watched the x-files and by season seven you have to start even before that to be fair but by season seven you have to start very judiciously watching episodes because so many of them are unwatchably yeah i think there's like a guide online for the x-files just to skip these ones

Like it lists all the good episodes and then all of the lore crucial episodes. And then it's like, well, the law makes so little sense that you don't even really need to. But yeah. And then by the time you get to like season nine, you're watching perhaps three episodes. Yeah.

because the rest of them are dog shit this is why TV shows should end after maximum five seasons unless they're Bob's Burgers which again very little bad in Bob's Burgers and it's like what season 15 now or something

I mean, it's impressive work to be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, Sopranos has one bad episode. Even that, you have to watch it just so you know what could have gone wrong. Like, oh God, thank God it's not like this all the time. But anyway, that's not what we're going to talk about. We're not one of these like, oh, do we just chat about pop culture and have opinions podcasts? No. I've done deep dive research. I've been down some rabbit holes for this episode. I'm excited. I'm excited about your rabbit holes. Including one in the past hour and a half, which...

really livened up the last hour before we recorded this so we are on episode three of talking about their history of Yugoslavia a country that never stopped being historical just relentlessly doing stuff yeah Yugoslavians and this week when we left off we were at the end of the war

And we were talking about the rise of Tito. I realized I don't think I explained where Tito's name comes from because that's not his given name. His name is Joseph Broz or Yosep Broz, but he takes on Tito as one of his underground communist pseudonyms. So when he's like,

part of the communist underground when being a communist is illegal Tito is one of his pseudonyms that he uses and he just kind of takes a liking to it basically that's fair and when journalists would ask him like why Tito he just I just liked it like I just thought it was a cool name yeah

and it is a cool name yeah so that is I think an interesting insight into the amount like he had to have several pseudonyms that he would use but then he just really latched on to Tito he thought it was cool yeah I think that's adorable I think that's great so it also like him responding that seems as accurate a representation of him as a person as anything because he seems to have just been a man who was like no this is the way

I know the right way and it's this. Yeah, pretty much. He is a supremely self-confident man. Yeah, yeah. He just has his ideas and fuck you. Yeah, kind of. Because one of the fascinating things, so this time we're going to talk about the end of the war. So from like 1945 all the way through to the death of Tito. So this period of Titoism and the two socialist federal republics of Yugoslavia.

and throughout the entire thing he is he is the sole supreme leader basically like he has the final decision in everything he is a dictator like there is a kind of parliament and there are kind of elections but there's only one party so it's not really a thing and he has the final decision everything so he is a dictator and that does tend to send people mad like the amount of dictators who then become incredibly paranoid about their safety or about the people around them but

at no point does he become like a paranoid weirdo he is consistently like quite chill but it seems to be and he's really chill with like everybody in the world and he seems to just have this genuine self-confidence about himself and the fact that people will like him like he just assumes that everybody's gonna like him and once he's had a chat with them they'll want to do what he wants

And a lot of the time he was kind of right. But it's just very impressive that he never kind of either... He never really goes mad with power and he never turns in on himself and becomes paranoid. He just seems to stay the same. A very, very pragmatic person. And he kept that. And like, obviously, can't support everything he did, the way he did everything. But the...

he prioritized communication, right? He prioritized messaging. He didn't just go out and say this is the way and it's going to be that way. He made efforts to change the social mood of the country and to explain and to embrace sort of traditional stories in order to promote his ideals for what Yugoslavia should be very successfully. He didn't have anything to fear because he had kind of effectively persuaded everyone. Yeah.

that he was right almost enough of everyone and there are times when it's like yeah this is what you should do like there's a we'll get to it but there's a you know a peasant uprising and it doesn't take very long for they're like oh they're not uprising against the state they're uprising because their lives are miserable what can we do to make their lives not miserable yeah basically yeah yeah

And the other thing, I was thinking about this earlier because I was reading a thing about his many, many palaces. So he has like 34. They're described as palaces, but then I found a thing that I'll put in the show notes that is pictures of them all. And they just look like big houses. They're the kind of houses that American doctors live in. Sure. They're not magnificent churches.

gold palaces of emperors or anything like that. They're like, you know, if you're a cardiologist in California, you probably own a house like this. But he owns a lot of them under a socialist regime, which is the kind of thing that you would think would be problematic. Like that people would be like, oh my God, we're living under socialism and he has 34 houses. But then I realized that he makes people's lives genuinely better. So it's not like we're starving to death and he has 34 houses. It's like, yeah.

He's pretty chill and he has 34 houses. And people can and do own multiple houses in Yugoslavia. Yeah. So it's not like it becomes more of a like, oh, how cool. He has 34 houses. Maybe one day I'll have 34 houses. But anyway, we'll start at the beginning and we'll work through to the good times, basically. So 1945 happens. The war is won. Everything is terrible. A million people are dead and 35 million people are homeless or displaced. Wehrmacht in their

retreat had destroyed everything they saw whenever they had time to pause and burn something down they did so they burned down basically everything something like a third of the infrastructure of the country which was not significant at the time the

something like only a few hundred kilometers of paved road and things like that but they've just burned everything down so it was a place in tatters and full of very traumatized people and dead bodies so tito's kind of great thing is federalization and what he calls self-management and he

declares and puts together a thing that's called the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. It is completely federated. And this is one of these things where you're like, I have no idea what you were thinking when you did this, but sure. It has five nations, which are like ethnicities and six republics. So six states, which are pretty much independent states.

the nations are the Slovenes, the Croats, the Serbs, the Macedonians and the Montenegrins. And you're like, grand, feel like there's someone missing. They're the famous ones. And for some reason, Bosnian Muslims are just left off of the list. Like they're not considered to be their own ethnicity.

They do, however, get their own republic or a Bosnia-Herzegovina is the sixth republic. So there's Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia are the kind of six republics, each of which has its own little government. It has its own economic policy and it is run as its own republic with the kind of supranational presidency over the top.

who does foreign policy, essentially. That's like their main thing. And they do kind of broad scale economic policy and things like that. Serbia is also split into two kind of sub regions. So Vojvodina, Kosovo. Mm-hmm.

which is another famous one for reasons that will become clear. The basic deal or the ideal is that everyone will be a member of an ethnicity. If you are a Bosnian Muslim, then they basically need you to say that you're either a Serbian Muslim or a Croatian Muslim. Like Bosnian isn't an option. Pick a different. Yeah.

So you're a member of an ethnicity, you're a member of a state, and then you're also a Yugoslav. And what they are very, very keen on is social justice, equality, self-determination. So everybody is equal and diverse.

There is a complete ban on anything that attempts to raise one nationality or ethnicity above another. And they say the new constitution says basically that we are a community of people equal in rights who on the basis of self-determination, including the right of separation, have expressed our will to live together in a federative state. Sure. Seems good, actually. Seems fine. Yeah.

The deal is that if you can, like none of the states are ethnically homogenous and there is a complete, like the higher up rhetoric is that ethnic homogeneity is not something that anybody should be aiming for. Brotherhood and unity is like Tito's messaging. It's like his catchphrase, brotherhood and unity. And we'll come to it in a wee second, but I read a book by Alexander Heman, who is a Bosnian whose family grew up during this time and then they left Bosnia

They grew up in Sarajevo and they left Yugoslavia in 1992 for fairly obvious reasons. And.

And his mother was one of these teenagers who was 11 when the war ended. And she loved Tito, like loved. She's a Bosnian Serb and she absolutely loves Tito. And she gets really involved in these youth projects and these community projects that are put together by the Communist Party to fight.

infrastructure voluntarily basically and one of the things that she is on and she's on work groups that build this enormous highway that runs through massive swathes of Yugoslavia called the highway of brotherhood and unity which is a very communist thing to call a highway that's beautiful I love it yeah

It reminds me of that one episode of Parks and Rec where they're trying to persuade people not to get upset about their being fluoride in the water. So they start calling it freedom water. Yes. It is. But this is something that he refers to like over and over again as brotherhood and unity and that everybody's equal. You can live anywhere in the country of Yugoslavia and no matter what your religion, no matter what your ethnicity, no matter how complicated your like...

is because there's all kinds of people. There's Germans, there's Italians, there's Ukrainians, there's Hungarians, there's like, you know, loads of ethnicities. But no matter where you are, you will always be treated the same. You'll have the same education. You will have the same rights. You will never be barred from anything and you will never be treated differently because we are all together in this and we've all agreed to live together. And so that is...

is, I think, a really incredibly progressive 1945 thing to do, and I think a very clever thing for him to do. And not everybody loves it, obviously. And the downside is that they crack down very hard on anybody who has anything in their name that even looks like the suggestion of nationalist. Yeah.

Like anything that even looks like it might be publishing like pro-Serbia stuff that might suggest that Croats are not equal. Anything that even looks like it is like this is a group for Macedonians. Then they're like, no, you can't have a group for Macedonians. It has to be a group for everybody. Yeah.

So, which people, like, not everybody loves. There are people who have very strong opinions about this for, as I say again, fairly obvious reasons following the war where everybody was massacring each other. Yes. Yeah. There's some trauma to deal with. Yeah. Yeah.

And that you suspect that the reason that he has to repeat Brotherhood and Unity so much is that not everybody was listening. Like generally, if you have to say something 115 times, it's not because everybody heard you and was playing along the previous 114 times. Yeah.

But the period from of like the late 1940s into the early 1950s is this unbelievable feeling of positivity and enthusiasm and joy and optimism that.

massively just in kind of enthuses everybody in the country it's it's not surprising like in my experience like you live through a disaster and then when everyone comes together to try and rebuild like it's it's a heady emotional mix for everyone to be in at the same time like it's it is it's very easy to feel unified in those sorts of circumstances it is and that he his his

The kind of main aim of Titoism was to have everybody engaged on a very personal level with their community and with the running of their community. He calls it self-management. And the kind of the first part of this is that he gets people voluntarily involved in these rebuilding programs. But he also, and this is

I do genuinely think that if you're going to forcibly socialize a country, the way he does it is incredibly well. Basically, they confiscate huge amounts of private property from large landlords, from banking, from churches, from people who own large amounts of land, basically. So they put a limit on how much land a person can own.

which is not very big, but it's big enough. And then they redistribute the land that they have taken in packages to 300,000 people. See, this is the future liberals want. And it already happened. It is.

So basically, almost all of the people who were left homeless or displaced by the war were given land that they could then work, that was their land. He basically, instead of keeping it in the hands of the state, which he's against the idea of a state, basically, and he doesn't want to be a state, and the underlying principle is that he thinks that it's called witherism, basically.

Yeah, I like this. I don't think it's true, but I like the idea. It's compelling. It is. The idea is that you can gradually kind of give people more and more autonomy in the running of their daily lives on a small scale basis. So they're running their own land. So 90% of the land is given out and that you can then get them involved in that. Generally at the factory level or the workshop level or in small communities, they have democratic...

And he then goes around and hands out, like gives people money, gives people tools. So something like 20% of the farms in Yugoslavia were still using wooden tools. Like they didn't even have metal ones. And he goes,

goes around and gives people money so they can improve their farms he goes around and gives people tools and he then initiates huge programs of education where everybody children and adults are taught to read taught to engage are basically bused to schools and there is a real desire to educate the peasantry yeah and everybody and he does this not

by collectivizing particularly and not by kind of the Stalinist or Leninist approach, which is to murder people until they obey. He basically sends out people to persuade people that this is a good idea. So he holds meetings everywhere and is like, oh, this is what you would get out of it. Like if you educate your children, then this is what you can have. And to listen to them and then answer their questions and then be like...

yeah, fair enough. And then, you know, react to their issues rather than, as I say, punch people in the face or stab them all. He doesn't do like weirdo programs of landlords. He's just like, okay, you have a couple of acres now, deal with it. And not murdering people and educating people and giving them stuff that makes their life better is, and this will astonish you, great. Yeah. Mm-mm.

Like real desire to have industrial progress, to urbanize, to educate, to improve productivity of farms and things like that. But to do it ideally without the horrors of capitalism or he perceives to be the horror of capitalism and to without the horrors of what he has seen in the Soviet Union. Yeah.

which he says is terrible like that's not made people's lives better and he genuinely wants to make people's lives better it does it's not like perfect and there are fuck ups but it is still a significant like it is an unbelievable

unbelievably successful program. He also turns the economy around within two years, right? Like two years after the war, the country has nothing. And then because of this massive investment in rebuilding infrastructure and giving people jobs, rebuilding infrastructure...

He just turns the ship around real fast. Real fast. And by the 1950s, they're experiencing what is considered to be an economic miracle, basically. They are growing faster than Japan, which is huge. They are growing. So by the 1950s, their economy is growing 13% a year and Japan's economy is growing 8% a year. And so that is like a huge growth.

And they also, and from a personal level, I'm very keen on this. They made abortion on demand legal and made birth control free and available to everybody with the specific aim that every child would be a desired child, which I think is... That's beautiful. Fantastic. That's genuinely such a beautiful way to put it. Yeah. And I think, and it's wonderful. And then that automatically allows women to work way more effectively.

And they're able to then... So this period... So I read Alexander Hermann's... He's got a book called My Parents in Introduction, which is about their lives both before and after the siege of Sarajevo. And basically, they're like their parents were...

peasants like not poor peasants like not starving to death peasants but they were peasants like their life was the village and they there was nothing beyond that they were both the first children in their families to go to school and they were sent to school in like villages nearby basically so they lived away and then they what seems like the program was that state

corporations so things like electricity and water and gas and all the rest of it is nationalized and you could you would write and ask for a stipend from a state corporation that you wanted to work for so his father does one for like an electricity company i can't remember who his mom does one for but they basically pay for their education and then pay for them to go to university so they then both go to belgrade i think for university which is where they meet and

And they then have to go and do a certain amount of work for that company, but they have an education. So they both leave their village. They both move to the city. They both become professionals, educated professionals in their field. His father becomes an electrical engineer who is sent all over the world to work with pylons, which is quite cool. Yeah.

And then they get married out of love. They date. They're like the first people that they know who date and marry for love rather than marry for land or whatever. And then have children who grow up in a city, who go to school, who are educated, who then go on to reject everything they ever stood for. But what he says is they were the first people

in like generations of their family who could describe themselves as individuals who left the family, left the peasantry and went off to become a middle class that did not exist at all in anywhere really in Yugoslavia. There was an individuality

intellectual elite and there was peasantry and very little in the middle. But what this did, like this Titoism, was create a middle class who could own things and who could have a vision for their future and vision for their lives getting better. And they own this little house that they build themselves. So they have an apartment in

And then they buy a plot of land and build a house on it. That's their country house. And they have a car and they have a color television. And like they live this life of luxury that is unimaginable to them when they were children and like growing up during the war when they thought that their lives are going to be just peasantry. And they couldn't didn't even think that there would be anything like

like that could ever exist beyond that. And it is astonishing speed that they create this really amazing. And yeah, and they create a literate, largely employed, industrialized, modern economy in

in what feels like the blink of an eye with the near enough full participation of everyone involved because everybody's like yeah I'll come and help you build a road yeah because also working working towards part of your country's infrastructure it's not just that this is going to be like a good job they're going to pay you well

You get to be proud. You've contributed something so tangible and that's something that is, like, time and time again demonstrated to be something that people want, something that people value is being able to feel like they've invested something in. Yeah. Yeah. And what he understands to a degree that I think is very impressive is that people also do need to have something personal that they feel like they're working towards. It can't just be the country. Like, and in a lot of the other communist nations in the USSR, like...

especially in Russia, they took that away. Places that Russia held really firm control over, like Ukraine, where they forcibly collectivized and said that you weren't allowed to have personal property of any kind. Yeah. It just demotivates. Yeah, of course it does. To a real degree that is very visible. Yeah.

And yeah, so basically this is like the 1950s are a real glory time. And the second reason that it is a glory time and that he is able to do this so successfully is that in 1948, he binned off Stalin. And he is pretty much the only person who managed to tell Stalin to go away and stop bothering him.

And what brought it about is really complicated, like geopolitical, that involves him, like stuff going on in Bulgaria and Albania and Greece. And at one point, Tito sends some troops to go and help something out in Albania and Stalin loses his mind because he's like, how dare you do anything without me telling you? Then he tries to force, for some reason, Bulgaria and Albania to become single country. Yeah.

tries to bash them together in the hope, I think, or one of the books I read suggests that he thinks that it will make Yugoslavia the subordinate nation to Bulgaria because Dimitrov, Georgi Dimitrov is closer to Stalin, basically, and it will put Tito in his place. Yeah.

It's astonishing that you can look at the only place in Europe that successfully kicked the Nazis out themselves and think, yeah, we can just make someone else control them. They'll be fine. Yeah, it does. You would look at Tito and be like, yeah, I reckon I can tell him to do it. But Stalin, unfortunately, had got a bit more than a bit off his rocker.

He then, basically he considers Russia to be the center of the universe. He thinks that it is vitally important that everybody pay attention to him. He considers anything that is a deviation from what he has done to be an attack on him. And so he starts writing letters to Tito and starts complaining to the very newly formed Common Form, which is the Communist Information Bureau. It's basically like a

It's kind of like a replacement for Comintern. It's just the communist political parties is where they go from around the USSR and associated communist countries. He told them that he didn't believe that, like basically because Tito was not doing collectivization particularly or not doing it very much.

He accused him of capitalism and anti-Soviet and anti-Russian activities. And he then booted Yugoslavia out of the common form, which basically removed them from any access to the Soviet Union, and then tried to persuade everybody to rise up against Tito. Mm-hmm.

And this was a massive crisis because for a lot of people who had got into communism, Stalin and the USSR were like the sun around which everybody orbited. And there were a lot of people who genuinely believed that this would end the ability of Yugoslavia to exist.

And that isolation from the USSR would be catastrophic. And there are also a lot of people who fucking love Stalin. Like, if you've done anything in leftist organizing ever, then you know that you're still going to occasionally meet someone who's like, well, actually, I think gulags are brilliant.

And there are people who love the violent crushing approach. And there were plenty of those in Yugoslavia as well. Yeah. And so this was a huge, huge crisis. But what Tito very cleverly did is he had chatted to the British and the Americans and slyly managed to allow them to believe, I think is probably the right term, allow them to believe that if they moved away from the USSR that maybe they would stop being so communist. Mm-hmm.

And so they started giving him tons of money. Yeah.

Like loads of money, like pretty much by the end of the month in which he was booted out of the common form, he had managed to get like five million pounds from the British and was getting more money from the Americans because he had kind of basically, they thought that if they kept giving them money, then they would, and like military stuff and loans and all of the aid that you can give, that they would... Woo them into the side of the...

Cold War, basically. Exactly. Or that they would become capitalists. They'd be like, oh, you know, actually capitalism's brilliant. They did not realize at all that he was a very committed communist and a very committed Marxist. He just was not a Stalinist. They also didn't then realize that the domino theory and the whole, that backed the whole commitment to the

Yeah.

Which also is what Tito was trying to say this whole time. I liked the idea that he is talking to all these third world countries, which of course the original meaning of third world is that they were neither aligned with the Western first world nor the Russian second world. And they're all just like, we could just not do this, actually. We could just not. We can just, you know.

co-exist the non-alignment so the non-alignment movement which still exists as it is and is behind some UN agencies today right it is yeah and it was so that's a bit later it comes around like officially like late 1950s early like

is when that emerges. The first meeting of the non-alignment movement is held in Yugoslavia, in Belgrade, in 1961. It is driven by Tito himself, Nehu of India, Nasser of Egypt,

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukamo of Indonesia. And so it is a very broad range of people because Sukamo is a violent anti-communist. And Nasser is attempting to create the Pan-Arab League.

And Tito is a furious communist. So it's quite an interesting collective of people. It eventually holds 120 countries, including all but one country in Africa. And it's basically specifically standing against colonialism, imperialism, and promoted the decolonization and self-determination of countries in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world, mostly. Yeah.

And he, Tito travels relentlessly in those areas. And this is actually one of the reasons why Bosnian Muslims didn't cause that many problems about not being recognized as an ethnicity because they knew that Tito himself was such a fighter for Arab rights and for Muslim rights in a lot of the Middle East. And he was...

For a man who had fought a brutal guerrilla partisan war and executed a lot of Nazis, his life as a diplomat was incredibly pro peaceful coexistence and peaceful resolution. And he spent a lot of his time on the international stage mediating between the USSR and the US-UK kind of Western countries and political

trying to prevent people from bombing each other or invading one another's countries because the other thing that they're very for is one of the main agreements of the non-aligned movement is respecting borders like don't go marching into other people's countries because you think that you should can bomb them out of being communist and you know obviously people have seen the Vietnam War seen the Korean War seen all of these interventionist attempts to and

I mean, this is before they really started interfering in South America, but they'd seen America name itself world police and try to prevent communism everywhere. And this is where this idea of the third world comes from, that they're going to be neither communist nor particularly, nor Western-style capitalism. And it's one of those things that, when I've seen that spoken of before, it's always like, these are the countries...

that didn't have sufficient wealth or military strength to be worth either the USSR or America wooing them to their side. They weren't going to contribute, so they were kind of left off the list. But that's not really the case. They were opposed to the whole project and actively trying to talk people out of doing this whole thing. And I think that's the part of the story that just doesn't get told. Yeah.

Yeah, it is specifically countries that refuse to join NATO and refuse to join the Warsaw Pact. And it has come to mean, yeah, like basically because the Americans won, because like NATO won the Cold War, it's come to mean countries that wouldn't hang out with us and we didn't want them anyway. Yeah.

But yeah, technically it just refers to the large amount of countries who just didn't want to be involved in this ideological war that they thought was silly. And Tito does a lot of work to promote...

on a global level. But that kind of comes after he has booted out Stalin and it is his greatest work, I would say, probably. Okay, I have to talk about my rabbit hole that I spent the last hour working on. Yeah. Which is the end of the Stalin period. And so 1948 is the big split. And...

He lines kind of slightly more with the Americans and approximately an hour, hour and a half before we start recording and Oliver sent a little kind of meme thing, like an image macro that has a claim on it that says...

that Tito wrote a letter to Stalin and said, stop sending people to kill me. We have already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle. If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow and I won't have to send a second. And it is the exact kind of thing that sounds like nonsense or at the very least sounds like it has been warped somehow. So I was like, well, I'm going to find out what this source is and I see where it's come from.

So the English text comes from Robert Service's biography of Stalin. And he frames it as one strong man threatening another strong man, basically. But it is kind of amazing that he would like this idea of Tito being like, I'm going to kill Stalin. So he, thankfully, thank God for Robert Service, has a footnote. And for this, I will appreciate him forever. Yeah.

which goes to a Russian biography, which was translated into English as Unknown Stalin, is by Roy and Jerez Medavev. I believe that they are completely unrelated. They just have the same surname. Okay. So I obviously got that book. I was like, okay, what's that one? And they quote a personal friend of theirs. So this comes from the...

kind of remembrances of a guy they knew. And the guy is called... This is such a bad name. His name is Alexei Snegnov. Just... Snegnov, you poor guy. Snegnov was an aide to Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev. And he apparently was...

personally present in 1955. So Stalin dies in 1953 and they, there were kind of plans to maybe turn Stalin's Dasher, his like country house into a museum. Like, you know, those writers museums where you can go and like see their desk and be like, oh, their kitchen. Yeah.

They kind of thought they might do that for Stalin's Dasher and be like, come and see where Stalin lived and you can look at his desk and his chair and this is his coffee cup. But they decided that this wasn't going to work out. So they then cleared it all away. And in the meantime, there had been a fairly concerted effort to destroy as many of Stalin's letters as possible and as much of his personal documentation because nobody wanted those things ending up in history books ever. Sure.

So a lot of it had been destroyed, but apparently they then, when they decided to clear out the Dasher after two years, they opened the drawers and found, and started emptying them out properly, and found underneath some newspapers at the bottom of a drawer, five letters, of which a few years later, when they were talking to him, he could only remember three of them. One of them is a letter from Lenin telling Stalin off for swearing. Wow.

One of them was from Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed during the Great Purge, asking Britain in the days before he was executed and apparently ended with the lines, Koba, why do you need my death? So quite a personal letter. And the third letter was the one from Tito, which said, Stalin, stop sending people to kill me or I will come and kill you. That is wonderful. Yeah.

Yes. And so it may well be true, which I'm pleasantly surprised by. Yeah. The wording basically comes from the memory of a guy from 1955, but nobody knows what the letter is. He's, as far as I can tell, the only source because there's no further places to go. But that is possibly Stalin sent a load of people to kill him and he threatened to kill him back.

There is a competing tradition, which appears in most of the books about Tito that I have read, which comes from a Boris Yeltsin advisor and former military guy in post-Stalinist Russia. Mm-hmm.

Dimitri Volgokhanov, a better name, Volgokhanov. He wrote a bunch of books. Basically, he started being a historian and started actually looking at Stalin archives and then became massively disillusioned by the actual words of all these people he was raised to revere as gods and then gave up on communism altogether eventually.

But he wrote a book that came out in about 2000 and no, 1993. Sorry, came out in 1993 about a history of the Soviet Union in seven leaders. And he claims that there were two plans to assassinate Tito, but neither of them was carried out. One of which was to infect him with a plague.

Okay. That seems like the sort that would have a lot of collateral damage. Uh-huh. This one also feels like one that would have a lot of collateral damage, and I'm kind of delighted by it. It feels like the exact kind of thing that would appear in a mad spy novel. They were going to give him a jeweled box, like a fancy box, and when he opened it, a poison gas would come out. Yeah.

Like, it's just needlessly complicated. It is. You just hire a spy to infiltrate his household and poison his coffee. Yeah.

Yep. Well, apparently. So either they tried five times and used things like bombs and rifles, or they tried two times. Well, they didn't, because these plans were never actually carried out. They were just like people sitting around in a room with a poisoned jewel box and the plague. But either way, it is generally believed that Stalin was not pleased with Tito's

But that was my rabbit hole of following footnotes as far back as I could follow footnotes until they stopped doing footnotes. But so basically it's completely reasonable to believe. Yeah, completely reasonable. So you can completely believe in the letter, which I hope is pleasing for everybody as it is for me, because I'm always delighted when something turns out to actually be true. Yes. Okay. So now...

1950s, 1960s, everything is kind of great. There are occasional issues. So there is a fairly significant issue when one of the kind of main architects of the regime called Milovan Dilias, I do not know how to pronounce this, Dilias, I think it is, Dilias, who

In the 1950s, started pushing more for parliamentary democracy of some kind, basically. And was like, look, things are going all right, but it would be better if we could do... If we had other parties, basically. There should be some kind of system where people have a say in how the party is run. And he was very concerned with something that...

them very much at the beginning. And one of the reasons why they hated the USSR and the USSR system was that the party and the state had become synonymous. And therefore, it was impossible for the state to wither because the party would always want to exist. Like the only way that the state could wither is if the Communist Party withered.

And he felt that that was happening and that there should be other political opinions allowed in political life. And basically, he writes a load of articles saying this in Yugoslavia. And as a result, he's expelled from government. He loses all of his government jobs. So he then gives a interview to the New York Times, who, and this is fantastic, they published it on Christmas Day.

in 1954. And it is a fairly long interview, obviously I read it, with the New York Times, in which he says, what we've got at the moment is a system that is totalitarian in its political life, that there is people, we are not allowed to have political opinions that disagree with Tito. And he says, I thought that things were opening up

And because we've got artists who are allowed to say things in literature and in song. And I thought that I would be able to say, have an opinion, but I was punished for it. And I've left the communist party. And what he says is this, like, basically this is an experiment. I'm taking a risk thinking this, he says, I don't know what's going to happen as a result of this interview. And I hope that nothing bad will happen. And it will mean a lot from our country. If nothing bad happens to me as a result of this. And like me saying that, that,

this is becoming totalitarian. Unfortunately, what happened was he was arrested and sentenced to... He was given originally an 18-month suspended sentence. And then he wrote a book and published it called The New Class, An Analysis of the Communist System, in which he said that the system in Yugoslavian politics had created a political elite who...

And this is the new class he's talking about. They created a political elite who gave themselves privileges and were too embedded in the system. And that being a high ranking member of the party made you better than everybody else. And that if you're not allowed to critique this, then you're living in a totalitarian government. This was a massive bestseller and it got him put in jail for like five years. Yeah. And then when...

friend of his wrote to Tito and was like look this is a bad plan like I really think that you would be better off not imprisoning people who disagree with you he also got put in prison for four years yeah that's a bit of a misstep on of our boy Tito yes um so this is the like major problem

With any kind of dictatorship. And why I can never, like, this is not going to be like the Tito fan cast, is that he does keep putting people in prison. He also does big old purges post the Stalin situation, where something like 16,000 people end up in a prison island where they are, quote unquote, reeducated with largely torture and death. Yeah. When you hear the term reeducation, you really have to throw up a bit of a red flag.

Yeah, no, like there's one of those communist words that nobody loves. But he, and you know, this is, I think, one of the joys of history and people in general, which is that they can do amazing things and do really terrible things and not see any particular, like, you can be like, oh, yes, peaceful reconciliation, unless you write a book about me being bad. But yeah, but he is...

focused very strongly on the economics of the country and is kind of less concerned with political freedom. And I...

would say that by the end of his life he really thinks that he went too far in giving people political freedom and he considers that to have been a bad thing that he he really doesn't think that political freedom is a very good idea at all which is not great it's not great it is one of those things where like sometimes you look around and you understand it like doing things yeah democratically and having political freedom it's a slower method to whatever your political aims are like

And this is, I think, one of the big... One of the things that makes it simpler to be politically conservative because conservatives fundamentally don't actually believe in democracy. They believe in consolidation of power. So it's really easy to reconcile those two things. But if you're on the left and you believe in leftist aims and you want equality and you want people to have the freedom to follow their own, to build a life that is meaningful to them, and if you want...

you know, ordinary things like socialized education and health care, then you probably also believe in democracy. And that means that you have to convince everyone else in order to meet those aims. And that's a really long, long job. And it's hard to do. And it's

consistently being pushed back by people who are more willing to manipulate people to meet their ends. And it's always going to be compromised because there's never going to be more than 10 people that agree 100% with you. So it's always never going to be the full vision. Dictatorship gets you your full vision. And for the most part, it seems that unless you are a member of the... Unless you want to be involved politically, which...

Frankly, most people don't as we live in a democracy and you'll still never get more than like a 60% turnout in any given election. There is no, like most people fucking adore Tito to a degree that is creepy. Like there is an intense cult of personality around him, which we will come to when he dies. The second crisis is the fall of Alexander Rankovitch.

who is kind of the second or third in command, depending on what period we are in. He is a vice president and vice prime minister a bunch of times. He is very, very powerful during the 1940s and 1950s. And he is largely in charge of Serbia, Macedonia. And he is a pro-Serb nationalist. Mm-hmm.

And it is surprising on that level that he is able to hang out with Tito as much as he does. But he basically just seems to think that he has power. So he's just going to use it to do whatever he needs to do. And what he does is takes control of Kosovo and spent like 10, 15 years attempting to neutralize

non-violently ethnically cleansed Kosovo. So he was the, he created an OG hostile environment where he basically made life in Kosovo miserable with raids and discrimination and like random searches on the street and that kind of thing against

Albanians specifically. So there was a very large population of Albanians and also Muslims in Kosovo, and he wanted it to be ethnically Serbian. So he spent a long time running Kosovo as a police state, trying to force out as many Albanians and non-Serbs as he possibly could, which he managed to somehow do kind of secretly until 1966.

He also kind of set up a sort of shadow government within the government, whereby he had loads of people who were loyal to him and not to Tito. It seemed like he might try and eventually make a play for overthrowing Tito, possibly. But a bunch of people came together and went to Tito and were like, look at what he's doing. This is unacceptable. And Tito was like, oh, yeah, he is. And he fired him from everything. And...

Once he has his fairly dramatic fall, he is surprisingly not executed or anything like that. He's just kind of booted out and has to live this very low-key existence. He is important because he is considered to be an inspiration for Slobodan Milosevic, who we will get to chat about.

Next time. But yeah, so that is the second kind of major crisis. And then the third major crisis is your 1971 Croatian Spring, as it is called. There are also student movements, actually. There was a third crisis in 1968, the year that everybody had

some student movements and Yugoslavia was relatively open so students all over the country knew about it and there were student protests about various things because nothing is ever perfect and so there were student protests in 68 which were handled exactly the same way as student protests virtually everywhere which involved a lot of people being really violently beaten which not great astonishing how as soon as a student is doing something

every government in the world is like well maybe if we just hit them really hard yeah despite the fact that at the same time they're like it's not like the student protests that happened 30 years ago because those people students were right uh yeah these ones these ones are wrong and bad and we're definitely not going to look back in 30 years and realize they were right absolutely not i mean just because that's happened every other time um

Anyway, that got put down with some classic police violence, which was not a great move. And that kind of put a lot of people off, but not so much. So again, Alexander German's mother was part of this and she was beaten during the attacks. And she said she returned to the party, but she never returned with the same enthusiasm. It kind of put a massive dampener on her enthusiasm for communism and the Communist Party. Yeah.

Then 1971, you have the Croatian Spring, which is this big movement in Zagreb fighting for more independence for Croatia. It was a very specifically and kind of melodramatically, maybe, nationalist protest. And it is the beginning of new nationalism really coming to the fore. Mm.

whereby they wanted more independence, more decentralization, more pulling away from the other countries. In part, what has happened over the economic miracle is that some areas, most notably Serbia and Croatia, have industrialized and become more

more rich and more productive than the smaller countries. So places like Bosnia-Herzegovina, although Bosnia-Herzegovina has this massive tourism industry. Yeah.

And but places like, you know, Macedonia and Kosovo, which are smaller and have not had the same economic input, the Croatians and to a certain extent the Serbians as well, start to believe that the other places are parasites that are sucking away all of their young people, sucking away all of the money that they're raising, that they don't see why they should be giving away, why they should be having to pay for

for things happening in the other areas of Yugoslavia. They don't see why they should have to be paying for Slovenes or Slovenia to be doing anything to get a new highway when it's theirs. A lot of young people were leaving Croatia, partly to work in other places in the world, but partly just to

you know, go to Sarajevo, go to Belgrade, which the leaders described as a genocidal form of denationalization. Okay. They also felt that there were too many Serbs and you can already see the beginnings of some problems that are going to come up again. They basically said they wanted everything

independent Croatia that was no longer part of Yugoslavia they wanted their own constitution that ended equality so the Yugoslav constitution says that everybody is equal can't discriminate and everybody has equal rights and they wanted they proposed a constitution that explicitly said that Croatia is for the Croatians and everybody else is a minority that gets fewer rights so

which they did manage to put down. And they put it down pretty much without violence, like no mass violence. People aren't massacred or anything like that. It is kind of fairly well handled. But what Tito, what it does do is there had been more and more moves over the 1960s towards more decentralization, to more power, to work like...

self-management groups as they're called, and then more power so that people could run their own economic policies more completely. And there had been a movement to separate the party from the state basically. So there could be local parties that ran things. And he immediately turned back and was like, "No," and grasped everything back

and passed some fairly heavy censorship laws. And then he said, the means of disseminating all information, the press, the radio, the television, it must be in our hands and not in the hands of anyone who works against our unity. And then he said, we were too hell-bent on democracy. Yeah.

Yeah, so what you get as soon as you have censorship laws, as soon as you make things more illegal, you get more prisoners and counter-revolutionary activities, quote unquote, means that you now can be arrested for like taking a photograph that people don't like or making a film that people don't like. And that is never great. No.

But this all happened during a part of the process of reform. So from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, there was this kind of process of reforming communism that they were trying to do, which the original aim of was to decentralize even more.

up being less decentralized than the original plan because of these uprisings or because Tito was so freaked out by nationalism. What they did do was in 1974 constitution, they recognized Bosnian Muslims as a nationality. Oh, that's nice. They finally got there. They got there. Yeah.

Yes. So they are recognized as a nationality of their own and not just a religion. So in part, this was because they had been kind of fighting for it and it had been recognized that they have a distinct ethnic consciousness. Like it is not necessarily that they are all practicing Muslims or...

because religiosity is waning like quite strongly across everywhere because people are becoming more educated and that's what happens but they do have a specific relationship to Islam they have a specific relationship to Turkey and the Ottoman Empire that feeds like things like the foods that they eat what they do for their

wedding ceremonies, what they name their children. They circumcise even though they technically, people kept trying to ban circumcision, but they still circumcise. They have their own songs. They have their own dialect, which has Arabic in it. So they'll say, you know, instead of, you know, God willing, they're Muslim, so they'll say inshallah. And

They make up fully 40% of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And so they are finally recognized as an ethnicity in their own right. And the new constitution renames Yugoslavia again. The place just has so many names. The fourth constitution, and it is the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Mm-hmm.

So he is also named president for life. Tito gets that job. So instead of having to occasionally pretend that they were reelecting, they're just like, okay, this feels like a waste of everybody's time. Yes. But, and it kind of, you know, long,

restates all of the previous stuff but that's the main things is that it recognises Bosnians Bosnian Muslims as people in their own right and

In general, the 1970s are not amazing. In part, this is because people have grown up under communism and it is no longer for people who are coming of age, people who were born in the early 50s and are now entering their teens, like they're now in their 20s, people who are teenagers who have never known any life but this.

are doing what young people do and rebelling against it. Yeah. And again, Alexander Chimon is really interesting on this because he's like, he would have furious arguments with his mother because he wanted to listen to punk music in the 70s and he didn't want to have anything to do with Tito and he thought that all of her stories about like gloriously coming together to sing songs about how much they love Tito and writing letters to Tito because they love him so much was the insane and deeply uncool behavior of a mom. Yeah.

And like, I think it's very important. Yeah. And like, these are young people who are looking at the values of the country and as profoundly uncool. Yeah.

And they want to be cool and they want to do something different. And they don't want to have to submit things to censorship boards. And they've only known a quite nice life. Like they were born in their nice state-sponsored flat and they've always had a car. Yeah. And the only time that they ever have to deal with peasant stuff is when they go back to their parents' house, like to visit their grandparents. They just don't really believe that it exists anymore.

in the same way that you don't really like I don't really believe that the 70s existed and my nephews don't believe that the 90s existed like um and yeah it's just really uncool to be a communist yeah

and also because there is a national a global economic crisis in the 1970s um in like it happens everywhere it's a real massive problem you have things like massive oil prices um you have all the electricity going off in the uk and like the three-day week and you have

Carter in the US telling people that maybe they should like turn their lights off more and huge queues for oil and gas and stuff like that like it's a it's a international crisis but Yugoslavia is still a little country that is very industrial um and I did read a thing that was like

The 1970s is the point at which countries start to become post-industrial. Some of them do it forcibly, like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are crushing unions in industrial areas. Yugoslavia struggles to become post-industrial, although tourism is really its only post-industrial industry. But also,

Tito and Titoism was focused on lifting the country out of peasantry, of industrializing it, of having modernization. And it achieved that. And then it didn't know what the next goal was. Yeah. It...

Unlike a lot of the other countries in the USSR, which never really managed to achieve that and therefore were able to consistently say to people, you are suffering for the next generation who will also suffer for the next generation who will also suffer for the next generation. Like there is an imaginary future that will be better. Tito genuinely did make their children's lives better and he made their lives better. And then by the late 1970s, everyone's like,

what is a like defining thing now and they're starting to look at their neighbours and like eyeball them and be like do they have it a bit better than me and so there is some kind of stagnation during that period and then in 1980 Tito dies he is

In his 80s, he is still president for life. He still, right up until the end, has his basically making all of the big decisions. He dies on the 4th of May in Ljubljana. He dies because he got circulation problems in his leg and he refused. And it kind of started dying because of lack of blood. And he refused to let them amputate it.

because it was like, I don't have time. I don't want my leg amputated. I have papers to read. And so they didn't amputate it until it was too late, basically. And he got gangrene in his leg and that infection...

absolutely overrode his like 84 year old body and he died um the footage of tito's death like announcements are astonishing there is this very famous footage which i have put online which you can watch of a so there was a football match happening between split and belgrade and um i i

As an aside, the football team of Belgrade was called the Red Star of Belgrade. I just find like it's a problem with communism. They're always like just name and stuff. But they announced it over the loudspeaker and then the football match stopped. And there is this footage of stadium is silent apart from sobbing.

And you can just hear people weeping. And then they kind of fairly spontaneous, like spontaneously start singing songs about Tito. And it's like a comrade Tito, we will always be your children or something like that. Yeah. And it is just like, it is a stadium of silence apart from sobbing, genuinely people crying. And there is a,

A bit in Hemant's book where he's like, I was watching TV with my dad and they announced it and we just did not know what to do. So we just stood up and just stood in front of the television. And this is like people are bereft in a way that is like...

It feels quite genuine. And like there is genuine sobbing. It is mostly when you look at the footage, because there's footage of the funeral and stuff, it is mostly older people that are there. They are people in their 50s and 60s and 70s. But, and as far as they are concerned, they have lost their mythical hero. Like he is the national hero who single-handedly overthrew the evil and created Yugoslavia and

from scratch um and um there's this great um uh like diary entry from an anti-Tito guy called Dobrika Kostic um considered Tito to be the greatest enemy of the Serbian people he said like he kept trying to get talk to people about how he hated Tito um and they were nobody would join in anyway um

I am completely alone with my anti-Titoist feelings. I feel so lonely and completely isolated. Which is kind of delightful, I think. Like, he's just constantly trying to be like, oh, Tito, man. And they're like, oh, God, yeah, we love him so much. All I want is a friend who also hates Tito.

Yeah, nobody hates Tito with him. His funeral was attended by 128 of the 154 UN countries. Jimmy Carter did not go. And on the footage of the funeral, there is someone in the YouTube comments who's still mad about it. Jimmy Carter, the nicest president, and he couldn't go to Tito's funeral.

It was attended by 31 other presidents, 44 kings, sorry, 44, four kings, six princes, 22 prime ministers, including Margaret Thatcher. And the footage that I will put in the shoe notes has Margaret Thatcher's name spelt in Serbo-Croa, which is delightful. And 47 ministers of foreign affairs. It was like he had such a...

an impact that people travel and the New York Times published a a

An obituary of him in which he said, unlike others who rose to power on the communist wave after World War II, Tito did not demand that his people suffer for a distant vision of a better life. After his initial Soviet influence bleak period, Tito moved towards radical improvement of life in the country and Yugoslavia gradually became a bright, smart, and

bright spot amid the general greyness of Eastern Europe which is a bit of a slag on everybody else in Eastern Europe but also Poland and Ukraine were not great places to be um

And yeah. And then things start to go very wobbly indeed, which we will talk about next week. But in general, unless you wanted to start a political party or write a book about how you don't like Tito. I've understood it was pretty good. Generally a good time to be alive in Yugoslavia. And this is the reason why there is a thing called a Yugo nostalgia. Yeah.

And this is why you still have people who talk about it, because it did work. And he did kind of create a miracle. And he did not use mass violence to do it. But it also highlights the inherent problem in one party systems in general, but like behind one president. Like, I think a lot about the fact that the fact that the American Revolution succeeded and like,

transferred into a functional government that ran the country is it constantly is it miraculous that almost never happens but I think part of it is because of the fact that there were multiple people to hang your hat on like once George Washington stepped down they were like

he wasn't the only mythical hero, he could pass things on to everyone who also loved James Madison, everyone who also loved Thomas Jefferson, like there were people to like help that rockier transition of the first few decades of existence until it became an accepted status quo that this is how things are done and you, one person that can do things well is not enough. You have to have someone coming up behind you to make it stick.

And you have to, I think the other like really miraculous thing about it is that you, by having a multitude of people sign like the Declaration of Independence and the first constitution, not all of them agree. And therefore not everybody who agrees with the project of America has to agree with one guy. Yeah. And which is always a problem because then you,

if you can if you're only allowed to have like one opinion then that just means that there's a lot of people who don't agree with you but if you can have a multitude of opinions but around the core of the idea that

Yes, America is a big country full of diverse people with diverse opinions about things. But we all agree that it's a country. And I was actually thinking that while I was writing these notes that like it's actually a genuine miracle that given the size of America and the multiplicity of people and the interest that...

certainly modern Americans have with their kind of ethnic heritage. It's kind of a miracle that it held together and has only had one civil war. And it is a problem now that there is that sort of mythical attitude to the founding fathers. But at the time, it helped. At the time, it helped, yeah. I mean, everything causes problems eventually. Where you have to be adaptable and ready for the next thing. At least there wasn't just the one guy. There's a version of American history that has George Washington be

Yeah.

you know, less willing to share. And that ends everything with some more brutality afterwards when people, when there isn't another strongman. Yeah, like it could have been a hundred years of revolutions and counter-revolutions like France had, but it's not. It's just like one civil war, admittedly awful, but like... But one in 250 years is actually very good. So, well done, Americans. LAUGHTER

Create, I mean, I was going to say creating countries right there, but maybe fewer genocides would have been delightful. Fewer genocides would have been preferable, but no one gets everything 100% right. So next week we are back to atrocity, unfortunately, because it is the collapse. But it is, yeah. But it was nice to have a bright spot. It's nice to have a bright spot and it's a very good bright spot. It's very impressive.

it is it is yeah and yeah we should be delighted right so yeah next time atrocity what else do people need to know janina you can ask us a question yourself that you would like us to do an episode uh about at history sexy.com you can also support us via ko-fi or patreon or just find out more about us and that's is that everything that's all that that's all the things

Yeah, if you support us on Patreon then you get the episodes a week early and if you're at the three or five pound level then you get a sticker from my very own hands and future bonus content. Is there anything else? If you have questions which like I saw a meme on Reddit, did X really say this? The meme that I can follow footnotes for an hour of my life then I will love you forever. So please ask me those questions because it's genuinely my favourite time to spend a time. Yeah.

dubious internet quotes uh fun our fun division yeah yes exactly until next time then janina bye