Tito

he charismatic, near-mythological figure of Josip Broz Tito was many things: an inspirational partisan leader and scourge of the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War; a doctrinaire communist but an ever-present thorn in Moscow`s side; an oppressor, a dictator, a reformer, and a playboy. He managed Yugoslavia`s internal tensions through personality, force of will, and political oppression. It was only after his death in 1980 that the true scale of this feat was understood; the country`s institutions and politicians were then revealed as rudderless, and the country created by Tito - a Croat turned Yugoslav - collapsed into a bloody and at times genocidal civil war. These ethnic conflicts were Tito`s nightmare, yet, as Neil Barnett shows in this short but engaging biography, they were in many ways the result of his own myopic egomania.