He was a well-known activist of the international communist movement, a great Marxist; he was the only outstanding leader in the Second World War who fought for independence entirely by his own strength; he was also one of the most important initiators of the international "Non-Aligned Movement", and he was tito, the outstanding party and state leader of Yugoslavia.
Tito
On the stage of modern world history, with the strength of a small country, single out germany and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers, a weak guerrilla behind enemy lines into a powerful regular army to defend the country, and a head of state who resolutely does not rely on other countries and is deeply supported by the people on the road of national liberation, General Tito of Yugoslavia can definitely be regarded as the first person to be well-known.
He was hailed as The "God-given Leader" of Yugoslavia, and his career as a horseman was legendary. In this issue, I will talk to you about the legendary life of Tito, the "life president" of Yugoslavia.
Tito (1892–1980), formerly known as Joseph. Broz, born on 25 May 1892 in Croatia under Austro-Hungarian rule to a poor peasant family, went out to earn a living at the age of 15 and became a fitter in Zagreb due to his poor family.
In 1913 he enlisted in the army, joined the Croatian 25th Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army, was wounded and captured in a fierce battle with the Russian army in The First World War, learned fluent Russian in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, joined the Communist Party in Omsk, Russia in June 1917, returned to Yugoslavia with his Russian wife in 1919, and began to participate in the revolutionary struggle organized by the Yugoslav Communist Party, and from then on embarked on the road of arduous struggle for the liberation of the Yugoslav people.
After Tito returned home from the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been defeated in World War I, and the new kingdom formed by the union of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia was named "Kingdom of Yugoslavia" in 1929, and it was only then that the state of Yugoslavia appeared for the first time in history.
Since Yugoslavia was a patchwork of many regions and nationalities, and the culture and religion were very complex, the state was very weak, the workers' movement rose and fell, and soon Tito was arrested in the struggle against the ruling class. In court, when the judge asked him if he had confessed his guilt, he replied passionately: "I admit that I am a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, but I do not recognize the bourgeois court, in fact I am not guilty." "
In April 1934, he changed his name to Tito and continued his revolutionary activities; in December, Tito was elected a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party and sent to Moscow; during this period, the factional struggle within the Yugoslav Communist Party was very complicated, tito carried out a vigorous reorganization of the Communist Party, strengthened the unity within the Party, and made the Yugoslav Communist Party grow into a well-organized political party. In October 1940, the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was held, tito was elected general secretary, and his prestige among the Yugoslav people grew day by day.
On April 6, 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Germans and quickly fell. At this time, several forces appeared in Yugoslavia, including the "Chetnik" (Serb language, referring to the Green Forest Army), led by the old officer Mikhailovich, who went into exile in London under the banner of safeguarding the interests of the Serbian nation, pursuing a policy of non-resistance; Faced with such a complicated situation, Tito did not hesitate to lead the troops into the war of anti-aggression.
On 7 July 1941, Tito-led guerrillas first launched an armed uprising in Serbia, which then spread throughout the country, dealing a heavy blow to the armies of Germany and its vassal states and establishing the first liberated area centered on Užice. By the end of 1941, more than one-third of the territory of the South had been liberated.
In December, in the fight against the German offensive, Tito created the first regular army, the First Proletarian Brigade, and without any foreign assistance, he led this team to fight independently for more than twenty months, crushing seven enemy attacks.
At the Battle of Sudeska, Tito was gloriously wounded, becoming the only commander-in-chief wounded on the battlefield during World War II. On November 29, 1943, Tito was awarded the rank of Field Marshal.
In order to remove Tito's eye, in 1944, Hitler ordered the German army to plan "Operation Vaulting", sending an elite special forces unit, the 500th SS Airborne Battalion, to raid the Yugoslav Partisan Supreme Command in an attempt to capture Tito.
After a secret reconnaissance, the Germans determined the location of Tito's activities, and the paratroopers raided the town of Dawa in the middle of the night, preparing to capture Tito in one fell swoop. However, after capturing the town of Dawa, the Germans did not find any trace of Tito, but were given a heavy counterattack by the guerrillas stationed in the mountains, and of the 874 men of the 500th Airborne Battalion who participated in the battle, 576 were killed and missing, and 48 were seriously wounded.
Little did the Germans know that the strategist field marshal never spent the night at the town's headquarters, but in a cave 1.6 kilometers away from the town. Hitler was furious when he heard this news, but he could not do anything about Tito.
In order to unite all democratic forces at home and abroad and to create conditions for international recognition of the new Yugoslavia, in June and November 1944 Tito and Prime Minister-in-exile Subasic held two talks and reached an agreement to establish a coalition government.
On March 7, 1945, the People's Democratic Federal Government of Yugoslavia was finally established, with Tito as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. On 15 May, all of Yugoslavia was liberated. On 29 November, the Constituent Assembly opened in Belgrade and the People's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formally established, with Tito as President and Supreme Commander of the Federal Government.
In 1953, Tito was elected President of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia.
Throughout World War II, the Confederate army led by Tito annihilated more than 400,000 German and Italian troops at the cost of 305,000 killed, making an important contribution to the victory of the anti-fascist war in Europe.
Beginning in 1953, Tito served as President of the Republic, ruling for more than thirty years, he firmly grasped the power of the party, government and army, and won the sincere support of the Yugoslav people. Unconvinced by the Soviet Union's finger-pointing against Yugoslavia, he resolutely broke with Stalin, who, in a fit of rage, expelled Tito's Yugoslavia from the communist family and threatened: "As long as I move my little finger, Tito will be finished." "
However, the actual result was that Stalin almost exerted the strength to eat milk, used the strength of the entire communist camp to intimidate, and even suppressed the situation with large troops, but did not make the "iron hero" submit to it for a little bit.
Seeing this, the Western countries, led by the United States, began to assist Yugoslavia in distress. Tito used the assistance of the West to carry out "autonomous socialism" reforms in his own country, taking the improvement of the people's quality of life as the primary goal, developing the domestic economy, and gradually becoming one of the most developed countries in Eastern Europe, so that the people could live a relatively rich life.
Under Tito's leadership, 36 percent of Yugoslav households owned their own cars, had a television for every 1.8 households, and were able to travel freely to the West every year, which was extremely rare in the "Eastern Camp" at the time.
After the war, Tito's strategic ideas and social development paths in line with The national conditions of Yugoslavia made Tito one of the most talented political leaders of the twentieth century.
The first is the strategic idea of "national defense." On the basis of summing up the historical experience and lessons of resisting foreign aggression in World War II, he proposed the establishment of Yugoslavia's "defense for the whole people" system, repeatedly emphasizing that Yugoslavia is on the "cusp of the wind" and making the people always ready to "meet war at any time."
He also exhorted the Yugoslav people: "We must work as if there had been no war for a hundred years, and be as prepared as if war might break out tomorrow".
Accordingly, in 1969, Yugoslavia promulgated the National Defence Law and the Military Service Law, which embodied this strategic idea, and later enshrined this idea of "national defense" in its constitution. The people of all ethnic groups in Yugoslavia actively responded to President Tito's call and established a complete and strict "defense for the whole people" system from top to bottom, which played a positive role in national security and people's lives.
This is followed by the "theory of social autonomy".
Tito believes that the only way out of the state centralization and the victory over bureaucracy is to realize Marx's theory of social autonomy, let the working masses directly participate in the management of all the state institutions and enterprises, and truly become the masters of the state and enterprises.
In June 1950, the Federal Assembly of Yugoslavia passed the Basic Law on the Transfer of State Economic Enterprises and High-Level Economic Organizations to the Collective Management of Workers, Yugoslavia began to implement workers' autonomy, all major decisions of factories, from production planning to income distribution, were decided by the Workers' Committee, and successively promulgated the "Basic Law on collective management of state-owned economic enterprises and supreme economic union" and the "Law on the Management of National Economic Planning", which stipulated that state ownership should be changed to social ownership and directly managed by producers. This reform has been gradually implemented in the fields of education, culture, health and finance.
The "decentralization and democratization" reform carried out by Yugoslavia broke through the control of the traditional Soviet model and embarked on a path of socialist development in Yugoslavia that was different from the Soviet development model.
The third and most important is the "non-aligned ideology".
In fact, Yugoslavia's path to non-alignment was also Tito's most difficult choice, which was put forward under extremely difficult circumstances in Yugoslavia. As the leader of the country, Tito, in order to enable Yugoslavia to survive in the gap between the bipolar pattern, especially summed up the lessons of the conflict between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, keenly saw the international environment in which Yugoslavia lived, and realized that it was necessary to unite with a large number of newly independent countries in the world at that time, gather the "third world", and form a new force to resist the exclusion and isolation of the two sides of the Cold War.
In September 1961, at the initiative of Tito of Yugoslavia, the first Summit of Non-Aligned Countries was held in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, with the participation of representatives of 25 countries. Tito's non-aligned thinking not only enabled Yugoslavia to quickly get rid of the predicament of isolation, but also provided a powerful weapon and a practical guarantee for the vast number of developing countries to defend their national interests, showing the tremendous strength produced by the combination of weak and small countries and making great contributions to world peace.
Although Tito also implemented a series of misguided ethnic policies during his reign, laying the foundation for the future disintegration of Yugoslavia, this did not affect his glorious image in the eyes of the Yugoslav people.
During the war, he was the commander-in-chief of the Partisans of Yugoslavia, fighting the powerful German-Italian army with his own strength and strong will; after the war, he was a great political leader who united the will of the people, and his policies of "autonomy" at home and "non-alignment" with the outside world showed the extraordinary boldness and wisdom of the "giants of small countries".
His greatness was also recognized worldwide, and in May 1980, tito died of illness at the age of 88, and delegations from 100 countries attended his funeral, including 35 heads of state, 3 monarchs and 24 prime ministers of government.
Resources:
Xu Li, "Iron Hero - Former Yugoslav Leader Tito", Journal of Tianjin Managers College, No. 6, 2011
Wenting: "Neither the West nor the East, Tito and His Yugoslavia", National Humanistic History, No. 1, 2012
Shen Zhihua, "How the "Tieto Road" Was Formed: The Beginning and End of the Conflict in Southern Jiangsu in 1948", Chinese and Foreign Book Digest, No. 10, 2007
Zonghe: "The Legend of Tito, the "Lifelong President" of Yugoslavia", Chinese and Foreign Digest, No. 12, 2017
Gao Xiaosong, "Tito and Yugoslavia", Leadership Literature, No. 23, 2015