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JOSIP BROZ TITO: NATIONAL QUESTION IN YUGOSLAVIA IN THE LIGHT OF THE LIBERATION WAR Title: Nacionalno pitanje u Jugoslaviji u svjetlosti Narodnooslobodilačke borbe (National question in Yugoslavia in the light of the Liberation War) Originally published: Proleter No. 16, September 1942 Language: Serbo-Croatian The excerpts used are from Josip Broz Tito, Borba za oslobođenje Jugoslavije I, 1941–1945 (Beograd: Kultura, 1947), pp. 130–148. About the author Josip Broz Tito (originally named Josip Broz) [1892, Kumrovec (present-day Croatia) – 1980, Ljubljana]: politician, the leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1945 until his death. He was born into a poor peasant family, of a Slovene mother and a Croatian father, in the Croatian region of Zagorje. Between 1907 and 1910, he learned the locksmith’s trade in Sisak. He then worked in Zagreb as a metal-worker, where, he became part of the socialist movement. During the First World War, he served as a non-commissioned officer in the Austrian army and took part in combat on the Eastern front in Galicia, where he ended up as a prisoner of war in 1915. After the revolutionary clashes in 1917, he fled first to Petrograd and then to Siberia. In 1920, he went back to what had in the meanwhile become the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where, as a Communist Party organizer, he continued to work under strong regime pressure. He was imprisoned between 1928 and 1934. In 1934, he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (hereafter CPY) and adopted the code name Tito. He spent the next two years in Moscow working for the Balkan section of the Communist International (Comintern). After his return to the country in 1937 with a Comintern assignment to purge dissident elements from the CPY, he was appointed the Party’s secretary general. In this capacity he followed faithfully Comintern policies, thus contesting Serbian policies towards other Yugoslav nationalities and schemes to fragment the Yugoslav state. Following the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia and attack on the USSR in 1941, Tito organized and led the communist anti-fascist resistance against the Germans and their Croatian allies in what became known as the Liberation War of 1941–1945. In 1942, the partisan movement and the communist-dominated provisional government under his leadership came into conflict with the Chetniks, a Serbian resistance movement that favored the restoration of pre-war monarchy. After unsuccessful attempts to reconcile the rival groups, the Allies gave their support to 482 SOCIALISM AND THE NATIONALITY QUESTION Tito in 1944, and a year later recognized him as prime minister, thus clearing the way for the Communist Party’s monopoly over power in post-war Yugoslavia. Josip Broz Tito was the first post-war president of Yugoslavia, later to be proclaimed president of the state for life. During the 1950s and 1960s, he first insisted on the need to build a new type of community based on the idea of belonging to the same Yugoslav nation. Starting at the end of the 1960s, Tito changed his attitude towards acknowledging the importance of national differences, claiming that the co-existence of the different nationalities should be based on the concept of “brotherhood and unity.” Although the ideology of “brotherhood and unity” prevailed until the very end of Yugoslavia, yielding varied levels of dedication among the public, there are opinions that it was exactly the national identities, energies and sentiments it had attempted to suppress that engendered the wars and violence of the 1990s. Main works: Nacionalno pitanje u Jugoslaviji u svetlu Narodnooslobodilačke borbe [National question in Yugoslavia in the light of the Liberation War] (1942); Borba za oslobođenje Jugoslavije [Struggle for the liberation of Yugoslavia] (1945); Izgradnja nove Jugoslavije [Building of the new Yugoslavia] (1950). Context The text, written in 1942, represents the communist view on the national question in interwar Yugoslavia, and on the question of the borders of the future state. This view is inscribed in a long and influential leftist tradition in the political history of Serbia, starting with Svetozar Marković and including names such as Svetozar Miletić, Nikola Pašić, Pera Todorović, Mita Cenić and Dragoljub Jovanović among its major proponents. The Communist Party started to organize itself in the early 1920s within harsh political circumstances and under repression by the regime. Still, it came to articulate a clear political alternative to the nationalist policies of the ruling elite in the years prior to the Second...

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