Blind-Alleys on the Road to Communism: ‘Isms’ of the Automobile Sport in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1945–1992

Abstract

This paper analyses the development of automobile sport in Yugoslavia, using it as a specific lens on the Yugoslav society and political system. Focusing on races on the track of the Belgrade Grand Prix of 1939, which new socialist authorities used for propaganda purposes until the late 1950s, the ‘national class’ competition as the first professional competition in the country, and the Soviet-style Sutjeska Rally, my analysis shows that automobile sport in socialist Yugoslavia featured a variety of characteristics of both ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ sport. This contradictory situation included parallel existence of many ‘isms’ – ‘amateurism’ and ‘professionalism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘unitarianism’, ‘propagandism’, ‘commercialism’, and many more. Being in a constant flux between these opposite pairs, automobile sport in Yugoslavia clearly reflected many of the contradictions of the Yugoslav state system.