Christopher Catherwood
speaker
137 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Christopher Catherwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
That village in which he's born, Kumrowetz, is in many respects a microcosm of the Austro-Hungarian state.
It's a place where language is a fluid concept.
The language spoken from village to village will change imperceptibly as you move in one direction or another, and
This dialect that he speaks cannot be classed as standard Croatian or standard Slovenian.
It is very much of the region that he is from and has all kinds of borrowings from other languages as well.
What we see in Tito is someone who is very keen for life experience, someone who moves away from the village at an early stage in life as an apprentice, gets to know the world, living in various towns, initially small towns, but then he moves on to Zagreb where he is immediately familiarized with trade union politics, becomes a member of the metal workers union.
but then never really stays anywhere for very long.
He fights for Austria-Hungary against Serbia in 1914.
Now, this is an aspect of his biography which will become rather uncomfortable when he comes to power in Yugoslavia, the idea that he has actually fought against the Serbs.
This starts a whole new chapter of his life as he finds himself deep in the Russian interior, just as he had done as a teenager where he embraced the opportunities of work and travel and language.
He continues to do this as a prisoner of war, starts to read in Russian, has relationships with Russians.
the situation is really becoming very fluid.
And he finds himself in a part of Russia which is already in Bolshevik hands, whether in late 1918, early 1919, it's all a little bit obscure.
But what we see here clearly is an exposure to revolution.
We see an exposure to the nuts and bolts of how you make a revolution happen.
what it looks like on the ground, the practicalities.
And I think this is something which is going to have a definite impact on Tito's life going forward.
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