Here is the biography of Marshal Josip Broz Tito:
Josip Broz Tito was born on May 7, 1892, in the village of Kumrovec, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Croatia). He was the seventh of 15 children born to Roman Catholic peasants. His blacksmith father, Franjo Broz, was a Croat, and his mother, Marija, was Slovene.
Tito joined the Croatian Social Democratic Party and was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army in 1913. During World War I, he was sent to Ruma, where he began to find his calling and was later arrested for anti-war propaganda and imprisoned. He was sent to Galicia to fight against the Russians and Serbs in 1915 and was seriously wounded by shellfire. In April 1915, his entire battalion was captured by the Russians.
After the war, Tito joined the Bolsheviks in St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd after the first revolution) and engaged in street fighting during the attempted Bolshevik coup d'etat in Petrograd on July 16-17, 1917. He fled to Finland to avoid arrest but was captured and sent to prison. He escaped and joined the Red Army in Omsk, Siberia, fighting with the Red Guards in the first years of the Russian Civil War.
Tito applied for membership in the Russian Communist Party in the spring of 1918 and became a metalworker and union organizer. He was arrested after a Bosnian KPJ member assassinated the Yugoslav Minister of the Interior, leading to the outlawing of the KPJ. Tito switched to underground organizing and eventually became the leader of the KPJ's Committee in Zagreb.
In 1934, parliamentary democracy in Yugoslavia was replaced by a dictatorship under the Yugoslav king, and the KPJ remained banned. Tito was named a full member of the KPJ Politburo and Central Committee and adopted the nom de guerre "Tito." He went to the USSR in 1935 and served in the Communist International's Balkan section before being named Secretary-General of the KPJ and returning to Yugoslavia to rebuild the party.
During World War II, Tito's partisans fought against the Axis powers and were officially recognized at the Tehran Conference. After the war, Tito consolidated his power and that of the KPJ by purging his government of non-communists and eliminating domestic rivals. He imposed a new constitution on Yugoslavia and organized a strong army and secret police force.
Initially, the economy and society were collectivized in Soviet fashion, but Tito began to resent Stalin's constant meddling and eventually denounced the Soviet policy of unconditional subordination of small socialist countries to one large socialist country. In response, Stalin had Tito and the KPJ expelled from the Cominform in June 1948.
Tito purged the KPJ of hardcore Stalinists and decentralized the economy, putting more power into the hands of workers' councils. He turned to the West for financial aid and maintained a balance among the different ethnic groups and nationalities of his multi-ethnic country.
Tito's ties with the West encouraged trade and tourism, and his system of "symetrical federalism" ensured stability for as long as the KPJ and the secret police maintained control of Yugoslavia. He was styled President-for-Life in 1974 and died on May 4, 1980, in a hospital in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
