I don't even know how to post this, but I need to get it out.
My parents told me how everyone cried when Tito died. That collective grief was the backdrop of my childhood. But my own perspective was always complicated. I come from one of those "complex" Balkan marriages, so no one can dismiss me as a simple hater. I loved my mother and my father, and that taught me from the start that identity is never black and white.
Yet, from as early as I can remember, I felt that Serbia had been forced to cheat and double-cross the Russians. And I always sensed that Tito wasn't a real Yugoslav. He felt like something else—an internationalist, a "citizen of the world" who was chosen and backed by foreign powers to manage Yugoslavia, not to lead it as one of its own. His purpose seemed to be to keep the country just stable enough, and just independent enough from Moscow, to serve as a useful buffer for the West during the Cold War.
And as for him being a Croat? That never felt genuine, either. He was a man without a true national home. Maybe that's why he could rule over all nations without ever truly representing any of them.
For Serbs, his legacy feels like a double betrayal. First, he broke our deep, fraternal ties with our Orthodox Slavic brothers in the East. Second, he built a system that systematically suppressed Serbian national identity while empowering others—a structure that ultimately led to the federation's bloody and unjust collapse.
So I ask others from my generation, those who remember the tail end of his era: Did you feel the same disconnect?
Was Tito ever truly one of us, or was he always just a manager for someone else's project?
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