On May 4, 1980, 87-year-old Josip Broz died in Ljubljana, Slovenia, after a remarkable six-decade career as soldier, revolutionary and statesman. He also left behind a remarkable multicultural experiment in national unity. Yugoslavia (Slavic for “Land of South Slavs”) was, as its name implies, conceived as a Balkan state for the southern Slavs. In practice, however, it was an unsteady confederation of six ethnically similar but culturally, religiously and linguistically different republics—Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia. Tito had just the right combination of charisma and ruthlessness to force them to live together. His demise left a void no successor could fulfill, condemning the southern Slavic confederation to its own slow death.
Josip Broz was born on May 7, 1892, in Kumrovec (in present-day Croatia), the son of a Croat father and a Slovene mother who raised him in the Roman Catholic tradition. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1913, he entered World War I as a senior noncommissioned officer and distinguished himself in combat before being wounded and captured by the Russians in 1915. During his time in Russia, or shortly after returning to his homeland, he joined the outlawed Communist Party of Yugoslavia and became increasingly activist, adopting the pseudonym “Tito” in 1934 (“to reduce the chances of exposure,” he later explained).
Yugoslavia’s republics began falling away one by one like leaves from a rotting tree
During World War II Tito commanded the multiethnic Yugoslav Partisans against the German and Italian occupation forces and their independent Croatian allies, also fighting alongside and sometimes against the Serbian royalist Chetnik resistance forces. In the fall of 1944 the arrival of the Soviet Red Army hastened the ouster of Axis forces from Yugoslavia. Following the liberation of Belgrade
