Wherever I look, Tito’s name pops up. Throughout erstwhile Yugoslavia, the new generations are exploring the man. And the tangled myth. There are books and dramas and movies. Operas would not surprise me, either. Tito’s name is everywhere. The best I can come up with, by way of brooding praise, is that there was a short period, roughly between 1948 and 1958, when South Slavs were sovereign because of him. And through him. For about a decade, spanning the break with Stalin and the break with Mao, the history of South Slavs was written on their own barren land. But the South Slavs will never recognize the unprecedented feat, for it will never be clear which among them were the most sovereign of all: the Serbs, the Croats, the Slovenes… A pity.

Addendum (October 23, 2015)

As it happens, Tito’s name came up once again this very afternoon at Marko’s. There were a bunch of us around the table, and everybody had something to say. When my turn came up, I mentioned the brief period of sovereignty of the South Slavs under Tito’s rule. And I emphasized that this was the first, and most likely the last, such period in the history of these peoples. For good measure, I explained what sovereignty meant, and I added that much of the history of the South Slavs was written elsewhere—say, Rome, Constantinople, Venice, Istanbul, Vienna, Budapest, Washington, DC, or Moscow. Nobody questioned my claims, but the conversation quickly turned to Tito’s many foibles, including his penchant for women. There was much laughter, too. In these parts, sovereignty is a foreign concept.