Neil Barnett
speaker
125 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 14 Jul
Neil Barnett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And what is very striking is that the reason he became leader essentially was because Stalin and the NKVD had murdered the rest of the leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia.
I doubt that Tito was completely innocent in that process, to put it mildly.
But of course, one of the things that will have been a huge advantage to him as well, aside from his willingness to take direction ideologically,
is the fact that he was a completely known quantity to the Soviet communists.
He had been recruited on their soil and sent back into Yugoslavia.
And so compared to other Yugoslavs who were more intellectually convinced and had not been recruited and trained in Russia, he was far preferable to Stalin and the NKVD.
That was a huge advantage for him.
And this is the problem that the Blue Eagles last had, because they were scared witless of the communists.
But then they didn't really want to be under fascist rule either.
And so I think for all Yugoslavs, it was a very ambivalent time, really.
And the thing about Tito, he wasn't just a communist, he actually believed in Yugoslavia.
He was the person who actually believed in the country for which he was fighting.
And that's what makes Tito quite remarkable, actually.
And that's why, of course, when he went, it disintegrated.
Technically speaking, Croatia was a kingdom from 1102 to 1918.
Croatia existed, but it was a kingdom under the Kingdom of Hungary.
And so he was a Hungarian subject as a Croat.
The sad thing about Franz Ferdinand is that if he hadn't been assassinated, you'd have had a federation of the Balkans.
Galicia would have been in it, the Poles would have their kingdom, Hungary would have their kingdom, the Croats would have their kingdom, and so you'd have had a Balkan federation.
And that would have been a very different outcome from what then subsequently happened.
Showing 101–120 of 125 · page 6 of 7
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