He gained further international attention as a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, alongside Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Sukarno of Indonesia.

In May 1918, the anti-Bolshevik Czechoslovak Legion wrested control of parts of Siberia from Bolshevik forces, the Provisional Siberian Government established itself in Omsk, and Broz and his comrades went into hiding.

At this time, Broz met a 14-year-old local girl, Pelagija "Polka" Belousova [sh], who hid him and then helped him escape to a Kazakh village 64 kilometres (40 mi) from Omsk.

[56][60] Broz again worked maintaining the local mill until November 1919, when the Red Army recaptured Omsk from White forces loyal to the Provisional All-Russian Government of Alexander Kolchak.

Wearing dark spectacles and carrying forged papers, Broz posed as a middle-class technician in the engineering industry, working undercover to contact other CPY members and coordinate their infiltration of trade unions.

[89] After arriving at Lepoglava prison, Broz was employed in maintaining the electrical system and chose as his assistant a middle-class Belgrade Jew, Moša Pijade, who had been given a 20-year sentence for his communist activities.

[106] However, before the Purge really began to erode the ranks of the Yugoslav communists in Moscow, Tito was sent back to Yugoslavia with a new mission, to recruit volunteers for the International Brigades being raised to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Arriving in Yugoslavia a few days ahead of the Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria, he made an appeal condemning it, in which the CPY was joined by the Social Democrats and trade unions.

Several factors were at play in his survival: his working-class origins, lack of interest in intellectual arguments about socialism, attractive personality, and capacity to make influential friends.

Hoping to return to Yugoslavia before the 1938 Yugoslavian parliamentary election in December, Tito requested permission to do so from Comintern's Georgi Dimitrov several times, saying that his stay in Moscow was greatly prolonged, but to no avail.

[134] After the Partisans managed to endure and avoid these intense Axis attacks between January and June 1943, and the extent of Chetnik collaboration became evident, Allied leaders switched their support from Draža Mihailović to Tito.

King Peter II, American President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill joined Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin in officially recognising Tito and the Partisans at the Tehran Conference.

[140] With their strategic right flank secured by the Allied advance, the Partisans prepared and executed a massive general offensive that succeeded in breaking through German lines and forcing a retreat beyond Yugoslav borders.

[141] In the final days of World War II in Yugoslavia, units of the Partisans were responsible for atrocities during Bleiburg repatriations, and accusations of culpability were later raised at the Yugoslav leadership under Tito.

[citation needed] Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito met with the president of the Bishops' Conference of Yugoslavia, Aloysius Stepinac on 4 June 1945, two days after his release from imprisonment.

Harsh repressive measures against dissidents and "enemies of the state" were common from government agents,[155] although not known to be under Tito's orders, including "arrests, show trials, forced collectivisation, suppression of churches and religion".

Although Tito was formally an ally of Stalin after World War II, the Soviets had set up a spy ring in the Yugoslav party as early as 1945, giving way to an uneasy alliance.

[161] The Soviet answer on 4 May admonished Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) for failing to admit and correct its mistakes and went on to accuse them of being too proud of their successes against the Germans, maintaining that the Red Army had saved them from destruction.

[162] An invasion of Yugoslavia was planned to be carried out in 1949 via the combined forces of neighbouring Soviet satellite states of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, followed by the subsequent removal of Tito's government.

On 28 June, the other member countries of the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia, citing "nationalist elements" that had "managed in the course of the past five or six months to reach a dominant position in the leadership" of the CPY.

[182] Nagy's kidnapping, followed by his execution, almost led Yugoslavia to break off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and in 1957 Tito boycotted the ceremonials in Moscow for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, the only communist leader who did not attend.

Tito met many world leaders during his rule, such as Soviet rulers Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev; Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indian politicians Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi; British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher; U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter; other political leaders, dignitaries and heads of state that Tito met at least once in his lifetime included Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Willy Brandt, Helmut Schmidt, Georges Pompidou, Kwame Nkrumah, Queen Elizabeth II, Hua Guofeng, Kim Il Sung, Sukarno, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Suharto, Idi Amin, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Kenneth Kaunda, Gaddafi, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceaușescu, János Kádár, Saddam Hussein and Urho Kekkonen.

Economic reforms encouraged smallscale private enterprise (up to five full-time workers; most of these were family businesses and largest in agriculture)[199] and greatly relaxed restrictions on religious expression.

[212] This ability was put to a test several times during his reign, notably during the Croatian Spring (also referred as the Masovni pokret or Maspok for short, meaning "Mass Movement") when the government suppressed both public demonstrations and dissenting opinions within the Communist Party.

[225] Dominic McGoldrick writes that as the head of a "highly centralised and oppressive" regime, Tito wielded tremendous power in Yugoslavia, with his authoritarian rule administered through an elaborate bureaucracy that routinely suppressed human rights.

Yugoslavia also paid high interest on loans compared to the LIBOR rate, but Tito's presence eased investors' fears since he had proven willing and able to implement unpopular reforms.

"[240] Tito is credited with transforming Yugoslavia from a poor nation to a middle-income one that saw vast improvements in women's rights, health, education, urbanisation, industrialisation, and many other areas of human and economic development.

Close to 100 foreign heads of state visited Tito at the island residence, along with film stars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Carlo Ponti, and Gina Lollobrigida.

[277] His official biographer and then fellow Central Committee-member Vladimir Dedijer said in 1953 that he spoke "Serbo-Croatian ... Russian, Czech, Slovenian ... German (with a Viennese accent) ... understands and reads French and Italian ... [and] also speaks Kazakh.

[289] Tito's reputation as one of the Allied leaders of World War II, along with his diplomatic position as the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, was primarily the cause of the favourable international recognition.