Tito

President of Yugoslavia (1953-1980)

• Born: May 7, 1892
• Birthplace: Kumroveć, Croatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Croatia)
• Died: May 4, 1980
• Place of death: Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now in Slovenia)

Tito built and led the Yugoslav Communist partisan army, which was the most successful guerrilla resistance force against the Nazis and fascists in World War II. After the war, he broke away from Joseph Stalin and led the country on an independent communist path.

Early Life

Tito (TEE-toh) was born of mixed Croatian-Slovenian ancestry in Kumroveć, a Croatian village, which then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the seventh child in a family of fifteen. His earliest political memories were of the peasant revolts against the Hungarian landlords in 1902. At seven he went to the new elementary school in Kumroveć, which had one teacher for three hundred and fifty pupils. At first he was a poor student but as time went on he improved. At twelve, as was customary, he stopped school and went to work for his uncle as a herder. At fifteen, although his father had hoped to send him to the United States, he went to work as a waiter. Shortly, however, he became an apprentice locksmith and learned about Marxism from a coworker.

At eighteen, Tito went to Zagreb, found work, and joined the Social Democratic Party of Croatia and Slovenia. In 1913, at twenty-one, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. At the beginning of World War I, he was briefly jailed for antiwar agitation but was acquitted and served with his regiment as an officer in the Carpathians on the Russian front. In 1915, Tito was wounded and captured by Russian troops and sent to a prisoner of war camp in the Ural Mountains, where he came in contact with the Bolsheviks. He escaped in May, 1917, during the Russian Revolution and made his way to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where he stayed briefly but was soon recaptured and returned to Siberia. After the October Revolution, he joined the international Red Guard and fought against the White forces of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak. It was in Siberia that he married his first wife, Pelaghia Belousnova, the daughter of a Russian worker.

Life’s Work

In 1921, after the Russian Civil War, Tito returned to Croatia, where he joined the newly formed Communist Party of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. At this time, the party was under the leadership of the old Serbian Social Democrats, and the young Croatian worker despite his experience in Soviet Russia was consigned to minor rules of propaganda and participation in demonstrations and strikes. The party was declared illegal in 1921, and Tito was arrested in 1928 and spent five years in prison. There he came into contact with one of the most important influences in his life, the theoretical Marxist Moša Pijade. Pijade helped Tito form his conception of Marxism. After his release from prison, Tito, by this time taking the name he is best known by, went to the Soviet Union, where he witnessed the Stalinist purges of the 1930’s that brought down the Serbian leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Tito was now elevated to the supreme party leadership. Tito returned to Yugoslavia, and at a secret party meeting in October, 1940, he was elected general-secretary of the party. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Tito organized the resistance that up to that time was chiefly led by the Serbian royalist nationalist Draža Mihajlović. It was as the commander in chief of the Yugoslav resistance army, the most successful in Europe, that Tito came into public renown.

As the leader of the Yugoslav forces, he built up a movement of 250,000 from all over the country including all nationalities. This gave him an advantage over his chief rival, the Serbian anticommunist Mihajlović, and Stalin was able to convince his Western allies in 1942 to throw all support behind Tito. The guerrilla war against German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupation forces was complex and multifaceted, but it degenerated into a civil war between the partisans, as Tito’s group was called, and the chetniks of Mihajlović. Both sides often made alliances with the occupiers, especially as a fascist defeat seemed imminent and the struggle became more and more a fight for control of Yugoslavia after World War II. Although in December, 1945, Red Army troops moved into the country to fight the retreating German army, Tito won largely on his own efforts.

Thus, after the conflict Tito was able to establish independent political authority over the country. Soviet leaders were anxious that they regain control of the international communist movement and began to recruit Yugoslav agents to oppose Tito’s independence. For his part, Tito not only wanted to establish independent communist rule in Yugoslavia but also hoped to enlarge his own influence in an all-Balkan communist federation and exerted pressure on Albanian communist leaders, negotiated with the communist leadership of Bulgaria, and armed the communist insurgents in Greece. To the West, Tito appeared to be the most uncompromising of the new Eastern European communist leaders. Therefore, it was a great surprise when the Soviets expelled Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau in 1948.

Tito then decided to go his own way. He followed separate foreign and economic policies from the Soviet Union. At the time of the Cold War in the 1950’s, before the rupture of relations between China and the Soviet Union, Tito stood as the only communist leader in power not allied to Moscow. He was able to use his position to gain aid from the West, and in November, 1950, the United States Congress passed the Yugoslav Emergency Relief Act. Along with Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, he started the nonaligned nations movement in the international arena. In domestic policies, Tito advocated his own way toward socialism by emphasizing workers’ control of factories. This permitted more economic liberalization in Yugoslavia than existed in other communist-controlled countries. Although in the late 1940’s Mihajlović was tried and executed as a war criminal and leading critics such as Milovan Djilas were imprisoned, more liberalism appeared in political and social life as well. As time went on, Yugoslavia enjoyed access to Western literature and freedom of travel long before the other socialist countries of Eastern Europe.

Tito could not solve all of Yugoslavia’s problems. He was never able truly to unite the country, and hostility among the nationalities remained, although he was able to keep them under control while he lived. When he died, however, these burst forward with a new fury. The concept of workers’ control of factories has also led to many economic problems inflation as well as unemployment. The differences in the country from rich industrialized republics in the north to the agrarian ones in the south, combined with the national confrontations, has been one of Yugoslavia’s critical issues since World War II.

Tito’s dictatorial methods caused some of his closest allies to fall away. Djilas became a critic whom Tito threw in jail. Aleksander Rankovic, his chosen successor, also was jailed for abuse of power. Ironically, although Tito is best known for his clash with Stalin, he himself carried out his own “cult of personality” in Yugoslavia and became the glue to hold his fractious land together. When he died in 1980, there was no suitable successor. Under Tito’s direction the League of Communists had established a system of rotating presidents to take into account the national differences a method that was bound to fail and the consequences of which have not yet been resolved.

When asked by Vladimir Dedijer, his comrade and sympathetic biographer, to explain the differences between his system, what the West called “Titoism,” and the Soviet system, Tito replied that Yugoslavia was building “genuine socialism” while the economic policies of the Soviet Union have “degenerated into state capitalism under the leadership of a dictatorial bureaucratic caste.” Second, Yugoslavia was developing socialist democracy impeded only by the lack of technology. In the Soviet Union, there was not democracy, only a reign of terror and no freedom of thought or creative work in literature. Third, Yugoslavia was a true federation of equal republics, while the Soviet Union was an equal federation on paper only. The Russian republic, through its Moscow bureaucrats, dominated everything. Critics of Tito, however, assert that the same charges could be leveled at him.

Significance

Tito is one of the major political leaders of the twentieth century. His military and political accomplishments enabled him to defy both Adolf Hitler and Stalin. He had the rare gift of carrying out a revolution and leading a government. As a military commander, Tito was able to organize a vast guerrilla army. While it is true that he was supplied by the Allies, the effort was still monumental. He took on one of the most successful war machines of the twentieth century and was able to maneuver through an extremely complex and multifaceted array of forces fighting both foreign enemies and domestic opponents.

As the leader of a small country, Tito was in danger of being swallowed by the superpowers during the time of the Cold War. However, he was most successful in playing one off the other. He was the first communist leader after World War II to become diplomatically an ally of the West. Although a European and communist head of state, he became a leader of the developing world. The force of his personality alone held his fragile government together. Using a combination of tyranny and liberalization, he established Yugoslavia as a country to be reckoned with in international and European politics. Because of his success, he also established himself as a major contributor to the field of socialist ideology. Maintaining that his was the true Marxism, he put into practice the economic principle of workers’ control of factories. He was the first communist leader to introduce a policy of openness into a communist-led government since the 1930’s.

Tito’s faults cannot be overlooked. In many ways he was as egotistical in assuming personal command as his great opponent Stalin. His cult of personality rivaled that of the Georgian dictator. His intolerance of criticism, even from persons such as Djilas who were ideologically close to him, has tarnished his claim to have been a proponent of egalitarian democracy. His unwillingness to share power or introduce genuine multiopinion councils has led to chaotic national and political problems that linger in the region today. Furthermore his economic policies have not all proved successful. While trying to implement the benefits of socialism, his country has experienced both unemployment and inflation. Yugoslavia’s postwar development under Tito was impressive, but in the 1970’s it ran into economic snags and since then has been left behind. Tito’s place in modern history rests with his war effort against Hitler and his defiance of Stalin. Perhaps he owes much to the fortunes of time and place, but no one can deny the magnitude of his achievement.

Bibliography

Adamic, Louis. The Eagle and His Roots. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952. An early biography written by an American-Yugoslav collaborator with Tito. Partly propaganda, partly a friendly appraisal by an important historical figure himself, the president of the American Slavic Committee.

Auty, Phyllis. Tito. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. An excellent short biography by one of the leading scholars of Yugoslav history. Includes maps, notes, an index, and illustrations.

Campbell, John C. Tito’s Separate Road: America and Yugoslavia in World Politics. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. Part of the Policy Book series of the Council on Foreign Relations. A brief scholarly analysis of Tito’s economics and politics especially in relation to its effect on international affairs. Contains bibliographical notes.

Dedijer, Vladimir. Tito. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953. The semiofficial biography of Tito written by his comrade in arms and including extensive interviews with Tito. An invaluable source. Contains an index.

Djilas, Milovan. Tito: The Story from Within. 1980. New ed. Translated by Vasilije Kojić and Richard Hayes. London: Phoenix, 2001. An evaluation of Tito by a former ally and Yugoslavia’s famous dissident. Contains a biographical appendix and illustrations.

Lane, Ann. Yugoslavia: When Ideals Collide. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. A history of the former Yugoslavia, explaining the role other nations have played in its rise, its fall, and its rebuilding. Includes information about Tito’s government, his death, and his legacy.

Lilly, Carol S. Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia, 1944-1953. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2001. Examines the Yugoslavian Communist Party’s attempts, and ultimate failure, to transform the country’s social and cultural mores, values, and behavior during its first nine years in power.

Maclean, Fitzroy. Eastern Approaches. Reprint. New York: Time-Life Books, 1964. Originally published in 1949, these memoirs are written by one of the British officers who served with Tito’s partisans and are an important source of information about Tito and his abilities. Includes an index, maps, and illustrations.

Rusinow, Dennison. The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Published for the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Although dealing with the history of Yugoslavia after World War II, this work by a leading scholar gives an excellent survey and appraisal of Tito’s contribution to the country. Includes an index and a bibliography.

Ulam, Adam B. Titoism and the Cominform. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1952. An important scholarly monograph by a respected political scientist and critic of Marxism. This work analyzes the split between Stalin and Tito and examines its theoretical basis. Includes an index and a bibliographical note.