Tito’s Yugoslavia and after

Abstract

After the Second World War and the devastation caused by German and Italian invasion, the Yugoslav peoples had the task of rebuilding their society after it had been torn apart by occupation and fratricidal warfare. The legends surrounding Tito’s Communist Partisans and their war of liberation are well known, immortalised in such works as Milovan Djilas’ Wartime, Fitzroy Maclean’s The Heretic, and Frank Lindsay’s Beacons in the Night. However, as has been seen in the preceding two chapters, contemporary Serbian and Croatian reinterpretations of this period were often negative. The Croatian myth of Bleiburg maintained that the foundations of Tito’s Yugoslavia were constructed on the genocide of Croatian soldiers. For the Serbs, Tito was little more than an ethnic Croat with a grudge against Yugoslavia’s largest and most powerful nation. Both sides presented the lifetime of the SFRY as an era when national identity was suppressed under a barrage of Communist propaganda. National symbols were replaced with ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ and Tito’s own cult of personality. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, ethnic hatreds seemingly smouldered below the surface, manifesting themselves in bizarre and often contradictory ways. The first part of this chapter explores Serbian and Croatian nationalist interpretations of the Yugoslav period, during its rise, its decline, and finally, its Fall. The second examines how propagandists succeeded in making direct connections between past eras of persecution and the contemporary wars of the 1990s. For both sides, the past was nothing more than a template for the present and the future. Past patterns of behaviour, values, morals, paradigms, and ideologies directly determined national goals and priorities in the 1990s.