Josip Broz Tito

Josip Broz Tito (May 7, 1892 - May 4, 1980), better known as Marshall Tito, was the leader of Yugoslavia from the end of World War II until his death.

Tito was born in Kumrovec[?], Austria-Hungary (now in western Croatia), the seventh child in the family of Franjo and Marija Broz. His father Franjo was Croat, while his mother Marija was Slovenian. After spending some of his childhood years with his mother's father in Podsreda, he entered the primary school in Kumrovec and finished it in 1905.

In 1907, moving out of the rural environment, he started working as a locksmith apprentice in Sisak. There he became aware of the labour movement and celebrated May 1 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, Tito worked for shorter periods in various places of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

From Autumn 1913, Tito served his military service; in May 1914 he won a silver medal for the second place at a fencing competition of Austro-Hungarian Army in Budapest. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was sent to Ruma[?]. Due to the anti-war propaganda, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Petrovaradin fortress. In 1915, he was sent to Galicia to fight against Russia. In Bukovina, Tito was seriously injured from a grenade from a Russian howitzer. In April, the whole battalion fell into Russian captivity.

After spending several months in the hospital, Tito was sent to a work camp in the Urals in Autumn 1916. In April 1917 he was arrested for organizing demonstrations of prisoners of war; later he escaped the camp 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. He was then sent to a prison camp in Kungur, but escaped from the train and in November enlisted in the Red Army in Omsk. In the Spring 1918, he applied for membership in the Russian Communist Party.

His first wife was Hertha Haas, who in May 1941 gave him his first born son Mišo.

Timeline

• 1920 Josip Broz became member of Yugoslavian Communist Party[?]
• 1934 member of Political Bureau of Central Komitee of YCP[?] ( since then he used nickname Tito )
• July 4, 1941 Tito called for armed resistance against Nazi Germany.
• 1941-1945 Chief Commander of National Liberation Army
• 1945-1953 Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia
• 1948 Rift with Stalin (INFORMBIRO)
• January 13, 1953-1980 President of Yugoslavia
• 1961 Co-founds, Non-Aligned Movement with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and India's Jawaharlal Nehru
• April 7, 1963 Named "President for life"

He died in Clinic centre in Ljubljana, May 4, 1980. His funeral enticed many world's celebrities, mainly from politics. At that time, speculation arose about whether Yugoslavia could continue to be held together by his successors: Tito's greatest strength had been in suppressing nationalist insurrections and maintaining unity throughout the country. Without Tito's call for unity, the people of Yugoslavia could not hold together. Ethnic divisions and conflict grew, and eventually erupted into gruesome civil wars (Croatian war, Bosnian war, Kosovo War).

Tito is buried in his mausoleum in Belgrade, called Kuća cveća (The House of Flowers) and many people every year visit the place, although it does not hold any sentries any more.