
Contents
Prologue The Good Life and the Yugoslav Dream
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Published:December 2011
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Yugoslavs take in more than they produce, and they spend more than they take in. How?!
Rather nicely, actually! For whatever it is that the modest opportunities of the present phase are not able to offer them, they use a magic wand to pull it out of their top hats—or their everyday hats, or their caps, or the folding caps they wear as soldiers. …
Yugoslavs have liberated themselves. They have gotten rid of some of their traditional complexes. And they are now breathing in deeply and grabbing, just grabbing. So, on this volcanic territory of constant uprisings and illegality, a new illegal movement has broken out—a movement for happiness, for a little house surrounded by flowers, for a bathroom lined with tiles, for sedans and deodorants.
—Matija Bećković, “O Jugoslovenima” [On the Yugoslavs], 1969
Reflecting on socialism in Yugoslavia at the close of its first decade, Milovan Djilas complained that his country’s Communist Party and state officials had betrayed the promise of their own revolution by creating a New Class: an exclusive coterie of apparatchiks seduced by the material trappings of the power they enjoyed, entrenched in their control of the nation’s income and resources, and, as a result, utterly at odds with the time-honored communist ideal of a classless society. Djilas, once one of Tito’s closest associates and later the Yugoslav dissident par excellence, used his book The New Class to deliver a blistering indictment of the bureaucracy that had emerged in the years after the Communists’ rise to power. The implications were nothing short of damning: the governing élites had gone far beyond ousting the hated bourgeoisie (not that there had been all that much of a bourgeoisie to hate in Yugoslavia) and had, in effect, taken the place of their traditional enemies, reserving to themselves a privileged lifestyle previously available only to the wealthy few, who, in a place as poor as Yugoslavia, had always been very few indeed.1
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