Socialist Yugoslavia Research Articles

Spaces of Synthesis

Zlatko Ugljen’s architecture represents a profound engagement with the interplay between regional identity and universal architectural values. Through an analysis of his most significant works, this paper examines how Ugljen synthesizes traditional construction principles with modernist architectural expression, ensuring the continuity of spatial and cultural meaning. Particular attention is given to the concept of the architecture of respect, analyzed within the theoretical frameworks of critical regionalism and the phenomenology of space. Furthermore, the paper investigates the impact of socio-political contexts - ranging from socialist Yugoslavia to the post-conflict reconstruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina - on Ugljen’s architectural practice. Employing a methodological framework that integrates a comparative analysis, case studies, and a phenomenological approach, the paper explores the materiality, spatial organization, and symbolic dimensions of his architectural solutions. The findings suggest that Ugljen’s work serves as a paradigm for contemporary architectural practice, demonstrating how regional identity can be reaffirmed while simultaneously establishing universal spatial values capable of addressing the challenges posed by globalization and cultural fragmentation.

The Muslim Woman and Contemporary Feminist Meaning-Making in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Can AFŽ’s “Veil Lifting“ Campaign be Understood as Wholly Emancipatory?

Local contemporary academic feminist historical accounts of the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ) develing campaign in socialist Yugoslavia overwhelmingly applaud it, understanding it as yet another instance of emancipatory politics and policies championed and defended by the organization. Few accounts problematize the campaign (and later legal ban) and contextualize it in terms of the socialist state’s Orientalist motivations, exclusion of considerations of the bodily autonomy and preferences of those traditional and/or religious Muslim women who wished to continue with such veiling practices. We ask, how do these historical accounts of the AFŽ campaign today appear in contemporary feminist meaning-making at the post-Yugoslav semi-periphery? We conclude that such uncritical contemporary recounting of socialist state Orientalist motivations and a predominant lack of critical feminist grappling with state-ordained undressing of women works to reproduce Orientalist frames of Muslim women as “oppressed”, “backward” and “lacking in agency”. In other words, we show how hasty and superficial feminist remembrance bundling the "veil lifting“ campaign in with other AFŽ triumphs works to normalize the Orientalist readings as well as the idea that the modern secular state-sanctioned ban on (Muslim) women’s dress is by default an emancipatory and acceptable feminist practice.

Building the migration industry: socialist Yugoslavia’s agenda for labour migrants’ pre-departure training

ABSTRACT This article explores labour migrants’ pre-departure training in socialist Yugoslavia, commenced by the Yugoslav government to further structure and control labour emigration and aligns it with the state’s objectives and labour migration policy. Informed by the theory of institutional change, the article utilises primary archival sources produced by Yugoslavia’s key stakeholders in labour emigration. It elucidates the Yugoslav government’s and broader establishment’s attitudes towards pre-departure training, their objectives in implementing pre-departure training, and their efforts to expand and institutionalise it as a regular platform for sending workers abroad. The article argues that the Yugoslav government and broader establishment aimed to establish pre-departure training as a regular platform for sending workers abroad and thus increase the state’s profit and control over labour emigration. Furthermore, the article argues that pre-departure training remained limited in scope due to Yugoslavia’s reluctance to invest the resources necessary for its organisational development and institutionalisation.

The memory and history of the post-Second World War Croatian diaspora in Argentina

ABSTRACT After their defeat in the Second World War, thousands of Croats—including civilians, soldiers and the leadership of the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH)—fled Croatia and established new communities throughout the western world. Argentina was one of the main destinations to which the NDH/Ustaša political and military leadership escaped. From 1945 to 1990, they preserved their narrative on the NDH as a fulfilment of a 1000-year-old yearning for Croatia’s independence, as they pushed for the destruction of socialist Yugoslavia and the recreation of an independent Croatian state. Due to the Cold War context and local anti-Communist alliances, they managed to reconfigure themselves as anti-Communists and victims of Communism in Yugoslavia, and, eventually, as democrats. This paper by Židek historicizes the tools of the intergenerational transmission of memory and political ideas among the post-Second World War Croatian diaspora in Argentina. It is based on extensive archival research from fifteen archives in three countries (Croatia, Serbia and Argentina), as well as semi-structured interviews and oral testimonies across generations of the Croatian diaspora in Argentina. What emerges is a monolithic narrative transmitted across generations, with inevitable reorganizations and reinterpretations to fit each generation’s needs. The resulting common denominator is a coherent and stainless victimization narrative devoid of any uncomfortable elements that would potentially unsettle a coherent collective memory and thereby collective identity.

Chasing the Himalayan Train: Yugoslav Ascents of Eight-Thousanders (1975–1995)

In 1960, when Yugoslavian exploration of the Himalayas began, Aleš Kunaver – the leading visionary of Yugoslav Himalayanism – famously wrote: “If you want to catch a moving train, you have to outrun it!” At that time, the global race for the world’s highest peaks was already over. But in just fifteen years, the Yugoslav climbers not only caught up—they became the locomotive and transformed their country into a mountaineering superpower. Since the mid-1980s, Yugoslav alpinism has been among the world’s elite. Their ascent culminated in 1975 with the extraordinary ascent of the Makalu South Face and continued in 1979 with the ground-breaking ascent of the Everest West Ridge. By 1995, the Yugoslavian mountaineers had climbed all 14 eight-thousanders. This article traces the development of alpinism in socialist Yugoslavia and examines the unique characteristics of its physical culture and sport system. It argues that state-sponsored structures, ideology and mass mobilisation were key to the explosive growth of climbing after the Second World War. The article also examines how mountaineering functioned as an instrument of soft power, symbolising national strength, identity and ambition during the Cold War era.

Domestic Historiography of Socialist Yugoslavia

Domestic Historiography of Socialist Yugoslavia

Hope and despair: Female workers’ professional status in Yugoslav industry

This article explores female blue-collar workers’ professional positions and integration into workplace democracy within the self-managed industry in socialist Yugoslavia. Drawing on an extensive analysis of contemporary reports archived by Yugoslavia’s central women’s organisation, the article explores female blue-collar workers’ professional qualifications and participation in worker education programmes and worker councils – Yugoslavia’s self-managed industry’s core democratic body. The article aims to shows that the prevailing gender and class-based social order within Yugoslav industry hindered female workers’ professional advancement and representation in workplace democracy, perpetuating their secondary status, which was manifested through poor representation in workplace democracy and predominantly low professional qualifications.

Partisans, Prosthetics, and Decolonisation: War, Disability, and Yugoslav Medical Internationalism in Algeria

Abstract The article investigates the medical dimension of Yugoslav assistance to the Front de libération nationale (fln) during and after the Algerian War of Independence, focusing on care for wounded and disabled soldiers and veterans. The article observes Yugoslav socialist medical internationalism as having had immediate and long-term goals, stemming from the experience of the Second World War and the post-war development of disability care, and based on the understanding of the Algerian wartime and post-colonial context as similar to the situation in Yugoslavia. The similarities in the conditions, challenges, and shortages during the Algerian liberation struggle shaped medical assistance, but Yugoslavia also had a very recent experience of building military medicine and institutions of disability care. This article brings together the fields of study of war and medicine, veterans and disability care, and socialist internationalism during decolonisation.

Elusive Development: The Disillusionment of Migration Studies in Socialist Yugoslavia

This article analyses the emergence of modern migration studies in socialist Yugoslavia and their contribution to the debate on the development effects of migration. In the mid-1960s after massive outmigration from Yugoslavia to Western Europe started, the government supported the establishment of migration studies as a new scientific field. This article argues that migration research was initially closely aligned with political agendas. Development was a priority in policymaking, which is why Yugoslav migration research was strongly interested in the development impact of migration. This study shows, however, that scholars became increasingly sceptical about such an effect. Instead, some highlighted the limitations on development of the restrictions on private business created in Yugoslavia’s self-managed economy. The government thus decided to blame the messenger and disbanded the leading migration research centre in Zagreb. This article is based on the analysis of original research from that time, archival documents and expert interviews.

Yugoslavia is (not) a Refugee Country? Refugees between Transit and Integration in an Ever-Changing Socialist State

Abstract Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for refugees hoping to reach the Western Bloc. Those transiting were mainly, but not exclusively, escapees from various countries in the Soviet bloc. A few refugee groups also settled in Yugoslavia against the backdrop of shifts in international constellations, tense relationships with neighboring countries, and transnational mobilizations. This article will first investigate the dichotomy between transit and the few instances of refugees integrating into socialist Yugoslavia. Next, it will investigate the ease of the resettlement process by exploring how the length of time spent in the country was influenced by hierarchies among different refugee groups based on ethnic origin, political allegiances, class, and which opportunities for resettlement were available to whom. Finally, it will reflect on how the changing role of temporary refuge or permanent haven that Yugoslavia ascribed to itself was constructed and challenged by the host society, potential countries of resettlement, and the refugees themselves.

Sacred Music as a Subversive Force in Socialist Yugoslavia

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia that had organised the partisan army to fight against the German Nazi forces as occupiers in World War II was well prepared for establishing its one-party system after the war. In March 1945, the Central Committee of the Party of Yugoslavia decided that control over culture in the new state should be institutionalised and very promptly a department for propaganda (Agitprop) was founded within that highest political body. The Union of Serbian Composers followed the general line of disciplining creative artists and in one of its typical statements it recommended that its members should “develop and help the fight against influences of idealistic conceptions, decadency and the vulgarisation of music”. After the conflict and break with the USSR in 1948 and the resulting rapprochement of Yugoslavia to Western countries, the conditions for a more liberal cultural climate were gradually built, enabling thus a quicker development in the direction of contemporary Western compositional trends. Criticism of modernism, decadence, and experimentalism observed in some of the newly composed music lasted for some time more, finally calming down after 1960. However, censorship subsisted in Yugoslavia for longer, but outside strictly art music: the church music sphere was always perceived as belonging to oppositional and enemy activities. In the article are examined the attitudes of the cultural officials both towards performing sacred music composed in the past, and the use of church melodies in new works.

Poetic Migrations within Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement

Abstract This article analyzes the Yugoslav poetry festival, The Poetry Evenings in Struga, Macedonia as a catalyst of transnational poetry exchanges on the fringes of Europe between 1961 and 1990. It examines to what extent the organizers, the participating poets and the literary output generated by the festival (anthologies, journals, translations etc.) contributed to the promotion of poetry as world literature. By evoking a migratory poetics through various means and practices, the festival intended to further transnational solidarity as one of the central tenets of the Non-Aligned Movement. The three crucial elements of this migratory poetics were: 1) the subversion of spatial and political categories of the time, specifically those of an eastern and western bloc, invoking an ideal of poetry that was constantly oscillating between the local and the global, and which particularly recognized those marginalized within the dominant political power dynamic; 2) the promotion of multilingualism and translation, particularly from and into minor languages (the festival’s main languages were Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian) and 3) the invitation and recognition of authors who were either internally or geographically displaced from their countries of origin due to their non-conformist and dissident views.

The State Symbols of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Twentieth Century

This paper explores the relatively frequent changes of symbols that had been used to represent the land, province, territory and state of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the twentieth century. Throughout this time the small multi-ethnic Balkan country had mostly been a part or unit of larger state structures, such as the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (1878-1918), Royal (1918-1941) and Socialist Yugoslavia (1943-1992). In 1992 it managed to gain its independence which was then followed by a three-year-long brutal military aggression and armed conflict that ended in 1995. Seeing as each regime change also required an adjustment of symbols which would have reflected the newly established political realities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this case study can serve as an appropriate illustration of the significant role symbols can play in modern state-building processes and construction of collective identities. In analysing these changes, the author examined a number of legal texts and contemporary discussions, revealing that the political elites responsible for designing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s symbols often oscillated between traditional heraldic inspirations from the Middle Ages and the unconventional modern desire for neutral solutions.

FINIS AFRICAE : Imaginarna Afrika Vladimira Stojšina

The paper thematizes the role of the topos of imaginary Africa in the novel Cinema in a Matchbox (Bioskop u kutiji šibica) by Vladimir Stojšin. The motif of Africa is present in literary works for children of socialist Yugoslavia, but the role of imaginary Africa in Stojšin’s work does not fit into the themes of “socialist exoticism”, primarily due to the absence of an ideological component. On the other hand, Stojšin’s Africa is not a suitable topic for contemporary imagology. The paper, using a minimal imagological conceptual apparatus as a means of interpretation, attempts to define the specifics of the use of this motif in the aforementioned work, both in terms of content and form, since the entire composition of the novel is determined by the delays resulting from the postponement of the journey to “Africa”, which at the end of it all experiences an inglorious finis.

The Serbian Identity of FK Crvena zvezda (FC Red Star Belgrade) in the Socialist Era: Perspectives from Memoirs and Biographies

The article argues that the Crvena zvezda Football Club (FC Red Star Belgrade) maintained both Serbian and pan-Serbi­an identity during the socialist era (1945–1991), based on primary sources such as memoirs, and biographies. With no Serbian dy­nasty or state, and the Serbian Orthodox Church marginalized, FK Crvena zvezda became a unifying factor for the Serbian people in socialist Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia-Uruguay Relations: Diplomacy, Trade, and Emigration (1946–1955)

The article analyzes socialist Yugoslavia’s stance towards Uruguay in the decade following the Second World War, using ar­chival materials, relevant scholarship, and contemporary newspa­per reporting. The introduction outlines diplomatic ties, beginning with Uruguay’s recognition of communist Yugoslavia and ending with the FNRJ embassy’s de facto independence in Montevideo. The section on economic cooperation examines trade exchanges over the entire period, focusing on existing contracts and trade volume. The final section explores Yugoslav emigrants’ activities in Uruguay, including their organization and connections to their homeland.

Kužiš, stari moj

Despite all the difficulties of post-WWII scarcity, the state apparatus of the new, socialist Yugoslavia recognized the importance of the fledgling film production for affirmation of the new social relations. The ‘partisan’ period of Yugoslav cinema was followed by the soc-realist period of administrative management which set the foundation for contemporary film production in Yugoslavia. Cinema was considered a new socialist art governed by the principles of ‘people’s realism’. Contemporary social reality was portrayed not as it was, but as it ought to be, aligning with the expectations of the new man and society. This paper follows chronologically the changes in feature films of socialist Yugoslavia from the medium of promotion of the socialist society to the medium of reflection of its crises and reforms. From the film sagas about the heroes of postwar revival, shock workers and visionaries of a better society, to the bitter portrayals of aged and disillusioned partisans, corrupted officials who abuse the self-management system, ailing miners and depressed railmen, Gastarbeiters in the limbo of economic migrations, etc. Yugoslav cinema opens a specific perspective on the crises and reforms of Yugoslav socialism which is worth taking a closer look at.

The Denationalisation of Agricultural Land and Forests in Slovenia: Unfolding a DecadesLong Journey

The article analyses the denationalisation of agricultural land and forests in post-communist Slovenia, in the aftermath of its departure from socialist Yugoslavia in 1991. It begins with a historical overview of the relevant nationalisation measures adopted during and after the Second World War on the territory of Slovenia. It then analyses the prerequisites for, and the procedural rules on, the restitution of agricultural land and forests as set out in the Act on Denationalisation of 1991, and its further amendments, primarily shaped by decisions of the Constitutional Court. Special legislation on the return of property to agrarian communities and their members, as well as cooperatives, is also analysed. The article also focuses on the legal and procedural nuances that have shaped the denationalisation process in Slovenia, which after more than 30 years is finally in its closing stage.

Social Ownership and Restitution of Agricultural Land in Croatia

This paper discusses the state of agricultural land in Croatia from a historical perspective. It first discusses the genesis and development of collectivisation of agricultural land in Croatia after the Second World War, particularly with reference to the idiosyncrasies of Yugoslav socialist property as compared to traditional Soviet doctrines. The developments are characterised by gradual changes in legal status as reflections of changing ideologies and policies during the socialist period concerning self-management, as well as sectoral developments (cooperative and industrial sectors). The paper goes on to analyse the transformation of social ownership over agricultural land, both in terms of its direct transformation into state ownership, as well as its in-kind restitution to former rights-holders or their descendants, particularly referencing the causes and consequences of various problems in achieving initial privatisation goals. The paper finally draws conclusions on the current state of agricultural land policies and its prospects.

Origins of Modernity: Plečnik and Grabrijan

The first part of this research is based on the analysis of several articles published by Dušan Grabrijan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, his book Plečnik in njegova šola (Plečnik and His School), and the analysis of Grabrijan’s teaching method rooted in Auguste Choisy’s book Histoire de l’architecture (Choisy, 1899), published as a study script. The book Plečnik in njegova šola (Grabrijan, 1968) is based on Grabrijan’s published and unpublished texts, some of which were originally written during his WWII imprisonment. It attempts to critically contextualize, evaluate, and present Plečnik’s work. The book was edited by his wife, Prof. Nada Grabrijan, and published posthumously in 1968.One of the first three of Plečnik’s graduates, Dušan Grabrijan, is the author of the Memorial to Slovenian Modernity in Ljubljana Žale Cemetery (dedicated to Ivan Cankar, Dragotin Kette, and Josip Murn, with Oton Župančič’s memorial added later, designed by his son, architect Marko Župančič), built between 1924-25 as a result of a winning student competition in Plečnik’s seminar. The memorial was commissioned and funded by Milena Rohrmann. The composition is tripartite, with a reference to Mount Triglav, consisting of three joint columns, of which Ivan Cankar is the tallest and placed in the center. The memorial follows Plečnik’s design principles.The final part of the paper will examine Plečnik’s modernity and his classical yet modern understanding of the architectural discipline, his ‘flexible classicism’ with his inventiveness, playfulness, daring upcycling, experimentation with materials, forms, and structures, all within the frame of highly developed local crafts, not industry. Indeed, the building industry only really developed after WWII in socialist Yugoslavia. Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt were among the first architects in the region to face the new challenges in architecture. They were trying to answer the new questions: How to connect the new role of an architect, industrialization, and new social needs with the mosaic of local cultures, contexts, and communities, and how to apply Plečnik’s human scale to the modernist architecture of the Balkans?