TITO AND THE RISE AND FALL OF YUGOSLAVIA. By Richard West. Sinclair Stevenson; 320 pages; Pounds 17.99

SPYING the excellent biography by Jasper Ridley in the company of its reviewer at the bar of a Zagreb hotel, the prime minister of Bosnia, Haris Silajdzic, sighed: "Ah, Tito, a good man." Like much else in shattered Yugoslavia, that view of Jozip Broz Tito, the communist who ruled it from 1945 to 1980, is contentious. Marshal Tito Streets are being renamed in Croatia, where Tito risks becoming a non-person. In Serbia he is openly vilified.

Tito's was, on the face of it, a legendary life: a canny peasant boy, born in rural Croatia in 1892, who became one of the century's great leaders, who stood up to Stalin and who won his war-wracked country 40-odd years of peace and relative well-being under his own peculiar brand of communism. Those achievements are overshadowed, though, by what has happened since Tito's death in 1980: the break- up of Yugoslavia and a civil war unleashed by beleaguered, aggressive Serbs. If he is to be judged by what he left behind, then Tito may be said to have failed.

But as a good chronicler should, Mr Ridley tells his subject's life from beginning to end without hindsight. He describes Tito's tough, cheerful character, which appealed across political lines. He brings out the limits he worked within: Yugoslavia was small, poor and ethnically split. Its first feeble democracy had died in infancy between the two world wars. It was occupied in 1941-45 by Hitler's and Mussolini's armies and ravaged by murderous Yugoslav hangers-on.

Mr Ridley compares Tito to a tsarist general, loyally serving his master (for

Tito, communism) and relishing the trappings of power. He loved dressy clothes, enjoyed good living and had the run of several state houses. He was passionately fond of women, who tended to feel the same about him, which helps explain how he came to be estranged from four wives.

Communism appealed to Tito not as a theory--he was no intellectual- -but as an all-embracing faith. As a full-time revolutionary, he survived five years in King Alexander's jails (where he read The Economist each week) and, later in Moscow, Stalin's purges. Tito lodged with other foreign communists at the notorious Hotel Lux, where guests seen hail at supper often failed to appear for breakfast. Tito somehow escaped this lottery of death. Nonetheless, by the time he came to power after the second world war, during which he led the communist partisans in Yugoslavia, he had seen Stalinism too close to want his country run from Moscow.

He drew close enough to the West to get economic aid, but to Tito economics made sense only in political terms. He did realise that the promised land of communism was not self-sufficient. To get foreign exchange he let Yugoslavs out to work and tourists in. This worked after a fashion until the oil shocks of the 1970s caused Yugoslavia's foreign debts to soar.

By then Tito was ill and had bouts of gloom. In 1971 he warned Croatia's national-minded communists: "Under the cover of `national interest' all hell is assembling." Three years later he had a last try at venting national feeling in a united Yugoslavia with a new constitution. He asked Fitzroy Maclean, a friend and Churchill's wartime envoy, if he thought this would work. "I hope so," Mr Maclean replied. "So do I," said Tito uncertainly.

For 35 years Tito governed what had been and would be ungovernable. And he did this, though a dictator in a one-party state, as much by horse-trading and winning trust as through his secret police. But he did too little to create stabilisers that would outlast him. The slogan "After Tito--Tito" was a sour joke; the eight-member collective presidency was a fair-weather vessel that sank in the first storm.

At the end of his book, Mr Ridley surmises that the southern Slavs will either learn to live at peace in independent states or they will turn again to a strongman. Many Yugoslavs curse or disregard Tito. Others look back to his days as a silver age. Given the ruin across their land, it is not hard to see why. A snag with strongmen is that they cannot be relied on to be Tito.

Although Richard West's book inevitably covers much of the same ground, its emphasis is different. Mr West believes that Tito was essentially a nationalist rather than a communist, and his main aim is to explain and sustain this assertion.

He is particularly good in describing the three-way struggle in Yugoslavia in the second world war between Tito's communist partisans, the Nazi-backed Croat Ustasa and the Serbian Chetniks. With British and Russian help, Tito's group established indisputable military and political dominance in the country. In a territory suited to guerrilla warfare, battles tended to be savage and indecisive. Tito led his followers from the front, setting a personal example. Anecdotes relating to partisan exploits and camaraderie are the yeast of Mr West's book.

Mutual disaffection between Stalin and Tito simmered throughout the war and came to a head in 1948 when Tito broke with Stalin over the question of federation with Bulgaria and Albania. Almost overnight Yugoslavia assumed a position of central importance in East-West relations.