Communist Yugoslavia Research Articles

Beyond ideological platitudes: socialism and psychiatry in Eastern Europe

For both contemporaneous commentators and historians, psychiatry within what was Communist Europe has largely been discussed through the prism of politics and ideology. Recently, scholars have begun to debate the extent to which psychiatric practices within post-WWII Eastern Europe were beholden to the ideological aspirations of the political elite. This paper enters into these debates by suggesting the need for more nuance in how historians analyse the relationship between ideology and psychiatry in this context. Specifically, it argues that there is a need to differentiate between psychiatric practices that were socialist by design—where professional knowledge was theoretically guided by ideological considerations—and those that were socialist by default—where practices were shaped by the socialist context without being meaningfully inspired by ideology. In order to demonstrate these distinctions, this paper reflects upon psychiatric developments within Communist Yugoslavia (1945–1991). By drawing a clearer distinction between “socialist by design” and “socialism by default”, it becomes easier to reconnect Eastern Europe to the broader historiography of twentieth century psychiatry, while simultaneously providing new insights into the experience of state-sponsored Communism.

Batović, Ante Benjamin Bilski (review)

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 384 Batović, Ante. The Croatian Spring: Nationalism, Repression and Foreign Policy Under Tito. Translated, edited and expanded by Ante Batović and Benjamin Bilski. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2017. xiii + 352 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £69.00: $100.00. This is an extremely important book that illuminates how the ‘Croatian Spring’ of 1971 evolved within the context of the democratization, de-centralization and economic reform of Communist Yugoslavia. Ante Batović, a graduate from Zadar/Zara on the Dalmatian coast, provides an excellent and succinct survey of post-war Yugoslavia to 1965, before moving on to analyse the reforms that were eventually stalled when the ‘Croatian Spring’ was repressed. In an otherwise extremely detailed account, the one missing element is an analysis of the leftist student protest of 1968, which might be intentional, as their views never made it into the mainstream and were discarded equally by unitarists and nationalists. Instead, Ante chronicles the endless economic debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and examines how they related to or inspired national grievances. During the autumn of 1971, the Croatian leadership was either removed or forced to resign, while a similar fate followed soon after for Serbian and other liberal Communist functionaries. Offering a broader perspective, Batović also considers Yugoslavia’s international role during the Cold War — the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Prague Spring and Soviet military intervention — and its relations with the Soviet Union and the United States, taking in President Nixon’s visit in October 1971, right in the middle of the crisis. In addition to his research in Belgrade and Zagreb, Batović incorporates substantial material from the British, American and NATO archives as well as the literature and memoirs of key participants. This level of detail brings fresh insights and new conclusions to the debates, especially concerning American and British anxieties about the potential scope of Soviet Russia’s response to any sign of a weakening Yugoslav regime. Whilst this might simply be an expression of their own interests and bias, it is an important element in considering Yugoslavia’s international status, something that has rarely been considered in previous scholarly studies. Batović quotes the British and American diplomats stationed in Belgrade and Zagreb extensively, which gives his narrative a certain distance, a sense of the outsider’s point-of-view, as well as a vitality and immediacy that is often lacking in the bureaucratic language of official sources. This material, along with foreign press reports, forms a compelling and substantial component of Batović’s analyses and conclusions. Even though the book’s focus is on the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, its index reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ for Croatia in the 1990s. Student leaders reappear twenty years later but often on opposite sides, with former REVIEWS 385 Communist candidates featuring at high levels in Tuđman’s nationalist establishment, whilst the most prominent non-Communists, such as Ivan Zvonimir Čičak and Dražen Budiša, opted either for the opposition, or human rights and minority protection activism. Yet Batović offers nothing on the links between the Communist leadership of Croatia and the more radical and nationalist Matica Hrvatska, which was a beacon for intellectuals and student activists. Nor is there any consideration of how realistic the demands for hard currency and language sovereignty were, given that Yugoslavia had central price and currency control and Croatia had a large and powerful Serbian ethnic group. Meanwhile, a full evaluation of the Soviet Union’s role awaits the opening of their archives. With the Croatian question a key issue for both the first and second Yugoslavia, it is surprising that this is the first scholarly monograph to appear on the subject. The text has been impeccably translated into English and is meticulously packaged and presented with only a handful of typos and problems with Slavic diacritics. The endnotes are so rich that they function as an annotated bibliography of Croatian/Serbian- and English-language literature that goes far beyond the declared focus of the book to cover the entire history of Socialist Yugoslavia. Batović’s study would have benefited, however, from a discussion of its...

Automotive factory ‘Crvena Zastava’: Yugoslav self-management socialism and challenges for national automobile industry

In 1955 the Automotive Factory ‘Crvena Zastava’ (Red Flag factory) began to manufacture automobiles based on the FIAT license and became a driving force of the communist Yugoslavia transformation from an agrarian into industrialised, urban and motorised country. This paper explores Zastava’s experience of building and developing the Yugoslav automobile industry in the context of the Yugoslav self-management system from the 1950s to the 1980s. The article aims at showing that the concept of self-management was sensible in light of the multinational Yugoslavia break from the Soviet bloc, but that the net effect of its implementation proved problematic for the national automobile industry . Additionally, Zastava leadership attempts to achieve a larger industrial scale and financial autonomy clashed with the Yugoslavia trend towards decentralisation as much as the communist leadership’s fear of an alternative centre of power.

Zakletva u istoriji srpske ustavnosti

The article deals with oaths in the constitutions of the Principality and the Kingdom of Serbia, of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes/ Yugoslavia, of Yugoslav communist's constitutions and of post communist's constitutions of Republic of Serbia. In constitutions of the Principality and the Kingdom of Serbia, oaths were religious. Oaths in St. Vitus Constitution were religious also. However, in debates during the creation of this Constitution, there were many arguments against religious oath, but in favor of nonreligious affirmations. In the September Constitution (1931), the oath of representatives was nonreligious. In the communist constitutions the oaths were made according to Yugoslav communist ideology. In the post-communist constitutions the oaths were shaped according to ideology of human rights. In some situations oath was given an exceptional importance. Firstly (1859), the oath of counsellors was the first step in building independent state; secondly (1920/21), the representative's oath had the purpose to save monarchy; thirdly, presidential oath in the last Serbian Constitution (2006) was as important as guardian of part of state's territory (Kosovo i Metohija).

Svetovni praznici u komunističkoj Jugoslaviji - obeležavanje Dana borca 1961. godine u Titovom Užicu

Svetovni praznici u komunističkoj Jugoslaviji - obeležavanje Dana borca 1961. godine u Titovom Užicu

Per non rimanere soli : la Jugoslavia e la sinistra italiana, 1948-1957

The main aim of this paper is to examine, on the basis of relevant and so far unpublished documents from Belgrade archives, the stance of Yugoslav communists towards the Italian left after Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform in 1948. Since the break up with the Cominform in the same time meant the termination of cooperation with the closest party until then – the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), Yugoslavia was very active in trying to win support of other Italian left-wing parties, movements or individuals. This required the widest possible basis for gathering all left-wing members into a broad spectrum which would encompass everybody, from communists to social democrats. The initial attempts to win the support of the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) through the existing sympathies of its leaders did not give the expected results, because this party after some time took the same attitude as the PCI and the Cominform. In the same time they also failed to gain a stronghold with some other parties of the Italian left, like the Partito Socialista Unitario. The Yugoslav attempt to organize a so-called “progressive movement” in Italy, composed of various pro-Yugoslav party dropouts, also had a very modest effect. A bit more significant stronghold was obtained only after the emergence of the two pro-Yugoslav dissidents – Valdo Magnani and Aldo Cucchi – who withdrew from the PCI in 1951 and organized their own Movimento Lavoratori Italiani, which soon grew into the Unione Socialista Indipendente, both movements enjoying the Yugoslav support. After the reconciliation with the USSR, Yugoslavia resumed the relations with the leading Italian left-wing parties – in 1956 with the PCI and the next year, 1957, with the PSI.

Muslims' nation‐building process in socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1960s

AbstractDuring the 1960s, the Yugoslav Socialist authorities gradually recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina's Muslims as a nation. Interestingly, in the 1940s, the Yugoslav Communist leaders refused to consider Muslims even as an ethnic group and saw them only as a religious community whose members had to designate themselves as Serbs or Croats. Why did the regime decide to recognise Muslims as a nation in the 1960s, whereas 20 years earlier they supported the opposite position? To understand the shift, this nation‐building process must be understood as the result of a dual dynamic on the federal and the republican level, where important changes occurred. At the federal one, the Communist authorities initiated a decentralisation process within the context of Yugoslav self‐management in the 1950s, which significantly reinforced the republic elites. This coincided with the resurgence of the national question in the whole of Yugoslavia. Simultaneously, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a new elite progressively rose to power in the 1960s and put the ‘Muslim question’ on the political agenda. This led to the gradual increase in status of the Muslims from a religious community to an ethnic group at the beginning of the 1960s and then to a nation at the end of the decade.

Aus den Ruinen der alten erschaffen wir die neue Welt! Herrschaftspraxis und Loyalitäten in Kosovo (1944–1974) by Isabel Ströhle (review)

REVIEWS 785 Other opportunities existed for ordinary people to learn what the authorities expected of them, including engagement with propaganda, broadly conceived. Yekelchyk makes an original analysis of people’s attendance at public lectures and talks, and their reading of newspapers; his attempts to gauge their enthusiasm make for an important addition to the study of Stalinist subjectivities. Labour was the crucial means through which people exercised their citizenship and expressed their commitment to the Soviet state, and Yekelchyk importantly extends his definition of labour to voluntary work and to investment in state loans. It is useful to read this in the light of Dale’s greater emphasis on post-war workers’ autonomous survival strategies. But Yekelchyk’s most important contribution is to add more weight to the scholarly rehabilitation of Soviet elections as important incubators of citizenship, notwithstanding the lack of choice they offered. He analyses the work of ‘agitators’, the public culture of the campaigns, and the practice of voting, including the expression of dissent. These two monographs offer a fine-grained picture of late Stalinist life in two different cities. They focus on different social groups, use different sources, and adopt different methodologies. They are written by scholars whose personal engagement with this history is quite different. But their conclusions are quite similar: people and power combined to redesign citizenship in a workable way after the Second World War. Late Stalinist life was unstable and dangerous but functional, and Yekelchyk in particular shows that it was capable of being reformed into a new and more stable and responsive variant of Sovietness after 1953. Both these very successful and enjoyable books deserve a wide readership among specialists in Soviet and post-1945 European history. Their fluent and accessible presentation, combined with the interesting questions they raise and the engaging material they deploy, make them very suitable too for students on higher-level courses. Faculty of History Mark B. Smith University of Cambridge Ströhle, Isabel. Aus den Ruinen der alten erschaffen wir die neue Welt! HerrschaftspraxisundLoyalitäteninKosovo(1944–1974).Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, 155. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich, 2016. 424 pp. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €54.95: £77.00: £41.99. Historical references are never far away in ongoing political debate, policy and academic research on Kosovo’s status and Kosovo-Serbia relations. Yet SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 786 there has been little international research on political and socio-economic developments in Kosovo during Yugoslavia’s twentieth century. Isabel Ströhle makes an important contribution to this field with a balanced and multifaceted study of the legitimation of Socialist Yugoslav rule in Kosovo up to the constitutional consolidation of 1974. The Yugoslav Communists maintained that the legitimation of their rule in Kosovo relied on the region’s accelerated socio-economic development. The author clarifies that the integrative potential of economic growth paired a new culture of materialism, consumption and individuality made some inroads in Kosovo during the 1960s, especially in dramatically transforming urban environments. However, the reach of the Yugoslav Dream was limited along the lines of the north-south divide in Yugoslavia and ethnic and rural-urban divergences within Kosovo. Particularly rewarding is the chapter on Kosovo’s large rural underclass, which was not only socio-economically but also geographically, symbolically and chronologically isolated from ‘contemporary’ socialist urban society. Ströhle also examines Yugoslav attempts to transform society. Regardless of the Communists’ radically modernist and anti-traditional discourse, in local practice the Party and affiliated mass organizations relied heavily on traditional patriarchal social hierarchies and structures for reaching the population. At the same time, local elites appropriated the Party’s structures to increase social capital within the local, ‘traditional’ community and the wider, ‘modern’ society. It is this interplay between progressive and conservative social relations that characterizes the socialist transformation of society in Kosovo. Except for its socio-economic underdevelopment, Kosovo was also particular in Socialist Yugoslavia for its majority-Albanian population. Based on the thoughtful use of Reinhart Koselleck’s historical categories of ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectations’, Ströhle insightfully analyses the repressive practices of the Yugoslav state security services in Kosovo. She argues that at the collective level, the state...

Alternative Religiosity in Communist Yugoslavia: Migration as a Survival Strategy of the Nazarene Community

Abstract The Nazarenes were founded by a former Reformed minister Samuel Fröhlich about 1830 in Switzerland, but they soon expanded to Central and Eastern Europe. Because of their pacifist beliefs and refusal to swear and to take an oath a large number of the Nazarenes were condemned to severe prison sentences. This religious community was persecuted primarily during the communist era in Southeastern European countries (Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia) since they were considered disloyal citizens and a threat to the government. From 1945 until 1960 the Nazarene illegal border crossing from Yugoslavia to Italy or Austria was highly present. Rejecting one of the essential components of Yugoslav communism, so-called “nationwide defence and social self-protection”, the Nazarenes were perceived as anti-communists and their existence was seen as illegitimate. The repression of this religious minority in communist Yugoslavia is the subject of this paper. The material collected for the purposes of this paper came to be the result of empirical research, conducted in Serbia (2009-2013) and the United States (2015), on the Nazarene community and their emigration to North America. Based on qualitative interviews and archival research, this paper aims to analyse community members’ narratives of their lives during communism and emigration of this religious minority across the Atlantic.

Integrating Rijeka into socialist Yugoslavia: the politics of national identity and the new city’s image (1947–1955)

This article investigates the politics of national identity implemented in Rijeka after World War II, when the city was integrated into socialist Yugoslavia. These national and political transitions posed various challenges to the consolidation of the Yugoslav Communists’ power. The nationalities policy embedded in the slogan “Brotherhood and Unity” was the official answer to the national question, promoting collaboration among the Croatian majority, the Italian minority, and other national communities in the city. This article focuses on the definition of postwar Rijeka’s image, investigating the relationship between Yugoslav socialism and national identities in everyday political practice. The negotiation of the representation of national identities in a socialist society led to ambivalences, contradictions, and contentions expressed in and through Rijeka’s public spaces, highlighting the different orientations of cultural and political actors. The process of building socialist Yugoslavia in this specif...

Gender Policies and Amateur Sports in Early Yugoslav Socialism

This article examines particularities of the communist gender policies towards sportswomen and men in early Yugoslav socialism. By situating Yugoslav gender history of sport in transnational perspective, it points to Soviet influences on the formation of sport policies in the early Yugoslav socialism. The article sheds a new light on how gender policies towards sports were articulated, and domesticated in Yugoslav practice. By paying close attention to how the Yugoslav communists imagined appropriate gender roles, whilst analysing the notions of gender they ascribed to sport activities, this article demonstrates that the Party not only excluded women from participating in certain sports, but that reproductive policies, the notions of gender, and the production of imagined bodies in which socialist masculinity was the key construct, crucially contributed to the gender regime in sports. The article emphasizes gender power relations ingrained into sport activities offered to young people, despite the fact that a large number of young women participated in sports for the first time.

From the Concept of the Communist ‘New Man’ to Nationalist Hooliganism: Research Perspectives on Sport in Socialist Yugoslavia

The article offers an introduction into the myriad of social functions sport and physical culture had during the Yugoslav socialist project. It illustrates how sport was central to the establishment of the federation’s physical and leisure culture in the early post-Second World War period, an international promotional tool for Yugoslav communists championing the ideological superiority of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ and the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as a social field in which the ideological contradictions of Yugoslav socialism became increasingly apparent. It argues that throughout the country’s existence, sport was one of the most popular and engaging cultural phenomena of social life emblematising the social dynamics of the socialist period, as well as questions of the everyday lives of the Yugoslav people. The article furthermore addresses some of the central issues that are chronic for sport-related research in socialist Yugoslavia. These include fundamental questions of the very nature of sport and its role in different political systems, but also more practical issues researchers face, such as the questions of relevant historical sources and the available scholarly and non-scholarly literature. It thus aims to expand the existing knowledge of the processes which defined Yugoslav sport during socialism and thereby contribute to a more nuanced understanding of socialist Yugoslavia’s society.

Rebuilding the community: the Federation of Jewish Communities and American Jewish humanitarian aid in Yugoslavia, 1944–1952

This article recounts the implications of American Jewish aid for rebuilding the Jewish communities of Yugoslavia in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. By focusing on the founding and the activities of the Autonomous Relief Committee (ARC), which channelled aid provided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the article argues that it was the power that ARC assumed, of deciding on funding priorities and being in close proximity to the new Yugoslav communist regime, that allowed it to shape the outlook of post-Holocaust Jewishness in Yugoslavia. The article is based primarily on previously unexamined sources from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia and JDC, and sheds new light on the dynamic period of negotiation of the new normative Jewish identity in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Obilježja i dosezi razvoja memorijalnog turizma u Hrvatskoj

Tijekom posljednja dva desetljeća ljudska patnja, katastrofe, tragedije i prerana smrt postale su uobičajene komponente mračnog turističkog proizvoda. Sve veća popularnost mjesta označenih kao memorijalni lokaliteti pretvorila je spomen obilježja i događanja povezana sa smrću i tragedijom, u dobro koje se može prodati i kupiti na tržištu. Rastući opus literature u ovom području otkriva snažnu vezu između putovanja, kolektivnog sjećanja i komodifikacije smrti zapakiranu kao specifičnu turističku atrakciju koja pruža raznolika turistička iskustva povezana sa smrću ljudi. Ipak, razvoj memorijalnog turizma u okviru mračnog turizma još uvijek otvara mnoga pitanja u vezi etike i epistemologije procesa komodifikacije empatije koja se veže uz masovne ljudske tragedije iz prošlosti. Pored analize obilježja i uspjeha međunarodno etabliranih memorijalnih lokaliteta, ovaj rad sadrži komparativnu analizu triju najpopularnijih memorijalnih lokaliteta u Hrvatskoj: 1) Jasenovac kao bivši koncentracijski logor iz Drugog svjetskog rata, 2) Goli otok kao bivša politička kaznionica iz vremena jugoslavenske komunističke ere i 3) Vukovar poznat kao ‘Grad heroj’, simbol hrvatskog otpora protiv vojne okupacije u Domovinskom ratu. Sva tri lokaliteta su pokazala određene snage, ali i slabosti u smislu razvoja memorijalne turističke ponude. Zaključak rada je da su vodeći memorijalni lokaliteti u Hrvatskoj, razmatrajući broj posjetitelja, ostvarene prihode i utjecaj na društvo, daleko iza vodećih međunarodno etabliranih memorijalnih lokaliteta u tom tržišnom segmentu, ali svakako predstavljaju privlačnu nekonvencionalnu turističku ponudu za kojom inozemna potražnja pokazuje konstantno rastući interes.

The cult of holy death in the socialist Yugoslavia

In Communist Yugoslavia there was a developed process of joint memory control through the glorification of war as ?the originator of the nation?. The symbol of the soldier?s readiness to sacrifice himself at the altar of the homeland became the subliminal memory of war, but also one of the clearest reflections of the present, which has created ideas of the past. In the process of creating the identity of the Yugoslav community, the key elements were represented by different types of memorialization of World War II and the glorification of sacrificing fallen Partisans. The official public memory as a model of society interpreted the present through the past. In that sense, the official policy of recollections encouraged the belief that the future would be better than the past and that the temporary present was just one of the stages of the progress.

Creating a communist Yugoslavia in the Second World War

The Second World War involved the conflict of three different ideologies - democracy, fascism and communism - an aspect in which it was different from the Great War. This ideological triangle led to various shifts in the positions, views, and alliances of each of the warring parties. Yugoslavia with its historical legacy could not avoid being torn by similar ideological conflicts. During the Second World War a brutal and exceptionally complex war was fought on its soil. The most important question studied in this paper concerns the foremost objective of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) - to carry out a violent change of the legal order and form of government of the pre-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

The crossed swords of memory: the image of communist Yugoslavia in the textbooks of its successor states

ABSTRACTA comparative analysis of textbooks in Yugoslavia’s successor states reveals conflicting narratives of Yugoslav communism. Two basic interpretative frameworks are: communism’s state-forming function, renewing or granting statehood; and, ‘Yugoslavism’ seen as an ideology ‘hostile’ to national aspirations. This created a ‘memory mutation,’ a shift of focus from the socio-political system to the national question, reducing the memory of communism to a memory of Yugoslavia, so the central function of the discourse on communism became to create the interpretative framework for the wars of 1990s.

Josip Broz Tito and Yugoslav Communism: A Review of the Work of Geoffrey Swain

Many writers before and after 1980 have pondered Tito’s historical significance. What kind of Communist was he? He crafted an image of an alternative kind of socialism in which workers were self-ma...

The Pedagogy of Workers’ Self-Management: Terror, Therapy, and Reform Communism in Yugoslavia after the Tito-Stalin Split

This article looks at the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry to read socialist Yugoslavia’s complex international and political position. It argues that the history of postwar mental health professions in this country opens up a larger social and political story of liberalization and authoritarianism in socialist Eastern Europe. After 1948, the conflict with the Cominform, and split with the USSR, Yugoslavia went on to receive Western material help, as well as political support, and developed its own more liberal and internationally open brand of socialism, predicated on the ideas of workers’ self-management and nonalignment. Yugoslav psychiatry and psychoanalysis became the most liberalized and Westernized professions in the region, but they also contributed to the operation of the violent “re-education” program at Goli Otok, the most authoritarian and repressive political project in Yugoslav history aimed at “re-educating” pro-Stalinists in the Yugoslav Communist Party. In this article, those two sides of the Yugoslav psychiatric profession will be demonstrated through the prism of self-management. First, the article discusses the application of psychotherapeutic techniques and self-management in the violent context of re-education camps for political prisoners. A similar combination of psychoanalysis and principles of self-management in “civilian” and Westernized child psychiatry is analysed in the second part. The article shows how these very similar notions and ideological principles could be used within the same sociopolitical framework and by the same profession but for radically different purposes.

‘Your Salvation is the Struggle Against Fascism’: Yugoslav Communists and the Rescue of Jews, 1941–1945

AbstractThis article recounts a little-known episode in which Yugoslav partisans, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, rescued some 2,500 Jews from the former Italian camp for Jews in the northern Adriatic in the autumn of 1943. By focusing on this historical event, the article argues for broadening the notion of rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. Rather than locating ‘rescue’ in the motivations of individuals, the article takes as a point of departure the collective aspect of rescue and investigates the importance of the ideological considerations of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in its decision to rescue the Jews. Rather than in abstract ethical notions, the partisan rescue of the Jews was rooted in their political vision of the future socialist federation, of which the Jews were part.