Tito's Widow

From the BBC:
"Tito's widow, Jovanka Broz, dies in Belgrade, aged 88"

The widow of the Communist leader of what was once Yugoslavia has died in Belgrade of a heart attack, aged 88. Jovanka Broz joined the partisans led by Josip Broz Tito who fought the Nazi occupation in World War Two.  She became first Tito's personal secretary, then his third wife in 1952. When Tito died in 1980, she was under house arrest for a time. She lived her last three decades in isolation.  She was left stateless by the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. "With Broz's death, we are left without one of the last most reliable witnesses of our former country's history,'' Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said in a message of condolence.  Jovanka Budisavljevic, an ethnic Serb, was born into a farming family in what is now Croatia on 7 December 1924. She joined the partisans when she was just 17, remaining with them until the end of the war in 1945.  After her marriage to Yugoslavia's authoritarian President Josip Broz - known as Tito - she spent nearly three decades as first lady. But after he died she was accused of plotting a coup.  She lived in seclusion in the Belgrade suburb of Dedinje and rarely gave interviews.  However, in 2009 she spoke to the Politika daily about the period after her husband's death.  "They chased me out ... in my nightgown, without anything, not allowing me even to take a photo of the two of us, or a letter, a book," she said. "I was in isolation and treated like a criminal... I could not leave the house without armed guards." Mrs Broz had been admitted to hospital in August in a serious condition, suffering from heart problems.  Her last wish was to be buried in the House of Flowers in Belgrade, next to Tito.

^ Broz was Tito's wife for the whole time he was leader of Yugoslavia. Tito kept the different ethnicities of the country together by force and when he died that strong hand also disappeared and led to the different Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. I don't know if Tito's authoritative hand did more harm than good or if he should have allowed the different provinces (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo) to become independent. On the one hand Tito kept Yugoslavia on a thin-line between both the East (Soviet Union and its satellites) and the West (the US.) Had the provinces been independent it could have made the Cold War in the Balkans more complicated than it already was. Tito's widow helped him to built Yugoslavia after World War 2, through the Soviet Split and into the 1970s when she became estranged from Tito. A woman who fought the Nazis, helped build a country and lived in the public eye for 3 decades died in obscurity 33 years after her husband. ^

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24602696