A biography of the charismatic and controversial Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito.The near-mythological figure Josip Broz Tito was a complicated one. An oppressor, a dictator, a reformer, and a playboy, Tito was an inspirational partisan leader and scourge of the Germans during their occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War, a doctrinaire communist, and an ever-present thorn in Moscow s side. He managed Yugoslavia s internal tensions through personality, a force of will, and political oppression. It was only after his death in 1980 that the true scale of his influence was understood. At that time, Yugoslavia s institutions and politicians were 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.