-
By
Wikipedia
Josip Broz Tito (Јосип
Броз Тито) listen
(help·info)
(May 7, (originally
May 25th on the official birth certificate) 1892
– May 4,
1980) was the
dictator of Yugoslavia
between the end of World
War II and his death in 1980.
Early years
Tito was born Josip
Broz in Kumrovec,
Austro-Hungarian
Empire (today Croatia),
in an area called Zagorje.
He was the seventh child in the family of Franjo and Marija Broz. His
father Franjo Broz was a Croat,
while his mother Marija (born Javeršek) was Slovenian.
After spending part of his childhood years with his maternal grandfather
in Podsreda,
he entered the primary school in Kumrovec,
and failed the first grade. He left school in 1905.
In 1907,
moving out of the rural environment, Broz started working as a machinist's
apprentice in Sisak.
There he became aware of the labor
movement and celebrated May
1 - Labor
Day for the first time. In 1910
he joined the union of metallurgy
workers and at the same time the Social-Democratic
Party of Croatia
and Slavonia.
Between 1911
and 1913,
Broz worked for shorter periods in Kamnik,
Slovenia;
Cenkovo,
Bohemia;
Munich
and Mannheim,
Germany,
where he worked for Benz
automobile factory; then went to Vienna,
Austria,
where he worked at Daimler
as a test driver.
From autumn 1913,
Broz was conscripted and served in the Austro-Hungarian
Army; in May 1914
he won a silver medal at a fencing competition of the Austro-Hungarian
Army in Budapest.
At the outbreak of the First
World War, he was sent to Ruma.
He was arrested for anti-war
propaganda and imprisoned in the Petrovaradin
fortress. In 1915,
he was sent to the Eastern
Front in Galicia
to fight against Russia.
In Bukovina
he was seriously injured by a howitzer
shell. In April, the whole battalion fell into Russian captivity.
After spending several
months at the hospital, Broz was sent to a work camp in the Ural
mountains in autumn of 1916.
In April, 1917,
he was arrested for organizing demonstrations of prisoners
of war but later he escaped and joined the demonstrations in Saint
Petersburg on July
16-17,
1917. He fled
to Finland
to avoid the police, but was arrested and locked in the Petropavlovsk
fortress for three weeks. After being imprisoned in a camp in Kungur,
he escaped from a train. In November, he enlisted in the Red
Army in Omsk,
Siberia.
In the spring of 1918,
he applied for membership in the Russian
Communist Party.
In 1936 the Comintern
sent comrade Walter (i.e. Tito) back to Yugoslavia from Moscow to
purge the Communist Party there. In 1937 he became secretary general of
the Yugoslav Communist Party. During this period he faithfully followed
Comintern policy, criticizing Serbian domination of other Yugoslav
nationalities and agitating for the breakup of the Yugoslav state.
Origin of the name
"Tito"
In 1920,
he became a member of the soon to be banned Communist
Party of Yugoslavia. Their influence on the political life of the Kingdom
of Yugoslavia was minor at the time. In 1934,
he became a member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the
Party, then located in Vienna, Austria, and adopted the code name
"Tito".
A popular explanation of
the sobriquet claims that it is a conjunction of two Serbo-Croatian words,
ti (meaning "you") and to (meaning "that"). As the
story goes, during the frantic times of his command, he would issue
commands with those two words, by pointing to the person, and then task.
In reality, Tito is an old, though uncommon, Croatian name, corresponding
to Titus.
Tito's biographer, Vladimir
Dedijer claimed that it came from the Croatian romantic
writer, Tituš
Brezovački.
World War II
On April 6, 1941, German,
Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces attacked Yugoslavia. The
Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. On April 17,
representatives of Yugoslavia's various regions signed an armistice with
Germany at Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance against the invading
German Wehrmacht.
The Independent State of
Croatia was established as a Nazi puppet-state, ruled by the Ustaše
which actually came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in
its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina
as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country
were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy.
On April 10th, the Politburo
of the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia met in Zagreb
and decided to start the resistance, naming Tito the chief of the military
committee.
The first resistance
action in occupied Yugoslavia occurred on April
29 in Maribor,
where local youths set several German vehicles on fire. Several other
actions followed, including that on June
22, when a group of 49 local men formed a military
formation and attacked a German supply train near Sisak.
On July 4,
Tito issued a public call for armed resistance against the Nazi/Fascist
occupation. Starting on July
7 in Bela
Crkva, Yugoslav partisans
staged a wide-spread guerrilla
campaign and started liberating chunks of territory. The activities
provoked Germans in to "retaliation" against civilians that
resulted in mass murders (for each killed German soldier 100 civilians
were to be killed and for each wounded 50).
In the liberated
territories, the Partisans organized people's committees to act as
civilian government. Tito was the most prominent leader of the Anti-Fascist
Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia - AVNOJ, which convened
in Bihać
on November
26, 1942
and in Jajce
on November
29, 1943.
On these two sessions, they established the basis for post-war
organisation of the country, making it a federation, and naming Tito the Marshal
of Yugoslavia. On December
4, 1943,
while most of the country was still occupied by the Axis, Tito proclaimed
a provisional democratic Yugoslav government.
As the leader of the
communist resistance, Tito was a target for the Axis
forces in occupied Yugoslavia. The Germans came close to capturing/killing
Tito on at least three occasions: in the 1943
Fall
Weiss offensive; in the subsequent Schwarz
offensive, in which he was wounded on June
9, having his life saved only because his loyal dog sacrificed himself;
and on May 25,
1944, when he
barely managed to evade the Germans after their Operation
Rösselsprung airdrop
outside his Drvar
headquarters.
During the early stages
of the Second World War, the partisan activities were not directly
supported by the western Allies,
but after the Tehran
and Yalta
conferences in 1943, the partisans were supported directly by Allied
airdrops to their headquarters, with Brigadier
Fitzroy
MacLean playing a significant role in the liaison missions. The Balkan
Air Force was formed in June 1944
to control operations that were mainly aimed at helping his forces. Due to
his close ties to Stalin,
Tito often quarreled with the British and American staff officers attached
to his headquarters.
On April
5, 1945
Tito signed an agreement with the USSR allowing "temporary entry of
Soviet troops into Yugoslav territory". Aided by the Red
Army, the partisans
won the war for liberation in 1945.
All external forces were
ordered off Yugoslav soil after the end of hostilities in Europe. The
remaining fascist Ustaša
and royalist Četnik
troops and their supporters were subject to summary trials and execution
en masse, particularly in the Bleiburg
massacre and foibe
massacres.
Post-war
After the Tito-Šubašić
Agreement in late 1944, the provisional government of Democratic
Federal Yugoslavia was assembled on March
7, 1945 in Belgrade,
headed by Tito. After the elections in November 1945, Tito became the Prime
Minister and Minister
of Foreign Affairs. It was at this time that Tito's forces, in loose
conjunction with the Red Army, were involved in killings and deportations
to Yugoslav and Soviet labor camps of many Donauschwaben
(ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia), as well as those Yugoslavs who objected.
In 1948,
Tito became the first Communist leader who defied Stalin's leadership over
the Cominform,
and the Yugoslav Communist Party was ejected from the association on June
28, 1948. This brought Tito much international recognition, but also
caused a rift with the Soviet
Union and triggered a period of instability often referred to as the Informbiro
period. Tito's form of communism was labelled Titoism
by Moscow
which encouraged purges against suspected "Titoites'" throughout
the Communist
bloc.
On June
26, 1950,
the National Assembly supported a crucial bill written by Milovan
Đilas and Tito about "self-management"
(samoupravljanje): a type of independent socialism
that experimented with profit
sharing with workers in state-run enterprises. On January
13, 1953,
they established that the law on self-management was the basis of the
entire social order in Yugoslavia. Tito also succeeded Ivan
Ribar as the President of Yugoslavia on January
14, 1953. On April
7, 1963,
the country changed its official name to Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Under Tito's leadership,
Yugoslavia also became a founding member of the Non-Aligned
Movement. In 1961,
Tito co-founded the movement with Egypt's
Gamal
Abdel Nasser and India's
Jawaharlal
Nehru, thus establishing strong ties with the third
world countries.
For a period in the 1960s
and '70s, some intellectuals in the west saw Tito's model of market
socialism as representing a point to which the Soviet and western
economic systems would over time converge. The Yugoslav standard of living
was somewhat higher than Eastern Europe, particularly because Yugoslavs
were permitted to travel easily to Western Europe or other countries,
bringing in money to support the economy.
Tito's greatest strength
in the eyes of the western communists had been in suppressing nationalist
insurrections and maintaining unity throughout terrorism of OZNA
and UDBA. It
was Tito's call for unity, and related methods, that held together the
people of Yugoslavia. This ability was put to a test several times during
his reign, notably during the so-called Croatian
Spring (also referred to as masovni pokret, maspok,
meaning "mass movement") when the government had to suppress
both public demonstrations and dissenting opinions within the Communist
Party.
On May
16, 1974,
a new Constitution
was passed, and Josip Broz Tito was named President
for life.
In January 1980
Tito was admitted to the clinical centre in Ljubljana,
Slovenia
with circulation problems in his legs, and his left leg was amputated soon
afterwards. He died there on May
4, 1980,
three days before his 88th birthday, and his funeral drew many world
celebrities, mainly politicians.
It was the second largest funeral by number of politicians and state
delegations in history.
Aftermath
At the time of his death,
speculation began about whether his successors could continue to hold
Yugoslavia together. Ethnic divisions and conflict grew, and eventually
erupted into a series of Yugoslav
wars a decade after his death and the end of his strong rule that had
kept a lid on ethnic tensions.
Tito was buried in his
mausoleum in Belgrade,
called Kuća
cveća (The House of Flowers) and numerous people visit the
place as a shrine
to "better times," although it no longer holds a guard of honour.
The gifts he received
during his presidency are kept in the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia
(whose old names were "Museum 25. May", and "Museum of the
Revolution") in Belgrade. The value of the collection is priceless:
it includes many world-famous artists, including original prints of Los
Caprichos by Francisco
Goya, and many others.
During his life and
especially in the first year after his death, several places were named
after Tito.
Personal
Tito's first wife was Pelagija
Broz (maiden: Belousova), a Russian who bore him a son, Žarko.
They got married in Omsk
before moving to Yugoslavia. She was transported to Moscow by communists
when Tito was imprisoned in 1928.
His next notable
relationship was with Hertha
Haas, a Slovene of German ethnicity, whom he met in Paris
in 1937. They
never married although in May of 1941
she bore him a son Mišo.
They parted company in 1943
in Jajce
during the 2nd meeting of AVNOJ.
All throughout his relationship with Haas, Tito maintained a promiscuous
life and had a parallel relationship with Davorjanka
Paunovic, a courier and his personal secretary, who, by all accounts,
was the love of his life. She died of tuberculosis
in 1946 and
Tito insisted she be buried in the backyard of the Beli
dvor, his Belgrade residence.[1]
His best known wife was Jovanka
Broz (maiden: Budisavljevic). Tito was just shy of his 67th birthday
while she was 34 when they finally married in April 1959, with state
security chief Aleksandar
Rankovic as the groom's best man. Their eventual marriage was a bit of
a surprise since Tito actually rejected her some years earlier when his
confidante Ivan Krajacic brought her in originally. At that time she was
in her late 20s and Tito, objecting to her energetic personality, opted
for the more mature opera singer Zinka
Kunc instead. Not the one to be discouraged easily, Jovanka continued
working at Beli
dvor where she managed the staff of servants and eventually got
another chance after Tito's strange relationship with Zinka failed. Since
she was the only female companion he married during his time in power,
Jovanka also went down in history as Yugoslavia's first lady. Their
relationship was not a happy one, however. It had gone through many, often
public, ups and downs with episodes of infidelity (Tito with another opera
singer Gertruda Munitic, Jovanka with General Djoko Jovanic), and even
allegations of preparation for a coup
d'etat by the latter pair. Certain unofficial reports suggest Tito and
Jovanka even formally divorced in the late 1970s,
shortly before his death. The couple didn't have any children together.
Tito's notable
grandchildren include Aleksandra
Broz, a prominent theatre director in Croatia, and Svetlana
Broz, a cardiologist and writer in Bosnia.
Though Tito was most
likely born on May
7, he celebrated his birthday on May
25, after he became president of Yugoslavia,
to mark the occasion of an unsuccessful attempt at his life by the Nazis
in 1944.
Nazis found forged documents of Tito's, where May
25 was stated as his birthday. They attacked Tito on the day they
believed was his birthday.
May
25 was institutionalized as the Day of Youth in former Yugoslavia. The
Relay of Youth started about two months earlier, each time from a
different town of Yugoslavia. The baton passed through hundreds of hands
of relay runners and typically visited all major cities of the country. On
May 25 of
each year, the baton finally passed into the hands of Marshall Tito at the
end of festivities at the FK
Partizan stadium in Belgrade.
