Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans

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Balkan communist leaders

R.J. Crampton

To cite this article: R.J. Crampton (2004) Balkan communist leaders, Journal of Southern Europe
and the Balkans, 6:3, 211-225, DOI: 10.1080/1461319042000296787

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Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans
Volume 6, Number 3, December 2004

THEMES

Balkan communist leaders

R.J.CramptonUniversity of OxfordSt Edmund HallOxfordOX1 4ARUK

R. J. CRAMPTON

It cannot be entirely inappropriate that a lecture on Balkan communist leaders

should be given in honour of one of the world’s experts in the deadly art of
spear-fishing. However, Vane Ivanović had more arrows, or perhaps I should
say spears, in his quiver than those aimed at fish.
Born of a Croat mother and a Serb father in Osijek on 9 June 1913 Vane
Ivanović was brought up as a Catholic, though he later abandoned that
tradition. The vicissitudes of politics and of his parents’ relationship meant that
he came to England and was educated at Westminster School where he was on
the modern side. This in many ways he regretted because it forced him to
abandon Latin and to forgo the chance of learning ancient Greek. Here I, who
underwent a similar experience when I changed school at the age of 16, feel a
great empathy and fully endorse his observation, that:
Ever since … I have regarded classical studies and the study of mathematics as
valuable exercises in concentration, memory, precision and clarity of thought—
all of which are most useful in the absorption and use of other knowledge.1

Though educated in England, in Westminster and Cambridge, Ivanović did not

lose interest in his homeland. In the war he served with SOE in Cairo and in
Italy. After the communists took power in Yugoslavia that country was
off-limits to one such as Ivanović but he was active in that valuable and
neglected community, the exiles with moderate views. He was a committed
‘European’ and his ultimate goal was a united Europe which included the
Yugoslav lands; a necessary and desirable condition for such a solution was
that those lands should be democracies. His views were summarized in
‘Democratic Yugoslavia; an outline for discussion’, a pamphlet published in the
late 1960s after a private conference at the home of the Earl of Bessborough in
Stanstead.2 Ivanović stated that there were two possible solutions to
Yugoslavia’s problems, a peaceful separation of nations, or a union that
worked. He said the former was impossible, not least because of Serb–Croat
hostility. His concept for a union that worked was interesting in the light of
post-1990 developments. He said the federation should have five units:
1
Vane Ivanović, LX. Memoirs of a Yugoslav, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1977, p. 101.
2
Vane Ivanović, ‘Democratic Yugoslavia; an outline for discussion’, Izvor Publishers, London,
no date. For the origins of the paper see Ivanović, Memoirs, pp. 315–321.

ISSN 1461-3190 print/ISSN 1469-963X online/04/030211–15  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1461319042000296787
212 R. J. Crampton

Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Macedonia. Whether

Montenegro should join Serbia should be left to the representatives of Serbia
and Montenegro to decide. The boundaries inside the federation should ‘in
general’ conform to existing lines, but that between Serbia and Croatia should
be determined by national representatives of both peoples inside a constituent
assembly and they should be helped by the local, border populations. In that
constituent assembly decisions would be valid only if passed by a majority of
Serbian representatives, a majority of Croat representatives, and a majority of
the representatives within the representation from all five units. A similar
condition was built into the Ohrid agreement of August 2001 whereby legis-
lation affecting the Albanians of Macedonia has to be passed not only by a
majority of the assembly in Skopje but also by a majority of Albanian deputies
sitting in that assembly. The obstacle preventing the advancement of the
Yugoslav peoples was, Ivanović believed, nationalism:
The form our several nationalisms have taken, in their present profusion,
compels them everywhere and at all times to conflict with each other. That is
why we have so far been unable … to step on to the European stage ready to
adapt ourselves to modern concepts in Europe.3

One of Ivanović’s more recondite accomplishments was that he was once

described as ‘“the only man on earth who had succeeded in speaking for ninety
minutes while both Randolph Churchill and Tito had remained silent” ’. This
was because Ivanović had translated the soundtrack of the film Desert Victory
which had been dropped to the Yugoslav partisans in the war when Randolph
Churchill was attached to them.4
This was one of the few links which our benefactor had with Tito who, in
turn, is one of the individuals whom I will discuss in the main part of my
lecture on ‘Balkan communist leaders’. The other main figures are Enver Hoxha
of Albania, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceauşescu of Romania,
Todor Zhivkov and, to a lesser degree, Georgi Dimitrov of Bulgaria, Slobodan
Milošević of Serbia and, at the end, one figure who was not a party leader, nor
a head of government, but who remains one of the most extraordinary
characters ever to appear in the top echelons of any communist party. I shall
begin by saying a very little about these leaders’ policies and then go on to
discuss their personalities.
********
Vane Ivanović recognized that the communist leaders in Yugoslavia, though
former internationalists, had by the late 1960s all given way to the nationalisms
which he believed were impeding the country’s evolution towards a healthy
political future.5 It was a truth applicable to all communist leaders in the
Balkans, not just in Yugoslavia. By the mid-1960s the Balkan communist world
had been tessellated. Each country and party followed a different line.
Yugoslavia had, of course, broken with Stalin and the Soviet Union in 1948 and
by the early 1950s had adopted its own form of socialism based on so-called
non-alignment abroad and an alleged worker-democracy at home. Romania
3
Ivanović, ‘Democratic Yugoslavia’, p. 111.
4
Ivanović, Memoirs, p. 183.
5
Ivanović, ‘Democratic Yugoslavia’, p. 111.
 Balkan communist leaders 213

opted for independence within rather than from the Warsaw pact and the
Soviet bloc. Albania, disgusted by the subsequent burying of the Soviet–
Yugoslav hatchet and the Kremlin’s abrogation of Stalinism, had broken with
the other East European socialist states and aligned with communist China.
Bulgaria’s distinctive feature was its slavish subservience to the USSR, even to
the extent that its leader was twice to propose the incorporation of Bulgaria
into the Soviet Union. And if Bulgaria’s individual line seemed to be to bury
its nationalism in its subservience to Moscow this nevertheless served Bulgar-
ian nationalist purposes because it secured for Bulgaria a guaranteed market
for its exports and a secure and cheap source of raw materials, above all oil, for
domestic use.
********
I will turn now to the main body of my lecture: the personalities of the Balkan
communist leaders. Virtually all Soviet and East European communist leaders
enjoyed long periods in power; and this was particularly true in the Balkans.
Of those who took over at the end of the Second World War all died en poste,
Georgi Dimitrov in 1949, Gheorghiu-Dej in 1965, Tito in 1980, and Hoxha in
1985. Before the revolutions of 1989 only one of their successors was removed
from office, that one being Vŭlko Chervenkov of Bulgaria in 1954. During the
1970s not a single Balkan communist leader left office.
Of these leaders only one, Enver Hoxha, could reasonably be described as
an intellectual. He alone of the main leaders had experienced tertiary edu-
cation, in his case in France, even though he was thrown out of university for
political reasons before completing his degree. He could show fierce intellec-
tual snobbery towards those who were or had become his enemies. Koce Xoxe
was removed from the party hierarchy in 1948—it was rumoured he was
strangled in a politburo meeting by the minister of the interior. He was the
only true artisan in the Albanian leadership at the time but despite these almost
proletarian credentials Hoxha dismissed him as an ‘illiterate tinsmith; … a
shitty rabbit’.6
None of these leaders of the workers’ movement come from a working-class
background. Hoxha’s parents were relatively well-off landowners of the Bek-
tashi sect. Gheorghiu-Dej was born to poor peasant parents and went to work
as a porter in Galaţi when aged 11. Ceauşescu too came from the poorer
sections of the peasantry, and, like Gheorghiu-Dej, he left home to find work
in Bucharest when aged 11. Tito’s background, on the other hand, was that of
reasonably well-off peasants. Zhivkov’s family was not as wealthy as Tito’s but
was almost certainly not as poor as Zhivkov and his propaganda machine
maintained, though throughout his period in power much of his background
and his early life remained obscure.
All these leaders were of a provincial background. Gheorghiu-Dej was born
in Bı̂rlad, in Moldavia; Dimitrov was born in Bulgarian Macedonia; Tito’s
birthplace was Kumrovec, a small town in Croatia; Zhivkov was born in
Pravets, a village in the Sofia district though some 60 kilometres from the
capital; Hoxha was a southerner from Gjerokaster; and Ceauşescu came from
Scorniceşti, a village in the Oltenia area of south-western Romania. Zhivkov

6
Arshi Pipa, ‘The political culture of Hoxha’s Albania’, in Tariq Ali (ed.), The Stalinist Legacy: Its
Influence on Twentieth Century World Politics, Penguin, London, 1984, pp. 435–464, 437 and 442.
214 R. J. Crampton

and Ceauşescu continued throughout their lives to favour their birthplaces;

Pravets prospered greatly and grew rapidly from a village to a town. Inhabi-
tants of Pravets were also frequently given preferential treatment.7 Even if the
dictators did not favour their birthplaces it was frequently assumed they did;
at the insane height of the Ceauşescu dictatorship it was said that Romanian
football teams were reluctant to beat Scorniceşti.
Being provincials and of humble origin a number of leaders had little
experience of life outside their own society. Hoxha, it is true, had been to
France and Belgium; Georgi Dimitrov travelled throughout Europe as an agent
of the Comintern, as did Tito, but before coming to power neither Gheorghiu-
Dej, Zhivkov or Ceauşescu had ever been outside their native land. And after
his stormy visit to Moscow in 1960 Hoxha never again set foot outside Albania.
If one plots their paths to power the most illustrious figure is clearly Georgi
Dimitrov, whose conduct during the Reichstag fire trial in 1934 made him a
figure of world renown. Thereafter he became head of the Comintern and
exercised as much power as Stalin was prepared to allow him. Tito, too, had
been a Comintern agent, though a much less prominent one, but his path to
power, like that of Hoxha, was essentially military. The achievements of the
partisan movements in both Yugoslavia and Albania, though much exagger-
ated, created a base on which both leaders built their internal power structures.
In the case of Yugoslavia at least it also bestowed considerable international
kudos on the partisan leader. Gheorghiu-Dej’s main claim to socialist fame lay
in his leadership of the rail workers’ movement in the early 1930s, particularly
during the major strike of 1933. Ceauşescu enhanced his party reputation by
spending a number of years in prison. Zhivkov, following Dimitrov’s example,
became a party activist when working as a printer in Sofia and claimed to have
been an active partisan, though the official propaganda machine made surpris-
ingly little of this during his years in power.8
Of the leaders under discussion Gheorghiu-Dej and Zhivkov owed a
particular debt to Moscow. When the Red Army entered Romania in 1944 the
Romanian Communist Party was tiny, its most prominent figures being Ana
Pauker, Vasile Luca and Emil Bodnaraş, none of whom were ethnic Romanians.
That this played a part in Gheorghiu-Dej’s selection as party leader is beyond
doubt. Although Ana Pauker was by far the most prominent of the three
figures quoted above, Stalin in fact chose Gheorghiu-Dej as leader and told him
‘“Ana is a good, reliable comrade, but you see, she is a Jewess of bourgeois
origin, and the party in Romania needs a leader from the ranks of the working
class, a true-born Romanian.… I have decided…” ’9 Zhivkov had become party
leader in 1954. This was because after the death of Stalin the new Soviet
leadership insisted that the cult of personality be ended and that the offices of
head of party and head of government be held by different figures. This
affected Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary and also Vŭlko Chervenkov, Bulgaria’s

7
Vladimir Kostov, The Bulgarian Umbrella: The Soviet Direction and Operation of the Bulgarian Secret
Service in Europe, translated from the French by Ben Reynolds, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel
Hempstead and St Martin’s Press, New York, 1988, pp. 137–139.
8
For a discussion of this see Petŭr Semerdjiev, Nishtozhestvo v dospehite na velichie, no publisher
cited, Paris, 1985.
9
Silviu Brucan, The Wasted Generation: Memoirs of the Romanian Journey from Capitalism to
Socialism and Back, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, San Francisco and Oxford, 1993, p. 42.
 Balkan communist leaders 215

so-called ‘Little Stalin’. Chervenkov remained head of government and

Zhivkov was chosen to head the party, partly because he had earned the
gratitude of a number of leading party figures after the communist takeover
because he had been in charge of distributing to party prominenti the property
and assets—houses, villas, furniture, books, pictures, etc.—confiscated from the
bourgeoisie and from political opponents. More importantly, he was chosen to
keep out Anton Yugov who was then the most powerful figure in the Bulgarian
politburo. In 1962 Zhivkov’s dependence on Moscow was proved in dramatic
fashion. The eighth congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) had been
due to meet in August but was postponed until November because of a food
crisis caused largely by Zhivkov’s own adventurous experiments in the agricul-
tural sector. Shortly before the congress a central committee plenum was called
during which Zhivkov made a sudden and unannounced trip to Moscow,
returning a couple of days later to inform an astounded audience that Yugov,
who had been made prime minister in 1961, had been removed from the
politburo and sacked as head of government. The links to and dependence on
Moscow were retained until the end of the Brezhnev era. During that period
Zhivkov was aided by the fact that the Bulgarians had made sure that one of
their agents had established very close links with Brezhnev’s daughter. A
judicious distribution of presents to her and her associates ensured that the
Bulgarian party was informed of all sorts of personal manoeuvrings and plots
in the circle around the Soviet leader.
Having attained power all communist leaders relied on the police to retain
it. In Albania the Sigurimi, known colloquially as ‘the historians’, were es-
pecially busy on those occasions when the Albanian party leadership initiated
a major change in policy. In 1948–1949 the victims were ‘the Titoites’, those
associated with Koce Xoxe. In the mid-1960s Hoxha apparently bowed to
pressure from the Kremlin to destalinize and allowed some criticism of the
party and its record, but after the Hungarian revolution the reins were
tightened again as those who had spoken out soon realized. A number of them
were executed, including the pregnant Liri Gega who was shot despite pleas
for moderation from Moscow. At the end of the 1970s Hoxha felt that his new
policy of total isolation, pursued since the break with China in the middle of
the decade, might provide cause for criticism or complaint and a purge was
instigated. The chief victim this time was a very big fish indeed, Mehmet
Shehu, who had been a close associate of Hoxha since 1948 and who held a
number of powerful posts, including that of head of the secret police. In 1980
he stepped down as minister of defence and in December of the following year
it was announced that he had committed suicide following a nervous break-
down. Shehu had fought in the Spanish Civil War and with the partisans
during the Second World War, and he had survived nearly four decades in the
vicious court around Hoxha; such a toughened veteran seemed an unlikely
candidate for suicide. It was said that in fact Shehu had been shot at a politburo
meeting, possibly by Hoxha himself.10 Hoxha announced that Shehu had been

10
Shehu’s body was discovered on 21 July 2001 ‘near the Erzen River in the village of Ndroq
between Tirana and the Adriatic’. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline, Vol. 05, No. 137,
Part II, 23 July 2001. For Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline, see ⬍ http://www.rferl.org/
newsline/ ⬎ .
216 R. J. Crampton

a secret agent working for an improbable if not unholy alliance of the Vatican,
the British and the Americans.
In Romania Gheorghiu-Dej was closely involved in the persecution, and
interrogation, of one of the chief victims of the Stalinist purges, Lucreţiu
Pătrăşcanu, and though Zhivkov did not stage show trials or imprison his
opponents his regime did murder Georgi Markov in London and attempt to
kill Vladimir Kostov in Paris. Tito’s regime relied heavily on the secret police,
particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kosovo was held in an iron grip
under Ranković and thousands of Cominformists, those who opposed the
breach with the USSR in 1948, were imprisoned on the island of Goli Otok,
whilst Andreas Hebrang, a Croatian communist and a Cominformist, was
almost certainly murdered in prison. In the 1970s thousands were arrested after
the so-called ‘Croatian Spring’, and after the Croatian regime had been forcibly
changed purges followed in the other republics of Yugoslavia. Ceauşescu, of
course, had massive and almost constant recourse to the police, especially after
his visit to North Korea in 1971 had provided him with a role model for the
exercise of absolute political power. Ceauşescu unrelentingly persecuted any-
one showing signs of opposition. A surprisingly high number of leaders of the
coal miners of the Jiu valley who went on strike in 1972 and 1977 died in car
crashes and it was rumoured that some of them were subjected to exceptionally
long X-rays which resulted in fatal cancers; officers implicated in the abortive
military coup of 1984 also died mysterious deaths and in most cases their
families’ requests for an autopsy were refused.11 When the workers of Braşov
rioted and ransacked party offices in 1987 Ceauşescu increased the already
considerable powers of the Securitate. No Balkan communist leader had any
qualms over the use of police repression even in its most brutal manifestation.
It is a general rule that the international communist movement did not
produce orators or great public speakers, Lenin and Castro being the main
exceptions. This was true with Balkan leaders, with the possible exception of
Hoxha. Both Zhivkov and Ceauşescu spoke with strong provincial accents and
in not entirely standard, grammatical language, Ceauşescu’s delivery being
hampered by a stutter. Tito’s linguistic background was so mixed as almost to
defy definition.12
If not refined the Balkan communist leaders were undoubtedly intelligent
and cunning; no one could rise to and remain at the top of a communist party
without having these qualities. Amongst the first generation of long-time party
activists Hoxha and Dimitrov had clear intellectual power, whilst Tito and
Gheorghiu-Dej, like Dimitrov, had proved they had organizational and con-
spiratorial skills. Amongst the second generation the road to power had been
rather that of opportunism within the established party machine. Nevertheless,
though Ceauşescu may have been unschooled and unread, even in Marx, he
had a phenomenal memory and, it was said, could produce verbatim long
passages from Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism.13 Zhivkov had peasant cunning
and had risen to power, rather like Stalin, by keeping a low profile. His skills

11
Brucan, op. cit., pp. 132–134.
12
Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Tito, Yugoslavia’s Great Dictator, A Reassessment, Hurst & Co., London,
1992, p. 101.
13
Brucan, op. cit., p. 101.
 Balkan communist leaders 217

were not always apparent to the outside world. Enver Hoxha thought him a ‘a
worthless person, a third-rate cadre’ and ‘the prototype of political medi-
ocrity’,14 and to quote the Czechoslovak communist Zdenĕk Mlynář, who
moved in the upper echelons of the communist world in the 1960s, Zhivkov
was ‘outstanding for his quite exceptional dullness. My years of close contact
with many high functionaries had taught me not to have high standards, but
observing a living Zhivkov from close up was shocking all the same.’15 If one
needs confirmation of this view one can find it in Zhivkov’s own memoirs
which include passages of such sublime stupidity as:
The truth is that if Gorbachev had not been a traitor we, the nations of the
socialist community, would not only have saved socialism but would have
reformed it root and branch, and then gone on to win over the entire world,
even the United States.16
Ceauşescu and Zhivkov were monoglot. Georgi Dimitrov, on the other
hand, was fluent in German and Russian, and indeed at times wrote in
Russian. Gheorghiu-Dej is said to have been able to speak some Russian
though he could not read Cyrillic;17 he is also said to have been able to speak
Yiddish.18 After his experience working in New York Slobodan Milošević had
reasonable English with, as readers of Richard Holbrooke19 may well remem-
ber, a facility in what might generously be described as colloquial English. Tito
understood and read some English, French and Italian as well as speaking
Slovene, Serbo-Croat, Russian and German; he also had a smattering of Czech
and Kirghiz.20
Richard West credits Tito with a sophisticated taste in art, with a particular
penchant for Delacroix. At least Tito had a healthy distaste for socialist realism,
though whether his enjoyment of Laurel and Hardy is to be regarded as a
positive or a negative indication I leave to the personal taste of my audience.21
If Tito did have a taste for genuine art, this was not replicated amongst other
leaders, although Gheorghiu-Dej was a friend of Ilya Ehrenburg and pre-
sumably an admirer of his verse. Ceauşescu’s taste was dreadful as the opening
of his grotesque palaces in Bucharest, Suceava and elsewhere revealed. He too
enjoyed films, his favourites being not Laurel and Hardy but US police thrillers
and movies about Napoleon.22 Zhivkov had no known cultural form.
Communist leaders were leaders of parties based firmly on ideology and all
their major policy decisions had to be justified in ideological terms. All leaders
paid lip-service to the ideology, and no doubt, like Cardinal Richelieu, believed
that faith was an important element in binding society together and in
14
See Jon Halliday (ed.), The Artful Albanian: The Memoirs of Enver Hoxha, Chatto & Windus,
London, 1986, pp. 168 and 362, n. 19, respectively.
15
Zdenek Mlynář, Night Frost in Prague: The End of Humane Socialism, translated by Paul Wilson,
Hurst & Co., London, 1980, p. 156.
16
Todor Zhikvov, Memoari, ‘Siv’ AD, Sofia and ‘Abagar’, Veliko Tŭrnovo, 1997, p. 9.
17
Brucan, op. cit., p. 38.
18
Ibid., p. 70.
19
For one among many examples of Milošević’s earthy English, see Richard Holbrooke, To End
a War, Random House, New York, 1998, pp. 105–106.
20
Richard West, Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994,
pp. 247–248.
21
Ibid.
22
Ion Pochepa, Red Horizons: The Extraordinary Memoirs of a Communist Spy Chief, Heinemann,
London, 1988, p. 13.
218 R. J. Crampton

preserving obedience. But how devoted were the Balkan communist leaders
themselves to ideology? Most of the first generation were genuine believers.
Dimitrov was anxious to fit the communist takeovers in Eastern Europe into
the ideological framework, Hoxha retained the fundamental ideas and prac-
tices of Marxism–Leninism, and Gheorghiu-Dej too retained his faith. When he
went to Moscow in 1961 and proudly told Khrushchev that Romania had
completed the final phase of the collectivization of agriculture, Khrushchev
responded that he must be mad, asking could he not see that it had been an
unmitigated disaster everywhere else, including the Soviet Union, and why
had the Romanians not done what the Poles had done and abandoned the
process before it was too late? Gheorghiu-Dej was outraged and accused
Khrushchev of abandoning Marxism.
Ceauşescu it seems had never read Marx, though he does appear to have
had some concept of ideology. He, or at least his advisors, worked out a
complicated ideological framework which was intended to justify the national-
ist form of communism which held sway in Romania.23 Also, the Romanian
party did attempt to enlist a wider section of the population than the other
ruling parties, and it put forward the concept of ‘blending’ by which the state
and the party would merge as mature socialism developed, part of the function
of ‘blending’ being to ‘re-proletarianize’ the party. Even at the very end of his
rule Ceauşescu stood by agricultural collectivization, and indeed his plans for
‘systematization’ involved a form of ‘blending’ of town and countryside similar
to that envisioned in Khrushchev’s agrogorodi two decades earlier. In Romania
in the late 1980s the MTSs (machine–tractor stations), though abandoned
elsewhere in Soviet-dominated Europe, still played a crucial role in agricultural
production, and that central feature of the Soviet system, the 5-year plan, still
held sway; when the rest of communist Eastern Europe was moving towards
decentralization and flirting with the market economy Ceauşescu’s regime
introduced a 5-year plan which set production quotas for 1800 items and laid
down over 400 ‘target indicators’; the text of the plan was over 40 metres
long.24
Zhivkov’s ideological dedication is more debatable. He had doubts, partic-
ularly after a visit to Japan in the early 1970s had shown him the achievements
of non-militaristic capitalism, about collectivization and rigid central planning.
He often said to a close advisor, ‘Ah, what were we doing abolishing private
property? What have we replaced it with? There’s no substitute for private
property!’ But his doubts went further. The same advisor recalls Zhivkov’s
wistful regrets that the communists had attacked religion: ‘“At least”, he said,
“religion teaches people not to steal. We can’t even do that.” ’ The advisor
concluded, ‘This may seem strange but I don’t think he [Zhivkov] was ever a

23
Gabriel Fischer, ‘Romania’, in Adam Bromke and Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone (eds), The
Communist States in Disarray, 1965–1971, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 158–179,
see pp. 166–167; Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics, Economics and Society. Political Stagnation and
Simulated Change, Marxist Regime series, series editor Bogdan Szajkowski, Frances Pinter, London,
1985, pp. 64–94, passim; Robert R. King, History of the Romanian Communist Party, Histories of Ruling
Communist Parties, series editor Richard F. Starr, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, Hoover Press
Publications, No. 233, 1980, pp. 106–112; and Robert R. King, ‘The blending of Party and State in
Romania’, East European Quarterly, 12(4), winter 1978, pp. 489–500.
24
Martyn Rady, Romania in Turmoil; A Contemporary History, I. B. Tauris, London, 1992, p. 63.
 Balkan communist leaders 219

convinced communist. Rather he used the party machine and communist

ideology as means for the accumulation of power.’25
Tito’s ideological commitment is even more questionable. Even though he
must have had a core of ideological faith in his youth when he courted
persecution as a member of the banned communist party, he was far more a
pragmatist than an ideologue, perhaps because his faith had been dented by
what he saw in Moscow during the purges. It was not so much ideology as the
appalling scenes he saw after the atrocities in Foča during the Second World
War which led him to place the need for ethnic reconciliation and accommo-
dation so high on his list of political priorities, though he did believe that the
amalgamation of the Yugoslav peoples could take place only because socialism
would create a higher form of identity. Tito did keep ideological experts such
as Edvard Kardelj and, in the early years, Milovan Djilas, around him, but Tito
himself, despite his long service in the party and the international communist
movement, had no depth of ideological conviction or even knowledge. On the
way to the funeral of leading Yugoslav communist Boris Kidrić, Tito travelled
by train with Milovan Djilas who later recalled:
… we talked about the forces that shape history. I attempted to explain history
in terms of the most rudimentary Marxist teaching, which is to say, the ideas
and the masses are the basic and decisive elements. Tito snapped: ‘Nonsense!
Often the entire course of history depends on one person.’26

With such remarks he would not have passed the compulsory examination in
Marxism–Leninism which all students had to pass in most Eastern European
universities in the communist years. Even more interesting is Tito’s attitude to
religion. There was the famous occasion shortly after the Second World War
when the new ruling party was at loggerheads with the Roman Catholic
Church and Tito remarked in front of print and radio journalists, ‘I, as a
Catholic …’. The party press simply changed the word ‘Catholic’ to ‘Croat’.27
Later in his life Tito showed indulgence to one Catholic who had helped him
in the past. When he was in prison in Zagreb in the inter-war period he
benefited from the kindness of a Mme Fidlerica who lived opposite the gaol
and did what she could to help the prisoners. After the war she continued her
charitable activities but now, of course, the inmates were prisoners of the
communists. Predictably, she was arrested and scheduled for trial. When he
learned of this Tito intervened. According to Vladimir Dedijer, admittedly a
hagiographer, Tito ordered, ‘“Let the old woman alone. She is a church-goer.
She used to help us and now she is helping the reactionaries. She sees no
difference at all and believes she is doing a good thing.” ’28
25
Kostadin Chakŭrov, Vtoriya Etazh, no publisher cited, Sofia, 1990, p. 99.
26
Milovan Djilas, Tito: The Story from Inside, translated by Vasilije Kojić and Richard Hayes,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1981, p. 134.
27
Nora Beloff, Tito’s Flawed Legacy; Yugoslavia and the West: 1939 to 1984, Victor Gollancz,
London, 1985, p. 33; Milovan Djilas, Rise and Fall, Macmillan, London, 1985, p. 39.
28
Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks; His Self Portrait and his Struggle with Stalin, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, London, 1953, p. 76. The hagiographic nature of this work has since been widely
attacked: ‘This ungraceful book, a cabbage head on a makeshift body, full of unrelated provoca-
tions, including Dedijer’s obsession with “revolutionary suicides” and vituperative epithets di-
rected against Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac … provoked a storm of protest. It was also widely read
and set the course for an entire line of iconoclastic volumes by Serbian authors.’ Ivo Banac, ‘The
220 R. J. Crampton

The relationship between individual communist leaders varied and if they

did not determine the relations between the parties and countries concerned
then they could aggravate differences. The Albanians were always, not without
reason, suspicious of Yugoslav intentions towards their state and even when
Stalin was insisting that Albania accept Yugoslav patronage Hoxha could still
find reason to dislike Tito. On a visit to Belgrade in June 1946 the ascetic Hoxha
had been shocked by Tito’s self-indulgent lifestyle, and had been much
incommoded by the flatulence of Tito’s dog, ‘Lux’. Gheorghiu-Dej not only
disliked Khrushchev because of the latter’s ideological impurity over collec-
tivization, he was appalled at his adventurism over Cuba; he believed the
Soviet leader had taken leave of his senses. The most notable examples of
personal antipathies colouring relations were Tito’s loathing of Rákosi and
Ceauşescu’s visceral hatred of Brezhnev. The relationship between Tito and the
non-Balkan Rákosi, does not come within the purview of this lecture but that
between Ceauşescu and Brezhnev does. Brezhnev had been in charge of Soviet
Moldavia at the end of the Second World War and had been responsible for the
large-scale russification of the area in 1950–1952, a process which had involved
the deportation of over a million ethnic Romanians. When he became leader of
the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) Ceauşescu ordered a dossier on the
persecution of the Romanians to be drawn up and this was handed to Brezhnev
when he visited Bucharest in May 1966; it was 10 years before he came again.29
The fact that other leaders met more often did not necessarily mean that
relations between them were cordial. Tito and Ceauşescu met almost every
year from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s but this was little more than a show
of solidarity between two regimes which were fearful of Soviet domination in
the Balkans. That fear, on the other hand, did not prevent frequent encounters
between Ceauşescu and Zhivkov though these were seldom more than ritual-
istic exchanges of fraternal greetings. When relations between leaders were
warm they could be ruined by political developments. Georgi Dimitrov had a
real admiration for Tito. He attempted to find, in the words of the Polish
communist Jakob Berman, ‘some sort of human, not brutal solution’30 to the
problem of Yugoslav–Soviet relations, and just as the dispute was coming to a
head there was the occasion when Dimitrov, passing through Yugoslavia by
train, whispered to Djilas that the Yugoslavs should stand firm against Stalin
at all costs.31
Much of the drama and surprise of the breach between the Soviet Union
and Yugoslavia in 1948 derived from the fact that relations between Stalin and
Tito had previously, on the surface at least, seemed so close. When Tito visited
Moscow in May 1946 he was treated virtually as the heir apparent in the
international communist movement. Stalin had declaimed that ‘“Tito must take
care of himself, that nothing would happen to him .. for I will not live … laws
footnote continued
dissolution of Yugoslav historiography’, in Sabrina Petra Ramet and Ljubiša S. Adamovich, Beyond
Yugoslavia: Politics, Economics and Culture in a Shattered Community, Westview Press, Boulder, CO,
San Francisco and Oxford, pp. 39–65, see p. 48.
29
Pochepa, op. cit., pp. 26–27.
30
Teresa Toranska, Oni: Stalin’s Polish Puppets, translated from the Polish by Agnieszka Ko-
lakowska with an introduction by Harry Willets, Collins Harvill, London, 1987, p. 224.
31
Patrick Brogan, Eastern Europe 1939–1989: The Fifty Years War, Bloomsbury, London, 1990,
p. 200.
 Balkan communist leaders 221

of physiology … but you will remain for Europe” ’.32 This had greatly flattered
the Yugoslavs and could perhaps have encouraged that tendency to excès de zèle
already born of the Yugoslav communists’ wartime exploits and successes. This
feeling was reinforced by the founding meeting of Cominform in Poland in
September 1947 where the Soviets had allotted to the Yugoslavs the leading
role in criticizing those parties which had not displayed sufficient ardour in the
drive towards placing the proletariat in power.
We have seen how, even as early as 1946, Hoxha could take offence at what
he considered Tito’s indulgent lifestyle. That indulgence never slackened and
Tito became renowned for his extravagant way of life, replete with numerous
palaces, gaudy uniforms, expensive motor cars, etc.; according to one account,
the former king of Yugoslavia had been content with six palaces, Tito had 38
residences and lived the life of a typical nobleman of the Austro-Hungarian
empire.33 Zhivkov was rather different. He eschewed gaudy uniforms and
though he had the use of palaces and residences towards the end of his career
when he had villas built for his children he was careful to rule out any
ostentation or marked difference from what reasonably well-off Bulgarians
might be able to afford.34 Nevertheless, some of those around Zhivkov did live
a life unimaginable for most Bulgarians. Georgi Markov’s revelation on the
BBC of this dolce vita bulgarica was one of the main reasons why the powers that
be in Sofia wished to be rid of him.35 Ceauşescu, too, had a string of palaces
throughout the country and, like Tito and Zhivkov, they were full of objects his
countrymen and women could never acquire, though in Ceauşescu’s case most
of his compatriots probably would not have wanted such kitsch. Tito, Zhivkov
and especially Ceauşescu shared the passion of a number of other communist
leaders for la chasse. Djilas once wrote that ‘Among the communist leaders of
Eastern Europe—and the Yugoslavs no doubt took the lead—hunting feasts
were manifestations of power.’36 Bears were particularly prized. And the hunts
were frequently entirely stage-managed with aged, drugged beasts being
pushed straight in front of the waiting guns. Another animal was better treated
by Ceauşescu. It is reasonably well known that the Ceauşescus had a food-
taster, a revelation which did not go down well in Buckingham Palace during
the state visit of 1978. What is less well known is that Ceauşescu’s dog also had
a food-taster, though a canine one. The dog, a black Labrador, had been given
to Ceauşescu by David Owen, foreign secretary at the time of the Ceauşescu
visit.
It could be that in this extravagance there was something of Balkan
historical tradition which assumed, perhaps expected, that leaders should live

32
See Leonid Gibianskii, ‘The Soviet bloc and the initial stage of the cold war: archival
documents on Stalin’s meetings with communist leaders of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, 1946–1948’,
in David Wolff (ed.), International History Project Bulletin (Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, Washington, DC), No. 10 (March 1998), pp. 112–134, 123.
33
Frank Roberts, Dealing with Dictators: The Destruction and Revival of Europe, 1930–70, Weiden-
feld & Nicolson, London, 1991, p. 180.
34
Chakŭrov, op. cit., p. 106.
35
For the revelations, not particularly good copy for the tabloids of today, see Georgi Markov,
The Truth that Killed, translated by Liliana Brisby with an introduction by Annabel Markov,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1983.
36
Djilas, Inside, p. 105.
222 R. J. Crampton

in grand style. Another Balkan tradition which certainly continued was that
leaders adopted, or at least stood kum, to a large number of children; Tito,
following the traditions of the Karadjeordjević kings, adopted ninth and
subsequent sons, though he abandoned the sexism of the past and adopted
ninth and subsequent daughters too;37 the Ceauşescus also adopted children.
Family links are always important in the Balkans and it was not surprising
that in the small world of the pre-1945 communist parties there were marital
ties; Vŭlko Chervenkov, for example, was the son-in-law of Georgi Dimitrov,
and there were similar links lower down the party ladder. The children of some
Balkan communist leaders benefited from the age-old institution of nepotism.
Milošević’s children were well placed when their parents were in power, and
perhaps even better placed after they had been ousted. Zhivkov promoted his
incompetent son and more dramatically his extraordinary daughter, whilst his
daughter’s husband was given a leading and, it is said, lucrative role in the
administration of Bulgarian sport. The Ceauşescus took nepotism to such
extremes that it was soon widely quipped that the Romanians were building
‘socialism in one family’. By the late 1970s there were some 40 members of the
Ceauşescu clan in important posts in Romania.
When talking of families, it may be noted that Balkan leaders were surpris-
ingly uxorious. Tito was an exception here, being closely associated with four
women. Georgi Dimitrov was married twice and the most moving passages in
his long and generally turgid diaries are those dealing with the death of his
young son by his second wife. Gheorghiu-Dej was divorced, though far from
celibate,38 whilst Zhivkov’s wife, a doctor, died at a relatively early age and he
did not remarry. The wives of Gheorghiu-Dej and Zhivkov played no obvious
part in politics. This was not the case with one of Tito’s wives and the wives
of Hoxha, Milošević and Ceauşescu. Tito’s last wife, Jovanka, had a say in
many party appointments and promotions, Nexhimije Hoxha was placed in
charge of ideology and of appointments in the Albanian party, a position of
great power, and of Elena Ceauşescu we shall speak presently. Slobodan
Milošević remained, remains, fiercely loyal to Mija Marković, the childhood
sweetheart he married early in adulthood. Mija Marković was always far more
a committed Marxist than her husband and is reported to have told him, after
he had received a telephone call at home from Radovan Karadjić, that ‘that
fascist’ must not call the family ever again.39
The most extraordinary of the marriages was that of the Ceauşescus, one
which again was contracted early in adulthood and which lasted until their
death together before a firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. Elena’s influence
grew steadily throughout the Ceauşescu reign and by the end of it she
exercised enormous power, particularly over party appointments and promo-
tions. She pretended to have an excellent political brain but perhaps the
explanation for her perspicacity, certainly in the final years, was more simple.
According to the recently published revelations of a Securitate officer who
occasionally acted as Ceauşescu’s double, in 1987 Elena persuaded high-rank-
ing Securitate officers to bug her husband’s office. She told them this was in

37
West, op. cit., p. 197.
38
Brucan, op. cit., p. 39.
39
Adam LeBor, Milosevic: A Biography, Bloomsbury, London, 2002, p. 182.
 Balkan communist leaders 223

case her diabetic husband suddenly took ill, but the real purpose was different.
Armed with the knowledge of what had been decided she would steer
conversations round to subjects recently discussed by the Conduator and his
aides and then blithely propose the solution they had just laboured to produce.
Thus she appeared to have political insight and acumen.40 She was also said to
be a chemist and ‘a scientist of world-renown’, though no-one in her field had
ever seen her as a student at a university or heard her utter a spontaneous
remark which indicated any scientific knowledge. Her ignorance was leg-
endary, as were the Ceauşescus efforts to secure scientific honours, especially
honorary degrees, for her. The Romanians took refuge, as did most peoples
under communist dictatorship, in jokes.

When a Romanian major, Gheorghe Prunaru, flew on a Soviet spaceship, he was

congratulated and decorated by Ceauşescu. But the president reproached him: ‘I
did not like the way you bounced up and down. It is not dignified for a
Romanian officer.’ Major Prunaru tried to explain that the law of gravitation
doesn’t work in space. Late that night, the leader was still thinking in bed and
said to Elena, ‘Lenuţa, when did I give that law of gravitation?’ She replied,
‘Why ask me? I am not a lawyer, I am a scientist!’41

Ceauşescu was exceptional amongst the Balkan communist leaders. He took

the faults and vices found amongst many of them to exceptional lengths. Tito,
it might be argued, just managed to prevent veneration turning into idolatry,
as it had with Stalin, Mao or Hitler; Dimitrov would have been appalled to
think his corpse would be stuck in a mausoleum, the more so if told that the
embalming would not work terribly well and that the body would have to be
taken out for periodic patching up; and Zhivkov was known as ‘Bai Toshko’,
an almost affectionate sobriquet which has tones of ‘Granddad’. Yet Ceauşescu
was different. His regime has been defined in a number of ways. Gale Stokes
wrote that ‘If Stalinism was the reductio ad absurdum of the idea that human
reason could transform the world … then Ceauşescuism is the reductio ad
absurdum of Stalinism’;42 as any student essay on transition will tell you, Linz
and Stepan called the regime ‘Sultanistic’,43 and Ceauşescu himself has been
referred to as ‘The Ghengis Khan of Socialism’.44 The reconstruction of
Bucharest, at enormous cost and frequently with indifference and brutality, is
surely a sign of a deranged personality, the more so in that the project was
undertaken at a time when the determination to pay off Romania’s foreign debt
had inflicted enormous deprivation on the population at large. The fact that at
40
Mihai Hodrea and Dumitru Balaci, ‘Getting the goods on the Securitate’, Central European
Review, 17 December 2003. The book in question is Dumitru Burlan, Sensational: After 14 Years
Nicolae Ceausescu’s Double is Ready to Confess, Bilingual Romanian–English, English translator not
specified, Ergorom ’79, Bucharest, 2003. For Central European Review, see ⬍ http://culture.tol.cz/
look/CER/ ⬎ .
41
Brucan, op. cit., p. 106.
42
Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, p. 54.
43
Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation; Southern
Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore
and London, 1996, pp. 344–365.
44
See, for example, Paul S. Shoup (ed.), Problems of Balkan Security: Southeastern Europe in the
1990s, The Wilson Center Press, Washington, DC, 1990, p. 52.
224 R. J. Crampton

the same time Ceauşescu was convinced that he was an economic genius45 can
only increase the suspicions of derangement and paranoia, other signs of which
were the fear of poisoning which gave rise to the food tasting and to the
constant washing of the hands in case he had touched some diseased or
poisonous substance.
I want to end with a brief reference to another exceptional figure amongst
the upper echelons of the Balkan communist parties, though this time not one
who reached the position of leader. This is Liudmila Zhivkova, daughter of Bai
Toshko. She had, inevitably, enjoyed a privileged childhood, and as a student
had spent an academic year in St Antony’s College in Oxford and then had
risen rapidly and in 1980 was made head of the politburo’s commission on
science, culture and art. What was extraordinary in this was that she held
views which were light years away from the official party line. Before she
attained high office she had become the darling of the intelligentsia, holding
regular séances each Friday evening in her apartment. Her company and her
patronage exhilarated the Sofia intelligentsia. She had little interest in Marxism
or the party and was anxious to stress Bulgaria’s cultural individuality. In
private she was prepared to admit to overt anti-Soviet feelings, once describing
the Soviet Union as ‘the most uncivilized country in the world’.46 Her own real
interest was in mysticism. In the later 1970s she visited India and was
rumoured to have disappeared for days to live alone in a cave and commune
with the higher spirits. Despite the disapproval of her father she also had
regular meetings with the remarkable Baba Vanga, a blind soothsayer from
south-western Bulgaria. And many of her views were close to those of the
Dǔnovists, a sect of sun-worshipers which had achieved considerable power
and influence in inter-war Bulgaria. Interestingly, in his early days Dǔnov
shared a house with Georgi Dimitrov in a workers’ suburb in Sofia. They were
friends and frequently Dimitrov listened to Dǔnov preaching; Dimitrov even
grew his hair to shoulder length, Dǔnov style.47
Zhivkova died at the age of 39 in 1981 when her power was already
waning.
What then can we say by way of brief conclusion to this discussion of
Balkan communist leaders? It should be noted that the first generation of
leaders differed considerably from the second. The first generation, Gheorghiu-
Dej excepted, were internationally trained and experienced. The second gener-
ation were nurtured entirely in the native party apparatus. They had little if
any international experience and their attitudes and aptitudes were drawn
from the Balkan peasantry whence they came. They knew, and felt, the power
of nationalism. They were prepared, perhaps eager, to harness that power.
But much of what we see in Balkan communist leaders is part of a long
historical tradition. The manic lengths to which Ceauşescu went to pay off
Romania’s foreign debt would have been intelligible to, if not condoned by, the
historic Romanian Liberals who had argued for national autarkism. Similarly,
parallels can be drawn between Ceauşescu’s policies and the ‘Autocracy,
Orthodoxy and Nationality’ of earlier decades.48 Perhaps here we come upon
45
Brucan, op. cit., p. 118.
46
Chakŭrov, op. cit., p. 160.
47
Atanas Slavov, With the Precision of Bats, Occidental Press, Washington, DC, 1986, p. 48.
48
See Stephen Fischer-Galati, ‘“Autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality” in the twentieth century:
the Romanian case’, East European Quarterly, 18(1), March 1984, pp. 25–34.
 Balkan communist leaders 225

the real difference between Balkan and other communist systems. Stalinism
was a centralized, authoritarian and, if necessary, brutal power construct. In
this it resembled to a considerable degree a mediaeval feudal system.49 But it
resembled a Balkan not a Western feudalism because Balkan feudal rulers did
not allow the centripetal tendencies shown in the West by barons, towns or
other institutions, including the church. Authority, power and wealth in a
Balkan monarchy were naturally concentrated in the ruling family which
constructed a network of dependent figures and institutions to perpetuate its
rule.
So too did Balkan communist leaders.

Richard J. Crampton is a Professor of East European History and a Fellow of

St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He is the author of many books on
Central and Eastern Europe, including Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century—
and After (1997) and The Balkans since the Second World War (2002).

Address for correspondence: St Edmund Hall, Oxford OX1 4AR, UK.

49
For an exposition of the argument that the collapse of Soviet-style communism brought about
a reversion not to capitalism but to feudalism see Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism and What
Comes Next?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996, pp. 205–208.