How long was tito president

Although many of his partisans were Communist, Tito's rapidly growing forces included many non-Communists. Although Yugoslavia's government in exile supported the Serbian resistance leader Mihajlovi, Tito's army and its successes soon eclipsed those of Mihajlovi and his chetniks.

His successes were based on swift guerrilla tactics, his own magnetic personality, and the appeal of his political idea of a federated Yugoslavia to non-Serbian elements. After initial cooperation, Tito and Mihajlovi soon clashed. By , Tito had a large army and controlled a much of Yugoslavia, centered in Bosnia.

Tito had Soviet support from the first, and in he received full British and U. After he liberated Belgrade in late , he negotiated the merger of the royal Yugoslav government and his own council of national liberation. In March, , he became head of the new federal Yugoslav government. Already the virtual dictator of Yugoslavia, he won a major election victory in November, , at the head of the Communist-dominated National Liberation Front.

King Peter II was deposed, and a republic was proclaimed. As premier and minister of defense from , Marshal Tito ruled Yugoslavia as a dictator, suppressing internal opposition, executing Mihajlovi and jailing Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb. He nationalized Yugoslav industry and undertook a planned economy. He didn't attempt to collectivize the small farmers, but forced them, under threat of severe penalties, to furnish large portions of their produce to the state.

In the Cominform accused Tito of having strayed from the Party line. The leader of communist Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, died after a long illness on May 4, , just days before his 88th birthday.

There was an outpouring of emotion over the death of Tito, who refused to let his Balkan country come under the Soviet thumb and kept a federation of different ethnicities and religions together. On Sunday, May 4, Tito is described as being in a "very grave" and "critical" condition in the latest of the bulletins which reported updates on his health since he was admitted to hospital in Ljubljana nearly four months earlier.

The news of his death finally comes in the early evening, in a statement from the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and the Presidency. It is addressed to "the working class, all the working people and citizens, and all the nations and nationalities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He had been admitted to hospital in January following circulation problems caused by diabetes and had his left leg amputated, before suffering multiple complications.

The daily health bulletins had described kidney failure, pneumonia, septicaemia, internal bleeding, liver damage and a comatose state. Television starts broadcasting a long tribute to the man who led the communist resistance to the German Nazi invaders, before founding the people's republic in He adopted the pseudonym Tito in the s after five years in prison for activism in the Yugoslav Communist Party, which was banned at the time. Educated in Moscow, at the end of World War II he became leader of a group of nations which had lived in a state of mutual suspicion and hatred that had torn them apart for centuries.

Tito preserved unity with an iron grip. The man who would be named Yugoslavia's president-for-life split with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, grouping states advocating a middle course between the Eastern and Western blocs. A tough character physically and mentally, and an inspiring and likeable leader, he had fought bravely in the First World War, served five years in prison as a Communist agitator and gone to Moscow, where he survived a ruthless purge of Yugoslavs in the Soviet Union by Stalin, who had some of them liquidated.

During the Second World War he led the Communist partisan resistance to the German occupation in a rivalry with the anti-Communist Chetniks which turned into a civil war. He set up a revolutionary government, won the support of the Allies, established the postwar regime and executed the Chetnik leader, Draza Mihailovic.

Now, however, the Soviet-style drive to transform Yugoslavia into an industrial state and collectivise agriculture had patently failed, economic breakdown threatened and the country had broken with the Soviet Union.

More than , state officials who had failed to change their stance rapidly enough were dismissed in , and some were sent to prison camps. Pro-Soviet sympathies in the army and air force were discouraged. Aid was sought and received from America. A law to have factories run by elected councils of their workers was passed in , and the collectivisation drive officially eased up in Cast out of the Soviet bloc, Yugoslavia was trying to find its own Communist path forward.