Word: broz
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...sides of the Balkan massif, Europe's two greatest powers were approaching a junction in the Balkans. Waiting at this mountainous meeting place of empires was a man who had newly risen into political history after a cryptic lifetime in the political underground: Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito. Tossed up suddenly in the slipstream of military and political movements, he was as little familiar to most of the western world as the lands he defended. But his two years of constant guerrilla warfare with the Germans had made one fact clear: in an area of decision...
...details of Tito's life history were obscure, but the results were plowed deep in Tito's gullied face. But before the plowing began, before he was even Tito, he was plain Josip Broz. His father was a Croat blacksmith in the village of Klanjec, near Zagreb. He had scarcely begun to learn his father's trade when the shot with which the Serbian nationalist, Govirlo Princip, killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, shot young Josip Broz into the Austrian Army...
...sent to the Eastern Front. Then, like Bela Kun, the future head of Soviet Hungary, and Tibor Szamuely, the future head of Hungary's Red Terror, Josip Broz was captured by the Russians, or deserted to them. It was 1915. He was 19. The Russians packed him off to Omsk, in Siberia...
...Omsk Josip Broz saw the mass execution of 1,600 striking railroad workers by Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. When the Red Army reached Omsk, Josip Broz joined up. The young Croat who didn't want to fight for the Habsburgs fought through the hard, bitter years of Russia's civil wars...
When they were over, Broz entered a school in Moscow. It was probably the West School, where foreign Communists were trained for ticklish work in foreign countries. For in Moscow the blacksmith's son from Klanjec had acquired a philosophy of life and action (Marxism), a party (the Communists) for which to work, conspire,* live and if necessary die, a Russian wife and son Zharko, who was decorated last year by Marshal Stalin for heroic service in the Red Army. Like most Russian-trained Communists, Broz soon acquired a dangerous mission also...