Tito and the vision of Yugoslavian unification

Tito the Grand Unifier

Marshal Tito, aka Josip Broz, was the communist dictator that unified many Balkan republics into one country called Yugoslavia after the second world war. He came to power as a leader during that great world conflict against Hitler and realized that with his split with Stalin; he needed more than Croatia to stand up to the formidable Soviet Empire. Thus, he incorporated Macedonia, Slovenia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, renaming this motley group, Yugoslavia which literally means “the Union of Southern Slavs.”

Tito was secretary-general (later president) of the Communist Party (League of Communists) of Yugoslavia (1939–80), the supreme commander of the Yugoslav Partisans (1941–45) and Yugoslav People’s Army (1945–80), marshal (1943–80), premier (1945–53), and eventually president (1953–80) of Yugoslavia. 

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Tito’s Vision born of aspirations

A shrewd man, he was quick to see that religion divided the countries under his rule: Croatia and Slovenia in the north and west are Roman Catholic, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia to the east and south-east are Eastern Orthodox thanks to the Ottoman Empire Bosnia-Herzegovina are a mix of Eastern Orthodox and Muslim thanks to the many years of Ottoman rule. Thus the various groups because of their various religions and cultures could not get along.

The problem started in the fourth century A.D. when the authorities in Rome and Byzantium agreed on a dividng line between the eastern and western branches of the empire. This line—called the Theodosian¹—ran through what was called Yugoslavia. By the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries various South Slav tribes entered the area and settled in often widely separated and sometimes isolated valleys and plains. In due course the Slovenes, Croats, and Bosnians became Roman Catholics and, adopted the Latin alphabet because they were in the “Roman” area. Serbs, Macedonians, and Montenegrins embraced the Eastern Orthodox faith and with it the Cyrillic alphabet because they were in the eastern area.

Since the area was large and the population sparse run-ins between ²the two fractions were seldom, but then when the Ottoman Empire conquered the Batlics, ruling from 1300 to 1800 they transplanted many of their own population, all of whom were Sunni Moslems. The the parts of the country not conquered by the Ottomans were, with the exception of Montenegro, were subjugated by the Habsburg Empire, the predecessor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire whose dominant religion was Roman Catholicism.

Then the twentieth century erupted with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo, now the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in June 1914. That triggered the various European treaties forcing the culmination of World War I. At the outbreak of the war, the Austro-Hungarian army contained numerous subject peoples, among them Croats and Slovenes. One such soldier was a former metalworker who had been born in a Croatian village to a Croatian father and a Slovenian mother, our man Josip Broz.

Early in the war Josip was seriously wounded and captured by Russian troops. He recovered from his wounds in a hospital in Russia and was working as a prison laborer when the Russian Revolution broke out and escaped. He made his way to Saint Petersburg and was there at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1918. After Lenin rose to power, Josip returned to his homeland in September 1920 as an enthusiastic, if unsophisticated Communist, but he experienced one thing that convinced him Communism would be the great unifier that would solve his nations problems.

By the mid-1930s he had become a skilled party organizer and during extended periods of imprisonment in Yugoslav jails because of his activities, acquired a solid grounding in Marxist-Leninist history and doctrine. In 1937 the Comintern³ appointed him general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY).

The rearing of Josip

But before all of that, Josip aka Tito was born in northern Croatia on 7 May 1892 (Old Style aka the Julian Calendar) or 19th May (N.S. aka Gregorian). He changed his country over to latter and so it is used for his chart. His parents, as mentioned, were culturally different; his father Croatian and his mother from neighboring Slovenia, but both though were from the Zagorje, or the ‘land beyond the Mountains,” and devout Roman Catholics. While his his adulthood, Tito was atheist, Josip was christened and baptised in his parents religion.

By his adolescence, though, he began to see the world was changing and joined the Communists, not because of mutual philosophical inclinations, but because he saw they were the rising tide that would float his aspirations. This shows up with his Lilith in the fifth house (a creative use of envy) square his Moon (getting impetus from his emotions) while sextile (support from ) Jupiter in the tenth. As Jupiter is in the tenth with militant Aries, he became a professional “agitator’ in Croatia encouraging others to throw off their traditions and aspire, like himself, to the opportunities beckoning in a new world order and revolting.

Pluto and Tito

When he was born, Pluto, then unknown, but if it had been it was was partile to Neptune, the planet that reminds one of their obligation to self. Found in his eleventh house, these two planets union suggests his dream of recreating his own being was tied to the times and as they are in the twelfth house the union of his homeland to those surrounding it , which ended up being seven countries and not just the next farm, was the key to his self-development.

This is supported by his rectified ascendant of 23 Cancer 17 with his Moon at 25 Aquarius and thus not in any traditional Ptolemaic aspect. According to Marc Edmund Jones, this gives the native the ability to see the potential in the situation at hand and use it for their benefit. As the Moon is the Lord of his chart, Tito was highly influenced by his surroundings and the people het met.

Jupiter at the top of the chart in the tenth house at 14 Aries 37 gets the Sabian keyword of ‘divorcement” So while Jupiter traditionally is the sign supporting law, legislature and religion here his ambition wanted to divorce himself and all around him from any of those legalistic and restraining ties. Indeed, this was his greatest motivation, and other aspects in his chart to Jupiter support it including the square to Venus in the twelfth of government and self-undoing.

The many loves of Tito

So, if Jupiter tells us of Tito’s ambition it is Venus in the twelfth tells us of his desire to conquer all that he met. This was not only his many wives and paramours, but untrammeled greed and ambition for power lying at it does at 12 Cancer 37, and getting the keyword of “Determination” and the symbol of “one hand slightly flexed with a very prominent thumb projecting out.” He we see that the square, the dynamic urge as Ruth Gerry called it, believing in his inherent supremacy over all others including that of nature and man with his desire to “rule his environment else surrender his own potentiality.”

Though in Cancer, it has no aspect to his ascendant, but it is quincunx to Lilith in the fifthin Scorpio showing how property that belonged to others was the real motive in his quest. From this aspect to Lilith we see how Tito was jealous of others wealth, coming as he did from a poor family, and he was not content in just taking over the neighbor’s lands but all of the lands he could grasp. This was also true in his personal life, of which we know little but second hand, that he had four wives with only the first and fourth lasting more than a couple of years and the last and longest union being Jovanka, a lieutenant colonel in the Yugoslavian army; they had no children. Alas, after Tito’s death she was unfortunate enough to outlive and was stripped of her personal property and belonging , placed under virtual house arrest. She died in Belgrade in 2013 at age 88.

It isn’t that his other wives were necessarily luckier either. His third wife, the Slovenian Herta, and also one of his shortest unions (3 years) with whom he had two children. Her marriage was dissolved after she discovered Tito was having an affair with his personal secretary while she had been in a Nazi prison camp and she found work as a government clerk. Herta died in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2010 at 95. Their son, Aleksander Broz aka Miso, is a retired Croatian diplomat.

His second wife, Elsa Johnna Koenig, was a German Communist. She used the nom de guerre of Lucija Bauer and had been married previously to a German communist Ernst Wollweber, whom Hitler sentenced to fifteen years in prison while his widow was sent to Moscow. There she married Tito, who was using the alias Frederich Walter, in October 1938. Walter aka Tito returned circumspectly to work undercover in Yugoslavia, but the two corresponded profusely. After the Soviet Union broke up, these letters became known, as did the records showing Elsa aka Lucija Bauer was shot as a spy for Gestapo on December 29, 1937.

His first wife Pelagia Belousova who married Josip when she was fourteen and he twenty-seven, was arrested as an “imperialist” spy on September 27, 1938 and divorced then. She had Tito had had three children, and despite this setback, Pelagia would live in Moscow for the rest of her life, dying in 1968. Perhaps Pelagia was the luckiest.

No conjunctions = no alliances

What is remarkable about his chart is the lack of conjunctions. This shows that his own forcefulness handled his rise to power. Tito had few associates and fewer friends, but when the Sun-Pluto-Neptune conjunction occurred after the discovery of Pluto in 1930, that changed. It was then, while he was in prison he met his closest compatriot, Ivan Ribar, another Pan-Slavist who also did not want foreign rule in his native country of Croatia — an understandable trait after Hapsburg rule.

This also coincides with his formal adoption of his nom de guerre, Tito. This lack is often, according to Marc Edmund Jones, is the hallmark of a secular humanist: — named not because they have a humanitarian outlook , but because they deal with people in broad impersonal strokes. They are also tend not to be religious and shun such designations, preferring to put power into their own hands then giving it to a deity.

When he died on May 4th 1980, the Yugoslav republics slowly broke up and fell back to their original state of squabbles and war. If he did nothing else, he kept the peace amongst the differing countries and Stalin out of them.

Notes:

This post was updated on 23 September 2026 for the missing tags which resulted in the original post causing WP errors. So I had to delete it and repost as new. This has happened a few times to me and I was told it was because of javascript incompatibilities i.e. the age of the original post.

Bibliography

Most of the history of Tito a is from a book I picked from my local library, part of their massive deaccession, Tito: A Pictorial Biography by Fitzhugh Maclean, . It was one of the many books they could not sell and so was in the “waste pile”, slated to be tossed. The book intrigued me, but filled page after page of pictures of Josip’s family and homeland I was totally intrigued.

Before this I knew was the name and something about what was once Yugoslavia and not much more. I couldn’t never told what the various countries that came out of it were, so in many ways I bit off alot more than I wanted to chew. But it was interesting, and I hope you enjoy it too. If so give the post a like, it certainly helps morale.

Another book I perused, and I mean that literally, was the American University’s area studies book, Yugoslavia. This one was from the Internet Archive that had been updated and published after Tito’s death in 1980.