Josip Broz Tito
Tito led the only resistance in occupied Europe that liberated its own country, built a communist state on it, told Stalin no in 1948 and lived, invented a socialism of workers' councils and a foreign policy of belonging to neither bloc, and held six nations in one federation for thirty-five years by being the thing they had in common; it lasted eleven years without him. He was born Josip Broz in 1892 in a Croatian village on the Slovene border, the seventh of fifteen children of a peasant, was a metalworker in Austrian and German factories, a sergeant in the Habsburg army wounded and captured by the Russians in 1915, and a Bolshevik by 1917. Back in Yugoslavia he organised, was jailed from 1928 to 1934, worked for the Comintern in Moscow through the purges that killed most of his party's leadership, and came out of them as its general secretary in 1937. The name was one of his aliases. When Germany broke up Yugoslavia in April 1941 he waited for the invasion of Russia and then raised the Partisans, who fought Germans, Italians, Ustaše and Chetniks at once, survived seven offensives, and by 1943 were the army the Allies backed. The council at Jajce that November made him marshal and the federation the goal. His troops took Belgrade in October 1944 with the Red Army and the rest of the country themselves. The state he made in 1945 was Stalinist in everything but obedience, and when Stalin expelled it from the Cominform in June 1948 for that, expecting the party to overthrow him, it did not. He purged those who wavered on the island of Goli Otok, took American aid, and from 1950 gave the factories to workers' councils and the republics more of the state. With Nehru and Nasser he founded the Non-Aligned Movement at Belgrade in 1961. He was president for life from 1974 under a constitution that rotated everything after him, lived in palaces with a white uniform, a wife thirty-two years younger and a taste for Hollywood, and died at Ljubljana in May 1980 at eighty-seven; the funeral brought delegations from a hundred and twenty-eight countries, the largest ever held. The federation held until 1991.
- Lived: 1892 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: Yugoslav
- Roles: president, revolutionary, general
