If Milosevic thrived on the attentions of diplomats, it's hard to understand exactly why he backed himself into a corner reserved for the world's pariahs. Particularly as NATO began to bombard Serbia in March 1999, Milosevic emerged not as a master manipulator currying favor but as a proud, stubborn and ultimately self-destructive local tyrant. LeBor suggests that Milosevic figured that if he hung tough, the NATO alliance would splinter. Kosovo was not, after all, a popular war in the United States, let alone in Europe. But then he scuttled his own plan by carrying out a brutal wave of killings and expulsions in Kosovo, as though he simply didn't bank on CNN's broadcasting images of refugees to the world's unanimous disgust. Not only did he lose the war but in clamping down on the Serbian opposition afterward, he provided its warring factions with a common cause. On October 5, 2000, nonviolent demonstrators gleefully toppled the Milosevic regime. Less than a year later Milosevic was arrested, jailed in Serbia and eventually extradited to The Hague.

If Milosevic was committed above all to maintaining his own power, why did he take such counterproductive measures in 1999? If, on the other hand, his commitment was to the Serbian national cause, what explains his total abandonment of Croatia's Serbs in 1995, when the lawless parastate he had supported was ethnically cleansed of Serb civilians by the Croatian Army's Operation Storm? Was Milosevic an ideologue or merely an opportunist? Until a biographer gains access to the man or his papers, Milosevic's motivations, at least as he understands them himself, will remain opaque. LeBor works from published sources and extensive interviews with Milosevic's wife and former cronies, most interestingly Dusan Mitevic, onetime head of the propagandistic Serbian state television, and Hrvoje Sarinic, onetime secret Croatian envoy to Belgrade.

The record is reasonably clear that from the time Milosevic took over the Serbian Communist Party in 1986, he aspired to autocratic power over the largest swath of Yugoslavia possible. To that end, he revoked in 1989 the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina, the two provinces whose self-government effectively checked Serbian power within the Yugoslav federation. He also steered allies into the highest offices of the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro. These moves practically sealed Yugoslavia's fate. A federation disproportionately dominated by Serbia, and by a power-hungry Serb politician at that, was not the Yugoslavia Croats and Slovenes had signed up for. The country hurtled down the highway to civil war, nationalist folk tunes blaring from the windows.

Throughout the Yugoslav conflicts, two narratives competed fiercely for attention, particularly in Europe and the United States, where each entailed a clear chain of policy responses. One, most prominently associated with the travel writer Robert Kaplan, held that the Yugoslav wars resulted from deeply ingrained ethnic hostilities, which themselves sprang from the national character of Serbs and Croats; or from the repressed memory of the Second World War; or even from medieval Balkan history. Those who took this view of the Balkan wars suggested that nothing could really be done from outside to halt or contain them. Exponents of the second view, who urged international intervention, insisted that the ugliness arose from the actions of cynical leaders. Yugoslavia's longest and most recent history, they pointed out, was of peaceful cohabitation. To buy the line about ancient ethnic hatreds (or "Balkan ghosts," as Kaplan put it) was to abandon the cosmopolitan Yugoslavs to the machinations of the atavistic few. LeBor's account provides a less politically instrumental and more nuanced picture than either of these two views.

From the day in April 1987 when Milosevic, then a party functionary under Stambolic's wing, assured a crowd of angry Kosovo Serbs, "No one should dare to beat you again," Milosevic was credited with unleashing the deadly toxin of ethnic grievance. As LeBor demonstrates with insight and subtlety, however, Milosevic was neither the gray-suited apparatchik his leaden speeches would imply, nor was he a fiery demagogue. Nationalist sentiment thrummed under the surface of post-Tito Yugoslavia for nearly all of the 1980s. It drew upon history, mythology and living memory of the Second World War. But that did not predetermine that it would splinter the country. Indeed, it might have come to nothing. But Milosevic quickly grasped that he could use Serbia's nationalists in his quest for power. They, however, thought they could use him in theirs.

With Milosevic now in the dock, new violence brewing in Kosovo and ultranationalists having made a shockingly strong showing in Serbia's fall 2003 elections, it might seem that in the end the nationalists got the better end of this bargain. Until the fall of 2000, however, the upper hand clearly belonged to Milosevic. He made nationalist ideologues his front men, then dumped them when they became inconvenient. He had his state-run television whip up a frenzy of sympathy for Croatia's Serbian parastate, then dropped it like a hot potato when it no longer served his interests to support it. His wife, Mira, never abandoned her leftist, nearly Maoist, rhetoric, condemning in print the very chauvinist thugs her husband promoted. In LeBor's telling, the Milosevic household was quite possibly riven by the national question--not because Slobodan actually committed himself to a nationalist ideology (though his feelings about the Serbian claim on Kosovo, according to LeBor, were genuine, as was his hatred of Albanians) but because the thugs he found politically useful espoused an ideology Mira found cosmetically distasteful. Post-Communist Yugoslavia was a political hall of mirrors. Ideology was contentless.

The Serbian economy, too, was a land of make-believe. The story of the criminalization of the Serbian economy and the impoverishment of the Serbs is nothing new, but LeBor's narrative lucidly conveys how deliberately the plunder was orchestrated from above. Isolated under sanctions, the Milosevic regime was starved for foreign currency and devised every means to extract it from the pockets of Serbian citizens. As LeBor recounts, this involved printing absurd amounts of money, which in turn produced mind-boggling hyperinflation. The regime also convinced citizens to invest in pyramid schemes run by friends of the ruling family. Soon enough a country that had enjoyed a near Western standard of living throughout the cold war was reduced to squalid desperation. Anyone who truly believed Milosevic was a nationalist might be disabused of such notions by LeBor's hard look at the Serbian leader's contempt for his own people. Milosevic stood for Milosevic, nothing more.

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