Josip Broz Tito

Josip Broz, known as Tito, led the communist Partisans who fought the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in the Second World War, and then ruled the country from 1945 until his death in 1980. He was the first communist leader to break with Joseph Stalin and survive, developed a distinctive system of "self-managing" socialism, and became a founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. His one-party state held together Yugoslavia's many peoples, but it did so partly through repression, and the federation broke apart in war about a decade after he died.

He was born on 7 May 1892 in Kumrovec, a village in Croatia, then part of Austria-Hungary, the seventh child of a Croat father and a Slovene mother. He left school early, trained as a locksmith and metalworker, and worked in factories in Croatia, Bohemia and Germany, joining the trade union movement. Called up into the Austro-Hungarian army, he fought on the Eastern Front in the First World War, was badly wounded and captured by the Russians in 1915. He was still in Russia during the Russian Revolution, and came home in 1920 a convinced communist.

The new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia, banned the Communist Party in 1921. Broz worked as a union organiser and party activist, and in 1928 was sentenced to five years in prison for communist activity. After his release in 1934 he worked for the Communist International in Moscow and in Europe, using many false names, of which "Tito" stuck. He survived Stalin's purges of the late 1930s, which killed much of the Yugoslav party's leadership in Soviet exile, and in 1937 was put in charge of the party, which he rebuilt as a disciplined, largely home-based organisation.

Germany and its allies invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia in April 1941. Croatia became a puppet state under the fascist Ustaše, who carried out mass killings of Serbs, Jews and Roma. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Tito launched an armed uprising. His Partisans, unlike the Serbian royalist Chetniks led by Draža Mihailović, recruited from all of Yugoslavia's nationalities under the slogan "brotherhood and unity", and fought both the occupiers and their local collaborators. The war in Yugoslavia was also a brutal civil war, and all sides committed atrocities.

The Partisans survived major German offensives, including the battles of the Neretva and the Sutjeska in 1943, where Tito himself was wounded. In November 1943 their assembly, meeting at Jajce in Bosnia, declared a new federal Yugoslavia. Convinced that the Partisans were the force actually fighting the Germans, Britain under Winston Churchill switched its support to Tito. In October 1944 Partisan and Soviet troops took Belgrade.

At the end of the Second World War Tito became prime minister and quickly established communist rule. In May 1945 and the following months, Partisan forces killed tens of thousands of captured soldiers and civilians, among them Croatian Ustaše and Home Guard troops, Slovene Home Guards and Serbian Chetniks, many handed back by the British at Bleiburg in Austria. Political opponents were tried, Mihailović was executed in 1946, the monarchy was abolished, and industry was nationalised.

Tito was at first a loyal Stalinist, but his independence and regional ambitions alarmed Moscow. In June 1948 Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, the Soviet-led bloc of communist parties. Tito refused to submit, purged supporters of Stalin and sent thousands of suspected sympathisers to the prison camp on the island of Goli Otok. To survive he accepted Western aid while keeping his communist system.

From 1950 he and his colleagues developed workers' self-management, in which elected workers' councils formally ran enterprises, and over time Yugoslavia allowed more market activity, consumer goods and foreign travel than the Soviet bloc. Tito became president in 1953. Abroad he presented Yugoslavia as belonging to neither bloc in the Cold War, and in 1961 hosted the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, working closely with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Jawaharlal Nehru of India.

Tito remained an authoritarian ruler. Milovan Đilas, once his close comrade, was jailed for criticising the new communist elite. When a Croatian reform and national movement, the Croatian Spring, gained momentum in 1971, Tito purged its leaders, and he moved against liberal reformers in Serbia soon afterwards. The constitution of 1974 gave the six republics and two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodina, much greater power, and named Tito president for life. He kept a lavish lifestyle, with residences such as the Brijuni islands, where he received world leaders and film stars.

He died on 4 May 1980 in a hospital in Ljubljana, three days before his 88th birthday. His funeral in Belgrade was attended by leaders from both sides of the Cold War and much of the developing world, and he was buried in the House of Flowers.

Without Tito, the collective presidency he left behind proved weak. Economic crisis, foreign debt and rising nationalism destroyed the federation, which broke apart in the wars of 1991–2001, out of which emerged independent Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo. His reputation is still contested across the region. Many people, especially older generations, remember him as the leader who defeated fascism, kept the peace between nations and gave Yugoslavs a respected place in the world and a rising standard of living. Others stress the post-war massacres, political prisoners and the one-party state, and argue that his system suppressed national tensions rather than resolving them.