Josip Broz Tito
Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito, was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and politician. Tito led Yugoslavia as prime minister from 1943 to 1963, and as president from 1953 until his death in 1980. The political ideology and policies promulgated by Tito are known as Titoism.
Tito was born to a Croat father and Slovene mother in Kumrovec in present-day Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary. Drafted into military service, he distinguished himself, becoming the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After being wounded and captured by the Russians during World War I, he was sent to a work camp in the Ural Mountains. Tito participated in the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Russian Civil War. Upon his return to the Balkans in 1920, he entered the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Having assumed control over the party by 1937, Tito was elected its general secretary in 1939 and later its president, the title he held until his death. During World War II, after the Nazi invasion of the area, he led the Yugoslav guerrilla movement, the Partisans, often regarded as the most effective resistance movement in German-occupied Europe. By the end of the war, the Partisans, with the Allies' backing since 1943, took power in Yugoslavia.
After the war, Tito served as the prime minister, president, and marshal of Yugoslavia, the highest rank of the Yugoslav People's Army. In 1945, under his leadership, Yugoslavia became a communist state, eventually renamed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Despite being a founder of the Cominform, his party became the first member—and he the only leader during Joseph Stalin’s lifetime—to defy Soviet hegemony in the Eastern Bloc, resulting in Yugoslavia's expulsion from the organisation in 1948 in what became known as the Tito–Stalin split. Alongside other leaders and Marxist theorists such as Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Đilas, he initiated the idiosyncratic model of socialist self-management in which firms were managed by workers' councils and all workers were entitled to workplace democracy and equal share of profits. Tito wavered between supporting a centralised or more decentralised federation, and ended up favouring the latter to keep ethnic tensions under control. Thus, the constitution was developed to delegate as much power as possible to each republic in keeping with the Marxist theory of withering away of the state. He envisaged the SFR of Yugoslavia as a "federal republic of equal nations and nationalities, freely united on the principle of brotherhood and unity in achieving specific and common interest". A powerful cult of personality arose around him, which the League of Communists of Yugoslavia maintained even after his death. After Tito, Yugoslavia's leadership was transformed into an annually rotating presidency, to give representation to all its nationalities and prevent an authoritarian leader. Twelve years later, as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and ethnic tensions escalated, Yugoslavia dissolved and descended into interethnic wars.
Historians critical of Tito view his presidency as authoritarian, while others characterise him as a benevolent dictator. He was popular in Yugoslavia and abroad, and remains so in the former countries of Yugoslavia. Tito was viewed as a unifying symbol, with his internal policies maintaining the peaceful coexistence of the nations of the Yugoslav federation. He gained further international attention as a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. With a highly favourable reputation abroad in both Cold War blocs, he received a total of 98 foreign decorations, including the Legion of Honour and the Order of the Bath.
Early life
Pre-World War I
Josip Broz was born on 7 May 1892 in Kumrovec, a village in the northern Croatian region of Zagorje. At the time it was part of the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the seventh or eighth child of Franjo Broz and Marija née Javeršek. His parents had already had a number of children die in early infancy. Broz was christened and raised as a Roman Catholic. His father, Franjo, was a Croat whose family had lived in the village for three centuries, while his mother, Marija, was a Slovene from the village of Podsreda. Franjo Broz had inherited a estate and a good house, but he was unable to make a success of farming. Josip spent a significant proportion of his pre-school years living with his maternal grandparents at Podsreda, where he became a favourite of his grandfather Martin Javeršek. By the time he returned to Kumrovec to begin school, he spoke Slovene better than Croatian, and had learned to play the piano. Despite his mixed parentage, Broz identified as a Croat like his father and neighbours.In July 1900, at age eight, Broz entered primary school at Kumrovec. He completed four years of school, failing 2nd grade and graduating in 1905. As a result of his limited schooling, throughout his life, Tito was poor at spelling. After leaving school, he initially worked for a maternal uncle and then on his parents' family farm. In 1907, his father wanted him to emigrate to the United States but could not raise the money for the voyage.
Instead, aged 15 years, Broz left Kumrovec and travelled about south to Sisak, where his cousin Jurica Broz was doing army service. Jurica helped him get a job in a restaurant, but Broz soon got tired of that work. He approached a Czech locksmith, Nikola Karas, for a three-year apprenticeship, which included training, food, and room and board. As his father could not afford to pay for his work clothing, Broz paid for it himself. Soon after, his younger brother Stjepan also became apprenticed to Karas.
During his apprenticeship, Broz was encouraged to mark May Day in 1909, and he read and sold Slobodna Reč, a socialist newspaper. After completing his apprenticeship in September 1910, Broz used his contacts to gain employment in Zagreb. At age 18, he joined the Metal Workers' Union and participated in his first labour protest. He also joined the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slavonia.
He returned home in December 1910. In early 1911, he began a series of moves in search of work, first in Ljubljana, then Trieste, Kumrovec and Zagreb, where he worked repairing bicycles. He joined his first strike action on May Day 1911. After a brief period of work in Ljubljana, between May 1911 and May 1912, he worked in a factory in Kamnik in the Kamnik–Savinja Alps. After it closed, he was offered redeployment to Čenkov in Bohemia. On arriving at his new workplace, he discovered that the employer was trying to bring in cheaper labour to replace the local Czech workers, and he and others joined successful strike action to force the employer to back down.
Driven by curiosity, Broz moved to Plzeň, where he was briefly employed at the Škoda Works. He next travelled to Munich in Bavaria. He also worked at the Benz car factory in Mannheim and visited the Ruhr industrial region. By October 1912, he had reached Vienna. He stayed with his older brother Martin and his family and worked at the Griedl Works before getting a job at Wiener Neustadt. There he worked for Austro-Daimler and was often asked to drive and test the cars. During this time, he spent considerable time fencing and dancing, and during his training and early work life, he also learned German and passable Czech.
World War I
In May 1913, Broz was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army for his compulsory two years of service. He successfully requested to serve with the 25th Croatian Home Guard Regiment garrisoned in Zagreb. After learning to ski during the winter of 1913 and 1914, Broz was sent to a school for non-commissioned officers in Budapest, after which he was promoted to sergeant major. At age 22, he was the youngest of that rank in his regiment. At least one source states that he was the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After winning the regimental fencing competition, Broz came in second in the army fencing championships in Budapest in May 1914.Soon after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the 25th Croatian Home Guard Regiment marched toward the Serbian border. Broz was arrested for sedition and imprisoned in the Petrovaradin fortress in present-day Novi Sad. He later gave conflicting accounts of this arrest, telling one biographer that he had threatened to desert to the Russian side but also claiming that the whole matter arose from a clerical error. A third version was that he had been overheard saying that he hoped the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be defeated. After his acquittal and release, his regiment served briefly on the Serbian Front before being deployed to the Eastern Front in Galicia in early 1915 to fight against Russia. In his account of his military service, Broz did not mention that he participated in the failed Austrian invasion of Serbia, instead giving the misleading impression that he fought only in Galicia, as it would have offended Serbian opinion to know that he fought in 1914 for the Habsburgs against them. On one occasion, the scout platoon he commanded went behind the enemy lines and captured 80 Russian soldiers, bringing them back to their own lines alive. In 1980 it was discovered that Broz had been recommended for an award for gallantry and initiative in reconnaissance and capturing prisoners. Tito's biographer Richard West wrote that Tito actually downplayed his military record as the Austrian Army records showed that he was a brave soldier, which contradicted his later claim to have opposed the Habsburg monarchy and his self-portrait of himself as an unwilling conscript fighting in a war he opposed. Broz's fellow soldiers regarded him as kaisertreu.
On 25 March 1915, Broz was wounded in the back by a Circassian cavalryman's lance and captured during a Russian attack near Bukovina. In his account of his capture, Broz wrote: "suddenly the right flank yielded and through the gap poured cavalry of the Circassians, from Asiatic Russia. Before we knew it they were thundering through our positions, leaping from their horses and throwing themselves into our trenches with lances lowered. One of them rammed his two-yard, iron-tipped, double-pronged lance into my back just below the left arm. I fainted. Then, as I learned, the Circassians began to butcher the wounded, even slashing them with their knives. Fortunately, Russian infantry reached the positions and put an end to the orgy". Now a prisoner of war, Broz was transported east to a hospital established in an old monastery in the town of Sviyazhsk on the Volga river near Kazan. During his 13 months in hospital, he had bouts of pneumonia and typhus, and learned Russian with the help of two schoolgirls who brought him Russian classics by such authors as Tolstoy and Turgenev.
After recuperating, in mid-1916, Broz was transferred to the Ardatov POW camp in the Samara Governorate, where he used his skills to maintain the nearby village grain mill. At the end of the year, he was transferred to the Kungur POW camp near Perm where the POWs were used as labour to maintain the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway. Broz was appointed to be in charge of all the POWs in the camp. During this time, he became aware that camp staff were stealing the Red Cross parcels sent to the POWs. When he complained, he was beaten and imprisoned. During the February Revolution, a crowd broke into the prison and returned Broz to the POW camp. A Bolshevik he had met while working on the railway told Broz that his son was working in engineering works in Petrograd, so, in June 1917, Broz walked out of the unguarded POW camp and hid aboard a goods train bound for that city, where he stayed with his friend's son. The journalist Richard West has suggested that because Broz chose to remain in an unguarded POW camp rather than volunteer to serve with the Yugoslav legions of the Serbian Army, he was still loyal to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, undermining his later claim that he and other Croat POWs were excited by the prospect of revolution and looked forward to the overthrow of the empire that ruled them.
Less than a month after Broz arrived in Petrograd, the July Days demonstrations broke out, and Broz joined in, coming under fire from government troops. In the aftermath, he tried to flee to Finland in order to make his way to the United States but was stopped at the border. He was arrested along with other suspected Bolsheviks during the subsequent crackdown by the Russian Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. He was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for three weeks, during which he claimed to be an innocent citizen of Perm. When he finally admitted to being an escaped POW, he was to be returned by train to Kungur, but escaped at Yekaterinburg, then caught another train that reached Omsk in Siberia on 8 November after a journey. At one point, police searched the train looking for an escaped POW, but were deceived by Broz's fluent Russian.
In Omsk, local Bolsheviks stopped the train and told Broz that Vladimir Lenin had seized control of Petrograd. They recruited him into an International Red Guard that guarded the Trans-Siberian Railway during the winter of 1917 and 1918. In May 1918, the anti-Bolshevik Czechoslovak Legion wrested control of parts of Siberia from Bolshevik forces, the Provisional Siberian Government established itself in Omsk, and Broz and his comrades went into hiding. At this time, Broz met a 14-year-old local girl,, who hid him and then helped him escape to a Kazakh village from Omsk. Broz again worked maintaining the local mill until November 1919, when the Red Army recaptured Omsk from White forces loyal to the Provisional All-Russian Government of Alexander Kolchak. He moved back to Omsk and married Belousova in January 1920. At the time of their marriage, Broz was 27 years old and Pelagia Belousova was 14. They divorced in the 1930s in Moscow. Broz later wrote that during his time in Russia, he heard much talk of Lenin, a little of Trotsky, and "as for Stalin, during the time I stayed in Russia, I never once heard his name". Tito joined the Communist Party in 1920 in Omsk. In the autumn of 1920, he and his pregnant wife returned to his homeland, by train to Narva, by ship to Stettin, then by train to Vienna, where they arrived on 20 September. In early October, Broz returned to Kumrovec in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to find that his mother had died and his father had moved to Jastrebarsko, near Zagreb. Sources differ over whether Broz joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union while in Russia, but he said that the first time he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was in Zagreb after he returned to his homeland.