Dear friends,
I recently came across this sentence: ''Besides his native language, Tito also speaks perfect German, Czech and KHIRGISIAN , which is a central Asia Mongolian tongue'' [1]
This literally blew my mind, resulting in me doing several quick google searches, only to come across a similar claim; ''Josip Broz Tito learned to speak Kyrgyz perfectly'' [2]
Can someone please shed some more light on this? When, why, and most important how did Tito even learn this language? It seems incredibly strange to me.
Hope to hear from y'all.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/fast/1944/tito-people/ch23.htm
[2] LIFE Magazine, August 14, 1944, Page 38
Tito did spend some time in what is now Kyrgyzstan during the Russian Civil War. From 1918 to 1920 he was hiding out in a village near Osh, the main city in the south of Kyrgyzstan, and eventually married an ethnic Russian from there.
However it should be noted that the region is, and was, mainly full of ethnic Uzbeks, who obviously don't speak Kyrgyz but rather Uzbek (and unlike Kazakh, I do believe Uzbek and Kyrgyz are quite different). Then there is the matter that I don't know how much interaction Tito would have had with locals, meaning ethnic Kyrgyz: they would have largely been nomadic herders at the time, largely illiterate, while the ethnic Russians (which wouldn't be many) would be more urban and literate. The Kyrgyz, like other Central Asian groups, were also rather indifferent to Bolshevism/Communism as a whole, so it further seems unlikely someone who was leaning towards that ideology would have worked close enough with the locals to learn their language. a 1953 biography by fellow Yugoslav Communist official Vladimir Dedijer also notes Tito spoke "Serbo-Croatian ... Russian, Czech, Slovenian ... German (with a Viennese accent) ... understands and reads French and Italian ... [and] also speaks Kirghiz," so he very well could have. But based on my own understanding of Central Asia and Kyrgyzstan, I would question his skills in Kyrgyz, if they did exist at all, though it would not be impossible of course.