January 14th 1953: Josip Broz Tito inaugurated
On this day in 1953, Josip Broz Tito was inaugurated as the first President of Yugoslavia. Born as Josip Broz to a poor Croatian family, he served in World War One, and was introduced to communism while in a Russian prisoner of war camp. The ideology struck a chord with the young Croat, and Broz became involved in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Once he returned to Croatia (now part of the new Yugoslavia), he promptly joined the newly created Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which was driven underground by a government crackdown. It was soon after his release from prison in 1934 that he began using the name Tito for underground party work. In 1939, he became the party’s Secretary-General, largely due to support for him in Moscow. During World War Two, and after the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia began in 1941, Tito became leader of the Partisan resistance movement in the country. The Partisan units took the offensive against the Axis forces, led by Nazi Germany, and aimed to establish communist communities; the movement was one of the most effective resistance efforts during the war. After the war, Tito emerged as the leader of a united, Communist, Yugoslav republic. The monarchy was abolished in 1945, thus beginning a dictatorship that would last over 25 years. Tito formally became president at a time when his government was cut off from the Soviet Union after a break with Stalin, and was increasingly aligning with the West. He eventually chose a course of non-alignment, and in this joined with the Indian, Egyptian, and Indonesian governments during the Cold War. Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death on May 4th, 1980. Without Tito as a unifying presence, tensions soon arose among the Yugoslav nations, and the country descended into civil war in the early 1990s, which resulted in the breakup of the country.
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