On December 29, 1949, the leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, declared that the country would follow its own communist path and broke off relations with Stalin.
After the confrontation with the Kremlin, propaganda in the USSR and its allies declared Tito a “Trotskyist“ and a “traitor”.
Under his leadership, the Yugoslav communists developed the theory of the so-called “self-governing socialist society” as a special type of “people's democracy", but in practice Tito's rule was a totalitarian dictatorship of the communist type.
And historians do not have it easy with Tito.
In most cases, their assessments are contradictory. Among his merits, everyone points to the termination of relations with Stalin in 1948, his commitment to the Non-Aligned Movement and the Third World, as well as the relative liberality of his regime. On the other side of the scale fall the mass murders after the end of World War II and the concentration camp on the island of Goli Otok, where Tito's loyal opponents to the USSR were sent at first, and then all sorts of political dissidents, summarized "Deutsche Welle".
The assessment of Tito encounters one main problem: nothing remains of his work. He did not take care of his inheritance, and the collapse of Yugoslavia began immediately after his death.
However, Tito's personality is contradictory in the first place. He comes from an ordinary family, becomes a partisan and a national hero, adores luxury, builds palaces, looks after horses, smokes expensive cigars, wears a ring with a large diamond and dresses in a white marshal's uniform with gold embroidery. Tito is the man who is not afraid to oppose Stalin, to build "market socialism" and to grant workers and labor collectives much more rights than they had even at the end of the Soviet Union. He becomes the leader of the "non-aligned states" and a Yugoslav dictator who, by all means, pumps up his personality cult and ruthlessly deals with his political opponents.
Josip Broz arrives in Moscow in February 1935.
He travels by roundabout routes and with false documents, after having served time in a Yugoslav prison for his membership in the banned communist party and for possessing firearms. The timing of his appearance in the Soviet capital is, to put it mildly, not particularly suitable. In Moscow and Leningrad, a wave of arrests and endless meetings have arisen, at which the “Trotskyists”, including members of overseas communist parties, are being denounced. The Moscow comrades accommodate Tito in a small room in the “Lux” hotel, where the Comintern activists and delegates of foreign communist parties, isolated from the outside world, live. Tito himself was also a Comintern activist and in this capacity bore the pseudonym "Friedrich Walter".
The German communists sheltered in the "Lux" hotel often complained about the conditions: the rooms were cramped and without any amenities, the toilet was in the corridor, the kitchen was shared, dirt and rats were a daily occurrence, and there was a bath once a week. However, Tito had grown up in much harsher conditions in his native Yugoslavia and life in the "Lux" hotel seemed downright luxurious to him: central heating, telephone, hot water, gas stoves in the common kitchen, a dining room, a bakery, even a barbershop.
It is not entirely clear what exactly Josip Broz Tito did in Moscow. Almost nothing is known about his stay for several months: Tito seemed to have disappeared. It is believed that at this time he most likely attended special, secret courses of the Comintern, where intelligence officers and fighters were trained. This training would definitely come in handy later, when he participated in the partisan struggle against the Nazis in the forests and mountains of Yugoslavia during World War II.
In Moscow he met with his Comintern comrades
and discussed with them the situation in Yugoslavia and in the Yugoslav Communist Party, and wrote “characteristics“ of his associates. Such “characteristics“ were required to be written by all communists, but the author Marie-Jeanine Kalich claims that, contrary to common practice, the documents signed by Tito did not have the character of political denunciations. When he does note some negative qualities of individual party figures, Tito does so in a purely human way: this one is everywhere and tries to pull the covers over himself, while that one is cheating on his wife.
Tito himself was not a saint in his own personal life. In Moscow, he divorced his wife Pelageya Belousova, whom he had not seen since 1929, when she emigrated to the USSR. Tito was very angry with her because she practically abandoned their son Zharko, with whom he arrived in the Soviet Union. While Tito was in a Yugoslav prison, Pelageya gave the child to an orphanage. Zharko was a difficult child, so he soon had to be placed in a reformatory, and his mother did not even know where. Tito, with great effort, managed to find his son and take him to him. But he also could not cope with the stubborn Zharko, who joined various hooligan groups and was involved in thefts.
But there was another reason for Tito's divorce.
In the hotel “Lux“ he meets the young German Lucy Bauer, whose real name is Johanne Elsa König. Lucy/Johanne is from Chemnitz, comes from a working-class family, is a member of the Young German Communists and at the age of 19 gives birth to a daughter. A year later, the Communist Party sends her to Moscow to be trained for illegal activities, while the child remains with her parents in Germany. Shortly after, Lucy comes into the sights of the Gestapo and there is no question of returning to Germany. She becomes a political emigrant, completes a course in drafting and starts working at the radio factory in Moscow. She still speaks very little Russian, so she and "comrade Walter" communicate in German. At one point, Lucy moves into Tito's room, where Zharko is already living. The young man unexpectedly becomes friends with his young "stepmother" and even begins to listen to her advice.
But the love between 44-year-old Tito and 22-year-old Lucy did not last long. The two married on October 13, 1936, and three days later Tito was forced to leave Moscow. The then General Secretary of the Comintern, the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, ordered him to go to Yugoslavia to bring order to the faction-ridden Communist Party there. Dimitrov promised Tito that Lucy and Zharko would follow him at the first convenient moment, but this never happened.
Ultimately, Lucy Bauer was arrested by the Soviet secret police NKVD along with over 4,000 other German emigrants who were declared a “fifth column”, spies, saboteurs and Gestapo agents. Lucy was charged under the infamous Article 58. She was sentenced to death, although she denied the charge of espionage. On December 29, 1937, she was shot in Butovo.
Tito continued to try to find out what his wife's fate was, but people who could give him any useful information also began to disappear one by one. It is not known when Tito learned what had happened to his young wife. Later, he himself never spoke about her. But when his conflict with Stalin broke out in 1948, Lucy's fate probably played an important role. Behind Tito's astonishing courage and intransigence in his confrontation with the powerful dictator, who was apparently ready to do anything to destroy him, there was not only the national leader's desire to preserve the independence of Yugoslavia, but also a strong personal dislike. And it is probably due to the tragic fate of Tito's young wife.
Tito was a symbol of the national self-esteem of Yugoslavia,
which melted after his death. Even during World War II, he was a living legend - a rebel whose face and real name no one knew, a precursor to Che Guevara. People of all Yugoslav nationalities were proud of the Leader, who crossed the world's oceans on his own yacht, made friends with Willy Brandt, Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, played the piano for the English Queen Elizabeth II, and the leaders of the whole world flocked to his funeral. After Tito, Yugoslavia went downhill. The good times of the 1960s and 1970s never happened again.