The Young Broz 13
with these three major ethnic groups, at least seventeen lesser minorities (Alba-
nians, Hungarians, Germans, and others) lived in the Kingdom SHS (Kraljevina
Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev; Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes), as it
was known, along with Macedonians, Montenegrins, and Bosnian Muslims
(whose ethnic identity was not recognized by Belgrade), making it the most
heterogeneous state in Europe. At least 80 percent of the population lived in
the countryside, where the conditions were often similar to if not worse than
they had been under Turkish rule because of the terrible poverty in the wake of
the war.^34
For the ruling classes in Belgrade, it was obvious that such a complex and
potentially conflict-ridden society could be dominated only with an iron fist, a
policy they soon started to practice, banishing the recently founded Yugoslav
Communist Party (CPY ) in December 1920. It was a heavy blow for the party,
pushed as it was into illegality: in 1920 it had sixty-five thousand members, in
1924 just 688.^35 Josip Broz was one of them, although he remained aloof from
the factional fights initiated by the troopless generals who made up the CPY
leadership. He was involved in trade union activity, in which the communists
also participated. Although he was not very active politically, he was unable to
avoid persecution, discrimination at work, even arrest and ill-treatment.^36 As
before the war, he did not like to stay in the same place for too long. From
Zagreb, he moved to Bjelovar in central Croatia, to the shipyards of Kraljevica
on the Adriatic coast, to Veliko Trojstvo in Bilagora County, and to Serbia,
where he found employment in the railway wagon factory at Smederovska
Palanka. He even returned briefly to his first job, that of a waiter, which he soon
lost because he spread communist propaganda among his colleagues.^37
In 1926, he tried to join the local party cell in Belgrade. The left-wing fac-
tion, which was strong in the capital, rejected him, for its leaders were highly
suspicious of his critical attitude with regard to internecine party quarrels. As
Tito later noted, “This infighting reached such dimensions that the honest
communists were prevented from joining the party organizations. The leaders
were interested only in retaining their positions... and the Comintern’s finan-
cial aid. Actually, it was more than that, as it involved a regular monthly salary,
much higher than the salary of ranking State bureaucrats. This too compelled
me to enter the fight against the factions.”^38 When he returned to Zagreb, Broz
began working as the secretary of the Metallurgical Workers Union, as well as
of the Union of Tanners and Leather Dressers. Later he joined the leadership
of the Civic Committee of the CPY, in which he represented the middle line,
hostile to both the left- and the right-wing factions. The former favored
a federal organization of society and state, the latter a single centralized one,
expressions of the different political cultures of Zagreb and Belgrade, which