Yugoslavia, dead and gone: the meaning of the Montenegrins and their breakaway.

HANDS up if you can point to Montenegro on the map. Only those with a special interest in the Balkans are likely to be able to identify this pinprick of a country with a beautiful stretch of the Adriatic and towering mountains in the background. Even those with that special interest tend to think of it as Serbia's little brother. The people there, almost 700,000 of them, speak Serbian, more or less. And yet in a national referendum they have just voted for independence from Serbia.

Self-rule for Montenegrins may not look like a tidal wave in this troubled world, but all the same it is heartwarming evidence that human beings can break free from their past, especially important when that past is choked with folly and crime. The Montenegrin vote brings the curtain down on some 80 years of experimenting with an entity called Yugoslavia, and about 45 years of experimenting with Communism there.

In one of his more rhapsodic poems, Tennyson praised Montenegrins as "chaste, frugal, savage," and went on to compress their history up till then into three lines:

   O smallest among peoples! Rough
   rock-throne
   Of freedom! Warriors beating back
   the swarm
   Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years.

Perhaps the only Montenegrin with a worldwide reputation is Milovan Djilas. He has described the very un-Tennysonian reality of life governed by tribal custom in those mountains. His great-grandfather, two grandfathers, his father and uncle and his own brothers, were all killed in feuds "as though a dread curse lay on them." The fears and hatreds of these primitive feuds, he says, were stronger than fear and hatred of the Turks.

In Tennyson's day, a monarchy replaced the line of warrior bishops traditionally ruling the country and holding off the Turks. In his capital of Podgorica, King Nicholas had a palace known as The Biljarda on account of its billiard table imported from England, and he became famous for sitting on the palace steps to receive visitors. The novelist Anthony Hope borrowed local elements for his fictionalized Balkan state of Ruritania, and so did Franz Lehar for The Merry Widow (Pontevedria!).

It was too good to last. The First World War began with the aggression of Serbian nationalists against the Austro-Hungarian empire. Fortunate enough to end up on the winning side, these undeserving nationalists claimed as their spoils "Greater Serbia," a completely imperialist figment comprising territories inhabited by Croats, Slovenes, Hungarians, Macedonians, Bosnians, Albanians, and others. In the peace process of Versailles, the Serbs had their way, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was duly welded from other peoples and their homelands. The Serbian army chased King Nicholas off his throne and incorporated Montenegro into their new kingdom. His descendant today lives in Paris, but renounces any claim.

The Versailles peacemakers were astonishingly ignorant about the Balkans, but then they equally knew almost nothing about the diverse provinces of Mesopotamia, which they were simultaneously revamping as the Kingdom of Iraq. Expert advisers such as Professor R. W. Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed fabricated the wholly imaginary identity of "South Slav," which amalgamated the various Balkan peoples now liberated from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Peoples of multiple ethnicities and religions were to be obliged to live in a unitary state when they had no wish to do so, and every incentive to destroy it. Obvious bias in favor of the Serbs further stamped the whole enterprise as dishonest. "The strong wine of Serbia," as Seton-Watson notoriously let slip, should not be dissolved "in the weak water of Yugoslavia." Intellectuals alone are capable of this kind of sentimental romancing about other people. T. E. Lawrence of Arabia was tangling his superiors up in similar fantasies about Sunni supremacy in Iraq.

Between the wars, Yugoslav politicians fatally exchanged shots in the Belgrade parliament, and the king, a Serb naturally, was assassinated by Croat terrorists. Invading in April 1941 in one of the Second War's blitzkriegs, Hitler smashed the Yugoslavia of Versailles. A Serbian nationalist and monarchist movement under Gen. Draza Mihailovic immediately aimed to restore the status quo, but the Communists were determined to forestall them and seize power.

Before the war, the Yugoslav Communist party probably had no more than 200 members. Its leader was Josip Broz, known by his nom de guerre of Tito. Born in 1892, Tito had become a Communist while serving in the First War. Appointed a Comintern official in Moscow, he had been too junior to be purged in the Great Terror that killed off potential Yugoslav rivals, but senior enough to study and absorb Stalin's brutality.

As the German occupation settled in, the British sent a military mission to support Mihailovic. What happened next remains controversial to this day, but it appears that highly placed British Communists like James Klugmann--a figure quite as traitorous as Kim Philby--were able to falsify field reports in order to discredit Mihailovic by ascribing his operational successes to the Communists and accusing him of collaborating with the Germans. Churchill accordingly switched to support Tito, a decision that he later regretted as the worst he had made in the war.

By the usual means of deception and crime, Tito replaced "Greater Serbia" with another political fabrication, "the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia." As the war was ending, he made sure that his Communist partisans eliminated opponents. The royal family was evicted; a firing squad shot Mihailovic; the Cardinal Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac was sentenced to 16 years of forced labor on trumped-up charges (Pope John Paul II was to beatify him). A prolonged campaign of mass murder left probably as many as 200,000 victims. Not so long ago, some 20,000 corpses were discovered in a remote canyon into which they had been thrown. John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar have just published a book about outrages Corsellis witnessed in Austria in 1945. Six thousand Yugoslav civilians and 12,000 members of an anti-Communist home guard had fled there for safety, but British soldiers forcibly delivered them all to Tito's men, who tortured and executed them. The perfidy remains inexplicable. Helping one way and another to put the Communists into power, the British condemned the country to stand in the front line of the Cold War.

Stalin at first was delighted with his apt pupil. Milovan Djilas was then Tito's right-hand man and possible successor, and he has recorded how on a mission to Moscow he listened to Stalin encouraging the Yugoslavs to ever more crime. Stalin took it for granted that Yugoslavia would duly take its subservient place in the Soviet bloc. Unexpectedly, Tito jibbed; he had acquired his own taste for absolute power. Yugoslavia, he decided, would be Communist in its own way. Enraged by this hubris, Stalin made the memorable but vain threat that he had only to shake his little finger and Tito would fall.

Dramatic in itself, the breach with the Soviet Union further served to establish Tito on the world stage. Along with leaders in India and Africa, he could pose as an independent nationalist and anti-imperialist, counting on American approval of his resistance to the Kremlin, as well as supportive swarms of Third Worlders, Trotskyites, socialist intellectuals, and, not least, former members of the British military mission. Misplaced sentimentality thus continued to overwhelm reality.

Tito's "socialist republic" in fact imitated the Soviet model, with Five Year Plans, a Central Committee, Workers Councils--and the secret police suppressing dissent, especially if it was nationalist. The poet Miodrag Pavlovic once took me to a bookstore in Belgrade, only to back out in panic because Alexander Rankovic, Tito's Beria, was browsing there. From the window of his apartment in Zagreb, another poet, Vlado Gotovac, pointed out the secret policemen watching us. A Croat, he was later sentenced to prison for nationalism, but after the collapse of Yugoslavia he was elected to the Croatian parliament.

Djilas himself had just come out of nine years in prison when I met him in his house. He was shockingly emaciated. Communism was the dread curse that lay on him, and he was determined to break it. The country's component nations should be free, but unless the United States won the Cold War, he warned, small nations like his and mine (Britain) were doomed to slavery. How tenaciously he fought what once he had helped to impose, with an impact on public opinion comparable to Solzhenitsyn's.

Tito appropriated royal palaces for himself, he loved expensive cars and horses and wines, and in his corruption, his fancy uniforms and self-awarded medals and even his bloated waistline, he came to resemble the late Hermann Goering. Boulevards in cities like Accra and Delhi are still named after him; otherwise nothing of the man survives.

Slobodan Milosevic, his successor, had a final shot at perpetuating the fantasy of "Greater Serbia." A petty crook without Tito's condottiere swagger, he persuaded a mixed bag of intellectuals and politicians--some of them in the British and American governments--to support him. This too was inexplicable. Together they doomed the artificial construct of Yugoslavia to go down in bloody ruin. The landscape has acquired more mass graves as memorials.

As a result, though, the "socialist republic" has finally gone the way of the former kingdom. Yugoslav is a term as extinct as Soviet. The constituent peoples now have won their separate nation-states, although the international protectorates of Bosnia and Kosovo remain unsettled business. Montenegro in particular has its long-delayed chance to live up to Tennyson's vision of it as a "rough rock-throne of freedom."

Mr. Pryce-Jones is an NR senior editor whose latest book, Betrayal: The French, the Arabs, and the Jews, will be published by Encounter in the fall.