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Josip Broz Tito (May 7, 1892-May 4, 1980), better known as Marshall Tito, was the leader of Yugoslavia from World War II until his death.
Tito was born in Kumrovec, Austria-Hungary (now west Croatia), the seventh child in the family of Franjo and Marija Broz. His father Franjo was Croat, while his mother Marija was Slovene. 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, Josip Broz 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.
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)
1953-1980 President of Yugoslavia
1961 Co-founds, Non-Aligned Movement with Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and India's Jawaharlal Nehru
He died in Ljubljana, May 4, 1980, At that time, speculation arose about whether Yugoslavia could continue to be 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).