Tito

Tito was a nom de guerre adopted in the mid 1930s by Josip Broz 1892–1980) to continue his underground work for the communist party in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It served him well when he was directing the partisan resistance to the German occupation of the Balkans (1941-1945), and was his permanent name after that.

• He had been born to a Croat father and a Slovene mother, thus understanding some of the ethnic tensions of his country. He was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army during the first world war, wounded and captured by the Russians (as a sergeant) in 1915, and a prisoner of war until 1917, when the Red Guard released and recruited him. He fought with reds in the Russian Civil War. Back in Yugoslavia, he rose to become General Secretary of the KPJ (Communist Party of Yugoslavia) in 1939. Through the 1930s, he was an active agitator and recruiter for the banned Communist Party, serving several prison sentences; he also recruited Yugoslavs for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In the Party, he was a strong leftist and federalist, who rejected co-operation with right wing elements like the Chetniks - and to some extent the allies opposing the Axis powers. When Germany occupied the Balkans in 1941, Tito was appointed Commander in Chief of all military forces fighting to liberate Yugoslavia. While he exercised tight control of his own partisan (largely Croatian) forces, the Chetniks continued to prioritize the Serbian monarchy and a Serbian nationalist programme, going so far as to devote more of their effort to fighting the partisans than to fighting the Axis. As the partisans also had to deal with the Ustase, it will be seen that Tito, as their leader, had the strength of character and of discipline to lead his country to liberation. Their military performance led Churchill to focus all assistance in Yugoslavia on Tito's partisans, despite their communist ideology.
• After the withdrawal of German forces, Tito's new government was determinedly communist - but independent of Stalin's USSR, as Tito held that communism must be established in any country with attention to that country's own conditions - the doctrine of 'national communism'. In Yugoslavia, this was held to mean reduction of centralized economic planning and a more 'free-market' approach to an economy of smaller worker-owned enterprises. The final split with Stalin was signalled in 1948 when Stalin removed all possibility of a Bulgaria/Yugoslavia federation. His independence of the Soviet Union led Tito to play a leading part in the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was meant to steer clear of the two sides in the Cold War.

According to Oxford World Encyclopedia, (Philip's, on line 2004 at Oxford Reference), "Tito's greatest achievement was to hold Yugoslavia together". It might also be said that to have ended the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, the only resistance leader to have done so between 1939 and 1945, was at least as memorable an achievement - as was the maintenance of Yugoslavia's independence as a communist state for thirty years..

Etymological note: Tito is the modern Italian form of the Classical Latin (Roman) praenomen Titus, the name of one of the Emperors, commemorated in the Arch of Titus in Rome, and Mozart's opera La clemenza di Tito ('The clemency of Titus').