Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito, was a worker who clawed his way to become dictator of the “worker’s state” he established in post-World War II Yugoslavia after driving out the German invaders. In his detailed biography, Jože Pirjevec, a Slovenian scholar, recounts the luxurious life Tito made for himself and his multiethnic country’s new communist ruling class. As Yugoslavia’s leader, the formerly hawk-faced partisan “gained weight and came to resemble an avuncular godfather.” The extravagant communist’s claim on history was his break with Josef Stalin, which resulted, Pirjevec argues, from the autonomy Tito enjoyed while fighting the Germans with minimal Soviet assistance. He had his own ambitions and no intention of becoming anyone’s puppet. Tito fostered a personality cult Pirjevec terms “pharaonic,” yet his egotism saved Yugoslavia from a worse tyranny than his own and kept its quarrelsome nationalities from dissolving into the civil war that flared a decade after his death.
