Jože Pirjevec's lively book Tito and His Comrades cannot have been an easy biography to write. Born in 1892, Josip Broz Tito led a long and complicated life. As Emily Greble states in her foreword to the translation of this book, originally published in Slovene in 2006, Pirjevec presents Tito as “political strategist, valiant marshal, global leader” but he does not deny that there were “other Titos as well” (xi). The harsher side of Tito explains the heated controversies that started almost immediately after he died in 1980 and intensified following the tragic manner of the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Greble signals some of the main lines of contention that emerged in these debates, but laments the lack of balanced, scholarly biographies, as most have “tended to swing between hero-worship and vituperation” (x).

Yet the period that has elapsed since the end of the Cold War has also seen the opening of archives that could shed light on Tito, as well as on the country that he governed and the world he lived in. In an impressive feat for any historian, Pirjevec researched in American, British, Croatian, Czech, German, Russian, Serbian, Slovene, and other archives and libraries. Able to read several languages, and a veteran of the times he writes about, Pirjevec consulted secondary materials published across America and Europe.

The result is certainly one of the more comprehensive biographies written to date. The surprisingly short first chapter covers the first forty-seven years of Tito's life, up to the Second World War. It nonetheless serves to show how early experiences of major historical processes shaped Tito's later life. Tito grew up in and fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War. Captured on the Russian front, he became a Bolshevik in the early revolutionary years. His work as an underground operative in the context of interwar Europe, with its inter-state rivalries, new and repressive nation-states in the place of collapsed empires, and highly ideological responses to the failures of global capitalism shaped Tito in decisive ways.

The independent, worldly, and ruthless Tito that emerges can then be better understood when facing his greatest battles. The following three chapters are long and detailed studies of Tito's role as victorious guerrilla leader in the Second World War, crafty and pragmatic state-builder in defiance of Stalin in the early Cold War, and an able global statesman as well as repressive domestic arbiter in the country's political and nationalities disputes from 1953 until 1973.

Here, Pirjevec excels as a story teller, presenting what is now probably the standard, liberal narrative of Tito's successes and failures. Tito takes credit for providing a more humane alternative to various right-wing nationalist movements in the Second World War, for evolving a more humane system of government than that which prevailed in the Soviet bloc, and for giving a voice to smaller nations in world affairs during the Cold War. He is simultaneously reprimanded for his vicious repression of opponents. Moreover, critically, his “coup d’état” against liberal, technocratic republic leaderships in the early 1970s is presented as having halted the process of reforms initiated “seven years before” with the famous market reform of 1965 (289). This provides the backdrop for the final chapter covering the sclerotic last years in power, which contribute to the violent collapse of Yugoslavia.

This will be a book specialists of the country will find valuable, but it is difficult to recommend to outsiders and students. Despite its erudition, it sometimes relies on dubious sources and presents their accounts as indubitable fact. For instance, the section on Tito's role in the Spanish Civil War (30–37) takes seriously hearsay that most historians have dismissed as proof that Tito physically found himself in Spain. In later chapters, Pirjevec refers to gossip and rumour, or the views of famous opponents like the former member of Tito's inner circle and later dissident Milovan Djilas, the controversial historian Vladimir Dedijer, or the Serb nationalist novelist Dobrica Ćosić. By contrast, although Pirjevec extensively uses Russian and American official sources, the paucity of materials from some important Yugoslav-era archives, particularly Tito's presidential archives, is notable. Furthermore, although the book makes much of Tito as, in the words of Greble, “a dogmatic ideologue driven by an unflinching faith in Marxist revolution” (xi), there is little exploration of what ideas actually moved him.

Pirjevec has therefore written an exhaustive but at times flawed book which nonetheless indicates useful avenues for future research. The definitive biography remains elusive.