by Adam LeBor
The Communist grandees had clearly laid out the path to career success for Milosevic and his fellow students. The party issued instructions which were to be followed, not questioned. When economic reforms were introduced during the 1960s, party activists explained them to their fellow members. Loyalty to the decisions of the party leader, and patience, were the most useful assets for a young apparatchik. The rewards could be considerable: a new flat, a good job running a hospital or a factory, even an ambassadorship abroad for those who followed the party line. This was all very cosy, but many of the early 1960s generation, often better educated and more sophisticated than their partisan elders, planned to jump the queue.
Slobodan’s brother Borislav provided an easy entrée to the university’s political elite. One of Borislav’s best friends was Dusan Mitevic, then the president of the students’ union. ‘Slobodan always looked a bit nerdy, with his plummy face. He wore a white and shiny nylon shirt, the kind you can wash, and leave overnight, and a tie. He was always with Mira. I think that Mira was a kind of wall between him and other people. He never really had friends.’ Borislav, in contrast, was hugely popular. He had grown into a tall and handsome young man, with dark hair and Slavic good looks. With his guitar and repertoire of songs, he was a must at every party. Borislav – Bora – had always been the one tipped for success, while Slobodan, most people assumed, would become a successful mid–level official.
Apart from Mira, perhaps the only true friend Slobodan Milosevic ever had was his fellow law student Ivan Stambolic. Stambolic was five years older, but like Milosevic he was from a provincial background and bright. Stambolic had worked in a factory in the southern city of Cacak and had come late to higher education. Unlike Milosevic he was not afraid of physical work. Although he was intelligent, Stambolic had studied at a technical school, rather than the usual secondary school. He was insecure about the gaps in his education and was not confident about his handwriting. While Milosevic wanted top marks in every subject, Stambolic was happy just to pass. Their personalities were quite different: Milosevic was somewhat distant, and always seemed to be calculating how best to exploit events for himself. Stambolic was much more popular, a warm and genuine person with a wide circle of friends. Yet somehow the two students struck up an alliance among the sometimes snobbish circles of Belgrade’s political elite.
There was more. Stambolic’s uncle Petar, a former President of Serbia, was, like Moma Markovic, one of the most powerful men in the country. Both men had perfect credentials as wartime Communist leaders. Milosevic well understood the value of these names.
In spring 1961, Milosevic took his first step up the ladder of party power that would, thirty years later, bring him to the very summit of Yugoslav politics. One day one of Milosevic’s fellow law students, Nebojsa Popov, was walking through Tasmajden Park, just behind Belgrade Law School, with a colleague when he bumped into his friend Ivan Stambolic. During the 1990s Popov became a leading figure in the opposition, and a respected academic. But in the 1960s he was a young idealist who like many of his generation believed that Titoist Communism was humanity’s great hope. Popov recalled: ‘I had just been elected secretary of the Communist Party at the law faculty. I need someone to be my right hand, my organisational secretary as it was called. I was walking with Ivan and he told me that Slobodan would be the ideal candidate. Without knowing him, I accepted, because I had complete trust in Ivan.’ Milosevic was soon offered the post. He accepted ‘with delight’, said Popov.6
Popov and Milosevic soon divided up the work. The relationship between the two men was broadly like that of a regional company president and his chief executive officer. As party secretary Popov was responsible for implementing the instructions issued by the Communist hierarchy, and keeping things on the right political track. Milosevic’s job was to sort out the day–to–day business of organising the administration. Although Popov was theoretically his superior, Milosevic controlled the minutiae of organisation. He kept records of who attended party meetings, processed applications for membership and controlled the flow of endless paperwork that Communist bureaucracy generates. Used correctly, the job of organisational secretary could be turned into an immensely powerful position. Encouraged by Mira, Milosevic set about doing just that.
By the early 1960s, the repression had eased off. Tito’s country was still a one–party state, to be sure, complete with secret police and a stultified bureaucracy, but compared to East Germany or Czechoslovakia there was considerable room for manoeuvre for those who wished to push the boundaries of freedom. Popov did. Milosevic did not. Popov and his colleagues organised controversial debates and theatre performances that tested the limits of Titoist tolerance. Amphitheatre number five of the Belgrade law faculty was soon a centre of Belgrade agit–prop. ‘Like many party activists at that time, I thought the party could be somewhere to do something about bringing culture to the wider public,’ said Popov. We were naïve, but we believed the party could help promote culture and intellectual values. We thought our basic job was to widen the education of both party members and ordinary students. We organised debates and theatre performances, and they were packed. Students came from all over Belgrade, not just from our university.’
These were exciting times, with something of the air of post–1917 revolutionary Moscow, when Vladimir Mayakovsky had draped Moscow in red banners and brought theatre to the workers. ‘We staged performances in amphitheatre five, and then we asked the actors to stay. Then the audience, the actors and the directors all discussed the play and the performance. We concentrated on ethical and political problems. For some of us, this was the most important thing we could do as party activists.’
Not for Milosevic. The last thing the dutiful, pedantic junior apparatchik was interested in was radical theatre that inspired creativity and innovation. Instead of challenging evenings at amphitheatre five, he attended seminars on party organisation and the structure of the hierarchy. He soon became known as a ‘cyclist’, a term then current for a typical party functionary who bowed his head under authority, but pushed down hard on the pedals – those underneath them in the party hierarchy.
Zivan Berisavljevic was another university friend of Borislav Milosevic. Berisavljevic, from the northern city of Novi Sad, later became Yugoslav ambassador to London. ‘When Slobodan was mentioned it was as Bora’s little brother. I knew him superficially then and hardly remember him from those days, he was too pale and marginal. But there is an African proverb, the higher the monkey climbs, the redder his arse gets. It means the more you climb up, the more you are observed and analysed.’7
In later years Milosevic would be more observed and analysed than any other figure in Yugoslav history, apart perhaps from Tito. In some ways the young Milosevic resembled Stalin, a man initially – and how wrongly – categorised by his rivals as so unremarkable, he was dubbed the ‘grey blur’. Like Stalin, Milosevic initially preferred to operate behind the scenes. Both men spent much time studying and mastering the mechanism of the apparat – as the party structure was known – its cell structure, the party hierarchy, and the way the party ‘line’ was developed, as a prelude to eventually taking power.
On a personal level, Milosevic and Stalin also share a history of paternal deprivation, together with a whole range of twentieth–century political leaders, including Bill Clinton and Saddam Hussein. Psychologists argue that an absentee father is likely to produce feelings of low self–esteem in a young boy. A child will question why his father has left, or does not want to be with him. The lack of a suitable domestic male role model also means the child is deprived of guidance in forming relationships in the wider world. In later life this can create a powerful drive to overcompensate. Some will seek to validate their self–worth through sexual promiscuity. Others enter politics.
Like Mira Markovic, Milosevic certainly had little contact with his father, who left Pozarevac for good in 1947. Perhaps a provincial background and dysfunctional paternal relationship is a requ
irement for a career as a political leader. Stalin, born Josef Dugashvili, passed a miserable childhood in the Georgian city of Gori, where he was beaten by his drunken cobbler father and brought up by his mother. Bill Clinton never knew his father, a travelling salesman who was killed in a car crash before he was born. Bill Clinton’s stepfather, Roger Clinton, was an alcoholic and a gambler who beat his wife. Saddam Hussein, born in the village of Tikrit in northern Iraq was abused by his stepfather, who prevented him from going to school, made him herd sheep and called him a son of a dog. Names too, seem to play a role. Saddam translates as ‘one who confronts’. Dugashvili later chose the name Stalin, meaning ‘man of steel’, even though he was short, with a withered arm. Perhaps it was mordant Balkan wit then, that gave Slobodan Milosevic a first name that translates as ‘freedom’.
In 1962, tragedy struck the Milosevic family. Isolated and alone in Montenegro, Svetozar slid into depression and shot himself in the head with a pistol. Svetozar was a deeply religious man, who took comfort in the spirituality of Serbian orthodoxy. One of the key tenets of Orthodoxy is a sense of continuity and affirmation. The sonorous chants, contemplative tradition, even the wafts of incense that characterise an Orthodox mass are all threads in a spiritual cord of faith, stretching through the centuries, from the time of Jesus right to the present day.
In Communist Yugoslavia, across the Balkans, that link was severed. For believers, Marxism was no substitute. Svetozar left a suicide note, which his sister Darinka found, explaining his decision. Like so many of his generation. Svetozar Milosevic had seen his life torn apart by the war, and he had never been able to make his peace with the new order, said his older son Borislav. ‘The death of my father was a surprise. It was not a straightforward event. For him, the war was the central event of his life. After that the old world was broken, and there was a new one that he did not understand. His ambitions and intentions were different, and he was not satisfied, because his life lacked enough activity and meaning. There were many people in the same situation, but most did not do what my father did.’8
Borislav was closer to his father than Slobodan was, and greatly missed him when he returned to Montenegro. In 1954, after graduating from secondary school, Borislav had spent a memorable summer with his father, walking and talking in the hills. Stanislava had encouraged Borislav to join the Communist youth movement, but he was still his father’s son. He wondered about theology and spiritual matters. Svetozar told him about the philosopher Immanuel Kant, but said that some mysteries could never be fully understood, quoting Emil du–Bois Raymond’s epigram, ‘Ignoramus et ignorabimus’, ‘we are and shall be ignorant’. Borislav recalled: ‘I asked him about God. He told me that the church says something different, but I should know that Jesus of Nazareth was not born as the son of God. He was born as a normal man. He became a perfect man, he was Christ, the Messiah, but he was a genuine man, a man like me, who then became Christ the Messiah.’ In Svetozar’s own theology there is perhaps an echo of the universal, humanist ideals that drew many to Communism in those days.
So restless and unhappy was Svetozar Milosevic that he tried to make a new life in the West. He wrote to Belgrade, requesting a passport. The request was refused. Svetozar then left Yugoslavia illegally. He travelled to France, but was quickly arrested and expelled. ‘Because he was a man over fifty years old, without a passport he was not allowed to stay,’ said Borislav. ‘The police extradited him back to Yugoslavia. He spent several months in prison, for crossing the border illegally.’
Slobodan only went to see his father once in Montenegro, after graduating from secondary school, according to Mira. ‘His mother thought it would not be a good idea to keep too much in contact with his father. Their relations were pretty loose, but that was mostly his mother’s decision.’ Slobodan, away on a study trip, did not attend Svetozar’s funeral. Nor has he made any effort to keep a relationship with the many relatives who share his name in his father’s home village. Suicide was stigmatised in conservative Montenegro. Outside the immediate family neither Slobodan nor Borislav discussed the death of their father by his own hand. Their friends, such as Dusan Mitevic, did not mention the subject, and it would have been bad manners to do so. ‘I did not find out from Bora that their father had committed suicide, because it was seen as something shameful. Someone else told me.’
The names of both of Svetozar’s sons are inscribed on his tombstone: ‘To a brother and father. With broken hearts and pain in our souls we build this as a symbol of our eternal remembrance. Your sister Darinka and sons Borislav and Slobodan.’
3
Building In
First Steps up the Party Ladder
1962–77
Milosevic would have long telephone conversations with Mira at the Communist Party office in the law school. Or rather, she would speak most of the time. He would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Nebojsa Popov, fellow law student at Belgrade university in the early 1960s.1
Milosevic’s first real political success was the affair of Tito’s Secret Letter. This may sound like a 1930s thriller by Eric Ambler, but would make a fine title for the kind of Communist comic opera staged nowhere better than the Balkans. In March 1962 the Yugoslav leader had written a closed letter, for party members’ eyes only, about a mini-crisis that had erupted in the complicated power structure of the Yugoslav state. This was an event of high drama. Special couriers were despatched to pick up a copy of the document which could not fall into the hands of non-party members. Telephones shrilled from Slovenia to Macedonia, as time-serving functionaries struggled to work out the implications for their careers once the letter landed on their desks.
The party then organised meetings to discuss the crisis. These meetings were open to the general public, but only party members could know about Tito’s secret letter and its contents. Any party member who inadvertently mentioned its existence to a non-party member would be expelled from the party in disgrace. How the government crisis could be discussed by the general public when only party members had been informed of what was happening – or what their leaders said was happening – was just one of the many opaque mysteries of life in a Communist state. Either way, all this gave vast scope for intrigue, double-dealing and denunciations. The party Organisational Secretary lived up to his title. Milosevic thrived in this conspiratorial atmosphere, according to Nebojsa Popov. All the necessary arrangements for distributing the letter and setting up the meetings to discuss its contents were faultlessly planned and implemented. Popov said: ‘He enjoyed every minute of it.’
Milosevic was also happy to carry out the less popular duties of an organisational secretary, of implementing party discipline, said Popov. Unruly members could be suspended, or expelled from the party, which could have serious implications for their future career. ‘Milosevic did not have a problem with this. On the contrary, he liked pronouncing strict disciplinary measures,’ said Popov.
Buoyed by his success, Milosevic decided it was time to position himself in public. He chose the occasion of a nationwide debate organised in 1963 by the Communist Party on renaming the country, then known as the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. The word ‘People’s’, felt some comrades, was not sufficiently ideologically zealous. It had echoes of the post-war era of the ‘Popular Front’. Every country in the world had its own people, and most were in any case republics. Party officials suggested a new name: the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. A directive went out from Belgrade across the country: comrades are expected to organise and attend meetings to discuss the proposal. Young cadre members such as Milosevic were particularly encouraged to take part, though only within the boundaries of Marxist orthodoxy, of course. Any proposal, for example, to rename the country the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as it had been known until 1929, would not have been well received.
The meeting at Belgrade law faculty followed the standard pattern. The party grandees lined up on the podium outlined the reasons for the na
me-change proposal to the rows of students in front of them. Most of the audience nodded sagely. But Milosevic had a better idea. Would it not be better, he asked, to put the word ‘Socialist’ first, to stress the country’s political orientation? Let Yugoslavia be called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, he proclaimed. This brings to mind the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian when one revolutionary becomes confused as to whether he is a member of the Judean People’s Front or the hated ‘splitters’, the People’s Front of Judea. Not to mention the Judean Popular People’s Front. But that satire is funny precisely because it draws on the Marxist obsession with tiny delineations of nomenklatura that demonstrate the ‘correct’ ideological rigour. The twenty-two-year-old Milosevic was not known for his sense of humour, but his political antennae were well tuned. His proposal was duly forwarded to the constitutional commission dealing with the matter and then ratified by parliament. Milosevic’s fellow students looked anew at the man in the white nylon shirt and polyester tie.
Just as noticeable was Milosevic’s close bond at university with Mira Markovic. They were infatuated with each other. Former friends and associates of Milosevic point knowingly to the fact that Mira is the only girlfriend he ever had. This is considered highly unusual in the still deeply macho society of the Balkans where women are expected to adopt a traditional role of home-maker while men are not necessarily expected to stay faithful. Even now it is common in Yugoslav homes for women to serve food to the menfolk, retire to another room and eat later among themselves, as in the Middle East.