After two years of street protests, strikes, and speeches against Yugoslavia's economic, political, and ethnic status quo--credited by friend and foe alike to the late Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia--one million Serbs gathered on November 19, 1988, in Belgrade to listen to one of theirs, Slobodan Milosevic, the president of the Communist Party of Serbia.
Born and raised in the small Serbian town of Pozarevac, the 47-year-old Milosevic today is the only Yugoslav leader not personally invested by Tito. And like Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, he is nudging his compatriots toward an open rebellion against their recent past.
Unlike Gorbachev, however, Milosevic and the Serbs do not hold the sway over Yugoslavia that their history and numbers would suggest. Before he died in 1980, Josip Broz Tito had seen to that.
After his allied-aided, Yalta-sanctioned victory over Serbian loyalists in World War II, Tito--a Croat and a former Austro-Hungarian master sergeant--divided Yugoslavia so that every nationality but the Serbs got an ethnic homeland. After creating Yugoslavia by their military prowess in 1918, and resisting the communists in 1941-45, the Serbs were treated like a defeated people. Despite their costly victories in two Balkan and two world wars, in 1945 the Serbs were deprived by Tito of a third of their population and half of their national territory. What was left--a rump Serbia--was further portioned into three independent parts, one of which, the Autonomous province of Kosovo, was turned over to the non-Slav, Muslim Albanians.
During the Tito era, the Serbian Orthodox Church was all but banned, while good relations were maintained with the Vatican and 700 new mosques were built in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Serbs' Cyrillic alphabet was suppressed in Croatia, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Croatia were pressured to leave for Serbia proper. Furthermore, the Serbs' formidable agrarian economy was destroyed by forced collectivization, limits on land ownership, and communist industrialization.
Touted as the communist world's first great reformer, Tito proved a much more conservative Marxist than Gorbachev, or even Milosevic. Whereas Gorbachev has publicly demanded competence from his managers, Tito fired the whole reform-minded Serbian leadership in 1972, charging them with "chauvinism" for wanting a freer economy and some democracy for Serbia.
Previously, in 1954, he made his chief ideologue, Milovan Djilas, an unperson for suggesting multiparty socialism for Yugoslavia. Yet, he used Djilas' 1950 idea of "self-management" as his own, to impress Western Marxists and spite the Soviets. In 1968, he massed tanks outside Belgrade because students chanting his name were calling for "socialism with a human face."
Still, even after he died, Tito was hailed by Western media and statesmen for the system he had created. As late as 1986, when Yugoslavia's foreign debt per capita was greater than Poland's and rising, and when Belgraders were queuing for milk, the Christian Science Monitor wrote, "Open and non-aligned, Yugoslavia prospers." Like Gorbachev later, Tito had fulfilled the need for a smiling communist, and his "maverick" communism brought Yugoslavia billions of dollars of mostly U.S.
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