Real Dictators - Tito Part 5: The Sun King

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Tito becomes an international celebrity, with a jet-set lifestyle to match his status. His hybrid ‘coca-cola socialism’ sees Yugoslavia booming. But the good times have been built on shaky foundations. And as Tito ails it seems his Balkan miracle will prove short-lived… A Noiser podcast production. Narrated by Paul McGann. Featuring Neil Barnett, Branko Brkic, Christopher Catherwood, Richard Mills, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Geoffrey Swain, Susan L Woodward. This is Part 5 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, Tony Onuchukwu, Rob Plummer | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cian Ryan-Morgan | Recording engineer: Joseph McGann. Real Dictators will be back soon with the stories of Emperor Augustus and Rafael Trujillo. In the meantime, check out Founding Fathers: An American Dream - the new show from the Noiser podcast network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's July the 31st, 1971, around 10 a.m. We're in Pula, Croatia, on the dazzling Istrian Peninsula. The old Roman port has changed hands several times through history. It's been Venetian, Austrian, fascist Italian. At the war's end, Nazi German. Though now, it's firmly part of Yugoslavia. In the morning sun, crowds gather expectantly. straining for a glimpse of two very special guests, Hollywood royalty.

And here they come now, delivered by Mercedes limo fresh from the airport, waving politely, two of the biggest film stars on the planet, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, as famous for their performances on screen as their turbulent love life of it. They're here at the personal invitation of President Yossi Bros. Tito. because Burton, the grizzled chisled Thesp, is about to play the Yugoslav leader in a movie. It's called the Battle of Suchaiska,

a heroic account of the partisans' victory over the Axis forces in Bosnia, 1993. At the key site, before clambering down into a waiting motorboat, Burton and Taylor make all the right noises, how delighted they are to be in such a beautiful country, how honored Burton is to have been offered such a dream heart. Half an hour later, and they're on the private island of Bruni, at the leader's summer residence, being served canopays and Turkish coffee by Mr. and Mrs. Tito themselves.

Tito is smaller than he imagined, Burton observes, more slight, though clearly not diminished in appetite, quite smitten it would seem with Burton's wife. Amid the media scrum, a chap could lose his temper, especially one renowned for his drunken brawling. But Burton has been off the source for six weeks. He records in his diary, and so he lets it all slide. With the film's director present, they sit down for a meeting. The gruff Welshman voices his concerns.

Privately, he thinks the script is terrible, a dreadful bundle of war movie cliches. But he hasn't the heart. to say so. He turns to Tito and declares that his part is too small. A great man such as the marshal deserves maximum screen time, front and center, at which Tito's face lights up. Tito asks his guests if they would like to go for a celebratory spin. He has a new Lincoln convertible, a gift from the people of Zagreb. Though it is Taylor who is invited to ride shotgun, Burton is consigned to the back, sitting alongside Yovanka, the First Lady. A plain woman, as he puts it, armed with, as he describes, a penetrating voice.

Just 50 yards from the villa, Tito clips the curb and punches the tire. No problem. He puts his foot down and clanks away on the wheel rim. On the north of the island, the Yugoslav leader has a petting zoo. In his white suit and shades, he makes a... show of feeding an elephant. Away from the interpreters, Tito speaks better English than he lets on, says Burton. He regales the actor with some amusing tales about Churchill and explains how this evening they're all to head back over to Pula for a film show. That night in a makeshipped cinema

in the old Roman amphitheatre, Tito walks in with Taylor on his arm. The crowd goes wild. He gives her a present, a gold cigarette holder. Burton can't help noticing that for all the smiles, all the cheers, it feels rather forced. He writes in his diary, I'm still worried by the atmosphere of dread which surrounds Tito. Cannot understand it. From the Noyser Podcast Network, this is the final part of the Tito story.

And this is real dictators. By the mid-1950s, Marshall Tito, Liberator of Yugoslavia, is its unassailable leader, and no longer a Stalin clone. His split with the Soviet Premier has seen Yugoslavia cast out of the eastern bloc, and thriving as an independent communist state, one which is about to change the global dynamic. In April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, a conference is held for the leaders of 29 Asian and African states.

They come from what is disparagingly labeled the Third World, what we call today the global south. Their countries have one thing in common. They have thrown off the shackles of colonial rule. Though warns the meeting's host President Sukarno, there are neo-colonists ready to fill the void. Across their continents, local conflicts are being exploited by the Soviet Union and the USA, crucibles of the Cold War by proxy.

The delegates sign a charter. It urges respect for human rights, the promotion of mutual interests, and, of greatest note, the rejection of membership of either superpower's military bloc. For Tito, the cogs are now whirring. Has Yugoslavia too not been the victim of colonial oppression? And has he, Tito, not demonstrated an independent spirit? When we left Tito in July 1956, he was back on Bruni, waiting to greet two. different VIP guests.

World leaders rather than movie stars, General Nasser of Egypt, and Prime Minister Nehru of India. Amid warm embraces their meeting is open-shirted and relaxed. On the 19th of the month, they too put pen to paper. Their Bruni Declaration, as it would be called, will upgrade the Bandung Mission Statement,

expanding its scope. And they will give their banned a name, the Non-Aligned Movement. In September 1961 at Belgrade's National Assembly, the non-aligned movement has its inaugural summit. Branco Burkic 1961 in Bluggett was first conference, and that was a major, major milestone.

Let me just remind you, it was 25 member states and three that was zeros. It grew up all the way to 110 in the mid-70s. So it captured the imagination and became an expression of the world They didn't want the Third World War, didn't want the nuclear annihilation, and didn't want to be part of the one or the other. With China and India on board, and with Latin America now involved, it can claim representation of 1.5 billion people, over half the world's population. And there, leading them as the NAM's new Secretary-General is one President Tito.

Dr Richard Mills. Tito presides over it, and comes to be known by many as the father of the non-aline movement. And this new political venture gives Tito the kind of platform that Yugoslavia never would have done. Suddenly we see Tito the world statesman, someone fighting for the world's poor, someone railing against the Cold War divide, and seeking much broader cultural and social equality in the world. As the non-aligned movement grows across its periodic powwows, Egypt, 1964, Zambia, 1970, Algeria, 1973, it will send Yugoslavia off on a whole new tangent. In the school books of the nation, children are invited to color in the countries of this neutral block,

Yugoslavia's new non-European family. In Tito's mind, the regimes in Cairo, New Delhi, or Jakarta are seen as more natural allies than London, Paris or Bonn. And these friends come with benefits. Yugoslavia embarks on a number of mutually beneficial economic projects, mining and engineering works in Africa, shipbuilding for India. For Yugoslavia's citizens, this is all uncharted territory. Never before has someone from the Balkans emerged as such an international figure. Not since Alexander the Great.

John F. Kennedy, Harley Salasi, Fidel Castro, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Nixon, Jagevarra, Yasser Arafat, Idi Amin, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, are just some of the leaders, for better or worse, with whom Tito will break bread. In 1963, NAM even has its hand in brokering the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Professor Christopher Catherwood The non-line movement was something he believed in but enabled him to play both sides against the middle, which he did extraordinarily successfully.

Professor Geoffrey Swain. Critics of Tito will say he just loved going on these jaunts and being treated as a great statesman. But it has a huge impact within United Nations. Suddenly these states have a new forum and together they're much more powerful than they were individually. On the domestic front, too, things are looking up. In the war's aftermath, Tito had attempted a disastrous Soviet-style collectivization of industry and agriculture.

But then came massive cash injections from the U.S., IMF and World Bank. By loosening the ties of a centrally planned economy, Tito has fostered a more agile, business-like environment. While heavy industry remains state-controlled, factories are to be self-reled. managed, run cooperative style by workers' councils, crucially with a stake in the company's profits. Small private enterprises are encouraged. You know, if you want to open a Swiss shop, if you want to open a restaurant, he understands that the government is not very good at those things. And it's all the balance.

A lot of few people started living really well, and then suddenly the whole population started living very well. This is a radical departure for a so-called communist state. It is essentially a hybrid economic model, a mix of socialist and market. In 1963, the Constitution is revamped yet again to rebrand this national enterprise. It is no longer the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, but pay close attention now, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. To the doctrinal Marxists, these capitalist flirtations are heresy.

China's Mao Zedong dams Tito with the greatest of all insults. He calls him a revisionist. But, as Tito puts it, he is merely tweaking things to suit Yugoslavia's needs. The new fiscal setup will earn itself a nickname, Coca-Cola Socialism. And it comes too with a diversification from heavy industry and mining, the staple of the Soviet sphere into manufacturing. Pharmaceuticals, art of industry, and mining. Uticles, artificial fibers, electronics are processed for exports, even cars.

In 1954, the first vehicle rolls off the production line at the Zastava plant. Its designs licensed from the Italian auto giant, Fiat. Defying all expectations, Yugoslavia becomes one of the world's fastest growing economies, what you might call the Balkan tiger. Tito's jet set lifestyle is not restricted to hobbitish. knobbing with politicians. Alongside Burton and Taylor, the likes of Gina Lola Brigida and Sophia Loren, over whom Tito slobbers like an excited puppy, are just some of the many celebrities to share

a cocktail or several at Bruni. I've forgotten how many holiday homes he has. By the time he dies, he has holiday islands, he has holiday hunting lodges, and he had a collection of cars and that sort of thing. So yes, he liked the good things. of light. There's his house on Lake Bled, the White Palace in Belgrade,

the old home of Prince Paul, and not so forget, is luxury locomotive, the famous blue train, with which to zip between them all. At his villa on Brioni, his favourite, he's apt to walk around with a pet leopard

on a chain. One of many exotic animals gifted by grateful NAM leaders, the reason for the founding of his private zoo. Despite his marriage to Yubanka, his fourth wife, it's no secret that Tito has racked up a number of affairs. Neil Barnett.

Frivolous, but in his latter years, he received regular massages from Slovenian identical twins and a sort of capers. And I think it goes back to my point, he wasn't fanatically ideological. He was a boy from a village in the mountains, who wants to beat king? Professor Nicholas of Shaughnessy.

He had this blue train, he had this yacht, he had this island, he had all these mansions, palaces and villas. The interesting thing is that they're the property of the Yugoslav state, not his family. So that when he died, they all went back to the Yugoslav government. Like the Habsburg Empress, he became godfather to every 12th child in Yugoslavia and so forth. And so what he does at some stage quite early on is he becomes an international celebrity. But he loved it all. He loved the uniforms, the actresses, the glitz, all the theatre, the pageantry, if you like.

He adored it. So when you think of the other communist leaders in Europe at that time like Qadar, like, say, Eric Honaker in East Germany, I mean they are quite repulsive. And this is part of the Tito thing. that he had enormous charm and charmed everyone. To his people, Tito's sins can be forgiven, for there is a vicarious pleasure to be taken in it all. Oh, our leader, he's the guy who does champagne with Hollywood sauce, you know, and all sorts of things.

He's our guy, you know, we're important, we matter. The world is coming to Yugoslavia, you know. Professor Susan L. Woodward. Woodward. But you couldn't also say that that is a part of his political skill, that he realized that part of his charisma would be the performance aspect, that if he didn't actually show what was possible by having a good life, how could he promise that to his country? He became a huge asset to Yugoslavia in its ability to position itself in the world

and charter its own course. And I think often the one-man explanation of history is incorrect, but the fortunes of Yugoslavia in that period are so closely tight. to him as a person, but it's hard to overstate. But while the likes of Jean-Pol Sartre hailing Yugoslavia some kind of earthly paradise, behind the scenes, the repression continues. The Directorate for State Security, or Udba,

has since replaced his secret police, Osna. While it might not come with the fearsome reputation of the KGB or the Stasi, it is under Alexander Rankovich, just as ruthless. It would disappear throughout the entire time, but you had to be doing something really serious to disappear. The deal was, if you so basically keep yourself to yourself, then you're okay, and you can say what you think, but you'd say it discreetly. It's June 2nd, 1968.

We're at the University of Belgrade, founded in the Age of Enlightenment. It's one of the most prestigious educational establishments in the country. Today, however, is not about lectures, seminars or anything academic. In the afternoon sunshine, 4,000 students had massed in front of the philosophy building. Barking through megaphones, a succession of speakers addresses the raucous crowd. The students have congregated here because the march they'd begun through the city center was beaten back by riot police. In protest, they announce, they are to begin a seven-day occupation of the university buildings. With their long hair and their placards, this scene could be replayed anywhere.

in the Western world, San Francisco, New York, London. But in Belgrade, the demands are not hippie norm. This isn't about Vietnam or free love or dropping acid, not even Parisian style about overthrowing the state. It's about how the government has gone too far, how it's strayed from its communist principles, how market socialism has created a class of bourgeois fat cats who've siphoned off the riches, To make their point, they've hung a banner over the entrance, renaming it, the Red University of Karl Marx. For the very first time in the history of the New Republic, people are in open revolt. People who took over Yugoslavia with tito, they were partisans, they were communists, they were not necessarily educated, people. They were not geniuses. They were not PhDs, professors, engineers and doctors.

However, they kind of liked the power. But then, you know, the new generation came in that was educated in 1950s and early 60s. And they became so-called technocratic generations. And suddenly their generation comes away and they're seeing that these old guys are not doing things that they were supposed to be doing. And they started rebelling against the old guys, you know. They were saying, you're communists and not a communist, you know, because you tasted power, you tasted a good life. And you betrayed the original dance of communism. But Tito is a wily old fox.

Four days into the dispute, he declares that the students are right. He is, as it were, down with the kids. He somehow manages to shape the situation so that he appears to be on the side of the demonstrators against the bureaucracy in the party. He's the master of political tactics and of the practicalities of power. While the students end their protest seemingly victorious, none of their demands are actually met. The ringleaders are all quietly thrown in jail. Tito's deft handling has been influenced in no small measure by what is happening in fellow

Slavic state Czechoslovakia. There, with students to the fore, a full-scale uprising is brewing, the Prague Spring, something that will culminate in August with a Soviet-led war. Warsaw Pact invasion. By the early 70s, you have people coming to adulthood who have no recollection of the war. And so for them, the appeals that Tito made to national solidarity and the recollection of the war and the Parsistan struggle really don't mean anything. And I think he understood that what happened in Prague in 1968 with this movement of students

was something that he couldn't take a neutral position on. He understood that very well, and I think that was probably a pretty small move on his part. More so than in Hungary, 1956, Tito feels the Soviet crushing of the regime in Prague far more personally. Pertinately, Alexander Dupchek's reforms had been inspired by Tito, what the Czech leader called socialism with a friendly face. Ever more fearful of his own vulnerability to the Russian bear, Tito up's defense spending by 50%. His on-off relationship with the USSR is over. 68 and the invasion of Chicks back here,

that's it as far as Tito is concerned. The Brezhneuf people are never going to accept that I'm anything other than unacceptable, and so that's it. In 1972, the USSR will try to make amends in Belgrade, with a huge sculpture dedicated to the Soviet Parsan Alliance, the monument of gratitude. Despite the significance of the gesture, Brezhnev's trip will come a poor second

to the state visit of New Indian Premier, Indra Gandhi. To shore up his position, Tito embarks on some strategic fence-mending elsewhere. In 1971, Pope Paul welcomes Mr. and Mrs. Tito to the Vatican. The Marshal had been excommunicated, for his imprisonment of the Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinat's, an alleged Ustasha sympathizer. Relations are also restored with West Germany. They'd been broken off due to Tito's formal recognition of the communist East German state. In April 1973, Philly Brandt will be the first West German chancellor to visit Yugoslavia since the war.

Brandt is on his way to visit Israel, amid emotionally charged scenes. there, he will lay a wreath at Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial. Tito's relationship with the Jewish world is, by contrast, contradictory. He had been one of the first leaders to acknowledge the new Israeli state. But Tito, in keeping with the NAM's sensibilities, has since backed the Arab nations in the Six-Day War of 1967, and will do so again in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. not least because, cynically, they are a ready market for Yugoslav weaponry. By 1964, Yugoslavia is already the fourth largest arms producer in the world. And this is where, again, regardless of the split with Stalin,

you wonder really what was Tito's position in the Cold War, because the non-aligned movement is obviously it's a misnomer. These were outriders of the Soviet Union, in my view, and it clearly wasn't sitting in the middle. It was cantered a long way off to the left. Towards the end of Tito's life, he could see with a great dismay as the Soviet-aligned countries like Cuba becoming much more aggressive within the movements. And that was giving him a lot of grief.

But it is, unfortunately, a reality of movement that has more than 100 countries and different interests. Tito becomes a backer of Aboumitao, the PLO, the IRA. There are allegations of him cozying up with Vendezzo. Venezuelan assassin Carlos the Jackal. I don't know how much that is understood in the Western world. He became a patron saint on just about every liberation movement you can find. So late 1950s and especially in 1960s, the great liberation of Africa happened. Many of those countries were given help by Yugoslavia.

It goes from helping the Krammakrumah to helping Wormel-Gedafi, you know, to helping Idi Amin. It seems an inconvenient truth to those gleefully awarding tito the Lejean d'Honner, or the Order of the Bath. Yugoslavia, for all its faults, still comes with extraordinary benefits. Its public education system is of an exceptional standard. It ranks highly in arts and culture. Punching well above its weight, Yugoslavia becomes a sporting powerhouse.

Football teams like Red Star Belgrade and Dina Mozagreb win European titles. It produces an excellent. of top tennis talent, champion skiers, and in particular basketball stars, the Dinaric region home to some of the tallest people in the world. In 1978, Sarajevo will be awarded the 84 Winter Olympics. The first time a socialist country has been accorded the honor, perhaps more prized than anything else, is the ability that Yugoslav citizens have to come and go as they please. Unlike their communist brethren elsewhere, venturing abroad is not an issue. I mean a wonderful type.

Well, my friends said, we live in a cage, but it's a very big cage, because they had freedom to travel to the West. The Yugoslav passport is one of the most user-friendly in the world. Like the Irish one, it's the only country in the world with no enemies. In 1967, with the advent of visa-free travel for foreign visitors, thus begin the war. another boom. Yugoslavia positions itself as a package holiday destination, arrival to the Spanish costas. Exposure to Western culture, consequently, is massive. Music, TV, movies. And so you have this extraordinary openness to the world. It's full of happy tourists. You have this passage of people in and out of Yugoslavia, the tourists come in, the workers go out, they earn

foreign exchange they come back. It's open to the world, it's integrated within the global community. Through West Germany's Gastarbiter, guest worker program, the youth of Yugoslavia too are afforded opportunities the rest of the communist world can only dream of. But it belies a dawning reality. Youth unemployment is rising. Yes, up to a million young Yugoslavs can be removed from the unemployment figures by shipping them off elsewhere. But what good is that when your brightest and best are being forced out of the country? As a war hero, liberator and global figure, Tito remains unimpeachable. Superficially the country seems to be doing fine.

But there is a growing lopsidedness to the economy. It's not just that in the cities you can procure for yourself a Gucci handbag, but be unable to find a loaf of bread. It's that within the country as a whole there are imbalances, a north-south divide. It's in the northern republics, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, where the industry and the wealth is created. Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia, by contrast, of the poor relations.

Where Slovenia has a standard of living equivalent to the Netherlands, the autonomous province of Kosovo is like that of the Sudan. With their architecture and culture, there is a lingering sense that Slovenia, Slovenia and Croatia were not so long ago part of a sophisticated middle European culture, not some outlying satrap of the Ottomans. And that economic situation also intersects with the nationalism in the sense that Yugoslavia was a slightly unusual empire,

in that the center of Serbia, the dominant state, was not the economic engine at all. The economic engine really was Slovenia and Croatia. And so Croats and Slovenians felt that, that on the one hand they're denied the autonomy they would like to have. And on the other hand, their wealth is taken from them into Belgrade and then redistributed. I mean, why can the Serbs pay for themselves? You know, and so you had this enormous resentment. And of course, Slovenia is, I mean, Slovenia is really a West European country.

I mean, being part of Yugoslavia was a total anomaly, really. In Kosovo, meanwhile, the ethnic Albanians grow resentful at their lack of full statehood, despite being more populous than both Montenegro and Macedonia, Tito's new republic had been founded on the principle that loyalty to the Yugoslav state is paramount. It has necessitated a suppression of regional identities. But without Hardman Rankovich, with whom Tito has since fallen out, and with increased decentralization,

a consequence of the economic restructuring, the old cracks begin to show. In Croatia, there is a particular pent-up frustration. It concerns the classification of the majority Yugoslav language as Serbo-Croat. Scholars in Zagreb argued that Croatian is not just a variant of Serbian, a mere dialect, but a language in its own right. Protests over textbooks being printed in the Serbian Cyrillic script are the thin end of a wedge. From 1967, there was an escalating revival of Croat folk songs and literature, a veneration of historic Croatian heroes,

along with the reappearance of the red and white checkered Croatian flag. Yugoslavia has the same old issue with Croatia that the Soviets had with Czechoslovakia. By 1970, it's no longer a benign cultural campaign. In Zagreb, Croatia, Croatia, communist oust the conservative Unitarians from power. The Communist Party of Croatia wanted a much more autonomy for the Communist Party of Croatia and for the space for Croatian people to express. And they became so-called mass-pok or mass movement.

Or as others call it, the Croatian Spring. And by this time you see Croats and Serbs disliking each other. And then what thought it happened was memories of the Second World War. So your grandfather killed My grandfather, you know, and all of something. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July. We're faced with a threat.

That can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor, friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility. Talk to Banner? I didn't know you could get that big.

Spider-Man, brand-new day. In theaters, July 31st. 7th, 1971, the 26th anniversary of the liberation of World War II. A mass rally is held in Zagreb. Tito's security apparatus clamps down on the dissidents. The leaders are purged. So when I say purge of Croatian party leadership in 1971, though they weren't banged up in prison and put on starvation, they were just removed from post. Though to balance the books, Tito, arch-federalist, purges, some of the Serb leadership too. But Tito cannot control events abroad. Amongst the Croatian diaspora,

there is an increasing romanticization, not just of the old country, but of the wartime fascist Eustache, and it's being orchestrated by a militant organization called the Croatian National Resistance, the HNO. In April 1971, Croatian paramilitaries attacked the Yugoslav embassy in Stockholm and killed the ambassador. In January 1972, a Yugoslav airline's passenger jet is blown up over Czechoslovakia. Tito's Udba hit squads, meanwhile, hunt down the Croatian rebels, turning domestic politics into a foreign, dirty war. The Croatian Spring is now a Croatian problem. With the 1973 oil crisis, the economy goes from bad to worse.

It's a state which by the 1970s is teetering on the brink because it's so heavily indebted to the IMF and the World Bank. Lenders start to call in the debts and it's in no position whatsoever to pay for them. The economy which has been built on this idea of self-management, which in practice turned out to be a huge bureaucratic monster, is on the verge of crumbling. It will require another constitutional rewrite, one that's inaugurated on May the 16th, 1974, one which to enable financial restructuring and to accommodate the Croatian situation advocates further devolution. Pledral ties are loosened, Republican leaders are given decision-making powers of investment, and that's what really brings up the Croat nationalism issue,

because the Dalmatian coast was already developing as a tourist honeypot, and they had huge foreign currency earnings. Now, who was going to decide what happened to those foreign currency earnings? Was that just part of the investment pot to be decided by Croatia? And the Croatians obviously said yes, when the other republic said, hang on. It's just chance that you've got the coast. We've got sunshine, but we don't have the coast.

You know, this money should be shared on Yugoslav days. And that was an issue that went round and round and round and now. They changed the constitutions of Yugoslavia. They're turning into more confederation rather than federation, and that's at the end. So the system has put the power back from the federal state into the so-called republics. And once the commanding federal force was over, the tito was out. They just basically took 10 years to destroy it. There is also, for the first time, a serious attempt to address what might happen after Tito's death.

Aged 82, Tito is approved as president for life. But the question is, for how long? The Constitution in 1974 is the key document here. It reconstitutes Yugoslavia as a federal state of eight units, so the six republics plus the two autonomous provinces in Serbia, Voivina and Kosovo, and it starts to talk about the post-Tito situation. Tito is president for life, but a future Yugoslavia will be led by a rotating presidency. One representative of each of those constituent units will take part in a shared rotating presidency. Basically, Tito is trying to ensure that no one can step in and dominate the state in the way

that he has done. It's a system which comes to be known as Tito and the Eight Dwarves. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia's foreign debts are now clocking in at $70 billion. The country's latest economic venture seems to sum up the whole Surrey state of affairs. In 1977, Zastava rolls out a new car, a family hatchback based on the Fiat 128 to be sold into the European and this time the U.S. markets. commercially as the Ugo. Reviewers will condemn it as possibly the worst must-produced car in the history of the auto industry. Though Tito was well into his 80s, he doesn't let up. And typically, he deflects from troubles at home with trips abroad. In summer 1977, he visits Beijing for a kiss and make-up with Mao's successor, Chairman Huaguo Feng. But he's not always greeted as

warmly as in the old days. A trip to the UN in New York sees Tito met with barricing and the burning of the Yugoslav flag by Croat expats. Tito's retreat from domestic frontline politics continues. He spends more and more time at his Bruni home, surrounded by memorabilia and working in his shed on his lathe, a reminder of his old days as a metal worker, with or without the missing fingers. He goes from being an absent father to a doting grandfather, and is certainly more attentive to the long-suffering Yovanka.

He finds time, too, to indulge his passion for football. After the war, for fear of their associations with the past, he disbanded the traditional soccer clubs and had new ones founded. They come with heroic socialist names, the aforementioned Red Star Belgrade and Dina Mozagreb, There's partisan Belgrade, the old army team, and the club of which Tito will become honorary president, Hydux Split, named after the Ottoman-era guerrilla bands. Throughout the 1970s, Tito has a series of health scares. Diabetic, a lifelong smoker and lover of whiskey, he suffers several rumored heart attacks. By late 1979, he's ailing. In January 1980, with circulation problems,

He's moved from Belgrade to the University Medical Center in Lubiana. With clots threatening to kill him outright, a decision is made. Tito must lose his left leg. Tito resists, threatening to shoot himself if the surgeon lays a hand upon him. By the time he does consent, he's past the point of no return, suffering from a lethal blood infection. And one of his eccentricities was that he felt really that death wasn't for him and he wouldn't go to people's fear force. He wouldn't contemplate the world without him,

which in retrospect was clearly a recipe for disaster. He slips away at 305pm on May the 4th, 1980, three days short of his 88th birthday. Though the news is sat on for three hours while they figure out how to break it, It's like Bratinev. They kept him artificially alive long beyond he should have died, you know. But they did it because of his symbolic unity value, and they couldn't imagine life without

Tito. He was the national hero as well as the dictator. It's Sunday, May the 4th, 1980, about 10 to 7 in the evening. We're in the Pollute Stadium in the city of Split. It's the crunch match of the Yugoslav football season, Hydeck versus Red Star-Belgrade. reigning league champions against the side poised to depose them. On the pitch it's a full-blooded encounter. Still in the first half, but already deadlocked at 1-1.

But then something strange happens. A buzz starts to go around, a rumor that sweeps across the terraces, passing from one fan to another. Some press their ears to transist the radios, the action on the field now of little interest. Reacting to the change in atmosphere, the game slows. A league dignitary gestures for the referee to halt play. The stadium comes to a hush, absolute silence. And then over the Tanoi comes the somber announcement.

President Tito is dead. The players mingle in the center circle. Both teams stand united in grief. Players from Serbia, Croatian, Bavina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia. In the stands, grown men blob like babies. When you watch the footage back of that match, there is genuine shock in the stadium,

genuine emotion, and you can hear the sobs of the crowd ringing around. The symbolism of the two teams standing in line mixed together with these vibrant red and white striped red star shirts and the bright white of Hydeck Split, both with the red stars of socialism on their badge, as they stand together emotionally and take this news on board. And then we have this spontaneous outburst of a famous song,

Comrade Tito, we swear an oath to you that we will not deviate from your path. And it rings round the 50,000 crowd present in the stadium. That is a big symbolic moment. Oh, dear, there was totally little about it. people, even by people who weren't communist. He was a dictator, but he was our dictator, you know. It's May 8th, 1980, where in central Belgrade, millions lie in the streets as the Marshal president is driven to his committal. There are representatives of 122 leaders present. They include four kings, six princes, 31 presidents, 22 prime ministers, and 47 foreign ministers.

The ministries include Chairman Hwa, Helmut Schmidt, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev, Eric Honika, Kenneth Cowander, Yasser Arafat, Indra Gandhi. Though not, conspicuously, President Jimmy Karza, who sends along his VP, Walter Mondale. When he died outside of United Nations General Assembly, this was the greatest gandering of statesmen and politicians ever. There was something about it. There was something in him that people admired. that stiff spine, which is you don't get it today in these politicians, you know.

Tito is the last of the war leaders to pass away. It will be the biggest funeral for a head of state till that of Nelson Mandela in 2013. Amid a huge public outpouring of grief, Tito is interred in the House of Flowers' Mausoleum. Without its supreme leader, the rotating presidency continues. But it's a case of papering over the cracks. There was a huge nostalgia for Tito, but realisation that Kuzda Gai had kept the show on the road, and the Federation system didn't work. Without him, why should people from Serbia be nice to these Richard Kourats who look down on them and regard them as peasants, you know,

and Croatians are thinking, well, why should we be nice to the Serbs who take all our money? So things that had been sort of discontent, should we say, then became lethal. People understood that possibly something bad was coming down the line after he died. But as the end approaches, this kind of national neurosis intensifies what will come next. And what was planned to come next in Yugoslavia was a rotating presidency, something like Switzerland has. But Yugoslavia isn't Switzerland. This was clearly not going to work. Obviously, the hope was that when the crunch came, the constituent parts of Yugoslavia could still agree to compromise.

But they found that increasingly difficult. Elsewhere, as the Soviet bloc begins to unravel, communist Yugoslavia will begin to resemble something from a bygone age, a historical relic. The Yugoslav state was only created after the First World War. It's an entirely artificial creation. It's a synthetic. It's a kind of model built with little bits of glass.

It's incredibly fragile. It has no real underlying unity, no real underlying logic, except the force of Tito's personality. If anyone in Yugoslavia believed in Yugoslavia, it was actually Tito. He lived that belief. He imposed that with force if necessary, with persuasion if possible. Yugoslavia is his passion. Yugoslavia is his mistress. He loves it to bits. and when he dies, it dies. It's as simple and tragic as that. All of us knew.

All of us knew that it's not the issue of if but when. Some of us thought about two, three years, some of us thought. Ten years, none of the people that I spoke to ever talk to, three years. Slavis going to remain a permanent mistake. It was, it's the sense of everything that was happening, plus the fate that Tito was not capable of coming up with any meaningful second generation, nobody will have his authority and the system will have to change it.

And we were right. With rampaging inflation, the economy goes into a death spiral. The wealthier republics grow even more resentful of the needier parts. It's the Albanians of Kosovo in particular, who are painted as perennial freeloaders. In Serbia in 1986, with tensions running high, a new politician comes to the fore. His name is Slobodan Milosevic, a communist by name, but an old-school Serb nationalist in reality. Over the coming months, he gains an increasing following. He will soon be elected the Republic's president.

On June the 28th, that date again, in 1989, he makes a speech to a rally of around 1 million people in the fields near Pristina. On the 600th anniversary, they've gathered at the Gazist. Mestan monument, a memorial to the Battle of Kosovo, site of the defeat of the Serbs at the hands of the Ottomans. To the excitable crowd, Milosevic drags up all the old grievances and puffs up the victimhood of the Serbs. He talks ominously of the future battles that must be formed. Within two years, Slovenia and Croatia will have seceded from the Federation, and the Balkans plunged into an ethno-nationalist war. The bloodiest European conflict since World War II,

complete with atrocities, death camps, and an ominous phrase, ethnic cleansing. And Yugoslavia will emerge with a prefix attached to it, former. Had Yugoslavia remained in one piece, it would be, I would think, now, one of the most influential countries in Europe, it would be the Poland of the south, if you like. And what we have instead is a series of small states, which, you know, are very charming and beautiful,

but they don't count for much on the European world stage. And I think it's a net loss that Yugoslavia cease to exist. And I'm not sure it was inevitable at all. Tito casts a long shadow. In the aftermath, in an expression of independence, there is a renaming of the squares and avenues that had once born Tito's name. The capital of Montenegro, Titograd, swiftly retitles itself, Podgorica. But with the passage of time, there has been a reappraisal of Yossipro's Tito,

a certain misty-eyed yearning for a perceived golden yesteryear. I'm born in Yugoslavia and I'm believing in Yugoslavia, and as I'm growing older, I have even greater appreciation or how beautiful this country is. Oh, I just need to travel to this country these days and realize the diversity of nation, of cultures, of nature, and man can't but feel sorry for the destruction of it. And you know what's interesting is it?

Maybe, let's say, apart from Slovenia's, I don't think any other nation would slightly have it better because you've slightly fell apart. I really don't think so. You know, I would have every reason to be bitter about him. But to survive what he survived and to create what he created, he takes an excellent human being. He did very well by Yugoslavia, given the circumstances and cards that he was dealt.

In the end, the country was not a gulag. It wasn't some dreary holding cell like the DDR. The people had, on the whole, a reasonable life and the ability to travel and a reasonable degree of prosperity and internal peace. I mean, those are all pretty big achievements, given the backdrop. And he managed to, I think, in the end, balance East and West pretty effectively.

So it's a pretty good scorecard on that count. What it means to be a dictator is very different depending upon the kind of political system and the country and the culture. There's no question that people think democracy is a good idea, people in the countries of the former Yugosavini, but most of them think their lives are not as good as it was before. Although he's seen he committed terrible things in the Pozs of 1948,

he actually did something impossible that nobody else has done and key people who were never united, united, and with a degree of peace and happiness that has eluded it in many parts of the world ever since. And he gave the peoples the bulk of the ability to keep good about themselves. Because if you were Czech, you're under Soviet rule. If you were Yugoslav, you know, Tito was a hard guy. And the Yugoslavs, they did ever since pride in their country, and they loved him. The idea of a Yugoslav state of building something like this in the Western Balkans was severely damaged by this genocidal war in the 1940s.

And yet, something positive was built there. There were losers. There were losers in all of this. And the party committed all manner of crimes that authoritarian regimes commit. And yet, for your average Yugoslav citizen, the 60s and 70s, were gone. golden years of travel, of outward-looking, world-leading behavior, whether that's in sport or in fashion or in filmmaking or in music. Yugoslavia was out there at the forefront for several decades.

Today in rural Komrabets, the old family home is a visitor center. They're proud of their native son. It's become a place of pilgrimage. is a statue outside. Tito in his military uniform, greatcoat around his shoulders, his face etched with determination, the partisan leading the resistance from the mountains. The man who for 35 years, and almost single-handedly, kept a country called Yugoslavia together. Thanks for listening. Real dictators will be back soon, with the story of Emperor Augustus. Stay tuned.

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