Josip Broz Tito

Tito was born to a Croat father and a Slovene mother in Kumrovec in what was then Austria-Hungary. Drafted into military service, he distinguished himself, becoming the youngest sergeant major in the Austro-Hungarian Army of that time. After being seriously wounded and captured by the Russians during World War I, he was sent to a work camp in the Ural Mountains. Tito participated in some events of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent 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 (KPJ). Having assumed de facto control over the party by 1937, Tito was formally 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 (1941–1945).^[5] By the end of the war, the Partisans, with the Allies' backing since mid-1943, took power in Yugoslavia.


After the war, Tito was the chief architect of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), serving as prime minister (1944–1963), president (1953–1980; since 1974 president for life), and marshal of Yugoslavia, the highest rank of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA). Despite being one of the founders of the Cominform, he became the first Cominform member and the only leader in Joseph Stalin's lifetime to defy Soviet hegemony in the Eastern Bloc, leading to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the organisation in 1948 in what was known as the Tito–Stalin split. In the following years, alongside other political 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 gradually 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 very powerful cult of personality arose around him, which the League of Communists of Yugoslavia maintained even after his death. After Tito's death, Yugoslavia's leadership was transformed into an annually rotating presidency to give representation to all of its nationalities and prevent the emergence of an authoritarian leader. Twelve years later, as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and ethnic tensions escalated, Yugoslavia dissolved and descended into a series of interethnic wars.


Historians critical of Tito view his presidency as authoritarian^[6][7] and see him as a dictator,^[8][9] while others characterise him as a benevolent dictator.^[10] He was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad.^[11][12] He remains a popular leader in the former countries of Yugoslavia.^[13] Tito was viewed as a unifying symbol,^[14] with his internal policies maintaining the peaceful coexistence of the nations of the Yugoslav federation. He gained further international attention as the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, alongside Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sukarno of Indonesia.^[15] 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.