Broz was accompanied to the Ministry by several dozen members who were carrying Josip Broz Tito's portraits, red flags and the Yugoslav flag, and a slogan reading "While we were comrades we lived ...like gentlemen, and now that we are gentlemen, how are we living now?" Broz replied that they would realize that the Communist Party was working "for their benefit too", adding that the Communist Party rallied "leftist forces in Serbia".
Tito also illuminates the inner circle, especially Tito's Montenegrin adviser Milovan Djilas, eventually sacrificed in a deal with the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. But Neil Barnett never quite tells ...us how the young Josip Broz, who served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Serbian front in the first world war, grew into such an ardent pan-Yugoslavist. Hatred for his drill sergeant, a fellow Croat, may have been a factor. Perhaps a fuller answer will come from Ivo Banac, the US-based Croatian historian whose forthcoming Tito biography, Barnett says, "could well become the definitive work". Neil Barnett's Tito, though a slim 175 pages, is entertaining and timely. Apart from Montenegro's referendum, we are in the middle of Kosovo's final status negotiations. A decade on from the Bosnian war, Barnett provides a blunt reassessment of the limits of holding a state together by force of personality. Like the country he led, Tito had multiple identities: the communist who carved out a separate path from Stalin's Soviet Union; the Slovene-Croat who imposed "brotherhood and unity" ruthlessly; the dictator who kept most of his people happy with relative wealth, backed up by international loans.
