The president of
Yugoslavia and the leader of its Communist Party from
1945 until his death in
1980, Josip Broz Tito came to power on the strength of the victories won by his
resistance army, the
Partisans, during
World War II.
The first Communist leader to defy
Stalin, his rule was characterised by the evolution of Yugoslavia's distinctive brand of
socialism, which became known as
Titoism, and by the international profile he obtained as one of the most active figures in the
non-aligned movement.
Ti, To
Tito was born Josip Broz in
1892 in the village of
Kumrovec, in modern-day
Croatia; his father,
Franjo Broz, was a Croat and his mother,
Marija Janovšek, a
Slovene. Theories about how he acquired his nickname abound: perhaps the most unflattering suggests that he was in the habit of ordering his colleagues 'You, do that' -
ti, to. More prosaically, Tito may just have been a common Zagorje name, convenient for anonymity.
Tito learnt his trade as a
locksmith and had become a socialist in
1910. He was drafted into the
Austro-Hungarian army in
1913, despite the protests of his well-connected girlfriend of the time,
Tereza Stacner. With the rank of sergeant, Tito participated in the first
Austro-Hungarian offensive against
Serbia before being sent to the Russian front, where he was captured.
Like many other prisoners of war in Russia, Tito was receptive to
Bolshevism, and took part in the
July Days uprising in
Petrograd before serving with the
Red Army during the
Russian Civil War. When he returned home in
1920 to the new
Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, he brought with him the first of his four wives,
Pelagija Belousova.
Despite the ban on the activities of the Yugoslavian communists, the
KPJ, Tito rose through its hierarchy in the late 1920s, and served a prison sentence from
1929 to
1934, the first years of King
Alexander's
royal dictatorship.
He joined the KPJ's
Politburo, in exile in
Vienna, on his release, and then worked for some time with the
Comintern, going to
Paris to organise volunteers for the
International Brigades to fight in the
Spanish Civil War. In
1937, Tito became the leader of the KPJ after Stalin fell out with his predecessor,
Milan Gorkić.
While in Paris, Tito had conducted several affairs before meeting his second wife
Herta Haas. During World War II, Haas, an Austrian, was arrested by the Nazis but exchanged with the Partisans for a German officer; she returned to Tito's side only to find he had taken up with another Partisan girl,
Zdenka Paunović.
Brotherhood and Unity
When
World War II reached Yugoslavia in April
1941, Tito was able to use the 7,000 members of the KPJ as the nucleus of the
Partisan resistance; only 3,000 would survive the war. The Partisan struggle almost assumed the character of a Yugoslavian civil war within the European conflict: as well as harassing German and Italian occupiers, the Partisans fought the
Ustaše, who collaborated with the Germans, and the
Chetniks commanded by
Dragoljub Mihailović.
The Chetniks, mainly army officers, aimed to restore Yugoslavia's pre-war government and the
Karađorđević dynasty. Tito hoped to turn victory into revolution, and the
Anti-Fascist Council for the Liberation of Yugoslavia, declared itself the country's future government on
29 November, 1943.
The British
Special Operations Executive switched its support from the Chetniks to the Partisans in
1943, recognising that Tito's army was killing more Germans than Mihailović's. Being in the right place at the right time to pick up equipment left behind by the hurried Italian withdrawal after the fall of
Mussolini was undoubtedly of assistance too.
However, the Partisans also had a genuine appeal to many Yugoslavians. Corruption and disputes over national autonomy had dogged political life between the wars, culminating in the assassination of the Croatian leader
Stjepan Radić during a parliamentary sitting in 1928 and the introduction of the royal dictatorship.
The ideals of Communism were thought to provide an alternative to this deadlock and the ethnic violence which had accompanied the war in many areas, and Tito's great slogan became
bratstvo i jedinstvo:
brotherhood and unity. In Communist Yugoslavia, the comradeship of the Partisan years would achieve the status of legend.
More Leninist Than Lenin
In the light of the speed with which the KPJ nationalised industry and eliminated its political opposition, Tito seemingly had good reason to believe himself the
Kremlin's favourite son. Less palatable to Stalin, however, was Tito's self-confidence in foreign policy.
He helped to arm Greek communists during their
civil war, even though Stalin had agreed with
Winston Churchill that Western influence in Greece should outweigh Soviet, and also envisaged incorporating
Albania,
Bulgaria or both into a
Balkan Federation.
Anxious about his own authority in the Balkans, or perhaps afraid that Tito might become belligerent enough to embroil the
Soviet Union in conflict with the rest, Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the
Cominform on
June 28, 1948: the anniversary, whether or not Stalin knew it, of the
Battle of Kosovo, a powerful symbol from medieval
Serbian history.
Tito and his comrades appear to have been profoundly shocked by the expulsion, and several, including Tito, came down with
psychosomatic illnesses; Tito was also grieving for Paunović, who had died of
tuberculosis less than two months before.
Initially, Tito attempted to demonstrate his loyalty to Stalin and Stalinism by stepping up the pace of agricultural
collectivization on the Soviet model. Gradually, however, a new version of socialism emerged which, according to the KPJ, was more authentically
Marxist-Leninist than the Soviet Union itself.
At the same time, up to 55,000 party members suspected of showing more allegiance to Moscow than Belgrade were persecuted in equally authentic Leninist fashion, and 8,000 were sent to the barren prison island of
Goli Otok.
The cornerstone of the '
separate road to socialism' was the idea of
workers' self-management, developed by Tito's friends
Edvard Kardelj and
Milovan Đilas. At first, the pair had some difficulty talking Tito around, until Kardelj explained its distinctiveness and an intrigued Tito exclaimed: 'Factories belonging to the workers - something that has never before been achieved!' Collectivization was also halted, in response to severe droughts and widespread peasant resistance.
The corollary of workers' self-management was the decentralisation of state authority itself. During Tito's lifetime, the powers of Yugoslavia's constituent republics increased at the expense of the federal government, and '
enterprises' - factories, local councils and public services - obtained increased economic responsibility, enshrined in Yugoslavia's mammoth constitutions.
Under Kardelj's pet system, republic and federal assemblies increasingly operated on the principle of
functional representation, not unlike
corporatism, where people voted, indirectly, into different chambers according to their occupation.
The Yugoslav Experiment
The first wave of reforms reached their peak in
1952, when Tito announced that not only should the state wither away in accordance with Lenin's vision but so too should the Communist Party itself. He changed its name to the
League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and emphasised that League members should exert their influence as individuals carrying out Communist doctrine, rather than through the bureaucratic apparatus employed in other Communist states.
However, apathy set in among a large part of the membership for whom the nuance was too much, and others such as Đilas interpreted it as a
green light to call for even more liberalisation. Tito initially sanctioned Đilas' articles, but once they began to impinge on the morals of the leaders themselves, summoned him to a televised meeting of the Central Commitee.
The plenum, at the presidential villa on the
Adriatic island of
Brioni, had the same intent, although not the result, of a
show trial: Đilas was not even expelled from the party then, although resigned of his own free will some months later and was imprisoned for 10 years for continued criticism in
1957.
After Stalin died, Tito's
rapprochement with
Nikita Khrushchev was public, although relations between Belgrade and Moscow waxed and waned throughout his lifetime after the invasions of
Hungary and
Czechoslovakia.
Yugoslavia was never accounted part of the Soviet bloc, and kept up more trade with the West than did its neighbours, providing many Yugoslavians with an increased
standard of living and more freedom to travel, often exercised in cross-border shopping trips across the border to
Trieste for those all-important
blue jeans.
Internationally, Tito was among the leading lights of the non-aligned movement, which added to his
moral authority at home. Alongside
Nehru of
India and
Nasser of
Egypt, Tito conceived of his country as
equidistant between the two sides in the
Cold War, and discovered these like minds at the
Bandung Conference in
1955. The first formal meeting of the non-aligned movement took place in
Belgrade in
1961.
In
1966, Tito oversaw the purge of another of his wartime comrades, his security chief
Aleksandar Ranković. Ranković had opposed the liberal trend of a second wave of reform, which appeared to be leading Yugoslavia closer and closer to something approaching a free market. The liberals themselves received Tito's displeasure in
1971, after they appeared to be allowing Yugoslavia's various nationalisms to become too vocal.
After Tito, Tito?
The question of Tito's succession was raised as early as the 1960s, when Kardelj and Ranković were appointed joint vice-presidents; in
1974, the year that Tito was formally made president for life, another decentralising constitution set up a State Presidency with one representative from each republic and from the autonomous
Vojvodina and
Kosovo.
Locating a replacement for Tito's executive functions might have been a
tall order in itself, but locating another individual with the same
talismanic nature as the Partisan and Communist leader was impossible. Tito symbolised the unity of the
confederation in much the same way as the old Austro-Hungarian emperor
Franz Josef had done, and was perhaps similarly irreplaceable.
Tito had displayed a longevity to rival
Fidel Castro, but died on
May 4, 1980 in
Ljubljana, and Yugoslavia's
collective presidency was instituted, with the official title rotating between the members of the State Presidency year on year: the semi-official motto became 'After Tito, Tito'. Perhaps because Tito's own constitutional arrangements had turned ambitious politicians towards the republics rather than the federal structure, the presidency lacked strong leaders in Yugoslavia's last, critical decade.
Tito was mourned by his last wife,
Jovanka Broz, and the children of his other many liaisons. The state, however, inherited his well-appointed villas where he had liked to receive other world leaders and sometimes even film stars such as
Sophia Loren. The Brioni islands, mostly open to the public, still boast the remnants of Tito's private
zoo, which included a forlorn
elephant, too large to be taken off the island, presented to him by the King of
Thailand.
Read more:
Phyllis Auty, Tito
Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Tito
Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Tito
Dennison L. Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974
Thanks to shallot for corrections