Tito’s Grandson: Not an Obituary

This article first appeared in the Yugobulletin newsletter.

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Tito’s grandson, Joška Broz, has died.

Instagram post of Serbia’s interior minister breaking the news of Broz’s passing.

Learning Broz

The news media announcing Broz’s passing listed off his biographical details:

• He was born in 1947. After his parents, Žarko Broz (Tito’s son from his first marriage, to Pelagija Belousova) and Tamara Venger (a Russian) divorced, he and his sister Zlatica spent his childhood with Tito and his fourth wife, Jovanka Broz.
• He flunked out of high school but graduated from a forestry vocational school and later also forestry faculty. He then worked as a forester and metal worker.
• He was Tito’s hunting companion and he oversaw his grandfather’s hunting grounds. He was then Tito’s bodyguard in his final three years.
• He owned two restaurants in Belgrade.
• He founded the Josip Broz Tito association, of which he was a lifetime president.
• He was the founder of a breakaway Communist Party, politician, and finally, from 2016 to 2022, a member of Serbian parliament on the coalition ticket of the nationalist-leaning Socialist Party of Serbia (Slobodan Milošević’s old outfit).
• He was married four times and is survived by three children and three grandchildren. His sister, author, cardiologist, and humanitarian, Svetlana, had died in March.
• An atheist baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church after Tito’s death, he died on 3 June at the age of 77.

Meeting Broz

I met Joška Broz in December 2019, at his cafe (not mentioned in the above news reports), at the edge of Belgrade and Zemun.

I bumbled around the neighborhood in the late afternoon darkness trying to find the place. I was nearly twenty minutes late, but Serbian/Balkan time flows differently and he greeted me as any other journalist.

I drank a light beer while he sipped coffee, while narodna muzika (folk music) played on the TV in the back.

“How do you remember your grandfather?” I asked.

“I have nice memories,” he said. “We had a nice country, we had everything. We had a country with free health care, free education; we were the fourth military power in the world, we had the greatest security in the world. We had everything, warm food, vacation resorts, rules, we had it all.”

Like any decent politician, throughout the conversation he tended to answer the questions he wanted to answer, rather than those I heard, while meandering to topics he wanted to be put on the record. He’d skirt personal questions and focus on topics of grand history and his grandfather.

He reiterated one of the most notorious recollections. Yugoslavia began disintegrating with the 1974 constitution, which grandpa did not want to sign, telling his grandson his greatest error was not vetoing the constitution back then. This wasn’t something Tito ever said in public. Yet, Broz said, all the stories about Tito’s mistakes, are “children’s tales.”

But he spent the greatest part of our conversation dispelling the popular conspiracy theory (also a “children’s tale”) that it wasn’t Tito who is buried at the House of Flowers, but rather a coffin full of sand.

Broz was with grandpa off and on during his final hospitalization in Ljubljana. They talked a lot, and Tito gifted him his hunting carabine and pistol.

But on the day Tito died, a Sunday, he found himself on in Belgrade. He suggested those in charge took the opportunity of his absence to turn of Tito’s life support. He rushed back to the hospital, ordering the news not be released to the country until his arrival.

He then oversaw Tito’s body placed in a metal coffin, which was then welded and placed into a wooden coffin. He then spent the next four days on watch, not sleeping, always within 10 meters of the coffin. And he saw the coffin being lowered into the ground and sealed into the tomb.

“There is no way he isn’t buried there,” Broz said.

After the funeral, he quit the security service right away, he said.

“There was no one else to work for.”

Remembering Broz

A lifelong Yugoslav, Joška Broz was the most prominent carrier of Tito’s legacy in the former Yugoslavia. At every opportunity, even when he got himself into hot water, he highlighted his grandfather’s good deeds and accomplishments.

Whether he ran for parliament or directed the Tito Association, he always defended his grandfather’s name and image. His Communist Party represented “the heritage of all that was good,” he told me. “We commemorate everything that connects us to all that [our past].”

In 2011, Broz was condemned for allegedly glorifying the communist regime when he claimed on live TV that, “if the Partisans [after WWII] hadn’t killed everyone they did, we wouldn’t be sitting here, and that, they in fact had not killed enough of those they should have.”

In 2017 he told Newsweek, the only thing he inherited from his grandfather was his surname. He had been robbed of a 60-million-dollar inheritance and was instead living “like a dog” on a $175 pension, living with no heat and on one meal a day.

Serbia must partner with countries that want to help it, like still-communist Russia and China, he told me.

“How can we be friends with someone who bombed us?” he asked, referring to the U.S. “How can a nation who murdered all the Indians [sic] teach us about democracy?”

Last year, on the anniversary of his grandfather’s death, no less, he told the media he had written letters to leaders of nonaligned countries asking them to vote against the United Nations resolution on the Srebrenica genocide (which was later adopted). He added that all these countries became free precisely thanks to his grandfather.

“Let me tell you this: We talk about him every day,” Broz told me. “Some say good things, some bad ones, but Tito is in some way remembered every single day.”