MILOSEVIC VS. TITO 

But Belgrade displayed fewer portraits of Tito: they were superseded by photo images of Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic... The slogan about "all Serbs in one state " was still months away, one could only foresee the Serb-Croatian or Bosnian wars, while the massacre in Kosovo was still beyond imagining. Still, the portraits of the new leader already promised future ordeals. Incidentally, you could see none of them on Pristina streets: the Albanian population of the area held on to Tito, but the portraits of Milosevic hung in plain view in the apartments of Kosovo Serbs, while in the Gracanica Monastery they were on sale alongside icons... The war was a few years away, but the countdown of months to it had already begun.

Josip Broz Tito and Slobodan Milosevic proved to be the best known Yugoslav politicians in the second half of this century. There is a good historical joke: when the former king of Yugoslavia was asked about his attitude to the communist marshal, the monarch answered he sympathized with him: "I alone know how to rule all these peoples that hate each other."

Prewar Yugoslavia was based on the perpetual struggle between Serbs and Croats for supremacy in the state: the Serb elite regarded the newly-formed state as the continuation of their kingdom; the Croats, of course, strove to keep abreast of the rulers, and they finally achieved autonomy. The Second World War showed that this ostensibly magnificent house was made of paper: they began to massacre each other, and it became obvious that, in addition to these two peoples, Yugoslavia was also populated by other nations with their own interests, and that it was impossible to restore the state without due respect for their aspirations. We can say Tito opted for the Soviet way when he divided Yugoslavia into republics and autonomous areas, but the Soviet Bolsheviks also invented nothing new: for the most part they simply established borders between the states that emerged after the collapse of the Russian Empire and were occupied by the Red Army. Tito also saw the apparent wishes of the Balkan nations on the war map. So he accepted not only the statehood of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Montenegro, with their evident state-forming and national potential, but also that of Macedonia, whose national identity had always been a matter of dispute between Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. (However, the possibility of forming a Macedonian state had always been kept in the geopolitical arsenal: for instance, in the last years of World War II the German intelligence chief General Walter Schellenberg suggested proclaiming an independent Macedonia, which Adolf Hitler rejected). And the statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a motley ethnic composition so resembling Yugoslavia itself, would backfire in the years of socialist Yugoslavia's disintegration. At the same time Tito designed models for ethnic minorities. Vojvodina, in which Serbs lived shoulder to shoulder with Hungarians, Romanians, Ruthenians, and other ethnic groups, became an autonomous area. Kosovo and Metochia, overwhelmingly populated with ethnic Albanians, became an autonomous republic. One should note here that Kosovo has always been Yugoslavia's most complicated region which has never fitted into the Slavic context and oriented itself toward a neighboring state. In the initial postwar years Tito was little preoccupied with this, for he had various geopolitical plans in common with those of Albania's leader Enver Hoxha: no one would have been surprised then if Yugoslavia had united with Albania and Kosovo made part of the latter. Everything changed in 1948, when Albania sided with the notorious Informburo resolution condemning Tito and began to actively recruit a fifth column of hard-core Stalinist communists in Kosovo. However, we can say Tito was lucky with Albania: the most liberal communist regime bordered upon the most conservative one. The Kosovo Albanians might have been dissatisfied with the attitude toward them in the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), but they knew only too well the way the people were treated in the "people's" Albania. This is why all the energy of Kosovo intellectuals was aimed at gaining the status of autonomy. Tito knew when to make concessions: in 1974 Kosovo and Vojvodina became autonomous areas, "almost republic," with their representatives sitting in the SFRY Presidium on a par with those of republics proper. The Albanians began to struggle for the status of a full-fledged republics, and they could perhaps have succeeded. However, the Tito epoch was coming to an end. A new period was approaching.

Tito's policies were aimed not so much at a communist party dictatorship as at the soft dictatorship of a personality capable of satisfying the needs of all Yugoslav peoples or forcing them to satisfy these, provided they did not protest. A politician by grace of God, Tito successfully maneuvered between the interests of his own state and those of its ethnic elites, wielding both the stick and the carrot like a virtuoso. He did not fear using force, for he understood that no one in the world would oppose him: the Soviet camp would close its eyes to the problems of a fraternal state, while the West appreciated the only open and Westward-looking Communist regime too much to compromise it as if it were a client state of Moscow. However, it turned out that the model Tito had built was designed for the capacities of one person alone, while the old marshal could not possibly find a worthy successor, for nothing grew in the shade of the tree he had become. The system of collective leadership, already started in Tito's lifetime, proved ineffective in the very first months after the death of the SFRY President for life. So those who were assessing their power ambitions could not but understand that they would not be able to keep hold of the whole of Yugoslavia. For Serbia, whose leaders had always considered it a poor center of Yugoslavia, the problem was all the more painful because, unlike the Russians, who still possessed a sufficient living space even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Serbs saw their opportunities dramatically reduced after the disintegration of Yugoslavia: suffice it to say Serbia does not even have access to the Adriatic Sea, with Yugoslavia's only port being in Montenegro.

A "prophet" appeared very soon, who was ready to brandish the slogan of chauvinistic Belgrade intellectuals. "All Serbs must live in a single state!" Is it Milosevic who thought this up? Or is it the first President of today's Federal Yugoslavia, the famous author Dobrica Cosic? The former quickly got rid of all those clean-handed intellectuals, but has had to coexist with them so far. They dream of the "Serbization" of Kosovo, but he cancels (hard decision) the area's political autonomy. The Kosovo parliament began to sit in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. This marked the end of Tito's Yugoslavia, all the rest is a matter of technique... This is the beginning of Milosevic's true political career, everything else is only a long list of human and ethnic tragedies: the tragedy of Croats driven out of their homes by the Yugoslav People's Army, and the tragedy of Serbs who traipsed in long columns toward the Yugoslav borders after the Croats had won back the Srpska Krajna... The tragedy of Bosnians - the Serbs, Croats and Muslims - who fell victim to war and "ethnic cleansing." The tragedy of Kosovo Albanians, now being ousted, and the tragedy of the Kosovo Serbs, now being bombed. Well done, Slobo! Each new conflict, each new war, and each new tragedy only strengthens your grip on power, so impotent in peacetime. You have created an entirely new Yugoslavia, one of perpetual war, confrontation with the outside world, misery, and hatred. The old marshal must be turning in his marble tomb looking at these changes. He was a master of maneuver, but his Belgrade successor does not need to maneuver, he may only need to provoke: every conflict allows him to further build a myth about a proud fortress, besieged from all sides, that may only be baled out by "Russian brothers" (who remembered them, always cash-strapped, in the SFRY?). Tito was the master of compromise, but his successor sticks to his "principles." What unites them is this: he wanted to rule forever, and so does his successor.

After Tito, at least Yugoslavia remained. A Yugoslavia which, in spite of all the shortcomings of its social system and economic development, and unresolved ethnic problems, still held a place of its own in the world, was respected and considered a country safe and interesting to live in. It might have been a myth, but a myth that prospered for many a decade. And what will be left after Milosevic?

DOSSIER

Slobodan MILOSEVIC, president of Yugoslavia
Born August 20, 1941, in Pozarevac, Serbia. An ethnic Serb. From 1959, member of the Yugoslav League of Communists (YLC).

In 1960 graduated from a gymnasium, in 1964 from the Law Department, Belgrade University. In 1963-1966 was secretary of the University YLC Committee for political and ideological education.

In 1966-1969 he was advisor to the chairman of the Belgrade City Council for economic issues, then chief of Belgrade's information service. In 1969-1973 he was deputy general manager and in 1973-1978 general manager of the Technogaz association. In 1978-1983 he was governor of the Belgrade United Bank, in 1984-1989 chairman of the Belgrade City YLC Committee, in 1986-1989 a member of the Central Committee, of the Presidium, and chairman of the Presidium of the Serbian Council of Communists. From 1990, chairman of the General Committee of the Socialist Party of Serbia.

In May 1989 he was elected chairman of the Presidium of the Socialist Republic of Serbia and, in 1992 President of Serbia. On July 15, 1997, the Skupshtina (Parliament) of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia elected Milosevic President of FRY.

From material in Argumenty i fakty, Moscow