• Anniversary. 150 years since the birth of Lenin: the despot, a virgin? that the communists praise
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We could play that fashionable thing of putting a historical character in today's postmodern categories. So Josip Broz 'Tito' would be what, according to the jargon 'incel' (involuntary celibates), is a 'chad': one of those men who represents virility at its best. Good looking, with a strong jaw, and sure of himself, Tito was not stopped by anything. Which Yugoslavia was subjugated by a fascist and puppet regime of the Nazis? It released her. What was the eye of a woman? He conquered her. That his interpretation of communism did not coincide with that of Stalin and that he called him to order? I challenged him. So it was from his rise to power, being marshal of the partisans who fought against the Croatian 'ustacha', until his death, which turns 40 on Tuesday.

The anniversary will inflame those nostalgic for the so-called Titoism: the particular system that made Yugoslavia the only communist country not subject to the Soviet Union. A model of self-managed socialism that allowed greater openness to the West, to the point that social control was looser and young people were able to indulge in rock, pop and other 'perversions' of capitalism. It was also the system that allowed a relative coexistence of heterogeneous peoples and ethnic groups that had been killing each other for centuries . The yoke, never better said, of communism kept Yugoslavia together for four decades. At the death of Tito, that happy union of the "southern Slavs" would enter an impasse: in just a decade everything was blown up, with the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

But before the dismemberment and balkanization, Tito was the good-natured dictator who spearheaded the Non-Aligned Movement: the true "pariahs of the earth" who did not want to fall under either Western influence or the Warsaw Pact . All this for something that many historians consider a testosterone dispute. And it is that, during the Second World War, Tito had managed to liberate Yugoslavia on his own and practically without Soviet help, with partisans who also played a leading role in Italy, with massacres that marked the end of fascism in that country.

After the war ended, Stalin wanted to group all the satellite countries or popular republics that the advance of the Red Army had left . But Tito said that did not go with him, he planted himself and showed his teeth, to which the supreme leader of the USSR responded by expelling him from the Cominforn. After the corresponding purges on either side, the situation normalized with the death of Stalin, although Yugoslavia always looked with the same distrust to the East and the West.

In any case, Tito (name of "comrade" chosen during his years of communist secrecy after the First World War) was able to indulge in what he really liked: the good life and carnal love. Dressed in white and smoking a large cigar or racking Dalmatian and Serbian wines , Josip Broz also challenged the moral staleness imposed by Lenin on fly affairs. Born in the Croatian town of Kumrovec in 1892, Tito was a spirited young man, even in the most extreme circumstances. During World War I he was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia, where he met a 14-year-old girl, Pelagija Belousova , with whom he would end up marrying and having several children. After the end of the relationship, Tito returned to Russia, already converted into a Soviet republic. In Moscow, during the crudest period of Stalin's purges, he met the Austrian Lucia Hauer . Back in Yugoslavia, he married the Slovenian partisan Herta Haas for the third time , with whom he had a son (the future ambassador Miso Broz) and whom he systematically cheated on with other women, including his secretary, Davorjanka Paunovic .

After World War II, he became fixated on another partisan, Jovanka Budisavljevic , 32 years younger than him and who ended up serving as an official first lady since her marriage in 1952. However, despite public appearances and official travel, the The relationship was very conflictive and full of infidelities and, in his last years, Tito even accused her of planning a coup against him. Although they had not lived together since 1977, she did the honors as an official widow at the 1980 funeral. Immediately afterwards she was placed under house arrest, although she continued to attend the Yugoslav leader's memorial every May 4 until his death in 2013.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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