Real Dictators - Tito Part 2: The Man of Disguises

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

An assassination in Marseilles plunges the Balkans into turmoil. The Europe-wide battles of Black versus Red make their way onto the streets of Yugoslavia. Pegged as a trouble-maker and pursued by the authorities, the shape-shifting Josip Broz flees to Russia. There he will be re-tooled as a Soviet agent. Dispatched by Moscow, he’ll return with a new mission and a new name… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Neil Barnett, Christopher Catherwood, Richard Mills, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Geoffrey Swain, Susan L Woodward. This is Part 2 of 5. Written by Jeff Dawson | Assistant Producer: Luke Lonergan | Exec produced by Joel Duddell | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design & audio editing by George Tapp | Assembly editing by Dorry Macaulay, Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann. You can listen to the next two episodes of the Tito story straight away, without waiting and without ads, by joining Noiser+. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's October the 9th, 1934, just before 4 p.m. We're in Marseille, France's great Mediterranean port. A cruiser of the Royal Yugoslav Navy, the Dubrovnik, proceeds slow ahead across the bay. It glides past the Guard of Honor laid by the French Marine National. Beneath rigging, strung with flags, matillos in white uniforms, line the decks of their warships. They salute in perfect unison as the Dubrovnik drops its anchor, and an immaculately polished motor launch chugs away from it, heading towards the docks. It bears the Dubrovnik's VIP passenger, the King of Yugoslavia, Alexander I.

The king's uniform is awash with medals and braid. On his head sits a cocked hat with an ostrich feather sprouting from it. A ceremonial sword dangles from his belt. A slim hawk-like man of 45, he wears a pair of round wire spectacles and a narrow-eyed look of concentration. He's here on serious business. Those medals are real, too. As a soldier in the Great War, Alexander was in the thick of it, fighting for the Serbian army against the central powers. As he steps onto the jetty, the king is met by the French foreign minister, Louis Bartou.

Bartu gives a respectful Republican bow and ushers his guest to an open-top limousine They have much to discuss The car edges along the cobbled quayside Past crowds waving red white and blue tricolor The vertical bands of France The horizontal ones of Yugoslavia It's advanced a mere 150 yards

When a scruffy young man jumps onto the running board Mow's a pistol in hand He fires nine shots at point-blank range. It's happened so quickly, the onlookers are dazed, stunned. In what seems like slow motion, the mortally wounded king slides down across the back seat. Eyes wide open, his final breath soon trailing away. In something of a media first, the whole thing is filmed in macabre close-up by the newsreel cameras. aided by the fact that the chauffeur, felled by a ricochet,

as slumped forward, his foot wedged on the brake. The assassin is Vladoc Geno Zempsky, a separatist, a vowedly anti-Serb, a member of the internal Macedonian revolutionary organization. As he makes his getaway, a mounted policeman slashes at him with his soul. Wounded, the gunman stumble. to be beaten to near death by the crown. No one has noticed Batu who's crawled onto the pavement. He too has been hit, struck as it turns out, by a stray gendarme's bullet.

He will be pronounced dead 90 minutes later. The assassin, meanwhile, denied medical attention will linger on till 8 p.m. If it sounds like a repeat of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, 1914. It is, just with the Serbian king subbing in for the Archduke as the symbolic Balkan oppressor. Astonishingly, in terms of royal security, not a single lesson has been learned. And this killing will in its own way prove just as devastating for the Yugoslav people, for it will trigger a series of events that will plunge the Balkans into a ninth circle of hell. From the Noiser podcast, network. This is part two of the Tito story. And this is real dictators. When we left Yossip

Bros in the last episode, he was coming home after the Great War. It served his master's well, fighting with distinction for the army of Austria-Hungary. But wounded in action, he'd become a Russian prisoner of war, another twist in a quite remarkable odyssey. As the Tsarist empire crumbled, Bross found himself in its capital, Petrograd, and with a ringside seat for one of history's momentous events, the Russian Revolution. As revolution turned to civil war, he was then sucked into the Bolshevik struggle, taking up arms with the Red Guards. In 1920, however, after five years away, it's time to come home. When he steps off the train in his hometown of Kummeritz, Croatia, it's with a Russian wife, Polka, and a baby on the way. Only the land that he arrives in is not the one he left.

He finds himself a citizen of a brand new entity. The kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The wanted war to end all wars has changed everything. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference has been established to prevent a reoccurrence. It is unabashed in apportioning blame for the conflict, one which has killed around 20 million people, and with as many again wounded. The central powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, are held liable for the damage and presented with the bill.

It will include crippling financial reparations, military disarmament and punitive losses of territory. It will involve a complete redrawing of the map of Europe, though no central power will be affected more than Austria-Hungary, the place where Armageddon began. To neuter the old Habsburg Empire and assuage the underlying nationalist tendencies, Austria-Hungary is completely dismantled. Not only is its core split in two, but its hinterland now plays host to a brand new constellation

of nation-states. The Czechs and Slovaks get their own tandem entity, Czechoslovakia. The bits of Galicia held by the Habsburgs are given up to a newly independent power. Holland. Romania, which carried on fighting Hungary for months after the general armistice, has a generous border settlement redrawn in its favor, meaning the Hungarians lose Transylvania. And in the heart of the Balkans comes that rather clumsily titled new amalgamation that Yossipras steps into, the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, or SCS.

The peacemakers put away their collared pencils. The New Europe is announced via the Treaty of Versailles, signed on the fifth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, on what is already a date of recurring significance in this series. June the 28th. And there will be an international peacekeeping mechanism to uphold the new order. The League of Nations. On paper, the SCS makes sense. It accords with the Corfu Declaration of 1917, a manifesto for the unity of South Slavs, a Yugoslavia,

Yugoslavia. Professor Christopher Catherwood. But it was a very shaky enterprise because it was an art of racial creation and it was the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which left out all the Albanians, Macedonians and various other people. And it wasn't a country that had naturally ever been there. This new union, proclaimed on December 1, 1918, also comes with the built-in design floor. During the war, the Croats and Slovenes had been on one side, the Serbs on the other.

They had been slaughtering each other in huge numbers. Serbia suffered over a million military and civilian deaths fighting against the central powers. Professor Susan L. Woodward They lost almost half, it is said anyway, almost half of the male population fighting for the West, as we now call it, in World War. One and many of the folk songs, even to this day, are songs that were sung in World War I.

And so Serbia proud of that contribution. To expect these parties to suddenly cozy up together, all sweetness and light is a beer big, big ask. The Allies thought all this was wonderful, but actually not, because they put together people who weren't used to each other and had very different experiences. Because if you were correct, you were suppressed,

but you weren't suppressed in the same way as you were a Serb under the Ottomans. To mollify the Serbs, the SCS is set up by the Allies as a tantamount greater Serbia, ruled from Belgrade. Montenegro, parts of Bosnia, Macedonia, along with the provinces of Kosovo and Voivodina are bolted onto the Serb nucleus. To the vector, the spoils.

The concession was to allow the Serbs to keep their political system, so you get a unified state at the time, not a federal state. The issue of integration was how to put pieces, territories, that had been part of very different systems. The Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, in Montenegro and Serbia to separate independent states. You can imagine the different systems of the economy, different rail systems,

everything that needed integrating was more about creating a country, and especially a state, that worked as one. Professor Jeffrey Swain. The two big national groups of the Criots and the Serbs. And in November 1918, as the old empire, are collapsing. Serbia still had military power. So the Croats found themselves in a subservient position as the dust settled in a new state emerged. Serb Republicans are not exactly

cocker hoop either. Mindful of the sweeping wildfire of Bolshevism, the Paris peacemakers have decreed that constitutional monarchies are the surest means of stability. There was only the King of Serbia because there wasn't a king of Croatia. And so very quickly the Serbs became the dominant group within that Yugoslav state. And the Croats always felt throughout the interwar years that they were being forced to play second fiddle. The promise had been a sort of federal state

and the reality was that it was a unified kingdom in which the Serbs took all the big posts. The new entity is placed under the rule of the elderly Serbian king, Peter I. This in itself is not without controversy. His Kara-Georgevich dynasty had only clawed its way back into power in recent times through a bloody coup. What could possibly go wrong? With little promise of economic fortune in rural Kummeritz, the newlywed Mr and Mrs. Yossip set up home in Zagreb.

Though with millions of ex-soldiers seeking employment, the jobs market is tough. Bross tries his luck as a steelmaker again, but ends up as a waiter. Revolution is etched deep into his soul. As a fired-up member of the local Communist Party, he's soon calling on his brethren to down aprons. The Yossip Bro's career cycle will go on rinse and repeat. He gets a job in a shipyard. but is fired after organizing a strike. He works in a flour mill on and off,

but even its tolerant owner is forced to dismiss him after he leads the workers out. He works on the railways, but gets involved in more industrial action than is tually handed his cards. It doesn't take long for Brots to be pegged as a troublemaker. Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy. He's an itinerant radical.

He's going from factory to factory organizing, strikes doing work. He has a trade. He served a three-year apprenticeship as a logsmith. And he can kind of do anything with his hands. He is very much the skilled artisan skilled worker. Interestingly, what he's actually doing is not occupying jobs which bear some relationship to his talent. Civil and industrial unrest is by no means isolated to the Balkans. hyperinflation and high unemployment are tearing Germany, Austria and Hungary apart. Italy too is protesting of what it calls its mutilated victory. Rome is seething over the Yugoslav Kingdom's appropriation of the coveted Dalmatian coast,

land which had been promised to Italy as a reward for siding with Britain and France. It's an age of extremes, inspired. Byired by what's happening in the new USSR, Bolshevism is spreading like a virus. A short-lived Soviet republic springs up in Hungary. There was also one in Bavaria. They are utter rejections of the capitalist model. In the opposite corner, fueled by a sense of resentment and national humiliation, ex-soldiers take to the streets seeking work, bread, and someone's a scapegoat.

It's the origins of what will become mass, vile and ultra-nationalist movements. Fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany. In the SCS, where they were ripped through 25 governments in the first 10 years, the foundations already seem shaky.

In the elections of November 1920, when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia comes third, winning 58 seats in the new constituent assembly, alarm bells. start ringing. In December, legislation is put into place, restricting all communist activity. Renegades reciprocate by assassinating Mila Radrascovich, the SCS Minister of the Interior. In August 1921, the Communist Party is banned outright. Its leaders are rounded up and interned, the movement forced underground. For Yosep Roze, this is a mere impediment.

The revolution must proceed by any means necessary. As a metal worker once more, Buckingzagreb, he becomes head of the local union. There follows more agitation, another sacking, and this time a brief stint in jail. These are lean years for the Brose family, tragic ones. Polka had lost the baby she was carrying on arrival in Yugoslavia. She miscarries three more. Another child, a daughter, dies at the age of two. In 1924, a boy is born named Zarko.

He is the first to survive beyond infancy. The oldest of Broz's eventual five official children. To provide for his family, Yossip must play to his strengths. If he cannot find settled employment, then he will do the one thing he's good at. he will become a professional agitator. Back in Moscow, a body known as the Communist International, or Comintern, is doing all it can to export the Marxist revolution, and it will pay hard cash of those willing to do its dirty work.

DeBros, it's no big deal. He's already a committed revolutionary. He's fought with the Bolsheviks is what he believes in. The old Europe has torn its sense. of a part. So this notion of scientific socialism, this notion of a new order which is bright and keen and organized and rational, not subject to the vagaries of the stock market, is not actually subject to casino capitalists. It must at the time have seemed a shining new vision which beckoned him. Dr. Richard Mills. The Comintern is playing a substantial role in

communist parties across Europe by this point. The difficulty though is how to shape the situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Because it's an illegal organization, you have members based in other capitals abroad, in Vienna and Paris and elsewhere. It's very difficult to communicate things. It's difficult to have an impact on the ground actually in Yugoslavia itself. Yusip Bros must do it on the sly. In fermenting trouble he will pose as a German businessman one minute, a faceless office clerk the next. In another disguise he will dye his hair red and grow a moustache.

He is a great thespian, a huge grammathe, a shakedaifter. He could be middle class, he could be working class, he could be a businessman, he could be an engineer, he could be a tough predatarian, he could be a wise and old army sergeant. This man had a consistent authentic self. There's no question of that. But is part of his array of tenants that he could appear to convince local people that he was a German, local people that he was an Austrian, local people that he was Russian.

He could get away with it. And if that isn't a stigmata of stupendous intelligence, I don't know what is. So adept is this comedian-like agent of chaos that Bros is seen as a rising star of the movement. He's elevated to Zagreb branch secretary within the underground party's Croatian movement. Though he's the interesting thing, these South Slav socialists never define themselves by ethnicity. To be Croatian is merely an expression of geography. They are, one and all, Yugoslavs, thoroughly subscribed to their new state. state's identity. Ideology trumps all. In August 1921, the country gets a new king, Alexander I.

Well, new-ish. The elderly Peter I's health had been in decline for years. Alexander had been acting as his regent since 1914. As a young man, 32 at the time of his coronation, a veteran Serb soldier to boot, Alexander seems a credible ruler. But he soon, proving adept at enriching himself, exploiting his tax-free status once in power. The kingdom looks set for a bumpy ride. It's not just a civic disorder stoked by the underground communists. Aping what is happening next door in Italy, Croatia has spawned its own black-shirted fascist movement, the Eustache.

As the years progress, one that will make the Nazis look like boy scouts. The battles of black versus red, characteristic of what's happening right across Europe, are now being enacted right there on the streets of the king's own realm. Yossipros receives orders from Moscow. His band of communists are to gather caches of arms, ready for the revolution they and Moscow are sure is about to begin. The king doesn't much care for the communists, nor for the disruptive Ustasha. whisper it quietly, but he doesn't much care for the Croats at all. He did spend four years fighting them.

But Alexander I was a man he must tread carefully. He has an ongoing feud with dynastic rivals, the house of Obrinovich. The last Obrinovich king had been murdered in 2003 in a most brutal fashion, shot along with his wife in their bedroom at the royal palace. Their bodies were then mutilated. disemboweled and thrown out of the window. They'd been killed by Serbian army officers, and not, it is whispered,

without a tacit nod from the Karadjjjjavits family. The new king is a man, as one might put it, who has to keep looking over his shoulder. The kingdom of Serbskaryat and Slovenes is a state which is in turmoil from the outset, and it's one where very quickly, the various battle lines are drawn. And there's a fight led, particularly by the Croatian Peasant Party,

for more autonomy for the Croats from the outset. Meanwhile, the new Prime Minister Nicola Passage of the majority People's Radical Party is also proving to be a heavy-handed Serb furster. It only adds to the polarization, not helped either by a north-south split within the kingdom. a divide by wealth and education. Up in the north, less than 10% of Slovenes are illiterate, for example.

In southern Macedonia and Bosnia, by contrast, the figure is over 80%. And it's not just ethnicity. Yugoslavia has a three-way religious divide. The Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians are Orthodox. The Croats and Slovenes are Catholic. Bosnia and southern Serbia, notably the province. of Kosovo contains substantial populations of Muslims. It leads to a rapid descent into corrupt politics, whereby passage, with the complicity of the Serb police, starts rigging elections,

with opposition leaders thrown in jail. It's June the 20th, 1928. On the floor of the assembly in Belgrade, a heated debate is in full cry. The Croat leader Stepan Radic waves his order paper, frustrated yet again at Serb attempts to thwart Croatian business. To a rival deputy, Puneisa Ratchich of the pro-Serve radical party, this is no big deal. He simply whips out a revolver and shoots dead five Croat MPs, Radich included. Unsurprisingly, Croat members are reluctant to retake their seats.

Whatever semblance of democracy the kingdom thought it had, has, like those butchered Obrinovich Royals, gone out of the window. It's a very unstable parliament, a parliament which starts with arguments and bitter exchanges of words and ends with the firing of guns and violence actually within the chamber. And then on the 6th of January 1929, the king, King Alexander, dissolves parliament and effectively declares a dictatorship. a royal dictatorship. The rebranded kingdom of Yugoslavia is now under his personal rule. All political parties are now banned.

The Serbian secret police are given special powers to enforce his will. Broz does not witness this royal coup. On Mayday, 1928, after orchestrated clashes with the police, he'd been arrested again, detained for 15 days. pulling off another fake ID wheeze, he'd seemingly hoodwink the authorities. But his true identity was always going to catch up with him. After the police bust, the real Yossipros is pulled back in. I mean, he's briefly arrested on several occasions, but it's only in 1928 that he is given a long-term prison sentence.

He was released on the promise of good behaviour, and he didn't behave well. Well, he carried on being a trade unionist, doing the things that they didn't want. So when they did imprison him, they added on these extra years to take account of his militancy. He uses his appearance in court to denounce the existing status quo and to declare, I am a communist, a communist, the for the people. Everything that I've done is to try and advance the cause of humanity. He's sent down for five years hard labour. Bross's time in the maximum security Leopoglaba prison in the north of Croatia

passes through various phases. Initially, there is protests and a hunger strike, but then he employs the same method as he did as a P.O.W, treating incarceration as a means of self-education. As a political prisoner, Bross hangs out with fellow radicals, forming a strong bond with a Jewish inmate called Musa Piyada. There are others there who will become steadfast comrades, Edvard Kardelch and Alexander Rankovich. And that moment is another formative moment in Tito's life,

because he ends up, like so many arrested communists, in Leppoglava prison, a place where these political prisoners are able to talk politics, where party cells are established, where the prisoners study Marxism, where they have access to all kinds of books and other literature is in that moment where I think we start to see the hardened revolutionary being formed

and Yossip Broz from that point very quickly rises through the ranks. Said he was like his university and that's when he actually sort of learned his communism. You know, he actually learned all the book crying old twiddly bits he was supposed to know about and believe in as a good communist. But if a week is a long time in politics, five years as an eternity. When Broz is paroled in March, 1994,

the world has shifted yet again. It's not just Mussolini who is entrenched as a fascist dictator in neighboring Italy. Adolf Hitler is now chancellor of the new Nazi Germany. The peace of Paris seemed a very old news. The Czechoslovakia experiment has left it with its neighbors all wanting a slice of it, not least Germany, which is eyeing up the German-speaking Sudetenland.

Austria, now a rump Germanic state, is itself under threat of absorption into the Third Reich. Mussolini is making a lot of noise about recreating a new Roman empire and advancing into the Balkans, reclaiming historic land. Hungary, meanwhile, is itching to recover some of the Balkan territory at lost at the conference table. Bulgaria too. Yugoslavia is surrounded by hostiles. The Wall Street crash of 1999 has deepened the world financial crisis, rendering a fledgling state like Yugoslavia particularly vulnerable. Amid the chaos, the Treaty of Versailles is willfully being undone.

Blind eyes are being turned to regular transgressions by Hitler and Mussolini. The League of Nations, set up to uphold international law, is a toothless tiger. In desperation, King Alexander I has been seeking a military alliance with friends. And so, in October, the king embarks for Marseille. In 1934, some of the king's many enemies catch up with him, and he's assassinated in Marseille. and that brings an end to that dictatorship, period. The assassination rocks not just Yugoslavia, but wider Europe. In France, there is deep shock that something like this could have happened on its own soil,

not to mention that their own foreign minister was killed. Rumors persist as to the role in the assassination of both the Croatian Ustasha and Mussolini's fascists. Next in lines of the throne is the king's eldest son, who should rule as Peter II. But Peter is just 11 years old. The royal dictatorship will fall instead to a regent, the king's cousin, Prince Paul. The regent starts to look for practical ways to solve some of the insoluble problems. We see a kind of return to a semi-democracy.

Eventually, we arrive at the Sporazim, the agreement, which sees the formation of an autonomous Croatia within the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Now, in some regards, that solves the so-called Croatian question. Unfortunately, though, it also opens up a whole load of new questions. If the Croats can have their own autonomous part of Yugoslavia, why can't the Slovenes? Why can't the Serbs? let alone other peoples that aren't even recognized as individual nations at this stage. So we see this state lurch from one crisis to an exit. Yossipros's prison release conditions had stated that he must go back to his home village of Kumravitz.

But when he gets there, he finds that Polka and their son have long gone. They've returned to her native Russia, virtually unemployable, with Yugoslavia in terms. turmoil and his family absconding. Bros heats the call to go to the one place he can be his true revolutionary self, the Soviet Union. From Moscow's perspective, the Yugoslav Communist Party was full of squabbling intellectuals who were not managing to get anywhere with the working class. He emerges in 1928 as a national figure because he tries to bring an end to this the factional disputes within the Yugoslav Communist Party, and then he's very quickly arrested.

But when he's released, it's remembered that he was seemingly playing a positive role. And so when he's released, he's sent to Moscow for training. They see that they've found someone with potential, someone with working class routes, but he's still felt to need political training. Once more, Broz is a master of the skies, fleeing Yugoslavia under a series of of false identities, going undercover to Moscow via Vienna. He sneaks into Austria by foot, navigating perilous mountain trails. At the border he stopped by a gang of military-style youths, sporting red armbands emblazoned

with swastikas. They're on the lookout for foreigners to terrorize. The Austrian Chancellor Ankhilbert Dolphus has just been assassinated, they informed Bross. They rejoice in their movement's part in the slaying, prelude to a Nazi uprising. Brose passes himself off as a native Austrian, one fully supportive of their actions, and heads off into the night. On reaching Moscow, Bross's true identity can at last be revealed. He's welcomed by his communist paymasters and given the VIP treatment.

He's put up in the Grand Lux Hotel, a place usually reserved for foreign dignitaries. There's fine dining, wine, a taste of bourgeois decadence reserved for only higher party officials. He's in good company. There are common-in-turn agents present from all over Eastern Europe who've returned to the birthplace of the revolution. It's like a school reunion. But just as Yugoslavia has changed, so is the Soviet Union. On the streets, in the corridors, there is an unease. and unease, a tension, a sense of something sinister afoot.

This is not a passionate hotbed of fraternal communism, but a bleak land under the rule of another dictator, one Joseph Stalin. And unbeknown to Brose, Stalin is in the midst of a mass cull of his opponents, suspected white Russians, army officers, academics, anyone deemed vaguely decadent or smeared as an imperialist. A slaughter that will run itself up into the millions, something known as the Great Purge. That night in the Lux Hotel there are screams and gunshots. Come the morning, many of the foreign commentant agents have been liquidated, killed by the agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Somehow, Yossip Broce has been spared, a possible case of an accident as much as design.

caught between a rock and a hard place. From now on he must keep his head down, do exactly as he's told. The NKBD eliminations will continue on a daily basis. Surviving any night is an achievement in itself. Well, Mosca in the late 30s is like the Hotel California. You can check in, but you can't check out. You may well never come back. Debrosa is acceptance that this is just the way things are.

and that to survive it is to become a functionary, a faceless apparatchik. He basically lies low and listens and tries not to commit. He learns to say yes and to keep quiet. Because by 1938 people are being arrested left, right, and centre. And there was a real danger. The Polish Communist Party had been wound up completely. there was a suggestion that the Yugosar Communist Party should be wound up. So he lies low and he does what he was supposed to do, which was to write reports,

and he kept the reports as bland as possible. Brose never meets Stalin in person. But one night at the Bolshoi ballet, he sees him across the theatre, sitting in a box, a squat, brutish man with a thick moustache. Brose may deplore Stalin's casual approach to political expunging, but he admires its ruthless simplicity, its unapologetic honesty. By the time he gets back to Yugoslavia, he knows what Stalin can be like at his worst. Unlike many other of the communist leaders, he wasn't sort of hypnotised by Stalin's Russia and its success.

He'd been there enough to know what was really going on. Brose will never reunite with his family. His wife has long since run off with someone else. A divorce is processed. But this seems less of an issue than it might. He will embark on one of the many affairs of his long life. This time with the Lux Hotel worker, an Austrian who goes by the name of Lucia Bauer. In October, 1936, they get married.

Though Bross, with purging now an acquired eye, will have her edited out of all official biographies. For three years, his training as a commenter and agent goes into overdrive, ready for what those in Moscow believed to be a guaranteed proletarian revolution in Yugoslavia. In 1937, Bross returns home, ready to play his part. As a Soviet agent, he's been given a code name. It's a one-word handle typical of an organization that has spawned the likes of Lenin, Molotov, Trotsky, even Stalin, the man of steel, though not perhaps as exciting.

Walter. Brose soon discards it for one of his own invention, one he's already been using unofficially. As with everything associated with the man, it's a word shrouded in mystery, but it sticks. Henceforth, he declares he will be known as Tito. There's a lot of debate about this. It is a name which featured in various family members, but there were also those who said it was because he would say, you there, so T-T-T-T-T is you-T-T-T-T,

you go there, you go there. It was to reflect his sort of authoritative nature. Personally, I think it's just a family name. There are all kinds of myths and rumours about where this name comes from, whether it's from the Serbo-Croat Pito, you do this, whether it's got some kind of relation to the Spanish Civil War, or whether, as I think is probably more likely, it was just a popular nickname in the Zagoria region at that time. And he is now Moscow's main man in Yugoslavia, elevated from his position a second in

command. The Soviets had Tito's superior, Milangorchic, bumped off. some say, as a consequence of a damning report that Bross had filed on him. Neil Barnett. And what is very striking is that the reason he became leader essentially was because Stalin and the NKVD had murdered the rest of the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. I doubt that Tito was completely innocent in that process, to put it mildly. But of course, one of the things that will have been a huge advantage of him as well, aside from his willingness to take direction ideologically

is the fact that he was a completely known quantity to the Soviet communists. He had been recruited on their soil and sent back into Yugoslavia. And so compared to other Yugoslavs who were more intellectually convinced and had not been recruited and trained in Russia, he was far preferable to Stalin and the NKVD.

That was a huge advantage for him. Pretty soon, Bros. Tito is up to his old tricks, orchestrating industrial unrest from behind the scenes. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia are still being banned. The Comintern has an additional task for him, recruiting Yugoslav volunteers to fight for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. It will entail Tito zipping back and forth to Paris, where mustering is being done, and where he will take up with a Comintern militant, the Slovene-born-Hirta-Hirte-Hir-Hir-to-Haw.

who, after a quick divorce from Bauer, will become Mrs. Tito number three. The conflict in Spain is fast developing into a proxy war between socialists and fascists. Tito doesn't serve in the international brigades personally, but is part of the machinery that sends thousands of Yugoslavian volunteers to the Iberian Peninsula. The Republicans end up on the losing side. With the victory for Franco's nationalists, it is fascism, Naziism, or in this case phalanjism, which is in the ascendancy. It seems an unstoppable force.

Being a communist seems an increasingly impossible thing. There's a parliamentary system in Yugosar the up until 1929, when the king declared his own dictatorship, and then in the middle of the 1930s, they allow a degree of parliamentary action to reemerge. But for the whole of the interwar period, if you were a communist, you were taking a huge political risk. In March 1938, Hitler's Germany launches its takeover of Austria, the Anschluss. The Nazis are now at Yugoslavia's border. In September, at Munich, the leaders of Britain and France caved to the furor's demands for the Reich's absorption of the Czechs of Daytonland.

In an overlooked part of the agreement, both Hungary and Poland take a chunk of Eastern Czechoslovakia for themselves too. Slovakia becomes a Nazi puppet state. Poland is next in Hitler's sights. In August 1939, communists everywhere are stunned with the revelation that foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Molotov and Ribentrop, have signed a non-aggression pact. Stalin and Hitler sworn ideological enemies are now bad fellows. With the Ribbentrov

Molotov pact, that really does demand a kind of Byzantine dance intellectually to try and comprehend it because what then happens is of course the dismemberment of Poland by both and Stalin's hovering up

Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and his attack on Finland So for a Stalinist, you have to accept very, very many sins in the cause of your Messiah. For Yugoslavian communists, it means there can be no military support from the Soviet Union, should Hitler make a move on them. Sheeta had written about the possibility of there being a revolution in Yugoslavia. Because he assumed that if there was a new war, the Soviet Union would be involved, and the Soviet Union would come to help a Yugoslav revolutionary state.

Within two weeks, via the invasion of Poland, Europe will be plunged again into a general war. The wider Balkans has already succumbed to conflict. In April 1939, Mussolini had conducted a disastrous invasion of Albania. In October 1940, he will follow it with an equally inept attack on Greece. With one Axis partner now at large in the Balkans, it only seems a matter of time before the Germans pile in. And this is the problem that the poor Yugoslav had, because they were scared witless of the communists. But then they didn't really want to be under fascist rule either. And so I think for all Yugoslavs, it was a very ambivalent time, really.

Through blind loyalty, Hitler is forced to bail out Mussolini over his Greek fiasco. But a direct land route to Athens can only be achieved by safe passage. through Yugoslavia. Prince Paul in Belgrade had been regarded by the West as a safe pair of hands, the only leader to hold out against Hitler. Oxford educated, a member of the Bullingham Club. He seems at times more British than the British, the epitome of the conservative establishment.

He also, confusingly goes by a nickname, not Tito, but Toto. And quietly behind the scenes. Toto is in a bit of a twist. There's a prevailing mood in the halls of power, a sense that Yugoslavia can only swim against the tide for so long. We see a Yugoslavia that has to exist within the broader situation in Europe at that time, and a Yugoslavia which becomes heavily dependent upon the trade with the axis. And it becomes more or less inevitable that it's,

going to join by this stage. We see some domestic politicians who are quite attracted to the trappings of fascism as well, who look to Mussolini as a bit of a role model, and Yugoslavia moves in that direction. In September 1940, Japan is brought into the Nazi alliance, upgrading it to a heavyweight Berlin-Rome Tokyo Axis, sealed by the Tripartite Pact. What's more, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia have since signed up as junior partners. Sensing which way the wind is blowing, and on the advice of his cabinet, the Prince makes a decision. March the 25th, 1941, we're in the great marble hall of the elegant Belvedere Palace, Vienna. There are assorted dignitaries present, uniformed representatives from the Axis member countries.

Even Hitler himself is scheduled to make a brief, appearance. In the past two weeks, Prince Paul has been to visit Hitler at Berchtesgarten, his home in the Bavarian Alps. Mussolini too, calling in on Il-Duccia in Rome. At Berthesgarten, the prince had found the Fuhrer in a generous mood, offering not only favorable trade terms for Yugoslav members of the Axis, but also a free gift, the Greek port of Salonica. And here at the palace comes the lavish signing ceremony, the point at which the deal will be sealed. To the appeasers in Belgrade, it is realpolitik. Yugoslavia is a sitting duck.

It's either live in coexistence with Nazi Germany or be obliterated. Mere self-preservation. He certainly is entering this pact and that is a point of no return. I think he's being threatened by Hitler and this is a moment of. and this is an offer you can't refuse. In Slovenia and Croatia there is reasonable public support for the move. But Prince Paul is on a fool's errand, for the Yugoslav army is largely populated by Serbs,

Serbs who fought the central powers once before, and who are not nearly so down with this heretical new arrangement. It's the following night, March the 26th, at the Zaymond Airfield, 10 miles northwest of Belgrade, a group of Yugoslav Air Force officers gathers. They've already had the private blessing of the Serbian Orthodox Church in what they're about to do. And they've been receiving intelligence and encouragement from Britain's secret sabotage specialists, the Special Operations Executive.

At a given signal just before dawn, armour units will be dispatched to sever phone and telegraph lines, isolating Belgrade from the rest of the country. Under cover of darkness, tanks and artillery units of the National Second Army had been moved up from Sarajevo, ready to secure key strategic points across the capital. It's an action that will be swift, silent, and bloodless. When Prince Paul's returning train is halted at Zagreb, he will be informed, politely, that he and his ministers have been deposed. The Air Force officers have placed governance of Yugoslavia in the hands of a provisional military committee under General Simovitch. They are acting on behalf of the true and legitimate head of state, Peter II, now 17, and whom they declare to be of age.

The next day the new king, or rather someone impersonating him, takes to the radio and explains the situation to the expectant nation. Yugoslavia will resist the Nazis at all costs. As the popular slogan goes on the streets of the capital, better a grave than a slave. Crowds turn out in their thousands to roar their defiance. The communists play no part in the military coup, but are fully supportive of it when the news breaks. Tito and co. take to the streets in wild celebration. Back at his Bavarian headquarters, Hitler is furious. He flies into a frothing rage, the likes of which even his closest confidence have yet to see.

This coup is a treachery of the highest order. Denied safe passage down to Greece, he will take Yugoslavia the hard way, although it will mean deferring his top secret plan to invade the Soviet Union. contemplating the enormity of what they've done, the new military hunter in Belgrade has a bit of a wobble. General Simovic mutters something about maybe remaining part of the tripartite pact after all, just not with Prince Paul as ruler.

But it's too farcical, and already too late. Hitler has his Cassus Belli. The furor summons his generals and lays out his plans. There is nothing ambiguous about the military campaign he is about to launch against these un-matched Slavs. Nor the unimaginable darkness into which their country is about to be plunged. It's called Furor Directive Number 25, Unterneemens Straff-Gerich, Operation Punishment. In the next episode, when the Nazis invade Yugoslavia, Tito takes

the mountains. Winston Churchill dispatches a crack team of paratroopers, led by a man rumored to inspire James Bond. Sneaking their way through the countryside, they will seek to rendezving with Tito's partisans, taking the fight to the German war machine. In just a few short years, remarkably, Tito himself will become the leader of the post-war Yugoslav state. That's next time. You can listen to next two episodes of real dictators right now, without waiting and without adverts, by joining Noiser Plus. Click the banner at the top of the feed, or follow the link in the episode description.