ABSTRACT
An eminent combatant for the world communism was not the way Tito was perceived in the West. The misconception was encouraged by the title "the non-aligned movement" adopted by the new association: an epithet suggesting neutrality between the Eastern and Western blocs. The Marxist-Leninist creed shaped the past as well as the future and this basic identity of attitudes explains why during the war, just as the Soviet Ambassador Maisky had added up Allied and Nazi losses in the same column, so Tito and his team lumped the Western Allies with the Germans as their "class enemies". In the post-Stalin era, he was thus able to return to the safer issues of "proletarian internationalism" without antagonizing his Western backers. A policy of genuine neutralism would indeed have commended itself to the many educated Yugoslavs, who shared Western cultural traditions.
