Josip Broz Tito

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 Marija (née Javeršek) and Franjo Broz. His parents had already had a number of children die in early infancy. Broz was christened and raised as a Roman Catholic. His father was a Croat whose family had lived in the village for three centuries, while his mother was a Slovene from the village of Podsreda. Franjo had inherited a 4.0-hectare (10-acre) 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, 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 immigrate to the United States but could not raise the money for the voyage.

Instead, aged 15 years, Broz left Kumrovec and travelled about 97 kilometres (60 mi) 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 (lit. 'Free Word'), 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.

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 (NCO) 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 ("true to the Emperor").

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 (POW), 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.

Interwar communist activity

Communist agitator

Upon his return home, Broz was unable to gain employment as a metalworker in Kumrovec, so he and his wife moved briefly to Zagreb, where he worked as a waiter and took part in a waiters' strike. He also joined the CPY. The CPY's influence on the political life of Yugoslavia was growing rapidly. In the 1920 elections, it won 59 seats and became the third-strongest party. In light of difficult economic and social circumstances, the regime viewed the CPY as the main threat to the system of government. On 30 December, the government issued a Proclamation (Obznana) outlawing communist activities, which included bans on propaganda, assembly halls, stripping of civil service for servants and scholarships for students found to be communist. Its author, Milorad Drašković, the Yugoslav Minister of the Interior, was assassinated by a young communist, Alija Alijagić, on 2 August 1921. The CPY was then declared illegal under the Yugoslav State Security Act of 1921, and the regime proceeded to prosecute party members and sympathisers as political prisoners.

Due to his overt communist links, Broz was fired from his employment. He and his wife then moved to the village of Veliko Trojstvo where he worked as a mill mechanic. After the arrest of the CPY leadership in January 1922, Stevo Sabić took over control of its operations. Sabić contacted Broz, who agreed to work illegally for the party, distributing leaflets and agitating among factory workers. In the contest of ideas between those that wanted to pursue moderate policies and those that advocated violent revolution, Broz sided with the latter. In 1924, Broz was elected to the CPY district committee, but after he gave a speech at a comrade's Catholic funeral, he was arrested when the priest complained. Paraded through the streets in chains, he was held for eight days and was eventually charged with creating a public disturbance. With the help of a Serbian Orthodox prosecutor who hated Catholics, Broz and his co-accused were acquitted. His brush with the law had marked him as a communist agitator, and his home was searched on an almost weekly basis. Since their arrival in Yugoslavia, Pelagija had lost three babies soon after their births and one daughter, Zlatica, at the age of two. Broz felt the loss of Zlatica deeply. In 1924, Pelagija gave birth to a boy, Žarko, who survived. In mid-1925, Broz's employer died, and the new mill owner gave him an ultimatum: give up his communist activities or lose his job. So, at age 33, Broz became a professional revolutionary.

Professional revolutionary

The CPY concentrated its revolutionary efforts on factory workers in the more industrialised areas of Croatia and Slovenia, encouraging strikes and similar action. In 1925, the now unemployed Broz moved to Kraljevica on the Adriatic coast, where he started working at a shipyard to further the aims of the CPY. During his time in Kraljevica, he acquired a love of the warm, sunny Adriatic coastline that lasted for the rest of his life, and throughout his later time as leader, he spent as much time as possible living on his yacht while cruising the Adriatic.

While at Kraljevica, he worked on Yugoslav torpedo boats and a pleasure yacht for the People's Radical Party politician, Milan Stojadinović. Broz built up the trade union organisation in the shipyards and was elected as a union representative. A year later, he led a shipyard strike and soon after was fired. In October 1926, he obtained work in a railway works in Smederevska Palanka near Belgrade. In March 1927, he wrote an article complaining about the exploitation of workers in the factory, and after speaking up for a worker, he was promptly sacked. Identified by the CPY as worthy of promotion, he was appointed secretary of the Zagreb branch of the Metal Workers' Union and, soon thereafter, the union's whole Croatian branch. In July 1927, Broz was arrested along with six other workers, and imprisoned at nearby Ogulin. After being held without trial for some time, he went on a hunger strike until a date was set. The trial was held in secret, and he was found guilty of being a member of the CPY. Sentenced to four months' imprisonment, he was released from prison pending an appeal. On the CPY's orders, Broz did not report to court for the hearing of the appeal, instead going into hiding in Zagreb. Wearing dark spectacles and carrying forged papers, Broz posed as a middle-class technician in the engineering industry, working undercover to contact other CPY members and coordinate their infiltration of trade unions.

In February 1928, Broz was one of 32 delegates to the conference of the Croatian branch of the CPY. During the conference, he condemned factions within the party, including those that advocated a Greater Serbia agenda within Yugoslavia, like the long-term CPY leader Sima Marković. Broz proposed that the executive committee of the Communist International purge the branch of factionalism and was supported by a delegate sent from Moscow. After it was proposed that the Croatian branch's entire central committee be dismissed, a new central committee was elected, with Broz as its secretary. Marković was subsequently expelled from the CPY at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, and the CPY adopted a policy of working for the breakup of Yugoslavia. Broz arranged to disrupt a meeting of the Social-Democratic Party on May Day that year; in a melee outside the venue, police arrested him. They failed to identify him, charging him under his false name for a breach of the peace. He was imprisoned for 14 days and then released, returning to his previous activities. The police eventually tracked him down with the help of a police informer. He was ill-treated and held for three months before being tried in court in November 1928 for his illegal communist activities, which included allegations that police had planted the bombs found at his address. He was convicted and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.

Prison

After Broz's sentencing, his wife and son returned to Kumrovec, where sympathetic locals looked after them, but then one day, they suddenly left without explanation and returned to the Soviet Union. She fell in love with another man, and Žarko grew up in institutions; even after he became famous, details of Broz's life were so obscure that all John Gunther could write in 1949 about his wife after meeting him was that she was possibly Russian and "died many years ago". After arriving at Lepoglava prison, Broz was employed in maintaining the electrical system and chose as his assistant a middle-class Belgrade Jew, Moša Pijade, who had been given a 20-year sentence for his communist activities. Their work allowed Broz and Pijade to move around the prison, contacting and organising other communist prisoners. During their time together in Lepoglava, Pijade became Broz's ideological mentor. After two and a half years at Lepoglava, Broz was accused of attempting to escape and was transferred to Maribor prison, where he was held in solitary confinement for several months. After completing the full term of his sentence, he was released, only to be arrested outside the prison gates and taken to Ogulin to serve the four-month sentence he had avoided in 1927. He was finally released from prison on 16 March 1934, but even then, he was subject to orders that required him to live in Kumrovec and report to the police daily. During his imprisonment, the political situation in Europe had changed significantly, with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the emergence of right-wing parties in France and neighbouring Austria. He returned to a warm welcome in Kumrovec but did not stay long. In early May, he received word from the CPY to return to his revolutionary activities and left his hometown for Zagreb, where he rejoined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia.

The Croatian branch of the CPY was in disarray, a situation exacerbated by the escape of the executive committee of the CPY to Vienna in Austria, from which they were directing activities. Over the next six months, Broz travelled several times between Zagreb, Ljubljana and Vienna, using false passports. In July 1934, he was blackmailed by a smuggler but pressed on across the border and was detained by the local Heimwehr, a paramilitary Home Guard. He used the Austrian accent he had developed during his war service to convince them that he was a wayward Austrian mountaineer, and they allowed him to proceed to Vienna. Once there, he contacted the General Secretary of the CPY, Milan Gorkić, who sent him to Ljubljana to arrange a secret conference of the CPY in Slovenia. The conference was held at the summer palace of the Roman Catholic bishop of Ljubljana, whose brother was a communist sympathiser. It was at this conference that Broz first met Edvard Kardelj, a young Slovene communist who had recently been released from prison. Broz and Kardelj subsequently became good friends, with Tito later regarding him as his most reliable deputy. As he was wanted by the police for failing to report to them in Kumrovec, Broz adopted various pseudonyms, including "Rudi" and "Tito". He used the latter as a pen name when he wrote articles for party journals in 1934, and it stuck. He gave no reason for choosing the name "Tito" except that it was a common nickname for men from the district where he grew up. Within the Comintern network, his nickname was "Walter"; because of the obscurity of details of his life, many imaginative theories would spread about the "Tito" nickname's origin.

Flight from Yugoslavia

During this time, Tito wrote articles on the duties of imprisoned communists and on trade unions. He was in Ljubljana when Vlado Chernozemski, an assassin for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and instructor for the Croatian ultranationalist organisation Ustaše, assassinated King Alexander in Marseilles on 9 October 1934. In the crackdown on dissidents that followed his death, it was decided that Tito should leave Yugoslavia. He travelled to Vienna on a forged Czechoslovak passport, where he joined Gorkić and the rest of the Politburo of the CPY. It was decided that the Austrian government was too hostile to communism, so the Politburo travelled to Brno in Czechoslovakia, and Tito accompanied them. On Christmas Day 1934, a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the CPY was held in Ljubljana, and Tito was elected as a member of the Politburo for the first time. The Politburo decided to send him to Moscow to report on the situation in Yugoslavia, and in early February 1935, he arrived there as a full-time official of the Comintern. He lodged at the main Comintern residence, the Hotel Lux on Tverskaya Street and was quickly in contact with Vladimir Ćopić, one of the leading Yugoslavs with the Comintern. He was soon introduced to the main personalities in the organisation. Tito was appointed to the secretariat of the Balkan section, responsible for Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. Kardelj was also in Moscow, as was the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov. Tito lectured on trade unions to foreign communists and attended a course on military tactics run by the Red Army, and occasionally attended the Bolshoi Theatre. He attended as one of 510 delegates to the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern in July and August 1935, where he briefly saw Joseph Stalin for the first time. After the congress, he toured the Soviet Union and then returned to Moscow to continue his work. He contacted Polka and Žarko, but soon fell in love with an Austrian woman who worked at the Hotel Lux, Johanna Koenig, known within communist ranks as Lucia Bauer. When she became aware of this liaison, Polka divorced Tito in April 1936. Tito married Bauer on 13 October of that year.

After the World Congress, Tito worked to promote the new Comintern line on Yugoslavia, which was that it would no longer work to break up the country and would instead defend the integrity of Yugoslavia against Nazism and Fascism. From a distance, Tito also worked to organise strikes at the shipyards at Kraljevica and the coal mines at Trbovlje near Ljubljana. He tried to convince the Comintern that it would be better if the party leadership were located inside Yugoslavia. A compromise was arrived at, where Tito and others would work inside the country, and Gorkić and the Politburo would continue to work from abroad. Gorkić and the Politburo relocated to Paris, while Tito began to travel between Moscow, Paris and Zagreb in 1936 and 1937, using false passports. In 1936, his father died.

General Secretary of the CPY

In June 1937, Gorkić was summoned to Moscow, where he was arrested, and after months of NKVD interrogation, he was shot. According to Banac, Gorkić was killed on Stalin's orders. West concludes that despite being in competition with men like Gorkić for the leadership of the CPY, it was not in Tito's character to have innocent people sent to their deaths. Tito then received a message from the Politburo of the CPY to join them in Paris. In August 1937, he became acting General Secretary of the CPY. He later explained that he survived the Purge by staying out of Spain, where the NKVD was active, and also by avoiding visiting the Soviet Union as much as possible. When first appointed as general secretary, he avoided travelling to Moscow by insisting that he needed to deal with some disciplinary issues in the CPY in Paris. He also promoted the idea that the upper echelons of the CPY should be sharing the dangers of underground resistance within the country. He developed a new, younger leadership team that was loyal to him, including the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, the Serb, Aleksandar Ranković, and the Montenegrin, Milovan Đilas. In December 1937, Tito arranged for a demonstration to greet the French foreign minister when he visited Belgrade, expressing solidarity with the French against Nazi Germany. The protest march numbered 30,000 and turned into a protest against the neutrality policy of the Stojadinović government. It was eventually broken up by the police. In March 1938, Tito returned to Yugoslavia from Paris. Hearing a rumour that his opponents within the CPY had tipped off the police, he travelled to Belgrade rather than Zagreb and used a different passport. While in Belgrade, he stayed with a young intellectual, Vladimir Dedijer, who was a friend of Đilas. Arriving in Yugoslavia a few days ahead of the Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria, he made an appeal condemning it, in which the CPY was joined by the Social Democrats and trade unions. In June, Tito wrote to the Comintern, suggesting that he should visit Moscow. He waited in Paris for two months for his Soviet visa before travelling to Moscow via Copenhagen. He arrived in Moscow on 24 August.

On his arrival in Moscow, Tito found that all Yugoslav communists were under suspicion. The NKVD arrested and executed nearly all of the CPY's most prominent leaders, including over 20 members of the Central Committee. Both Tito's ex-wife Polka and his wife Koenig/Bauer were arrested as "imperialist spies". Both were eventually released, Polka after 27 months in prison. Tito therefore needed to make arrangements for the care of Žarko, who was 14. He placed him in a boarding school outside Kharkov, then at a school at Penza, but he ran away twice and was eventually taken in by a friend's mother. In 1941, Žarko joined the Red Army to fight the invading Germans. Some of Tito's critics argue that his survival indicates he must have denounced his comrades as Trotskyists. He was asked for information on a number of his fellow Yugoslav communists, but according to his own statements and published documents, he never denounced anyone, usually saying he did not know them. In one case, he was asked about the Croatian communist leader Kamilo Horvatin, but wrote ambiguously, saying that he did not know whether he was a Trotskyist. Nevertheless, Horvatin was not heard of again. While in Moscow, he was given the task of assisting Ćopić to translate the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) into Serbo-Croatian, but they had only got to the second chapter when Ćopić too was arrested and executed. He worked on with a fellow surviving Yugoslav communist, but a Yugoslav communist of German ethnicity reported an inaccurate translation of a passage and claimed it showed Tito was a Trotskyist. Other influential communists vouched for him, and he was exonerated. A second Yugoslav communist denounced him, but the action backfired, and his accuser was arrested. Several factors were at play in his survival: his working-class origins, lack of interest in intellectual arguments about socialism, attractive personality, and capacity to make influential friends.

World War II

Resistance in Yugoslavia

Tito was in Zagreb, using the alias "Tomanek", when on 6 April 1941, Axis forces invaded Yugoslavia. On 10 April 1941, Slavko Kvaternik proclaimed the Independent State of Croatia, and Tito responded by forming a Military Committee within the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). He smuggled himself—reportedly helped by Czech engineers—not out of the country but to Belgrade. Attacked from all sides, the armed forces of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia quickly crumbled. On 17 April 1941, after King Peter II and other members of the government fled the country, the remaining representatives of the government and military met with German officials in Belgrade. They quickly agreed to end military resistance. Prominent communist leaders, including Tito, held the May consultations to discuss the course of action to take in the face of the invasion. On 1 May 1941, Tito issued a pamphlet calling on the people to unite in a battle against the occupation. On 27 June 1941, the Central Committee appointed Tito commander-in-chief of all national liberation military forces. On 1 July 1941, Comintern sent precise instructions calling for immediate action.

Tito stayed in Belgrade until 16 September 1941, when he, together with all members of the CPY, left Belgrade to travel to rebel-controlled territory. To leave Belgrade Tito used documents given to him by Dragoljub Milutinović, who was a voivode with the collaborationist Pećanac Chetniks. Since Pećanac was already fully co-operating with Germans by that time, this fact caused some to speculate that Tito left Belgrade with the blessing of the Germans because his task was to divide rebel forces, similar to Lenin's arrival in Russia. Tito travelled by train through Stalać and Čačak and arrived to the village of Robaje on 18 September 1941.

Despite conflicts with the rival monarchic Chetnik movement, Tito's Partisans succeeded in liberating territory, notably the "Republic of Užice". During this period, Tito held talks with Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović on 19 September and 27 October 1941. It is said that Tito ordered his forces to assist escaping Jews, and that more than 2,000 Jews fought directly for Tito.

On 21 December 1941, the Partisans created the First Proletarian Brigade (commanded by Koča Popović) and on 1 March 1942, Tito created the Second Proletarian Brigade. In liberated territories, the Partisans organised People's Committees to act as a civilian government. The Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) convened in Bihać on 26–27 November 1942 and in Jajce on 29 November 1943. In the two sessions, the resistance representatives established the basis for the post-war organisation of the country, deciding on a federation of the Yugoslav nations. In Jajce, a 67-member "presidency" was elected and established a nine-member National Committee of Liberation (NKOJ; five communist members) as a de facto provisional government. Tito was named President of NKOJ.

Aftermath

On 7 March 1945, the provisional government of the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (DFY) was assembled in Belgrade by Josip Broz Tito, while the provisional name allowed for either a republic or monarchy. This government was headed by Tito as provisional Yugoslav Prime Minister and included representatives from the royalist government-in-exile, among others Ivan Šubašić. In accordance with the agreement between resistance leaders and the government-in-exile, post-war elections were held to determine the form of government. In November 1945, Tito's pro-republican People's Front, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, won the elections with an overwhelming majority, the vote having been boycotted by monarchists. During the period, Tito evidently enjoyed massive popular support due to being generally viewed by the populace as the liberator of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav administration in the immediate post-war period managed to unite a country that had been severely affected by ultra-nationalist upheavals and war devastation, while successfully suppressing the nationalist sentiments of the various nations in favour of tolerance, and the common Yugoslav goal. After the overwhelming electoral victory, Tito was confirmed as the Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DFY. The country was soon renamed the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY) (later finally renamed into Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFRY). On 29 November 1945, King Peter II was formally deposed by the Yugoslav Constituent Assembly. The Assembly drafted the republican 1946 Yugoslav Constitution soon afterwards.

Yugoslavia organised the Yugoslav People's Army (Jugoslavenska narodna armija, JNA) from the Partisan movement and became the fourth strongest army in Europe at the time. The State Security Administration (Uprava državne bezbednosti, UDBA) was formed as the new secret police, along with a security agency, the Department of People's Security (Organ Zaštite Naroda (Armije), OZNA). Yugoslav intelligence was charged with imprisoning and bringing to trial large numbers of Nazi collaborators; controversially, this included catholic clergy involved with the Ustaše. Draža Mihailović was found guilty of collaboration, high treason and war crimes and was executed by firing squad in 1946.

Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito met with the president of the Bishops' Conference of Yugoslavia, Aloysius Stepinac on 4 June 1945, two days after his release from imprisonment. The two could not reach an agreement on the state of the Catholic Church. Under Stepinac's leadership, the bishops' conference released a letter condemning alleged Partisan war crimes in September 1945. The next year, Stepinac was arrested and put on trial, which some saw as a show trial. In October 1946, in its first special session for 75 years, the Vatican excommunicated Tito and the Yugoslav government for sentencing Stepinac to 16 years in prison on charges of assisting Ustaše terror and of supporting forced conversions of Serbs to Catholicism. Stepinac received preferential treatment in recognition of his status and the sentence was soon shortened and reduced to house arrest, with the option of emigration open to the archbishop. At the conclusion of the "Informbiro period", reforms rendered Yugoslavia considerably more religiously liberal than the Eastern Bloc states.

Presidency

Tito–Stalin split

Unlike other states in east-central Europe liberated by allied forces, Yugoslavia liberated itself from Axis domination with limited support from the Red Army. Tito's leading role in liberating Yugoslavia not only strengthened his position in his party and among Yugoslavians, but caused him to be insistent that Yugoslavia had more room to follow its interests than other Bloc leaders, who had more reasons to recognise Soviet efforts in liberating their countries. Although Tito was formally an ally of Stalin after World War II, the Soviets set up a spy ring in the Yugoslav party as early as 1945, giving way to an uneasy alliance.

In the aftermath of World War II, armed incidents occurred between Yugoslavia and the Western Allies. Yugoslavia acquired the Italian territory of Istria as well as the cities of Zadar and Rijeka. Yugoslav leadership was looking to incorporate Trieste as well, which was opposed by the Western Allies. This led to armed incidents, notably attacks by Yugoslav fighter planes on US transport aircraft, causing criticism from the West. In 1946, the Yugoslav Air Force shot down two US transport aircraft. The passengers and crew of the first plane were secretly interned by the Yugoslav government. The second plane and its crew were a total loss. The US was outraged and sent an ultimatum to the Yugoslav government, demanding release of the Americans in custody, U.S. access to the downed planes, and full investigation of the incidents. Stalin was opposed to what he felt were provocations, as he believed the USSR unready to face the West in open war so soon after World War II and when U.S. had operational nuclear weapons, whereas the USSR had yet to conduct its first test. Tito was openly supportive of the communists in the Greek Civil War, while Stalin kept his distance, having agreed with Churchill not to pursue Soviet interests there, though he did support the Greek communists politically, as demonstrated in several assemblies of the UN Security Council. In 1948, motivated by the desire to create a strong independent economy, Tito modelled his development plan independently from Moscow, which resulted in a diplomatic escalation followed by a bitter exchange of letters in which Tito wrote that "We study and take as an example the Soviet system, but we are developing socialism in our country in somewhat different forms".

The Soviet answer on 4 May admonished Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) for failing to admit and correct its mistakes and accused them of being too proud of their successes against the Germans, maintaining that the Red Army had saved them. Tito's response on 17 May suggested the matter be settled at the meeting of the Cominform to be held that June. However, Tito did not attend the second meeting of the Cominform, fearing Yugoslavia was to be openly attacked. In 1949 the crisis nearly escalated into armed conflict, as Hungarian and Soviet forces were massing on the northern Yugoslav frontier. An invasion of Yugoslavia was planned for 1949, via the combined forces of neighbouring Soviet satellite states of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, followed by the removal of Tito's government. On 28 June, the other member countries of the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia, citing "nationalist elements" that had "managed in the course of the past...six months to reach a dominant position in the leadership" of the CPY. The Hungarian and Romanian armies were expanded in size and, together with Soviet ones, massed on the Yugoslav border. The assumption in Moscow was that once it was known he had lost Soviet approval, Tito would collapse; "I will shake my little finger, and there will be no more Tito," Stalin remarked. The expulsion banished Yugoslavia from the Soviet-friendly bloc, while other socialist states of Eastern Europe underwent purges of alleged "Titoists". Stalin took the matter personally and arranged assassination attempts on Tito, none of which succeeded. Tito was well aware of Stalin's hostility and equally defiant, writing to the Soviet leader:

Non-Alignment

Under Tito's leadership, Yugoslavia became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1961, Tito co-founded the movement with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, in an action called The Initiative of Five, thus establishing strong ties with Third World countries. This move improved Yugoslavia's diplomatic position. Tito saw the Non-Aligned Movement as a way of presenting himself as a world leader of an important bloc, that would improve his bargaining power with the eastern and western blocs. In September 1961, Tito became the first Secretary-General of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Tito's foreign policy led to relationships with various governments, such as exchanging visits with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, where a street was named in his honour. In 1953, Tito visited Ethiopia, and in 1954, the Emperor visited Yugoslavia. Tito's motives in befriending Ethiopia were self-interested as he wanted to send graduates of Yugoslav universities (whose standards were lower than Western universities, thus making them unemployable in the West) to work in Ethiopia, one of the few countries willing to accept them. As Ethiopia did not have much of a health care or university system, Selassie, from 1953 encouraged Yugoslav graduates, especially with medical degrees, to work in his empire. Reflecting his tendency to pursue closer ties with Third World nations, from 1950 Tito permitted Mexican films to be shown in Yugoslavia, where they became popular, especially Un día de vida, which became a hit when it premiered in Yugoslavia in 1952. The success of Mexican films led to the "Yu-Mex" craze of the 1950s–60s as Mexican music became popular, and it was fashionable for Yugoslav musicians to don sombreros and sing Mexican songs in Serbo-Croatian.

Tito was notable for pursuing a foreign policy of neutrality during the Cold War and establishing ties with developing countries. Tito's belief in self-determination caused the 1948 rift with Stalin and, consequently, the Eastern Bloc. His speeches often reiterated that neutrality, and co-operation with all countries, would be natural as long as they did not use their influence to pressure Yugoslavia to take sides. Relations with Western nations were generally cordial.

In the early 1950s, Yugoslav-Hungarian relations were strained as Tito made little secret of his distaste for the Stalinist Mátyás Rákosi, and his preference for the "national communist" Imre Nagy. Tito's decision to create a "Balkan Pact (1953)" by signing an alliance with NATO members Turkey and Greece was regarded as tantamount to joining NATO in Soviet eyes, and his vague talk of a neutralist Communist federation of Eastern European states was seen as a threat in Moscow. The Yugoslav embassy in Budapest was seen by the Soviets as a centre of subversion in Hungary, they accused Yugoslav diplomats and journalists, sometimes with justification, of supporting Nagy. However, when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 broke out, Tito accused Nagy of losing control, as he wanted a Communist Hungary independent of the Soviet Union, not the overthrow of Hungarian communism. On 31 October 1956, Tito ordered the Yugoslav media to stop praising Nagy and he quietly supported the Soviet intervention on 4 November to end the revolt, as he believed that a Hungary ruled by anti-communists would pursue irredentist claims against Yugoslavia, as had been the case during the interwar period. To escape from the Soviets, Nagy fled to the Yugoslav embassy, where Tito granted him asylum. On 5 November, Soviet tanks shelled the Yugoslav embassy in Budapest, killing the Yugoslav cultural attache and other diplomats. Tito's refusal to turn over Nagy, despite increasingly shrill Soviet demands, served his purposes well with Western relations, as he was presented in the West as the "good communist" who stood up to Moscow. On 22 November, Nagy and his cabinet left the embassy on a bus that took them into exile in Yugoslavia, after the new Hungarian leader, János Kádár, promised Tito in writing they would not be harmed. Much to Tito's fury, when the bus left the embassy, it was boarded by KGB agents who arrested the Hungarian leaders. Nagy's execution almost led Yugoslavia to break off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and in 1957 Tito boycotted the Moscow ceremonies for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, the only communist leader who did not attend.

Reforms

Starting in the 1950s, Tito's government permitted Yugoslav workers to go to western Europe, especially West Germany, as Gastarbeiter ("guest workers"). The exposure of many Yugoslavs to the West and its culture led many Yugoslavians to view themselves as culturally closer to Western Europe than Eastern Europe. In the autumn of 1960, Tito met President Dwight D. Eisenhower at the United Nations General Assembly meeting. They discussed a range of issues from arms control to economic development. When Eisenhower remarked that Yugoslavia's neutrality was "neutral on his side", Tito replied that neutrality did not imply passivity but meant "not taking sides". On 7 April 1963, the country changed its official name from "Federal People's Republic" to "Socialist Federal Republic" of Yugoslavia. Economic reforms encouraged small-scale private enterprise (up to five full-time workers; most of these were family businesses and largest in agriculture) and greatly relaxed restrictions on religious expression. Tito subsequently toured the Americas. In Chile, two government ministers resigned over his visit to that country.

At the beginning of the 1960s, foreign observers noted that the country was “booming” and that, meanwhile, Yugoslav citizens enjoyed far greater freedoms than those in the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern Bloc. Literacy increased exponentially and reached 91%, healthcare was free at all levels, and life expectancy rose to 72 years.

In 1966, an agreement with the Holy See, fostered in part by the death in 1960 of the anti-communist archbishop of Zagreb Aloysius Stepinac and shifts in the church's approach to resisting communism originating in the Second Vatican Council, accorded new freedom to the Yugoslav Roman Catholic Church, particularly to catechise and open seminaries. The agreement also eased tensions, which had prevented the naming of new bishops in Yugoslavia since 1945. Holy See and Yugoslavia reconciled their relations and worked together on achieving peace in Vietnam. Tito's new socialism met opposition from traditional communists culminating in a conspiracy headed by Aleksandar Ranković. Allegedly, the charge on which he was removed from power and expelled from the LCY was that he bugged Tito's working and sleeping quarters as well as those of many other high government officials. For almost 20 years, Ranković was at the head of the State Security Administration (UDBA), as well as Federal Secretary of Internal Affairs. His position as a party whip and Tito's way of controlling and monitoring the government and, to a certain extent, the people bothered many, especially the younger generation of government officials who were working toward a more liberal Yugoslav society. In the same year, Tito declared that communists must henceforth chart Yugoslavia's course by the force of their arguments (implying an abandonment of Leninist orthodoxy and development of liberal socialism).

Final years and death

After the constitutional changes of 1974, Tito began reducing his role in the day-to-day running of the state, transferring much of it to the prime minister who was the head of government, but retained the final word on all major policy decisions as president and head of state and as the head of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The 40th anniversary of his communist party leadership was observed on the Youth Day of 1977 throughout Yugoslavia. He continued to travel abroad and receive foreign visitors, going to Beijing in 1977 and reconciling with the Chinese leadership that had once branded him a revisionist. In turn, Chairman Hua Guofeng visited Yugoslavia in 1979. In 1978, Tito travelled to the U.S. During the visit, strict security was imposed in Washington, D.C., owing to protests by anti-communist Croat, Serb and Albanian groups.

Tito became increasingly ill over the course of 1979. During this time, Vila Srna was built for his use near Morović in the event of his recovery. On 7 January and again on 12 January 1980, Tito was admitted to the Medical Centre in Ljubljana, the capital city of the SR Slovenia, with circulation problems in his legs. Tito's stubbornness and refusal to allow doctors to follow through with the necessary amputation of his left leg played a part in his eventual death of gangrene-induced infection. His adjutant later testified that Tito threatened to take his own life if his leg was ever amputated and that he had to hide Tito's pistol in fear that he would follow through on his threat. After a private conversation with his sons Žarko and Mišo Broz, he finally agreed, and his left leg was amputated due to arterial blockages. The amputation proved to be too late, and Tito died at the Medical Centre of Ljubljana on 4 May 1980, three days short of his 88th birthday.

The state funeral of Josip Broz Tito drew many world statesmen. It attracted government leaders from 129 states. Based on the number of attending politicians and state delegations, at the time it was the largest state funeral in history; this concentration of dignitaries would be unmatched until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005 and the memorial service of Nelson Mandela in 2013. Those who attended included four kings, 31 presidents, six princes, 22 prime ministers, and 47 ministers of foreign affairs. They came from both sides of the Cold War, from 128 countries out of 154 UN members at the time.

Reporting on his death, The New York Times wrote:

Evaluation

Dominic McGoldrick writes that as the head of a "highly centralised and oppressive" regime, Tito wielded tremendous power in Yugoslavia, with his authoritarian rule administered through an elaborate bureaucracy that routinely suppressed human rights. The main victims of this repression during the first years were known and alleged Stalinists, such as Dragoslav Mihailović and Dragoljub Mićunović, but in later years, even some of the most prominent of Tito's collaborators were arrested. On 19 November 1956, Milovan Đilas, perhaps the closest of Tito's collaborators, widely regarded as his possible successor, was arrested because of his criticism of Tito's regime. Victor Sebestyen writes that Tito "was as brutal as" Stalin. The repression did not exclude intellectuals and writers, such as Venko Markovski, who was arrested and sent to jail in January 1956 for writing poems considered anti-Titoist.

Even if, after the reforms of 1961, Tito's presidency had become comparatively more liberal than other communist regimes, the Communist Party continued to alternate between liberalism and repression. Yugoslavia managed to remain independent from the Soviet Union, and its brand of socialism was in many ways the envy of Eastern Europe, but Tito's Yugoslavia remained a tightly controlled police state. According to David Matas, outside the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe combined. Tito's secret police were modelled on the Soviet KGB. Its members were ever-present and often acted extrajudicially, with victims including middle-class intellectuals, liberals and democrats. Yugoslavia was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but scant regard was paid to its provisions.

Tito's Yugoslavia was based on respect for nationality, though Tito ruthlessly purged any flowerings of nationalism that threatened the Yugoslav federation. But the contrast between the deference given to some ethnic groups and the severe repression of others was sharp. Yugoslav law guaranteed nationalities the right to use their language, but for ethnic Albanians, the assertion of ethnic identity was severely limited. Almost half of Yugoslavia's political prisoners were ethnic Albanians imprisoned for asserting their ethnic identity.

Yugoslavia's post-war development was impressive, but the country ran into economic snags around 1970 and experienced significant unemployment and inflation.

Legacy

Tito is credited with transforming Yugoslavia from a poor nation to a middle-income one that saw vast improvements in women's rights, health, education, urbanisation, industrialisation, and many other areas of human and economic development. Evaluations, however, vary by region. In Slovenia, a poll by Mladina from 2010 found 75% of respondents considering him a "positive personality", with only 17% viewing him as a negative one; positive ratings were dominant across all generations (albeit lower among the youth), and the poll also had an unexpected finding that positive ratings reached about half (47%) even among supporters of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party, which is headed by Prime Minister Janez Janša, a strong critic of both Tito and the former socialist state. In Montenegro, when respondents were asked in 2021 to pick a historical figure who was most important for Montenegrin history, Tito came only in fourth place (chosen by 10.6%), but when asked to rate figures related to World War II, he came in first place with an average positive rating of 3.99 out of 5.00, overwhelmingly ahead of Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović, who averaged 2.75 (finishing second from the bottom on the list).

In his native Croatia, however, he is a more polarising figure; although ranked first in a 2003 poll to identify the "Greatest Croatian" by national weekly news magazine Nacional, he was only chosen by 26.4% of the respondents. In a 2019 Ipsos poll for Dnevnik Nove TV, when asked to choose between Tito and former president Franjo Tuđman, the first post-communist president and symbol of the nationalist camp, 51% chose Tuđman and only 35% Tito. Likewise in Serbia, his evaluation is divisive; a 2026 poll by political magazine NSPM found only 33.1% of respondents identifying Tito as "mostly positive", versus 47.0% viewing him as "mostly negative" and 19.9% withholding any evaluation, a slightly worse result than nationalist strongman Slobodan Milošević, who was 35.9% positive and 39.7% negative. This result for Tito matches the 32% who chose him as Serbia's greatest leader in 2016.

During his life and especially in the first year after his death, several places were named after Tito; several of these have since returned to their original names. For example, Podgorica, formerly Titograd (though Podgorica's international airport is still identified by the code TGD), and Užice, formerly known as Titovo Užice, which reverted to its original name in 1992. Streets in Belgrade, the capital, have all reverted to their original pre-World War II and pre-communist names as well. In 2004, Antun Augustinčić's statue of Broz in his birthplace of Kumrovec was decapitated in an explosion. It was subsequently repaired. Twice in 2008, protests took place in what was then Zagreb's Marshal Tito Square (since 2017 the Republic of Croatia Square), organised by a group called Circle for the Square (Krug za Trg), with an aim to force the city government to rename it to its previous name, while a counter-protest by Citizens' Initiative Against Ustašism (Građanska inicijativa protiv ustaštva) accused the "Circle for the Square" of historical revisionism and neo-fascism. Croatian president Stjepan Mesić criticised the demonstration to change the name.

Family and personal life

Tito's charisma was such that John Gunther was warned several times in Belgrade "Look out—don't be taken in!" Even those who opposed Tito's politics fondly recalled their Partisan days together. Women were especially amenable to his charm; he was married several times and had numerous affairs. In 1918 he was brought to Omsk, Russia, as a prisoner of war. There he met Pelagija Belousova, who was then 14; he married her a year later, and she moved with him to Yugoslavia. They had five children, but only their son Žarko Leon Broz (born 4 February 1924) survived. When Tito was jailed in 1928, Belousova returned to Russia. After the divorce in 1936, she remarried.

In 1936, when Tito stayed at the Hotel Lux in Moscow, he met the Austrian Lucia Bauer. They married in October 1936, but the records of this marriage were later deliberately erased.

In 1940, he married Herta Haas. Tito left for Belgrade after the April War, leaving Haas pregnant. In May 1941, she gave birth to their son, Aleksandar "Mišo" Broz. Throughout his relationship with Haas, Tito maintained a promiscuous life and had a parallel relationship with Davorjanka Paunović, who, under the codename "Zdenka Horvat", served as a courier in the resistance and became his personal secretary. Haas and Tito suddenly parted company in 1943 in Jajce during the second meeting of AVNOJ after she reportedly walked in on him and Davorjanka. The last time Haas saw Broz was in 1946. Davorjanka died of tuberculosis in 1946, and Tito insisted that she be buried in the backyard of the Beli Dvor, his Belgrade residence. Another secretary close to Tito was Olga Ninčić, daughter of Tito's opponent Momčilo Ninčić.

Tito's best-known wife was Jovanka Broz. He was just shy of his 60th birthday and she was 27 when they married in April 1952, with state security chief Aleksandar Ranković as the best man. Their marriage came about somewhat unexpectedly since Tito actually rejected her some years earlier when his confidante Ivan Stevo Krajačić originally presented her to him. At that time, she was in her early 20s, and Tito objected to her upbeat personality. Not one to be easily discouraged, Jovanka continued working at Beli Dvor, where she managed the staff and eventually got another chance. Their relationship was not happy. It had gone through many, often public, ups and downs, with episodes of infidelity and even allegations of preparation for a coup d'état by the latter pair. Certain unofficial reports suggest Tito and Jovanka formally divorced in the late 1970s, shortly before his death, but during Tito's funeral, she was present in an official capacity as his wife and later claimed inheritance rights. The couple had no children.

Language and identity dispute

During Tito's life and afterward, theories have been put forward suggesting the existence of several people who were actually Tito, none with any serious evidence to support them. Serbian journalist Vladan Dinić argued in Tito Is Not Tito that three separate people had identified as Tito. Tito's personal physician, Aleksandar Matunović, wrote a book about Tito in which he questioned his true origins, noting that Tito's habits and lifestyle could mean only that he was from an aristocratic family.

In 2013, media coverage was given to a declassified NSA study in Cryptologic Spectrum that concluded Tito had not spoken Serbo-Croatian like a native speaker. The report noted that his speech had features of other Slavic languages (Russian and Polish). The hypothesis that "a non-Yugoslav, perhaps a Russian or a Pole" assumed Tito's identity was included with a note that this had happened during or before the Second World War. The report notes Draža Mihailović's impressions of Tito's Russian origins after he had personally spoken with Tito.

However, the NSA's report was disputed by Croatian experts. The report failed to recognise that Tito was a native speaker of the very distinctive local Kajkavian dialect of Zagorje. His strong accent, present only in Croatian dialects, which Tito was able to pronounce perfectly, is the strongest evidence for his Zagorje origins.

Origin of the name "Tito"

As the Communist Party was outlawed in Yugoslavia starting on 30 December 1920, Josip Broz took on many assumed names during his activity within the Party, including "Rudi", "Walter", and "Tito". Broz himself explains:

It was a rule in the Party in those times not to use one's real name, in order to reduce the chances of exposure. For instance, if someone working with me was arrested, and flogged into revealing my real name, the police would easily trace me. But the police never knew the real person hiding behind an assumed name, such as I had in the Party. Naturally, even the assumed names often had to be changed. Even before going to prison, I had taken the name of Gligorijević, and of Zagorac, meaning the 'man from Zagorje'. I even signed a few newspaper articles with the second.

Now I had to take a new name. I adopted first the name of Rudi, but another comrade had the same name and so I was obliged to change it, adopting the name Tito. I hardly ever used Tito at first; I assumed it exclusively in 1938, when I began to sign articles with it. Why did I take this name 'Tito' and has it special significance? I took it as I would have any other, because it occurred to me at the moment. Apart from that, this name is quite frequent in my native district. The best-known Zagorje writer of the late eighteenth century was called Tito Brezovački; his witty comedies are still given in the Croatian theatre after more than a hundred years. The father of Ksaver Šandor Gjalski, one of the greatest Croatian writers, was also called Tito.

Awards and decorations

Josip Broz Tito received 119 awards and decorations from 60 countries. 21 decorations were from Yugoslavia itself, including the Order of the National Hero on three occasions. Of the 98 international awards and decorations, three were received on two occasions (Order of the White Lion, Polonia Restituta, and Karl Marx). The most notable awards included the French Legion of Honour and National Order of Merit, the British Order of the Bath, the Soviet Order of Victory, the Japanese Order of the Chrysanthemum, the West German Federal Cross of Merit, and the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

The decorations were seldom displayed, however. After the Tito–Stalin split of 1948 and his inauguration as president in 1953, Tito rarely wore his uniform except when present in a military function, and then (with rare exception) only wore his Yugoslav ribbons for practical reasons. The awards were displayed in full number only at his funeral in 1980. Tito's reputation as one of the Allied leaders of World War II, along with his diplomatic position as the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, was primarily the cause of the favourable international recognition.