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Franjo Tuðman (May 14, 1922 - [[December
9]], 1999) was the first president of Croatia in
the 1990s.

Tuðman'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 spelled
""Tudjman"".

The Communist

Franjo Tuðman was born in Veliko Trgovišæe, a village in
the Hrvatsko Zagorje region of northern Croatia.

During WWII Tuðman fought on the side of
Tito's partisans, where he
also met his future wife, Ankica. 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.

Others have observed that Tuðman 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 guerilla
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.

Tuðman left active army service in 1961 to found the
Institut za historiju radnièkoga pokreta Hrvatske
(""Institute for the History of Croatia's Workers'
Movement""), and remained its director until 1967.

The Dissident

Apart from the book on guerilla warfare, Tuðman wrote a
series of articles  attacking the Yugoslav
Communist 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 peoples""), 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 [[World War
II|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 reformist movement that was
actually set in motion by Tito and Croatian party
chief Bakariæ 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 manifestation of dissatisfaction
with the position of the Croatian people in
Yugoslavia, and it began to threaten the party's
political monopoly. The result was a brutal suppression by
Tito, who used the military and the police to crush
what he saw as the threat to his undivided power - Bakariæ
quickly distanced himself from the Croatian Communist
leadership that he himself helped gain power earlier, and
sided with the Yugoslav ruler.

During the turbulent 1971, Tuðman's role was that of the
dissident who questioned the central myth of modern
Serbian nationalism, the number of victims of
the Jasenovac concentration camp, as well as the role
of centralism in Yugoslav and the continuation of
ideology of unitary ""Yugoslavism"". Tuðman felt that this
originally Croatian romantic pan-Slavic idea from the
19th century had been mutated in harsh realities in both
Yugoslav states into the front for a pan-Serbian drive for
domination over non-Serb peoples — from economy and
a