Josip Broz Entering the Socialist Movement in Croatia, 1907-1913

The author pointed to some basical problems he discovered in the biography of Josip Broz of the period preceeding the First World War; his analysis brought him to some interesting facts and conclusions. The difficult economic period of his native region forced Josip Broz, even in his childhood, to finding his own place in that-time social structure. He joined the agile worker movements of Croatia entering thus that loose and changeable society. He was to choose from two paths: to strive to even modest change upwards inside the existing social structure i. e. to obtain better position in the existing society, or to think as well as work on changing the complete social structure. The contacts with socialist ideas and socialist movement, from the very early ones in Sisak to more thorough ones in Zagreb and later in Middle Europe, turned him to take up the second possibility - changing that social structure where peasants and workers made the basis but also the bottom of society (becoming an educated and engaged worker and then a revolutionary represented in itself a special kind of "social up-coming"). His turning to such ideas was of basical importance, while the matter got growing with the world war and socialist revolution in Russia. There opened a historical process which was going to change Josip Broz into Tito