Josip Broz Tito

Josip Broz Tito was born on 7 May 1892 in the village of Kumrovec in Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the seventh of fifteen children to a Croat father and a Slovene mother; eight of his siblings died in childhood. He apprenticed as a metalworker from 1907 and joined the metalworkers' union and the Social Democratic Party in Zagreb in 1910. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1913, he was captured by Russian forces in the Carpathians in 1915, hospitalised for thirteen months, and shuttled between prisoner-of-war camps in Russia. He escaped during the February Revolution of 1917, joined the July uprising in Petrograd, and after the October Revolution served with the Red Guards in Omsk.

Returning to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and worked as a union organiser. In 1928, after participating in protests over the assassination of Croatian peasant leader Stjepan Radic, he was arrested for communist agitation and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. On his release in 1934 he went underground, adopting the cover name "Tito." He was elected to the party Politburo that year, served in Moscow with the Comintern's Balkan secretariat, organised the despatch of about 1,600 Yugoslav volunteers to the Spanish Civil War, and in 1937 succeeded the executed Milan Gorkic as General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party — a tiny organisation of roughly 1,500 members which he set about disciplining and rebuilding.

Following Germany's bombing and invasion of Belgrade in April 1941 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June, Tito decided on armed resistance and was named commander of the People's Liberation Army (Partisans). His Partisans waged an extraordinarily costly mountain guerrilla war, drawing on every Yugoslav nationality, while his royalist rival Draza Mihailovic's Chetniks gradually drifted into collaboration with the Axis. From May 1943 the British and Americans switched their backing from Mihailovic to Tito. During the German Seventh Anti-Partisan Offensive in May 1944, German paratroopers landed within 1 km of Tito's headquarters at Drvar; he escaped carrying his own machine gun. By October 1944 he had liberated Belgrade in joint operations with the Red Army, and his forces totalled around 800,000 men at the war's end.

In the post-war years Tito built a one-party communist state on Soviet lines while consolidating personal power, but his Cominform expulsion in June 1948 transformed global communist politics. The break with Stalin began over Tito's unauthorised negotiations with Bulgaria, payments to Soviet military advisors, and a refusal to subordinate Yugoslav policy to Moscow. The deeper issue was Tito's insistence that his party owed its legitimacy to its own victorious revolution rather than to Soviet patronage. Soviet assassination attempts followed; in 1950 Tito allegedly sent Stalin a letter warning: "Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them. If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second." Surviving Cominform isolation through American, British and French food aid, Tito launched in June 1950 the Workers' Self-Management Law, which transferred enterprise management to elected workers' councils — a distinctive Yugoslav road to socialism between Soviet command planning and Western capitalism.

From the mid-1950s Tito turned outward. He hosted Nehru and Nasser on Brijuni in July 1956 and founded the Non-Aligned Movement at the first Belgrade Conference in September 1961, attended by 25 mostly Asian and African states. Yugoslavia received both American military aid (including M47 Patton tanks and F-86 jets in the 1950s) and Soviet support after the 1955 Khrushchev rapprochement, becoming the only socialist state actively brokering between the blocs. Tito visited the United States, met Kennedy in 1963, and hosted Nixon in Belgrade in 1970. When he died on 4 May 1980, the funeral on 8 May drew political delegations from 126 countries — at the time the largest state funeral in modern history, surpassed only by Emperor Hirohito's in 1989.

This cosmopolitan international image coexisted with a harsh domestic record. Tito's secret police, modelled on the Soviet KGB, ran a police state in which political prisoners reportedly exceeded those of all other Eastern European states combined. Goli Otok prison camp, opened after the 1948 split, held Cominform sympathisers and dissidents in conditions of severe brutality. The Bleiburg repatriations of May 1945 led to the killing of tens of thousands of returning Croatian collaborators and civilians; ethnic Germans were expelled from Vojvodina; and the 1956 purge of his designated heir Milovan Djilas showed that even loyalists could be discarded. Economically the 1970s brought chronic inflation and foreign debt that Tito's death only deepened. The 1974 Constitution loosened the federation into eight near-sovereign units whose balance only Tito's personal authority could hold; within a decade of his death, that balance collapsed into the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-2001. His legacy is therefore double-edged: in a 2003 Croatian poll he was voted the greatest Croatian, while in Slovenia in 2011 a constitutional court ruled it unconstitutional to name a public street after him. He remains the central figure of twentieth-century Balkan political history, simultaneously hero and dictator.