Tito, Josip Broz

Tito, Josip Broz (1892-1980), president of Yugoslavia, who established a Communist state independent of the USSR after World War II, and later became a leader of the non-aligned nations.

Originally named Josip Broz, he was born on May 7, 1892, in Kumrovec, Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary), of a Slovene mother and a Croatian peasant father.

Tito served as a non-commissioned officer in the Austrian army during World War I. Wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians, he became a Bolshevik at the time of the Russian Revolution (1917), and after the war he returned to Croatia (which had become part of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia) to work as an illegal Communist party organizer. After serving a prison term (1928-1934) and taking the name Tito as an alias, he went to Moscow to work for the Communist International (Comintern, later the Cominform).

In 1937 the Comintern sent Tito back to Yugoslavia to purge the Communist party there. During this period he faithfully followed Comintern policy, criticizing Serbian domination of other Yugoslav nationalities and agitating for the breakup of the Yugoslav state.

After Nazi Germany attacked both Yugoslavia and the USSR in 1941, Tito formed an all-Yugoslav Partisan force to resist the Germans and their Croatian Fascist allies (see European Resistance Movements of World War II). Tito primarily fought defensive battles when the Germans attacked him. In 1942 he formed a Communist-dominated provisional government, which brought him into conflict with the Chetniks, a Serbian resistance movement that favoured the restoration of the pre-war monarchy. After unsuccessful attempts to reconcile the rival groups, the Allies gave their support to Tito in 1944. By the end of 1945 the Germans were defeated, and the war-torn country was united, leaving Tito's government in full control. Without holding a referendum on whether to restore the monarchy or make Yugoslavia a republic, Tito set up a one-party dictatorship.

At first Tito was a loyal follower of Joseph Stalin, but when the Soviet leader criticized some of his actions he rejected Stalin's criticism. Consequently, the Yugoslav party was expelled from the Cominform in 1948. This extreme action left Tito with two options: surrender or fight. He fought back. His aides, Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas, revived Marxist humanism (the concept of workers' self-management) and recommended liberal economic reforms and decentralization of party and governmental power (the first step towards emergence of hidden nationalist tendencies within republics). In the 1960s Tito joined with leaders of African and Asian countries to promote the concept of non-alignment (independence from both the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States).

In 1953 the Croatian Tito married his fourth wife, Jovanka Budisavljevic, a young Serbian Partisan aide, thus symbolically uniting two of the largest and most antagonistic nationalities of Yugoslavia. A partial reconciliation with the Soviet Union (1955) further enhanced Tito's prestige at home and abroad. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia's independence remained an irritant to the Soviet leaders and a challenge to their domination over Eastern Europe. Tito supported the Soviet policy of détente with the West, but protested against the USSR's invasions of Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979). His independent stance preceded and influenced the Chinese, Albanian, and Eurocommunist challenges to Soviet supremacy in the Communist world. Tito died on May 4, 1980, in Ljubljana after a prolonged illness and was buried in Belgrade.

One of the last influential manipulators of post-war global power politics, Tito controlled Yugoslavia for 35 years. In foreign affairs he was a persistent promoter of détente, global non-alignment for the Third World, and pluralism within the international Communist movement. At home, he permitted some liberal reforms, but maintained the Communist party's monopoly of power. Tito's policies, however, encouraged separatist and nationalist tendencies among rival republics, which helped to sow the seeds for bloody civil war in the 1990s, some ten years after his death.