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'Franjo Tuđman' (May 14, 1922 - December 10, 1999) was the first president of Croatia in the 1990s.
Tuđman's political party HDZ (''Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica'', Croatian Democratic Union) won the first post-communist multi-party elections in 1990 and he became the president of the country. A year later he proclaimed the Croatian declaration of independence. He was reelected twice and remained in power until his death in late 1999. In English, his surname is usually spelled 'Tudjman'.

Contents

The Partisan

The Dissident

The national program

The President of Croatia

Controversy surrounding ''The Horrors of War''

Published works

Legacy

Family

Sources

External links

The Partisan

Franjo Tuđman was born in Veliko Trgovišće, a village in the Hrvatsko Zagorje region of northern Croatia, then a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
During WWII Tuđman, together with his brother Stjepan, fought on the side of Tito's partisans. During the fighting his brother was killed in 1943, but Franjo had better luck, finding the love of his life and future wife, Ankica. Shortly after the end of the war his father Stjepan, who was an important member of the Croatian Peasant Party, killed his wife and then himself, according to the police finding. Franjo Tuđman declared that his parents had been killed by the Ustaša at that time but after the breakup of Yugoslavia he blamed communists for the killing. This version has become the official version in modern Croatia. After the war's end Tuđman worked in the Ministry of Defence in Belgrade, attending military academy in 1957. In this Belgrade period of his life he became the president of FK Partizan which in the time of his presidency created many jokes.
He became one of the youngest generals in the Yugoslav People's Army in the 1960s — a fact which some observers linked to the fact that he sprung from Zagorje, a region that gave few Communist partisans, except for Tito himself.
Others have observed that Tuđman was probably the most educated of Tito's generals (as regards military history, strategy and the interplay of politics and warfare) — this claim is supported by the fact that generations of future Yugoslav generals based their general exam theses on his voluminous book on guerrilla warfare throughout history: ''Rat protiv rata'' ("War against war"), 1957, which covers topics as diverse as Hannibal's drive across the Alps, the Spanish war against Napoleon and Yugoslav partisan warfare.
Tuđman left active army service in 1961 to found the ''Institut za historiju radničkoga pokreta Hrvatske'' ("Institute for the History of Croatia's Workers' Movement"), and remained its director until 1967.

The Dissident

Apart from the book on guerrilla warfare, Tuđman wrote a series of articles criticizing the Yugoslav Socialist establishment, and was subsequently expelled from the Party. His most important book from that period was ''Velike ideje i Mali narodi'' ("Great ideas and small nations"), a monograph on political history that collided with central dogmas of Yugoslav Communist elite with regard to the interconnectedness of the national and social elements in the Yugoslav revolutionary war (during WWII).
In 1971 he was sentenced to two years of prison for alleged subversive activities during the so-called "Croatian Spring".
The Croatian Spring was a national movement that was actually set in motion by Tito and Croatian party chief Bakarić in the climate of growing liberalism in the late 60s. It was initially a tepid and ideologically controlled party liberalism, but it soon grew into mass nationalist based manifestation of dissatisfaction with the position of the Croatian people in Yugoslavia, and threatening the party's political monopoly. The result was suppression by Tito, who used the military and the police to crush what he saw as separatism, and the threat to the party's influence - Bakarić quickly distanced himself from the Croatian Communist leadership that he himself helped gain power earlier, and sided with the Yugoslav president. However, Tito took the protesters demands i