7 Josip Broz Tito 7Early Life
Josip Broz was born to a large peasant family, of a Croat
father and a Slovene mother. After working as an itinerant
metalworker, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian
army in 1913 to fight in World War I. As a prisoner-of-war
of the Russians, he became acquainted with Bolshevik
propaganda. In 1917 he participated in the July Days dem-
onstrations in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and, after the
October Revolution, joined a Red Guard unit in Omsk,
Siberia. In October 1920 he returned to his native Croatia—
then part of the newly established Kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes—and soon joined the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). His rise in the party hierarchy
was interrupted by a five-year prison sentence for possession
of bombs. In 1934, after his release from prison, Broz assumed
the pseudonym Tito. From February 1935 to October 1936,
he worked in the Soviet Union in the Comintern, becom-
ing its choice for the CPY’s new secretary-general in 1939.
Tito’s leftist strategy for the CPY focused the party on
armed insurrection and on a Soviet-style federalist solution
to Yugoslavia’s nationality conflict.
Partisan Leader
After Germany attacked Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, Tito
became the leader of Communist-dominated Partisan
resistance. Its ultimate aim, carefully concealed in the
rhetoric of “national liberation struggle,” was the seizure
of power. In Partisan-held territories Communist-
dominated administrative organs were established that
prefigured the future federal republics. As a result, Tito’s
Partisans threatened not only the occupiers and collabo-
rators but also the royal government-in-exile and its