Josip Broz Tito

Born in 1892 in what was then Austria-Hungary, Josip Broz became the youngest sergeant major in its army before being wounded and captured by Russians in World War I. Sent to a work camp in the Urals, he joined the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war that followed. Returning to the Balkans in 1920, he rose through Yugoslavia's Communist Party, taking control by 1937. During World War II he commanded the Partisans, a guerrilla force considered the most effective resistance in occupied Europe, and by late 1943 held power with Allied backing. As prime minister and then president, he built a communist state but broke with Stalin in 1948, becoming the first Eastern Bloc leader to defy Soviet hegemony and survive. He co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, developed an idiosyncratic model of socialist self-management, and favored decentralization to contain ethnic tensions. A cult of personality sustained his image for years after his 1980 death, but the rotating presidency that replaced him couldn't hold: twelve years later Yugoslavia fractured into independent states and descended into a decade of interethnic war.