18 December 2007

Tito and Evelyn


Josef Broz Tito

Oh, Evelyn was a beauty in her day- not that she is not now, I hasten to add. Annie would smack me if I implied otherwise. She is just of a certain age, if you know what I mean. You can see the vivacious young woman she was looking out from the portrait at the head of the stairs of the little house on Fairfax Drive, the part that remained cut off when they jammed Interstate 66 through the neighborhood.

The tones of the portrait are of the earth: ecru and flat yellow in the old modern fashion, though the lipstick is crimson and the lips on which it is carefully painted are sensuous and full. Her pale eyes flash out from the painting.

She has lived in the neat brick house for over fifty years, and she knows how to fight the power of the State. The narrow tree line shelters what is left of the street from the roar of the highway in the ditch below.

When Evelyn moved in with Warrant Officer Rene LaPlante, the house cost $17,000 dollars and it was just about brand new, part of a development to accommodate the soldier boys coming back from overseas. Judge Thomas had a graceful ante-bellum place down the street with plenty of land around it. It was historic, though no one seemed to care much, and it was smack in the middle of the new right of way. She fought the construction of that road for twenty years, and the only place the road-bed is as deep in the earth as was advertised to be.

She fought the construction of the road for twenty years. Evelyn is not a woman to be taken lightly, though she is old now. She chained herself to one of the trees the day that the bulldozers came, with a feisty neighbor, and they alerted the news cameras to the event.

She cut her teeth on Tito's secret police, the dreaded UDBA, and they were a hard lot. We tend to forget these days. Looking back from this side of the fallen wall, and the murderous times recent times in the Balkans, it is tempting to characterize Tito's Yugoslavia as a sort of golden age in the Soviet Empire.

After all, the strongman occasionally allowed us to call with our gray warships in the lovely Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik. His was communism with a human face, or so some would say now.

It was not quite that way, and the Strongman was a thoroughgoing product of his time. I was in Zagreb, the haunted old Habsburg capital of the Croats, during the unpleasantness in Bosnia. I was walking through the old city and under a graceful arch of the old cathedral drinking it in.

We qualified for combat pay while staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, which I considered very civilized. The military attaché who accompanied us, one of the pioneers in the new embassy in the new country, commented that the church had blocked the course of a great fire in medieval times, and saved the city. Accordingly, the people treated it with great reverence and ascribed beneficial properties to prayers said there.

Tito ensured that the secret police had the place well wired with microphones to capture the most heartfelt longings and transform them into actionable counterintelligence.

That was the Yugoslavia of 1948, when Evelyn was living in Belgrade, the citadel of the Serbs. Tito then was still at faithful Stalinist. The alternative in those days was death.

Josef Broz was born in another world, one that was imposed on the land of the Croats and Slovenes and Serbs and Dalmatians. It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and little Josef was the seventh of fifteen children. He only stayed in school to the age of twelve; and was apprenticed to learn a trade.

He was a restless young citizen of the Habsburg Empire, and left to wander. He was a test driver for the Benz motorcar concern before the great melt-down of the colonial system began in 1914. The war swept him away and he fought on the Russian front against the Serbs, the Little Russians.

He was fortunate enough to be captured and not executed, and in captivity he learned the Russian language. He was released when Czar Nicholas abdicated, and the country briefly trembled on the knife-edge edge of democracy. Josef sided with Lenin's revolutionaries, and went to Petrograd to become a part of the vanguard of the proletariat, a street fighting man.

After Lenin consolidated power, he fought in the Civil War. He was a Red against the Whites, and returned to Croatia in 1920 flushed with victory to join the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.

His talent and forceful personality ensured a rapid rise in the ranks, though the life of a revolutionary is a hard one, and punctuated with stints in prison. By the time he was released in 1934, several governments had come and gone and the Party was banned. It was in the time of life underground that he adopted an alias to allow him to work undisturbed. Josef Tito was born of necessity.

He had to go to the Soviet Union to cool off, and worked in the Balkan Section of the COMINTERN before returning to Croatia to rebuild the still-outlawed party.

In 1940, he was elected General Secretary of the Yugoslav Party, and the Phony War began between the Allies and the Germans. Tito was prepared to follow Moscow's line, and permit the unopposed annexation of Yugoslavia by the Reich. He did not respond to the German invasion of his country because of the Non-aggression pact between the Hitler and Stalin, and maintained his loyalty to Moscow even as the Germans flowed in.

Only after operation Barbarossa commenced and the black legions of Hitler forged east did he issue a call to arms against the Nazis. Thanks to their experience underground, the Communist partisans were well-equipped to deal with the occupiers, and Tito began to structure a resistance strategy that would not only liberate the country from the Germans, but install the Communist Party as the lawful government. In fact, the invasion was an excellent opportunity. A revolutionary government was established in those areas of the rugged land under his control which would emerge as the de facto government.

Competing with his Communists were the Serbian Chetniks, supported by Churchill and the Royal government-in-exile in London. The valor of Tito's fighters in the dark year of 1943 caused the Allies to reassess their strategy. The Communists were fighting, and drawing German resources away form the East Front. At the Tehran Conference, Allied leaders switched their support to the Partisans and officially recognized Tito's Partisans.

Allied aid began to flow to the Communists, and Churchill hoped that he could maneuver Tito into supporting the exiled King.

It was not in the cards. Tito may have been his own man later, but he was Stalin's first. He consolidated power after the Yalta Conference by purging his coalition of partisan of non-communists, and then moved to the next level to seize complete power.

He permitted the "temporary entry of Soviet troops into Yugoslav territory" and with their help, finished the Nazis. His credentials in Moscow were solid enough that Stalin withdrew the Red Army after VE Day, even as he eventually pulled them out of Austria.

With the foreigners gone, Tito turned his attention to eliminating collaborators the fascist-leaning Ustashe of Croatia, rigged the election of November 1945 elections, and had the leading Chetnik executed. He established a muscular secret security service known as the “UDBA” personally loyal to him. The spooks began to install microphones in the churches, and the priests and anyone else who stood in his way were liquidated.

In the way of these things, the purges eventually extended to those Communists who did not agree completely with Tito, having some disagreements about the collectivization of the economy. Agriculture escaped the fate of forced state ownership, but capitalism as a system in Yugoslavia was finished.

The mountains of Yugoslavia provided a certain independence for Tito that was not available to his Soviet-occupied neighbors to the north. Stalin found alarming. I have been on military staffs that were ordered to contemplate the ground occupation of the Balkans, and from personal experience know it is a daunting task. We once estimated the 4th Mechanized Division would take fully three years to clear the way to Belgrade, and in the end we did not do it.

Back in the day, Stalin resented Tito's failure to fully impose the Soviet model on his economy, distrusted his attempts to forge a Balkan federation with the Bulgarians, and was outraged by his meddling in the Greek Civil War. Stalin decided a coup was the way to go, though he could not pull it off. Instead, he expelled the "Tito clique" from the World Communist Movement, imposed economic sanctions and established a boycott of Yugoslav goods. That was in June of 1948, and that was the context of Annie's first three years on the planet.

Evelyn had her first child while Rene was going to some classified school at Arlington Hall, and then decamped for Belgrade in 1946 to join the military attaché office in Belgrade.

Stalin stopped short of physical invasion, but the threat was always there, and Tito opened and closed the border according to the way the winds were blowing from the East.

You can understand why Warrant Officer Rene LaPlante was concerned about his lovely wife Evelyn flying in with their tiny daughter Ann. There were rigid rules to when an aircraft might appear in the Yugoslav sky. Deviation by even a minute could mean being shot down in flames.

He had a good thing going, and he was eager to have his wife with him to share it. The parties were unending. Rene's house was nicer than the one the US Ambassador had, bequeathed to him by a Major who got the lease as the Nazis were leaving. Polished old wood, servants, drivers. It was a good life, if you could steer clear of the UDBA, and have an exit visa on the passport just in case a quick get away was necessary.

All Evelyn had to do was get there alive.

Tomorrow: Christmas in Belgrade

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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