Born May 7, 1892 in the village of Kumrovec, Austria-Hungary, Josip Broz was the seventh of fifteen children born to Roman Catholic peasant parents. He only attended school from the age of seven to twelve. After his apprenticeship to a locksmith, he wandered throughout the Empire as a journeyman, even working as a test driver for Daimler Benz near Vienna in 1913. At the age of 18 he joined the Croatian Social Democratic Party. In 1913 he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army and the following year, when World War I broke out, he fought on the Russian front against the Serbs. Captured there (1915), he was imprisoned in a Russian hospital, became fluent in Russian and was released when Russian Czar Nicholas II abdicated in 1917. Broz, who supported the Bolsheviks, took a train to Petrograd to fight in the streets with Lenin's revolutionaries where he was again captured then imprisoned. When the Comunists took power in October 1917, he was released and joined the Red Guard to fight in the Russian Civil War.

In 1920 he returned to Croatia, (now part of the newly established Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), and joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). The CPY was outlawed after a young Bosinian communist assasinated the Minister of the Interior and Broz was arrested several times. His arrests and detentions did not prevent him from continuing his underground communist activities and in April 1927 he joined the CPY's Zagreb Committee. His positions within the CPY brought him positive attention from Moscow: he was named a deputy of the Politburo of the CPY Central committee and leader of the Croatian and Slovenian committees. His rapid rise in the party was interrupted when he was again arrested. By the time he was released in 1934, the parlimentary regime had collapsed and had been replaced by the royal Yugoslav dictatorship which retained the ban on the communist party. Shortly after his release, Broz was named a full member of the CPY Politburo and Central committee. It was at this time that he adopted the pseudonym "Tito" to use in his underground party work.

In 1935, Tito travelled to the Soviet Union, working for a year in the Balkan section of Comintern. He returned to Yugoslavia after being named the Secretary -General of the still outlawed CPY by Comintern and proceeded to replenish the ranks of CPY (which had been severely reduced by Stalin's purges) with his hand-picked replacements - including men like Milovan Djilas, Aleksandar Rankvic and Edward Kardelj. In 1940, Tito's position was officially ratified by 105 of the 6,000 members of the CPY at a secret meeting in Zagreb.

Tito did not initially respond to Germay's invasion of Yugoslavia on Stalin's orders because Stalin had signed the Nazi -Soviet non-aggression pact. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union (June 1941), Tito called a Central committee meeting, was named Military Commander and issued a call to arms with the slogan, "Death to Fascism, Freedom to the People!" Tito's Partisans, due to their prior organization in underground communist cells, were well-organized and aimed not only to liberate Yugoslavia from the Axis powers, but to seize power for the Communist party. To this end Tito created a revolutionary government for the areas that the Partisans freed from Axis control. This government prefigured the administrative structure of the new Yugoslavia. Tito's Partisans faced competition from the largely Serbian Chetniks who were long supported by the British and the royal government in exile. After the Partisans stood up to intense Axis attacks (January to June 1943), Allied leaders switched their support to the Partisans and American President Roosevelt, British Premier Churchill and Soviet leader Stalin officially recognized the Partisans at the Tehran Conference. This resulted in Allied aid being parachuted behind Axis lines to assist the Partisans. Although Churchill had hoped that Tito would cooperate with the government-in-exile, this proved not to be the case. Tito consolidated power after the Yalta Conference (February 1945) by purging his government of non-communists. In November (1945), a new constitution was proclaimed and Tito organized a strong army and a strong secret police force (the UDBA) loyal to him. The UDBA methodically found, imprisoned and even executed a large number of Nazi collaborators, Catholic priests, those who had opposed the communist-led war effort, and even communists who did not agree with Tito. Tito then proceeded to centralize the economy and society in Stalinist fashion although agriculture was not successfully collectivized.

Stalin disliked Tito's attempt to ignore his suggestions as to how the new Yugoslav government and economy would be run. He was also very unhappy with Tito's foreign-policy decisions taken independently of Moscow: first to try to form a Balkan federation with Bulgarian leader Dimitrov, second with Yugoslavia's relations with Albania and finally with Tito's decision to support the communists in the Greek Civil War. Tito, angered by Stalin's interferences in Yugoslav affairs as well as with Stalin's attempt to depose him denounced the Soviet policy of "...unconditional subordination of small socialist countries to one large socialist country." Stalin's responsed in June 1948 by expelling the "Tito clique" from Cominform, in essence, kicking Yugoslvia out of the "socialist camp" to go it alone. Stalin imposed economic boycotts and sanctions but stopped short of physically invading Yugoslavia.

Tito then used the UDBA to purge the party and to "reeducate" Stalinist communists within the party. He also began a decentralization of the economy, supporting the idea of workers councils and workers self-management, an idea which he revised over the coming years. He also turned to the West at the same time that the West perceived an opportunity to utilize the first split in the Communist East bloc to its own advantage. Western aid to Yugoslavia came in both the form of dollars and tacit military cooperation with NATO. In return, Tito sealed off the border between Yugoslavia and Greece, effectively ending the Greek Civil War.

When Stalin died (1953), Tito was faced with the choice to continue his western orientation and reforms or to try to reconcile with the Soviet union. Tito chose to try to reconcile, meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Belgrade in 1955. The resulting Belgrade Declaration affirmed equality in relations between communist-ruled countries, although the limits of that equality became obvious in the case of other communist countries - Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Tito also began to conceive more broadly of a foreign policy in which countries could be actively neutral between the two blocs. With Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India, Tito convened a meeting of 25 actively neutral states on his island in the Adriatic in 1956. His policy of "nonengagement" led to his policy of "nonalignment" which created a third, alternative neutral bloc under his leadership. During the 1960's and 1970's he traveled widely in the third World to promote non-alignment.

Domestically, Tito tried to create a balance among the nationalities of the country that would ensure stability as well as his control of the country. He created a system of "symetrical federalism" that was suppose to ensure equality among the six republics and two autonomous provinces (Kosovo and Vojvodina) although in practice it frequently played the nationalities off against each other. He also decreased the power of the UDBA, was made President for life in 1974 and ousted his opponents while trying, ultimately to ensure stability in the succession to power. Tito allowed a freer exchange of people and ideas than most of the countries in the bloc. Many Yugoslavs worked in Western Europe, and Western Europeans visited and vacationed regularly in Yugoslavia. Tito also promoted scientific exchanges between his country and the West. Tito died on May 4 1980, after being gravely ill for almost four months, in a hospital in Lubljana.