Word: yugoslavic
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Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs lined the streets and hillsides of Belgrade for a glimpse of the long cortege bearing the body of the man who had led their country for 3½ decades. Wizened veterans of his partisan campaign during World War II, wearing rows of medals, let tears stream down their faces. Middle-aged housewives who had never known any other national leader put their arms tenderly around their children's shoulders and sobbed into handkerchiefs. Groups of schoolchildren, reared on his all-embracing national legend, waved small Yugoslav flags with awe in their eyes...
...state funeral for Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito last week was the most emotional that Europe had experienced in a decade, unrivaled since the memorial Mass for Charles de Gaulle at Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral in 1970. In attendance was a comparably vast assemblage of statesmen and royalty. It was a reflection of Tito's unique global role that his funeral attracted leaders from both East and West blocs, and from the Third World, in almost equal numbers. Official mourners came from 123 countries: four Kings, 32 Presidents and other heads of state, 22 Prime Ministers, more than...
Tito alternately loosened and tightened his hold over Yugoslav politics. When his close comrade Milovan Djilas began arguing for democratic reforms and criticizing the Communist Party elite in the mid-1950s, Tito had him jailed. After Croatian nationalism flared up during a period of liberalization in the late 1960s, he came down hard on the Croats and in 1971 forced their leaders to resign. He also launched a purge of liberals, which reminded the world that Yugoslavia was still a Communist nation run by a dictator. Yet by 1977 the trend was again away from the hard line...
...country does indeed face an immediate external threat or an internal threat of subversion, Yugoslavs have no illusions about its source. True, Belgrade's relations with Moscow have much improved since 1948. Seven years later Soviet Party Chief Nikita Khrushchev partly made up for the animosities of the Stalin era by flying to the Yugoslav capital. There, after an apparently amicable meeting with Tito, he publicly acknowledged that "different forms of socialist development are solely the concern of individual [Communist] countries." Tito's relationship with Leonid Brezhnev was edgy but cordial...
Still, the Soviets never stopped trying to infiltrate the Yugoslav party and the military, and any sign of weakness by the new leadership might tempt them to reinstate Moscow's sway over a satellite that got away. If an invasion were to come, there was every prospect that Yugoslav would live up to Tito's promise, first voiced at a press conference in 1951: "Every foot of our land is saturated in blood but if it is necessary, we will saturate it again, and it will remain ours. Yugoslavia will never again be conquered, except over the dead...