Josip Broz Tito
Josip Broz Tito
Main
president of Yugoslavia
original name Josip Broz
born May 7, 1892, Kumrovec, near Zagreb, Croatia, Austria-Hungary
[now in Croatia]
died May 4, 1980, Ljubljana, Yugos. [now in Slovenia]
Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. He was secretary-general (later
president) of the Communist Party (League of Communists) of Yugoslavia
(1939–80), supreme commander of the Yugoslav Partisans (1941–45) and the
Yugoslav People’s Army (1945–80), and marshal (1943–80), premier
(1945–53), and president (1953–80) of Yugoslavia. Tito was the chief
architect of the “second Yugoslavia,” a socialist federation that lasted
from World War II until 1991. He was the first Communist leader in power
to defy Soviet hegemony, a backer of independent roads to socialism
(sometimes referred to as “national communism”), and a promoter of the
policy of nonalignment between the two hostile blocs in the Cold War.
Early life
Josip Broz was born to a large peasant family in Kumrovec, northwest of
Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, of a Croat father and a Slovene mother.
He was apprenticed to a locksmith in 1907 and completed his training in
1910, when he joined the Social Democratic Party of Croatia-Slavonia at
Zagreb. After working as an itinerant metalworker in various
Austro-Hungarian and German centres, he was drafted into the
Austro-Hungarian army in 1913, completed noncommissioned-officer
training, and was sent as a sergeant in the war against Serbia in 1914.
Transferred to the Russian front in early 1915, he was seriously wounded
and captured by the Russians in April 1915. After a long hospitalization
he was sent to prisoner-of-war camps, where he became acquainted with
Bolshevik propaganda. In 1917 he participated in the July Days
demonstrations in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and, after the October
Revolution, joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk, Siberia. Following a White
counteroffensive, he fled to Kirgiziya (now Kyrgyzstan) and subsequently
returned to Omsk, where he married a Russian woman and joined the South
Slav section of the Bolshevik party. In October 1920 he returned to his
native Croatia (then part of the newly established Kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes) and soon joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia
(CPY).
Communist organizer
Broz’s career as a communist militant was cut short in December 1920 by
a state ban against communist activities. He lost his job in a Zagreb
locksmith shop and moved to a nearby village, where he worked as a mill
mechanic until 1923. Having revived his links with the underground CPY,
he served as a local and regional party functionary and trade union
organizer in Croatia and Serbia until 1927, when he joined the CPY
committee for Zagreb, quickly becoming its organizational secretary. He
promoted a campaign against party functions (the so-called Zagreb Line),
thereby attracting the attention of Moscow. Rewarded by being named the
Zagreb committee’s political secretary in April 1928, he led street
demonstrations against the authorities following the assassination of
Croat deputies in the Belgrade parliament in June 1928. His success at
reviving the CPY’s vitality was cut short by arrest in August 1928. The
police discovered bombs in Broz’s apartment—a testimony to his adherence
to the new insurrectionary line of the Comintern, the Soviet-sponsored
organization of international communism. During his trial, which ended
with sentencing to a five-year term, Broz defended himself with
exceptional courage and gained further credit with the party
authorities.
Broz’s prison term coincided with the establishment of the royal
Yugoslav dictatorship, which was promulgated by King Alexander I in
order to stem the nationalistic movements of disaffected non-Serbs. In
an attempt to break the modest influence of the CPY, the government
arrested most of the party cadre, sentencing many of its members to
terms far harsher than Broz’s. Despite these blows, at the time of
Broz’s release in March 1934, the CPY was slowly recuperating under the
agile leadership in exile of Milan Gorkić. Gorkić summoned Broz to the
CPY’s Vienna headquarters, where he attempted to secure his cooperation
by bringing him into the CPY Politburo. It was at this time that Broz
assumed the pseudonym Tito, one of many that he used in underground
party work. From February 1935 to October 1936, Tito was in the Soviet
Union, where he worked in the Comintern apparatus.
By 1937 Tito was increasingly involved in the CPY’s underground work
in Yugoslavia, where he established ties with a new generation of
militants. In 1937–38, Joseph Stalin’s purges devastated the CPY
leadership, claiming the lives of Gorkić and most of the other topmost
veterans. Tito profited from (and probably was an accomplice in) the
repression, gaining the Comintern’s mandate to replenish the CPY’s
leadership councils with his hand-picked lieutenants—Edvard Kardelj,
Alexander Ranković, Milovan Djilas, and Ivo Lola Ribar. He was the
Comintern’s choice for the CPY’s new secretary-general, a position he
formally assumed in 1939. At the Fifth Land Conference of the CPY, an
underground minicongress held in Zagreb in October 1940, Tito sketched
the CPY’s leftist strategy, which focused the party on armed
insurrection and on a Soviet-style federalist solution to Yugoslavia’s
nationality conflict. At that time the CPY had some 7,000 members, not
counting the additional 17,200 members of the Young Communist League.
Yugoslav partisan leaders Josip Broz Tito (left) and Mosa Pijade
(right).
Pijade was a Jewish partisan with the Communist resistance.
Yugoslavia, between 1941 and 1944.
Partisan leader
An opportunity for armed insurgency presented itself after the Axis
powers, led by Germany and Italy, occupied and partitioned Yugoslavia in
April 1941. The CPY remained the only organized political group ready
and capable of contending with the occupiers and their collaborators
throughout the territory of the defunct Yugoslav state. This meant that
the communist-dominated Partisan units were not simply auxiliaries of
the Allied war effort but an offensive force in their own right. Their
ultimate aim, carefully concealed in the rhetoric of “national
liberation struggle,” was the seizure of power. To this end, in
Partisan-held territories they established “liberation committees,”
communist-dominated administrative organs that prefigured the future
federal republics. As a result, Tito’s Partisans became a threat not
only to the occupiers and collaborators but also to the royal
government-in-exile and its domestic exponents, the Serbian Chetniks of
Dragoljub Mihailović. In time, Communist pressure drove the Chetniks
into tactical alliances with the Axis, thereby precipitating their
isolation and defeat.
In 1943, after Tito’s headquarters survived bruising Axis operations
from January to June (particularly in the battles of Neretva and
Sutjeska), the Western Allies recognized him as the leader of the
Yugoslav resistance and obliged the London government-in-exile to come
to terms with him. In June 1944 the royal premier, Ivan Šubašić, met
Tito on the island of Vis and agreed to coordinate the activities of the
exiled government with Tito. The Soviet army, aided by Tito’s Partisans,
liberated Serbia in October 1944, thereby sealing the fate of the
Yugoslav dynasty, which had the strongest following in this largest of
the Yugoslav lands. There ensued a series of mop-up operations that
strengthened Communist control of the whole of Yugoslavia by May 1945.
In the process the Yugoslav frontiers extended to take in Istria and
portions of the Julian Alps, where reprisals against fleeing Croat and
Slovene collaborationists were especially brutal.
The conflict with Stalin
Tito consolidated his power in the summer and fall of 1945 by purging
his government of noncommunists and by holding fraudulent elections that
legitimated the jettisoning of the monarchy. The Federal People’s
Republic of Yugoslavia was proclaimed under a new constitution in
November 1945. Trials of captured collaborationists, Catholic prelates,
opposition figures, and even distrusted communists were conducted in
order to fashion Yugoslavia in the Soviet mold. Tito’s excesses in
imitation eventually became as irritating to Moscow as did his
independent manner—especially in foreign policy, where Tito pursued
risky aims in Albania and Greece at a time when Stalin advised caution.
In the spring of 1948, Stalin initiated a series of moves to purge the
Yugoslav leadership. This effort was unsuccessful, as Tito maintained
his control over the CPY, the Yugoslav army, and the secret police.
Stalin then opted for a public condemnation of Tito and for the
expulsion of the CPY from the Cominform, the European organization of
mainly ruling communist parties. In the ensuing war of words, economic
boycotts, and occasional armed provocations (during which Stalin briefly
considered military intervention), Yugoslavia was cut off from the
Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites and steadily drew
closer to the West.
Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito greeted by British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill and
Anthony Eden in London
The policy of nonalignment
The West smoothed Yugoslavia’s course by offering aid and military
assistance. By 1953 military aid had evolved into an informal
association with NATO via a tripartite pact with Greece and Turkey that
included a provision for mutual defense. After the changes in the Soviet
Union following Stalin’s death in 1953, Tito was faced with a choice:
either continue the Westward course and give up one-party dictatorship
(an idea promoted by Milovan Djilas but rejected by Tito in January
1954) or seek reconciliation with a somewhat reformed new Soviet
leadership. The latter course became increasingly possible after a
conciliatory state visit by Nikita Khrushchev to Belgrade in May 1955.
The Belgrade declaration, adopted at that time, committed Soviet leaders
to equality in relations with the communist-ruled countries—at least in
the case of Yugoslavia. However, the limits of reconciliation became
obvious after the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956; this was
followed by a new Soviet campaign against Tito, aimed at blaming the
Yugoslavs for inspiring the Hungarian insurgents. Yugoslav-Soviet
relations went through similar cool periods in the 1960s (following the
invasion of Czechoslovakia) and thereafter.
Nevertheless, Stalin’s departure lessened the pressures for greater
integration with the West, and Tito came to conceive of his internal and
foreign policy as being equidistant from both blocs. Seeking like-minded
statesmen elsewhere, he found them in the leaders of the developing
countries. Negotiations with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal
Nehru of India in June 1956 led to a closer cooperation among states
that were “nonengaged” in the East-West confrontation. From
nonengagement evolved the concept of “active nonalignment”—that is, the
promotion of alternatives to bloc politics, as opposed to mere
neutrality. The first meeting of nonaligned states took place in
Belgrade under Tito’s sponsorship in 1961. The movement continued
thereafter, but by the end of his life Tito had been eclipsed by new
member states, such as Cuba, that conceived of nonalignment as anti-Westernism.
Self-management and decentralization
The break with the Soviet Union also inspired a search for a new model
of socialism in Yugoslavia. In this area Tito, never a theoretician,
depended on the ideological formulations of his lieutenants, notably
Edvard Kardelj. But he supported the notion of workers’ management of
production, embodied in the formation of the first workers’ councils in
1950. In the process, Soviet-style central planning was abandoned and
central agencies were trimmed.
Workers’ self-management had important consequences for internal
relations in multinational Yugoslavia. As power steadily shifted from
the federation to the republics, conservative centralist forces fought
back, opening cleavages within the communist elite between 1963 and
1972. During this period Tito purged first the Serbian centralists
(notably, Alexander Ranković in 1966) and then the leaders of the
decentralizing and liberal forces in Croatia (1971) and Serbia (1972).
The Croatian purge had a further effect of destabilizing Tito’s rule in
Yugoslavia’s most industrially advanced republic.
US President John F. Kennedy greeting Josip Broz Tito
during his visit to the US
Retrenchment of the 1970s
Tito’s response to the crises of the 1960s and early ’70s was to fashion
a system of “symmetrical federalism,” in which various internal rules
and rituals (including a rotating presidency to lead Yugoslavia after
Tito’s death) were supposed to formalize equality among the six
republics and Serbia’s two autonomous provinces (Kosovo and the
Vojvodina). This system, enshrined in the constitution of 1974, promoted
the weaker and smaller federal units at the expense of the big
two—Serbia and Croatia. Serbia’s displeasure at the independent role
assigned to its autonomous provinces and the promotion of minority
identity (especially that of the Albanians in Kosovo) was felt already
in Tito’s last years, but it became radicalized after his death in 1980.
Serb resentment provided the opening for Slobodan Milošević and other
promoters of recentralization, who contributed greatly to the undoing of
Tito’s federal system during the following decade.
Assessment
The irony of Tito’s remarkable life is that he created the conditions
for the eventual destruction of his lifelong effort. Instead of allowing
the process of democratization to establish its own limits, he
constantly upset the work of reformers while failing to satisfy their
adversaries. He created a federal state, yet he constantly fretted over
the pitfalls of decentralization. He knew that the Serbs, Croats,
Slovenes, and others could not be integrated within some new supranation,
nor would they willingly accept the hegemony of any of their number; yet
his supranational Yugoslavism frequently smacked of unitarism. He
promoted self-management but never gave up on the party’s monopoly of
power. He permitted broad freedoms in science, art, and culture that
were unheard of in the Soviet bloc, but he kept excoriating the West. He
preached peaceful coexistence but built an army that, in 1991, delivered
the coup de grâce to the dying Yugoslav state. At his death, the state
treasury was empty and political opportunists unchecked. He died too
late for constructive change, too early to prevent chaos.
Ivo Banac
Encyclopaedia Britannica
