Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia

Epilogue

320 Now I don’t want to get into statistics, but I am old enough to remember the time of abundance in the 1970s and the time of the crisis after Tito’s death when we had to wait for coffee, sugar, and oil, when we drove only on odd or even days of the month (because there was no gasoline), and things like that....It’s true, there was corruption during Tito’s time, but it’s also true that even the little guy could live normally—he had a secure job and could plan some sort of future for his family. —Arhandjeo, pseudonymous Fun Zone Web forum contributor, 2006 When Milovan Djilas first conceptualized the workings of his “new class” of privileged political and administrative functionaries in the mid-1950s, the subtle connections between political life and mass culture in Eastern Europe seemed, to most observers, a minor concern at best. Anchored as they were to the paradigm of the recalcitrant, principled, and politically engaged dissident, the typical Western inquiries into “life under socialism” throughout the Cold War era were suffused with a concern for the towering issues of freedom and political leadership. This has long been true of Yugoslavia as well, where the standard narratives of high politics are, for the most part, well known. Yet Yugoslavia continues to mystify. Much of the cultural history of the country—like the culture of socialist Eastern Europe more generally—still manages to elude us, even though what is at issue is a history usually not more than fifty years distant, and one within the recollection of many still living. Now, with the memories of the Cold War beginning to recede, we might do well to set aside, temporarily at least, the long dominant fascination with high-level decision making if we hope to delve more deeply into what happened “on the ground” in communist Europe and, in so doing, better understand its culture—and its politics, too. What mattered more consistently in the day-to-day lives of most ordinary Yugoslavs was not the drama of high politics per se but instead the concrete opportunities that the unusual Epilogue Missing It: Yugo-Nostalgia and the Good Life Lost Source for the epigraph: http://www.fun-zone.org/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t3825.html, forum topic “Drug Tito i SFRJ,” 24 November 2006 (last accessed 14 February 2008). Missing It 冷 321 economic and cultural liberality of the country’s curious, hybridized system afforded them. The pains and joys of the socialist era are indeed fading in the popular mind, and communism has, for many, lost its sting and its ability to inspire . This ongoing process of distancing compounds the difficulties posed by the scarcity of contemporaneous evidence of the nature of everyday socialism , making it now even more difficult to understand a way of life that has largely been left behind. But not all is lost. If we pay careful attention to the question of what gets remembered even to this day, we stand to learn a great deal more about the ways in which socialism was experienced by the ordinary people who lived through it. The Legend Lives: Remembering What’s Left of the Yugoslav Dream Since the late 1990s travelers visiting the Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, the capital of a newly independent Slovenia, have been offered a surprising lesson along precisely these lines. In most respects, the museum is nothing out of the ordinary. It is a sight familiar to those who have spent any time wandering through the smaller museums of the main cities of former Yugoslavia—a grand enough old building, tucked away unobtrusively in a quiet park, with modest exhibitions that are carefully and professionally presented notwithstanding the lack of resources available to museum staff in wealthier countries. Much of what the curators have chosen to put on display is, it bears noting, really quite conventional and unsurprising: traditional, if engaging, exhibitions of image and text that focus on questions of political and military history, the time-honored subjects of war and diplomacy and nationalism—all more or less standard fare for museumgoers across Europe. In the rooms leading up to the interpretation of Yugoslavia under socialism, for example, patrons will find displays dedicated to the movement for the political unification of the South Slavs, to Slovenia’s problematic experience in the troubled interwar Yugoslav state, and to the historiography of the Partisan resistance to German and Italian occupation, lately a delicate matter...