Edvard Kardelj

Edvard Kardelj (born Jan. 27, 1910, Ljubljana, Austro-Hungarian Empire [now in Slovenia]—died Feb. 10, 1979, Ljubljana, Socialist Republic of Slovenia, Yugos.) was a Yugoslav revolutionary and politician, a close colleague and chosen successor of Josip Broz Tito. He was the chief ideological theoretician of Yugoslav Marxism, or Titoism.

The son of a railroad worker, Kardelj graduated from the Ljubljana Teachers’ College. From the age of 16 he was a member of the outlawed Communist Party, initially in its youth league. He was imprisoned (1930–32) for his trade-union and party activities, and in 1934 he fled into exile, eventually making his way from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, where he received indoctrination in underground methods. It was in 1934, prior to his leaving, that Kardelj first met Tito. Back in Yugoslavia from 1937 on, he was arrested several times and imprisoned.

After the German occupation of Yugoslavia (1941), Kardelj helped organize the resistance front in Slovenia and thereafter accompanied Tito in much of the Partisans’ fighting. After the war he served as vice president (1945–53) under Tito, and he drew up (1946) the Soviet-inspired federal constitution of Yugoslavia. He became one of the country’s major theoreticians and legalists, directing the creation of all the succeeding constitutions of 1953, 1963, and 1974. His ideas strongly influenced subsequent political developments, especially those concerning the nature of national identity and the constitutional position of national minorities, in Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav states.

Over the years Kardelj handled many foreign missions and tasks as well, though he officially held the post of foreign minister only from 1948 to 1953. Throughout, he was a key figure in the collective leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party, known as the League of Communists. Kardelj was the main architect of a theory known as socialist self-management, which served as the basis of Yugoslavia’s political and economic system and distinguished it from the Soviet system. In foreign affairs he pioneered the concept of nonalignment for Yugoslavia between the West and the Soviet Union.