Tito was a politician of his own calibre. He was a visionary and pragmatist, a strategist and doer, one who, through extraordinary talents and under very special historical circumstances, made an unprecedented career. During the Second World War, he and his partisans liberated Yugoslavia from German occupation. It was the role in which he felt completely at home and which legitimized his long years of rule. Without him, Yugoslavia would probably no longer exist after the Second World War. For 35 years he remained the indispensable moderator of a more or less prosperous coexistence. But Tito's Yugoslavia hardly survived its creator for a decade, and an outbreak of violence followed which Europe had not experienced since the Second World War. Thus the shadow of bitter failure lies over Tito's life's work.