Word: tito
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...lowly and the mighty watched solemnly as eight military officers in braided dress uniforms appeared at the door of the Federal Assembly Building adjoining Marx and Engels Square carrying Tito's pale oak coffin. As distant cannons boomed out 21-salvo salutes, the casket was placed on an open gun carriage and covered with the blue, white and red Yugoslav flag. A military band struck up a funeral dirge, Yugoslav air force jets screeched overhead, and a jeep drew the carriage slowly along six-lane Kneza Milosa. Behind the casket, sobbing and dressed in black, was Tito...
...hours and 2½ miles later, the cortege reached the grounds of Tito's principal residence at 15 Uzicka Street, in the hilltop suburb of Dedinje overlooking the capital. He had asked to be buried there. To the strains of the Internationale, the coffin was placed above ground in a white marble vault bearing a stark inscription in raised gold letters: JOSIP BROZ TITO, 1892-1980. He had died just three days before his 88th birthday...
...little-known men who automatically succeeded Tito in his two national posts-Communist Party Chairman Stevan Doronjski, 60, and State President Lazar Koliševski, 66-eulogized their predecessor profusely. Said Koliševski at graveside: "You have left in your wake one of the deepest traces that a man can imprint upon history." Doronjski praised Tito's dramatic break with the Soviet Union in 1948 as "one of the turning points in the history of our movement," which ever since, he said, has resisted "tying itself to any power bloc...
Listening impassively nearby was Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, who commanded most attention among the visiting dignitaries. In a surprise move, Brezhnev decided to attend the funeral at the head of a phalanx of East European delegations. For the Soviets, Tito suddenly appeared to have attained a saintliness he had never enjoyed when alive...
Moscow had wasted no time in trying to get on the good side of the post-Tito government. On the eve of the funeral, Brezhnev and his Kremlin party sat down with Doronjski and Koliševski for what Tass, the Soviet news agency, called a "warm, comradely" meeting. China, which under Mao Tse-tung had long condemned Tito's "revisionism," similarly acted almost as though it had never differed with him. The first major head of government to arrive in Belgrade was Chairman Hua Guofeng, who grandly praised Tito for "great contributions to the proletarian revolution...