Editing Josip Broz Tito (section)

==Interwar communist activity==
===Communist agitator===
{{stack|float=right|[[File:Milorad Drašković wiki photo.jpg|thumb|The assassination of the Minister of the Interior, [[Milorad Drašković]], led to the outlawing of the [[League of Communists of Yugoslavia|Communist Party]].|alt=black and white photograph of a male in formal attire]]}}
Upon his return home, Broz was unable to gain employment as a metalworker in Kumrovec, so he and his wife moved briefly to Zagreb, where he worked as a waiter and took part in a waiter's strike. He also joined the CPY.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=77–78}} The CPY's influence on the political life of Yugoslavia was growing rapidly. In the 1920 elections, it won 59 seats and became the third-strongest party.{{sfn|Vucinich|1969|p=7}} In light of difficult economic and social circumstances, the regime viewed the CPY as the main threat to the system of government.{{sfn|Calic|2019|p=82}} On 30 December, the government issued a Proclamation ({{lang|sh|[[Obznana]]}}) outlawing communist activities, which included bans on propaganda, assembly halls, stripping of civil service for servants and scholarships for students found to be communist.{{sfn|Mahmutović|2013|pp=268–269}} Its author, [[Milorad Drašković]], the Yugoslav Minister of the Interior, was assassinated by a young communist, [[Alija Alijagić]], on 2 August 1921. The CPY was then declared illegal under the Yugoslav State Security Act of 1921,{{sfn|Trbovich|2008|p=134}} and the regime proceeded to prosecute party members and sympathisers as [[political prisoners in Yugoslavia|political prisoners]].{{sfn|Mahmutović|2013|pp=268–269}}

Due to his overt communist links, Broz was fired from his employment.{{sfn|Swain|2010|p=9}} He and his wife then moved to the village of [[Veliko Trojstvo]] where he worked as a mill mechanic.{{sfn|West|1995|p=51}}{{sfn|Vinterhalter|1972|p=84}} After the arrest of the CPY leadership in January 1922, Stevo Sabić took over control of its operations. Sabić contacted Broz, who agreed to work illegally for the party, distributing leaflets and agitating among factory workers. In the contest of ideas between those that wanted to pursue moderate policies and those that advocated violent revolution, Broz sided with the latter. In 1924, Broz was elected to the CPY district committee, but after he gave a speech at a comrade's [[Catholic]] funeral, he was arrested when the priest complained. Paraded through the streets in chains, he was held for eight days and was eventually charged with creating a public disturbance. With the help of a [[Serbian Orthodox]] prosecutor who hated Catholics, Broz and his co-accused were acquitted.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=80–82}} His brush with the law had marked him as a communist agitator, and his home was searched on an almost weekly basis. Since their arrival in Yugoslavia, Pelagija had lost three babies soon after their births and one daughter, Zlatica, at the age of two. Broz felt the loss of Zlatica deeply. In 1924, Pelagija gave birth to a boy, Žarko, who survived. In mid-1925, Broz's employer died, and the new mill owner gave him an ultimatum: give up his communist activities or lose his job. So, at age 33, Broz became a professional revolutionary.{{sfn|West|1995|p=54}}{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=83–85}}

===Professional revolutionary===
The CPY concentrated its revolutionary efforts on factory workers in the more industrialised areas of Croatia and Slovenia, encouraging strikes and similar action.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=87}} In 1925, the now unemployed Broz moved to [[Kraljevica]] on the [[Adriatic]] coast, where he started working at a shipyard to further the aims of the CPY.{{sfn|Auty|1970|p=53}} During his time in Kraljevica, he acquired a love of the warm, sunny Adriatic coastline that lasted for the rest of his life, and throughout his later time as leader, he spent as much time as possible living on [[Yugoslav training ship Galeb|his yacht]] while cruising the Adriatic.{{sfn|West|1995|p=55}}

While at [[Kraljevica]], he worked on Yugoslav [[torpedo boat]]s and a pleasure yacht for the [[People's Radical Party]] politician, [[Milan Stojadinović]]. Broz built up the trade union organisation in the shipyards and was elected as a [[union representative]]. A year later, he led a shipyard strike and soon after was fired. In October 1926, he obtained work in a railway works in [[Smederevska Palanka]] near [[Belgrade]]. In March 1927, he wrote an article complaining about the [[exploitation of workers]] in the factory, and after speaking up for a worker, he was promptly sacked. Identified by the CPY as worthy of promotion, he was appointed secretary of the Zagreb branch of the Metal Workers' Union and, soon thereafter, the union's whole Croatian branch. In July 1927, Broz was arrested along with six other workers, and imprisoned at nearby [[Ogulin]].{{sfn|West|1995|p=56}}{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=88–89}} After being held without trial for some time, he went on a hunger strike until a date was set. The trial was held in secret, and he was found guilty of being a member of the CPY. Sentenced to four months' imprisonment, he was released from prison pending an appeal. On the CPY's orders, Broz did not report to court for the hearing of the appeal, instead going into hiding in Zagreb. Wearing dark spectacles and carrying forged papers, Broz posed as a middle-class technician in the engineering industry, working undercover to contact other CPY members and coordinate their infiltration of trade unions.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=90–91}}

[[File:Josip Broz Tito in prison 1928.jpg|thumb|left|Tito's [[mug shot]] after arrest for communist activities in 1928|alt=a series of three black and white head and shoulders photographs]]

In February 1928, Broz was one of 32 delegates to the conference of the Croatian branch of the CPY. During the conference, he condemned factions within the party, including those that advocated a [[Greater Serbia]] agenda within Yugoslavia, like the long-term CPY leader [[Sima Marković]]. Broz proposed that the executive committee of the [[Communist International]] purge the branch of factionalism and was supported by a delegate sent from Moscow. After it was proposed that the Croatian branch's entire central committee be dismissed, a new central committee was elected, with Broz as its secretary.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=95–96}} Marković was subsequently expelled from the CPY at the Fourth Congress of the [[Comintern]], and the CPY adopted a policy of working for the breakup of Yugoslavia.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=96}} Broz arranged to disrupt a meeting of the [[Yugoslav Social-Democratic Party|Social-Democratic Party]] on May Day that year; in a melee outside the venue, police arrested him. They failed to identify him, charging him under his false name for a breach of the peace. He was imprisoned for 14 days and then released, returning to his previous activities.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=96–97}} The police eventually tracked him down with the help of a police informer. He was ill-treated and held for three months before being tried in court in November 1928 for his illegal communist activities,{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=98–99}} which included allegations that police had planted the bombs found at his address.{{sfn|West|1995|p=57}} He was convicted and sentenced to five years' imprisonment.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=101}}

===Prison===
[[File:Tito i Moša Pijade u zatvoru.jpg|thumb|Tito (left) and his ideological mentor [[Moša Pijade]] while they were imprisoned in the Lepoglava jail|alt=a black and white photograph of two men]]

After Broz's sentencing, his wife and son returned to Kumrovec, where sympathetic locals looked after them, but then one day, they suddenly left without explanation and returned to the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=102–103}} She fell in love with another man, and Žarko grew up in institutions.{{sfn|West|1995|p=59}} After arriving at [[Lepoglava prison]], Broz was employed in maintaining the electrical system and chose as his assistant a middle-class Belgrade Jew, [[Moša Pijade]], who had been given a 20-year sentence for his communist activities. Their work allowed Broz and Pijade to move around the prison, contacting and organising other communist prisoners.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=103–104}} During their time together in Lepoglava, Pijade became Broz's ideological mentor.{{sfn|Barnett|2006|pp=36–39}} After two and a half years at Lepoglava, Broz was accused of attempting to escape and was transferred to [[Maribor]] prison, where he was held in solitary confinement for several months.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=106}} After completing the full term of his sentence, he was released, only to be arrested outside the prison gates and taken to Ogulin to serve the four-month sentence he had avoided in 1927. He was finally released from prison on 16 March 1934, but even then, he was subject to orders that required him to live in Kumrovec and report to the police daily.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=107–108 & 112}} During his imprisonment, the political situation in Europe had changed significantly, with the rise of [[Adolf Hitler]] in Germany and the emergence of right-wing parties in France and neighbouring Austria. He returned to a warm welcome in Kumrovec but did not stay long. In early May, he received word from the CPY to return to his revolutionary activities and left his hometown for Zagreb, where he rejoined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Croatia.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=109–113}}

The Croatian branch of the CPY was in disarray, a situation exacerbated by the escape of the executive committee of the CPY to Vienna in Austria, from which they were directing activities. Over the next six months, Broz travelled several times between Zagreb, Ljubljana and Vienna, using false passports. In July 1934, he was blackmailed by a smuggler but pressed on across the border and was detained by the local ''[[Heimwehr]]'', a paramilitary Home Guard. He used the Austrian accent he had developed during his war service to convince them that he was a wayward Austrian mountaineer, and they allowed him to proceed to Vienna.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=113}}{{sfn|Vinterhalter|1972|p=147}} Once there, he contacted the General Secretary of the CPY, [[Milan Gorkić]], who sent him to Ljubljana to arrange a secret conference of the CPY in Slovenia. The conference was held at the summer palace of the [[Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Ljubljana|Roman Catholic bishop of Ljubljana]], whose brother was a communist sympathiser. It was at this conference that Broz first met [[Edvard Kardelj]], a young Slovene communist who had recently been released from prison. Broz and Kardelj subsequently became good friends, with Tito later regarding him as his most reliable deputy. As he was wanted by the police for failing to report to them in Kumrovec, Broz adopted various pseudonyms, including "Rudi" and "Tito". He used the latter as a pen name when he wrote articles for party journals in 1934, and it stuck. He gave no reason for choosing the name "Tito" except that it was a common nickname for men from the district where he grew up. Within the Comintern network, his nickname was "Walter".{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=114–115}}{{sfn|West|1995|p=62}}{{sfn|Ramet|2006|p=151}}

===Flight from Yugoslavia===
[[File:Edvard Kardelj zatvorenik.jpg|thumb|left|[[Edvard Kardelj]] met Tito in 1934 and they became close friends|alt=two black and white mugshots]]

During this time, Tito wrote articles on the duties of imprisoned communists and on trade unions. He was in Ljubljana when [[Vlado Chernozemski]], an assassin for the [[Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization]] (IMRO) and instructor for the Croatian ultranationalist organisation [[Ustaše]], assassinated [[Alexander I of Yugoslavia|King Alexander]] in Marseilles on 9 October 1934. In the crackdown on dissidents that followed his death, it was decided that Tito should leave Yugoslavia. He travelled to Vienna on a forged Czechoslovak passport, where he joined Gorkić and the rest of the [[Politburo]] of the CPY. It was decided that the Austrian government was too hostile to communism, so the Politburo travelled to [[Brno]] in [[Czechoslovakia]], and Tito accompanied them.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=116–117}} On Christmas Day 1934, a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the CPY was held in Ljubljana, and Tito was elected as a member of the Politburo for the first time. The Politburo decided to send him to Moscow to report on the situation in Yugoslavia, and in early February 1935, he arrived there as a full-time official of the Comintern.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=117–118}} He lodged at the main Comintern residence, the [[Hotel Lux]] on [[Tverskaya Street]] and was quickly in contact with [[Vladimir Ćopić]], one of the leading Yugoslavs with the Comintern. He was soon introduced to the main personalities in the organisation. Tito was appointed to the secretariat of the Balkan section, responsible for Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=120}} Kardelj was also in Moscow, as was the Bulgarian communist leader [[Georgi Dimitrov]].{{sfn|West|1995|p=62}} Tito lectured on trade unions to foreign communists and attended a course on military tactics run by the Red Army, and occasionally attended the [[Bolshoi Theatre]]. He attended as one of 510 delegates to the [[Seventh World Congress of the Comintern]] in July and August 1935, where he briefly saw [[Joseph Stalin]] for the first time. After the congress, he toured the [[Soviet Union]] and then returned to [[Moscow]] to continue his work. He contacted Polka and Žarko, but soon fell in love with an Austrian woman who worked at the Hotel Lux, Johanna Koenig, known within communist ranks as Lucia Bauer. When she became aware of this liaison, Polka divorced Tito in April 1936. Tito married Bauer on 13 October of that year.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=121–122}}

After the World Congress, Tito worked to promote the new Comintern line on Yugoslavia, which was that it would no longer work to break up the country and would instead defend the integrity of Yugoslavia against Nazism and Fascism. From a distance, Tito also worked to organise strikes at the shipyards at Kraljevica and the coal mines at [[Trbovlje]] near Ljubljana. He tried to convince the Comintern that it would be better if the party leadership were located inside Yugoslavia. A compromise was arrived at, where Tito and others would work inside the country, and Gorkić and the Politburo would continue to work from abroad. Gorkić and the Politburo relocated to Paris, while Tito began to travel between Moscow, Paris and Zagreb in 1936 and 1937, using false passports.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=122–123}} In 1936, his father died.{{sfn|Vinterhalter|1972|p=49}}

[[File:Španski borci.jpg|thumb|[[Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War|Yugoslav volunteers]] fighting in the [[Spanish Civil War]]|alt=black and white photograph of men firing weapons]]

Tito returned to Moscow in August 1936, soon after the outbreak of the [[Spanish Civil War]].{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=124}} At the time, the [[Great Purge]] was underway, and foreign communists like Tito and his Yugoslav compatriots were particularly vulnerable. Despite a laudatory report written by Tito about the veteran Yugoslav communist [[Filip Filipović (politician)|Filip Filipović]], Filipović was arrested and shot by the Soviet secret police, the [[NKVD]].{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=126–127}} However, before the Purge really began to erode the ranks of the Yugoslav communists in Moscow, Tito was sent back to Yugoslavia with a new mission, to recruit [[Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War|volunteers]] for the [[International Brigades]] being raised to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Travelling via Vienna, he reached the coastal port city of [[Split, Croatia|Split]] in December 1936.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=129}} According to the Croatian historian [[Ivo Banac]], the reason the Comintern sent Tito back to Yugoslavia was to purge the CPY.{{sfn|Banac|1988|p=64}} An initial attempt to send 500 volunteers to Spain by ship failed, with nearly all the volunteers arrested and imprisoned.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=129}} Tito then travelled to Paris, where he arranged the volunteers' travel to France under the cover of attending the [[Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne|Paris Exhibition]]. Once in France, the volunteers crossed the [[Pyrenees]] to Spain. In all, he sent 1,192 men to fight in the war, but only 330 came from Yugoslavia; the rest were expatriates in France, Belgium, the U.S. and Canada. Fewer than half were communists, and the rest were social-democrats and anti-fascists of various hues. Of the total, 671 were killed in the fighting, and 300 were wounded. Tito himself never went to Spain, despite speculation that he had.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Pavlaković |first=Vjeran |editor-last=Stojaković |editor-first=Krunoslav |others=Hodges, Andrew (proofreader) |url=https://europeanmemories.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Vjeran_pavlakovic_spain_.pdf |title=Yugoslav Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War |page=65 |journal=Research Paper Series of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Southeast Europe |number=4 |publisher=[[Rosa Luxemburg Foundation]] |access-date=1 August 2023 |via=Eurom – The European Observatory on Memories}}</ref> Between May and August 1937, he travelled several times between Paris and Zagreb, organising the movement of volunteers and creating a separate [[Communist Party of Croatia]]. The new party was inaugurated at a conference at [[Samobor]] on the outskirts of Zagreb on 1–2 August 1937.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=131–133}} Tito played a crucial role in organizing the return of the Yugoslav volunteers from German concentration camps to Yugoslavia when the decision was made to mount an armed resistance in Yugoslavia, the 1941 [[Uprising in Serbia]].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pavlaković |first1=Vjeran |title=The Spanish Civil War and the Yugoslav Successor States |journal=Contemporary European History |date=2020 |volume=29 |issue=3 |pages=279–281 |doi=10.1017/s0960777320000272 |s2cid=225510860 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/contemporary-european-history/article/spanish-civil-war-and-the-yugoslav-successor-states/A727D0D13ED59ED96550D823C701EECD |access-date=31 July 2023 |quote=Although there is no evidence that Tito actually crossed into Spain during the war, we know that he was crucial in coordinating the Yugoslav volunteers from Paris and subsequently organising their return from German labour camps once the decision to mount an armed resistance in Yugoslavia was made in 1941.}}</ref>

===General Secretary of the CPY===
In June 1937, Gorkić was summoned to Moscow, where he was arrested, and after months of NKVD interrogation, he was shot.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=134}} According to Banac, Gorkić was killed on Stalin's orders.{{sfn|Banac|1988|p=64}} West concludes that despite being in competition with men like Gorkić for the leadership of the CPY, it was not in Tito's character to have innocent people sent to their deaths.{{sfn|West|1995|p=63}} Tito then received a message from the Politburo of the CPY to join them in Paris. In August 1937, he became acting [[General Secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia|General Secretary of the CPY]]. He later explained that he survived the Purge by staying out of Spain, where the NKVD was active, and also by avoiding visiting the Soviet Union as much as possible. When first appointed as general secretary, he avoided travelling to Moscow by insisting that he needed to deal with some disciplinary issues in the CPY in Paris. He also promoted the idea that the upper echelons of the CPY should be sharing the dangers of underground resistance within the country.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=134–135}} He developed a new, younger leadership team that was loyal to him, including the Slovene Edvard Kardelj, the Serb, [[Aleksandar Ranković]], and the Montenegrin, [[Milovan Đilas]].{{sfn|West|1995|pp=63–64}} In December 1937, Tito arranged for a demonstration to greet the French foreign minister when he visited Belgrade, expressing solidarity with the French against Nazi Germany. The protest march numbered 30,000 and turned into a protest against the neutrality policy of the Stojadinović government. It was eventually broken up by the police. In March 1938, Tito returned to Yugoslavia from Paris. Hearing a rumour that his opponents within the CPY had tipped off the police, he travelled to Belgrade rather than Zagreb and used a different passport. While in Belgrade, he stayed with a young intellectual, [[Vladimir Dedijer]], who was a friend of Đilas. Arriving in Yugoslavia a few days ahead of the ''[[Anschluss]]'' between Nazi Germany and Austria, he made an appeal condemning it, in which the CPY was joined by the Social Democrats and trade unions. In June, Tito wrote to the Comintern, suggesting that he should visit Moscow. He waited in Paris for two months for his Soviet visa before travelling to Moscow via Copenhagen. He arrived in Moscow on 24 August.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=136–137}}

[[File:Josip Broz Tito's fake Canadian ID, 1939.jpg|thumb|Fake Canadian ID, "Spiridon Mekas", used for returning to Yugoslavia from [[Moscow]], 1939]]

On his arrival in Moscow, Tito found that all Yugoslav communists were under suspicion. The NKVD arrested and executed nearly all of the CPY's most prominent leaders, including over 20 members of the Central Committee. Both Tito's ex-wife Polka and his wife Koenig/Bauer were arrested as "imperialist spies". Both were eventually released, Polka after 27 months in prison. Tito therefore needed to make arrangements for the care of Žarko, who was 14. He placed him in a boarding school outside [[Kharkov]], then at a school at [[Penza]], but he ran away twice and was eventually taken in by a friend's mother. In 1941, Žarko joined the Red Army to fight the invading Germans.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=137}} Some of Tito's critics argue that his survival indicates he must have denounced his comrades as [[Trotskyists]]. He was asked for information on a number of his fellow Yugoslav communists, but according to his own statements and published documents, he never denounced anyone, usually saying he did not know them. In one case, he was asked about the Croatian communist leader Kamilo Horvatin, but wrote ambiguously, saying that he did not know whether he was a Trotskyist. Nevertheless, Horvatin was not heard of again. While in Moscow, he was given the task of assisting Ćopić to translate the ''[[History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)]]'' into [[Serbo-Croatian]], but they had only got to the second chapter when Ćopić too was arrested and executed. He worked on with a fellow surviving Yugoslav communist, but a Yugoslav communist of German ethnicity reported an inaccurate translation of a passage and claimed it showed Tito was a Trotskyist. Other influential communists vouched for him, and he was exonerated. A second Yugoslav communist denounced him, but the action backfired, and his accuser was arrested. Several factors were at play in his survival: his working-class origins, lack of interest in intellectual arguments about socialism, attractive personality, and capacity to make influential friends.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=138–140}}

While Tito was avoiding arrest in Moscow, Germany was placing pressure on Czechoslovakia to cede the [[Sudetenland]]. In response to this threat, Tito organised a call for Yugoslav volunteers to fight for Czechoslovakia, and thousands of volunteers came to the Czechoslovak embassy in Belgrade to offer their services. Despite the eventual [[Munich Agreement]] and Czechoslovak acceptance of the annexation and the fact that the volunteers were turned away, Tito claimed credit for the Yugoslav response, which worked in his favour. By this stage, Tito was well aware of the realities in the Soviet Union, later saying he "witnessed a great many injustices" but was too heavily invested in communism and too loyal to the Soviet Union to step back.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|pp=140–141}} After restoring the image of a decisive, coherent and non-fractional CPY to the [[Executive Committee of the Communist International|Comintern executives]], Tito was by October 1938 reassured that the party would not be disestablished; he was then tasked to compile two resolutions on plans of future CPY activities. Hoping to return to Yugoslavia before the [[1938 Yugoslavian parliamentary election]] in December, Tito requested permission to do so from Comintern's [[Georgi Dimitrov]] several times, saying that his stay in Moscow was greatly prolonged, but to no avail.{{sfn|Filipič|1979|pp=18}} The Comintern formally ratified his resolutions on 5 January 1939, and he was appointed General Secretary of the CPY.{{sfn|Ridley|1994|p=135}} After his appointment to the party's highest position of leadership, the newly formed [[Politburo]] of the Central Committee retained the old leadership team of Tito, Kardelj, Đilas, Aleksandar Ranković, and [[Ivo Lola Ribar]] (the representative of [[SKOJ]]) and expanded it with [[Franc Leskošek]], [[Miha Marinko]] and [[Josip Kraš]], and by the end of 1939 and start of 1940, [[Rade Končar]] and [[Ivan Milutinović]].{{sfn|Filipič|1979|pp=21}}