A COLD WAR

My guest today is Obrad. He grew up in Tito's Yugoslavia and joined the Yugoslav Armed Forces in the late 1970s. Today he lives in Canberra, Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we have a couple of guests from Slovenia - Lovro and Izak. They are 20-year-old students of international relations at The University of Ljubljana. They joined Cam on Zoom a few weeks ago to talk about Slovenia today and how the era of Tito and the Republic of Yugoslavia are taught in the schools and remembered by their families. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adcho...

Although all of the Ustashi leadership managed to escape Yugoslavia, one remained behind - Archbishop Stepinac. Not really a leader, more like an enthusiastic supporter. When Tito’s attempts to get him to publicly apologise for the crimes of the Catholics fails, he is put on trial - which creates massive international condemnation against Tito and the Communists. Learn more about your ad choices....

Chetniks escaping from Yugoslavia get shelter from the Vatican, but their leaders eventually settle in the UK and USA. Thousands of other fleeing Yugoslavs are sent back home by the British while almost all the leading Ustasha vanished in Austria and did not reappear until several years later in Argentina, Spain and the United States. Many anti-Communists clung to the hope that the Western Allies...

The new Yugoslavia tries to industrialise. Tito enjoys the luxury that came with being the Premier and gets a new wife, but his biggest issue in the years immediately following the war was how to unite the country. Hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Yugoslavs attempted to flee the country, took to the hills to continue fighting, or went into civil opposition. Learn more about your ad choices....

Tito’s relationships with both Stalin and Churchill suffer as a result of the fight over control of Trieste, the behaviour of Soviet soldiers in Yugoslavia, and Tito’s manipulation of the first free elections in Yugoslavia in 1945. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The near catastrophe of the Seventh Offensive led to recriminations between the British and Tito but it showed the Germans regarded Tito as a serious foe. Himmler said in a speech later in 1944: ‘He is our enemy, but I wish we had a dozen Titos in Germany, men who were leaders and had such great resolution and good nerves that though they were constantly encircled they would never give in.’ Meanwh...

At the second session of AVNOJ, 29 November 1943, the delegates became a legislative assembly under the Presidency of Tito, who was proclaimed Marshal. But this momentous occasion was followed with tragedy. During the winter of 1943–4 the Germans carried out ‘Operation Kugelblitz’ (‘Thunderbolt’), which the Partisans called the Sixth Offensive. In January 1944 Fitzroy Maclean came back to Bosnia w...

Churchill sends Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, one of the founders of the SAS, to Tito as his official representative. Churchilll’s decision to support Tito and Partisans - ie communists - over the Chetnik royalists has been the subject of much debate and anger for decades. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In November 1942 Tito set up his first form of Communist government, the Anti-Fascist Council for Yugoslavia (AVNOJ). Hitler asks Mussolini to send all of the Croatian Jews to German camps - Mussolini agrees, but his troops, lead by General Mario Roatta, refused to obey. Hitler's next attack on the Partisans, 'Operation Weiss’, began on 20 January 1943, with 90,000 Germans, Italians and Croats ver...

Tito barely gets out of Užice alive before the Germans arrive. Then he gets betrayed by Stalin, narrowly escapes capture again, tries to resign as party secretary, and finally sets up his new HQ at the Bosnian town of Bihać. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tito started his campaigning in the middle of 1941, after Operation Barbarossa had distracted the Nazis away from Yugoslavia. He met with the Chetnik leader Draza Mihajlovic to try to form a unified front. In Užice, a town of some 12,000 inhabitants, Tito proclaimed a symbolic ‘Red Republic’ boasting its own hotel, bank, factories, newspaper and prison. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...

The Jasenovac concentration camp, established in Slavonia, aka "the Auschwitz of the Balkans", "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind" and prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and axes. In the words of the Nazi general, von Horstenau, "The greatest of all evils must be Jasenovac, which no ordinary mortal can gli...

In 1941, after the creation of the NDH, Ante Pavelić, the leader of the Catholic fascist Ustasha, went to Rome to receive the blessing of Pope Pius XII - while his administration was publicly saying they were going to kill a third of the Croatian Orthodox. Throughout the spring and early summer of 1941 Roman Catholic priests, attended by armed Ustasha, carried out mass baptisms in Orthodox village...

On this episode we talk about the Independent State of Croatia, or NDH, lead by Ante Pavelić, and his Catholic fascist group, the Ustasha. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As caretaker secretary of the Yugoslav Party from 1937 to 1940, Tito first moved the Central Committee from Paris to Zagreb, then built up a new, young leadership loyal to him. These guys would be his inner circle for decades to come. When, in February 1941, the Yugoslav regent Prince Paul did a deal with Hitler to avoid an invasion of Yugoslavia, the Serbian Orthodox went nuts and overthrew Paul'...

Back to Tito and Yugoslavia. In 1934, the Croat Catholics rose up against the Serb King Alexander, leading to his assassination by a Ustasha agent while visiting France. Meanwhile Stalin purged the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, opening the door to a new generation of younger, more radical leadership, with Tito becoming the General Secretary. While living in Paris, he loved to visit t...

My guest today is Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he served as a professor of politics and director of St Antony's Russian and East European Centre. He has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, on communist politics more generally, on the Cold War, and on political leadership. His new boo...

By the time Tito got back to his home country in 1920, the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman empires had all been broken up. In their place were the independent states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, commonly known as Yugoslavia. It was then that Tito began his career as a revolutionary. Le...

In order to understand the career of Josip Broz Tito, we need to understand the religious and political history of the Balkans. As historian Richard West says: anyone who approaches the Yugoslavs without some knowledge of their religious history is like a chicken trying to understand a ladder. So on this episode, we do a quick review of the region from the fall of Rome through to the assassination...

Josip Broz Tito grew up in poverty on a small farm in Croatia. He dropped out of school at 13, and apprenticed as a locksmith and mechanic. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army and ended up in WWI, where he was injured and captured by Russians. When the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, he became a Bolshevik and fought with them against the White Army. Learn more about you...

After the bombing of Hiroshima, the Soviets work their asses off to get their own nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, despite the enormous financial commitment it required and the other, more pressing social and economic problems the country was facing after WWII. They saw it as a matter of self-defence against the USA. In 1947, Andrei Zhdanov introduced the 'two-camps doctrine’. And finally,...

When Stalin and Molotov heard what Truman had said at Potsdam about the USA having a new bomb ready, they saw it as a direct threat to the Soviet Union and increased their support for Soviet scientists. They might have been further advanced if it hadn't been for the purge of Soviet military strategists like Mikhail Tukhachevskii, aka "The Red Napoleon". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...

It’s commonly thought in the West that the Soviet Union stole all of the secrets for building a bomb from their spies in the West. Not exactly correct. When nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin in December 1938, the Soviets were as quick to react as the West. But their economy wasn't as strong, and they had many more problems to contend with, so it didn't get a high priority. And then 4 millio...

When WWII broke out, the Zionists declared their support for Britain. It's not like they were going to throw their lot in with the Nazis. For the Arabs, the choice was trickier. The British were seen by the Arabs as the protectors of Zionism while the Nazis were against the Jews - and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And for the first few years, the Nazis looked like the favourites to win. Then...