TITO, JOSIP BROZ

born May 7, 1892, Kumrovec, near Zagreb, Croatia, Austria-Hungary [now in Croatia] died May 4, 1980, Ljubljana, Yugos. [now in Slovenia] original name Josip Broz Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. He was secretary-general (later president) of the Communist Party (League of Communists) of Yugoslavia (193980), supreme commander of the Yugoslav Partisans (194145) and the Yugoslav People's Army (194580), and marshal (194380), premier (194553), and president (195380) of Yugoslavia. Tito was the chief architect of the second Yugoslavia, a socialist federation that lasted from World War II until 1991. He was the first Communist leader in power to defy Soviet hegemony, a backer of independent roads to socialism (sometimes referred to as national communism), and a promoter of the policy of nonalignment between the two hostile blocs in the Cold War. Additional reading Biographies include Phyllis Auty, Tito, rev. ed. (1974), conventional and uncritical; Vladimir Dedijer, Tito (1953, reissued 1972), the official biography by Tito's chief information officer; Milovan Djilas, Tito: The Story From Inside (1980), an account of the author's association with Tito; and Fitzroy Maclean, The Heretic (also published as Disputed Barricade, 1957), a sympathetic treatment by a leading British liaison officer to Tito's wartime headquarters. Josef Korbel, Tito's Communism (1951), is a shrewd study of early Titoism by a former Czechoslovak diplomat. Duncan Wilson, Tito's Yugoslavia (1979), thoroughly but unimaginatively assesses Yugoslav politics under Tito. Jasper Ridley, Tito (1994), is an uneven journalistic account informed by the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Richard West, Tito and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia (1994), is similar to Ridley but somewhat more sophisticated.