Looking back at it now, the death of Slobodan Miloševic seems of a piece with his life. When he reigned supreme in the Balkans, even those who claimed to know him well—and outside his immediate family circle, they were few—could never say with certainty who the “genuine” Slobodan Miloševic really was or what he stood for. Perhaps even expecting such authenticity is a Western, Judeo-Christian, or at least post-Christian-Freudian conceit, a fetishization of “essence” in the context of a man whose entire career was one of chameleonlike change that reflected the orthodoxy of the day. Baudelaire once wrote of his mistress that her eyes were deep pools of mystery behind which lay . . . nothing. My own sense is that much the same thing can be said about Miloševic. The man who went from Titoist apparatchik to reforming central banker whose views would not have seemed out of place in the Banque de France or the City of London, to Yugoslav patriot struggling to hold the Federation together, to Greater Serbian nationalist, and, finally, to Serb martyr, cannot be said to have had core beliefs—core beliefs other than in himself, that is.

In Laura Silber and Allan Little’s extraordinary BBC documentary, The Death of Yugoslavia, there is a piece of footage that captures Miloševic’s blend of tactical brilliance and his opportunism. It is April 24, 1987. Miloševic has recently become the head of the Serbian Communist Party, and he has come to Kosovo at the behest of his mentor, Ivan Stambolic (then Serbia’s president), to listen to the grievances of Serbs living in the province—to hear about their sufferings at the hands of their Albanian Kosovar neighbors. Unlike, say, Bosnia-Herzegovina, intercommunal relations in Kosovo have always been a zero-sum game. But until this point, Miloševic has never evinced the slightest interest in, let alone sympathy for, Serbian nationalism, even though that current is increasingly powerful in many circles in Belgrade. Indeed, he has come to tamp down the anger of the Kosovo Serbs and to dissuade them from marching to Belgrade in a mass protest that is almost certain to further destabilize Yugoslavia, which has still not righted itself after Marshal Tito’s death seven years earlier.