Portal:Communism/Selected biography/13
Josip Broz Tito (Cyrillic script: Јосип Броз Тито, 7 May 1892 – 4 May 1980) was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and statesman. He was Secretary-General (later President) of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (1939–80), and went on to lead the World War II Yugoslav anti-fascist guerrilla movement, the Yugoslav Partisans (1941–45). After the war, he was the Prime Minister from 1943 to 1963 and later President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1943 until his death in 1980.
Tito was the chief architect of the "second Yugoslavia", a socialist, aspiring towards communist, federation that lasted from World War II until 1991. Despite being one of the founders of Cominform, he was also the first (and the only successful) Cominform member to defy Soviet hegemony. A backer of independent roads to socialism (sometimes referred to as "national communism" or "Titoism"), he was one of the main founders and promoters of the Non-Aligned Movement, and its first Secretary-General.
During his rule he suppressed nationalist sentiment and promoted the "brotherhood and unity" of the six Yugoslav nations. After Tito's death in 1980, tensions between the Yugoslav republics emerged and in 1991 the country disintegrated and went into a series of civil wars and unrest that lasted the rest of the decade and continue to impact most of the former Yugoslav republics to this day. He remains a controversial figure in the Balkans.