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

5. Taming It

197 Comrade Tito, on the Adriatic coast there are tens of thousands of vikendice, weekend houses. There are, of course, little vikendice, there are people who have taken out credit or who have set aside part of their paychecks to build some little family house. But there are also many enormous villas, there are people who own a house in Zagreb and in Belgrade and still another at the seaside...and who along with that have two or three cars, motor boats and so forth. Is it possible to acquire all that by working? —Dara Janeković, interview with Tito at his villa on the island of Vanga, October 1972 Socialist critics found, as we have seen, plenty to say about the new Yugoslav culture of commercialism and the promotional activities that were driving it. But the record also reveals that even as late as the 1980s the Yugoslav political-administrative establishment had produced, in fact, surprisingly little in the way of official or even quasi-official rules or guidelines regarding these phenomena. To the extent that we may fairly speak of a “party line” on advertising or the rise of consumer society, any such code was at least as noticeable for the practical latitude it granted to the development of consumer culture and market culture as it was for its restrictive and disapproving tone. Given how sharp and sustained the attacks on consumerism proved to be, and given communism’s reputation for fusing state administration with rigid ideological control, this relative absence of directives and regulatory decrees from on high is especially noteworthy. As demonstrated both in the archival record and in the treatment accorded these questions of political and regulatory context in industry literature, high-level party and state interventions on these issues turned out to be infrequent, inconsistent, and inconclusive . Party members may have been deeply troubled by the directions 5 TamingIt The Party-State Establishment and the Perils of Pleasure Source for the epigraph: Dara Janeković, interview with Josip Broz Tito, Vjesnik, 8 October 1972, 1–4. Although this question was posed without a trace of irony, the interview took place at the Adriatic retreat—one of many such getaways for Tito—where the Marshal himself very publicly pursued the Good Life. 198 冷 Chapter 5 that Yugoslav consumerism was taking. But there is little if any indication that they were willing to back up their vocal misgivings with purposeful state action designed to rein it in. This absence of concrete governmental measures to restrict the culture of the market and check the perceived excesses of consumer attitudes, values, and behaviors is, in the final analysis, one of the most noticeable and distinctive features of the political history of consumption in Yugoslavia. On this point, it makes sense to pause to ask whether we can trust the record produced by the authorities themselves. Just as the legitimacy of socialist governments in Eastern Europe was always open to at least some doubt, the evidentiary quality of sources generated by socialist officials frequently comes into question, and with that, because of worries over censorship and self-censorship, sometimes even the fundamental credibility of sources that simply have originated within socialist societies. These problems are by no means eliminated in the context of Yugoslavia’s unusually loose style of socialism, but they are alleviated to a significant extent. The comparatively unthreatening quality of most of the questions at hand here helps as well. As regards less sensitive issues like those that surrounded the rise of consumerism , the official documents that emerge from Yugoslav files tend to reflect a reasonably wide range of opinions and intensity, and for our purposes such sources are, I conclude, usually not much more duplicitous or self-serving, if at all, than are typical archival finds from the collections of public administrative bodies in noncommunist countries. Similarly, when it comes to published sources, it is likely that, in comparison with what appeared in the Soviet bloc, readers can somewhat more easily trust what they find in Yugoslav publications to be representative of real sentiments among the population. That reliance should not be blind: the Yugoslav press was not entirely free, and self-censorship and “soft” implicit censorship were serious matters. But the Yugoslav debates were free enough to leave us with a historical record that is fairly indicative of the true contours of public decision making. It seems, in many instances, that when decisions were made, the decision was to leave well enough alone. Explicitly, at least...