The Yugoslavian Leader Who Survived Waves of Stalin’s Assassins | Hacker News Reader

The Yugoslavian Leader Who Survived Waves of Stalin’s Assassins

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49 pointsbelter12 comments

Tito was a cult of personality. Many legends about him were just that - legends, fabricated for the sake of keeping the south Slavic people obedient and afraid.

Citation needed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cults_of_personality#Y...

True story:

https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Roy-Medvedev/dp/1585675024

Pag 62

The referenced part, for anyone interested:

  Aleksei Snegov [...] told us that when Stalin's desk was being moved from his former study, they accidentally came across five letters addressed to him that he had hidden under a layer of newspapers in one of the drawers. Snegov could only recall three of them. [...] The third came from Marshall Tito in 1950. The text was brief: 'Stalin. Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle. ... If this doesn't stop, I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another.'

It seems that the Stalin incident story might have roots in reality.

Regardless, Tito was still a cult of personality and his country crumbled as soon as he died.

Yugoslavia is an interesting contrast to Ukraine. As a socialist country outside of the USSR it benefited from both the EU as well as USSR relations, while avoiding becoming a puppet state of either.

Unfortunately, it was held together with a shoestring and Tito as a dictator, and disintegrated without him. There is a local saying that Tito was the only true Yugoslavian citizen.

I cant help but wonder if there was a alternate future where Ukraine did the same, and benefited from both the east and the west. It seems like it suffered from some of the same internal divisions, but not to the same degree as Yugoslavia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia

“Stop sending people to kill me. If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.”

I’ve come across this quote before and it’s a classic. It makes you wonder if it’s just happenstance that Tito outlived Stalin, although I aspect if Tito did have Stalin killed, it would have been in such a way that everyone would have known about it.

Stalin helped his on death in many ways (his drinking for one). However organising a campaign against doctors around the time of his death is deeply ironic (though quite how effective treatment at that time would have been is relevant). Simon Sebag Montefiore has written some excellent books about him, which is mentioned in the below discussion of his death.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-death-stal...

Well, Stalin was also 14 years older than Tito.

He was an incredible man. A megalomaniac, pathologically violent tyrant, and it's one hell of a life he led. The accounts of his behaviour are just horrifying. I can't recommend the various books on him by Simon Sebag Montefiore enough (and also his book on Jerusalem, and the one on the Romanovs, but that's off topic).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/826564.Young_Stalin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/282108.Stalin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9477628-jerusalem https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/21094391-the-romanovs

Montefiore is a great one for telling the best story instead of the correct one. Much of his first book is based on sources known to be fabricated.

I would recommend Kotkin's Stalin biography instead.

Thanks for this.

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