Josip Broz Tito, Immortal Comrade - Josip Broz Tito, Besmrtni Druže

What does Tito mean to me? What is the “cult of personality” around him and what does it represent? To me, Tito is a symbol of a time that we no longer have; when my brothers the Croats, the Bosniaks, the Slovenes, and the Macedonians all lived side by side. From 1945 to Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia was (for the first time in its history), a nation of literacy, education, prosperity, and pride. For all the feuding nationalities of the Balkans, it was the first time that entire ethnic groups had been united under one flag; myths of Greater Croatia or Greater Serbia didn’t matter since it was the first time that all Serbs or all Croats lived in one country. This was a country of farmers and peasants, one that had below 50% literacy in 1930 and was ruled by a monarcho-protofascist dictatorship throughout the 1930s. It was a country that suffered a brutal genocide under occupation and collaborationist forces, and it was a country that was built by anti-fascist workers. For its 45-year history, Yugoslavia wa