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19 The lady of the house is a short, well-built woman with a kerchief on her head, and for her forty years very young looking. She is occupied with her copper coffee mill and her džezva [the traditional copper Turkish coffee pot]. Finally, she sits down at the table as well and pours the coffee. [I ask:] “In your home is it a regular habit to drink coffee?” “Earlier it wasn’t. At one time we only drank coffee when someone got a package from America. But in the last few years no one can be without coffee.” We took a look at newspaper headlines, selected at random, to help us remember what once made us happy, and it seemed impossible to us that all this could so quickly become just an ordinary, normal everyday way of living. —selections from Svijet, December 1966 By the mid-1960s millions of ordinary Yugoslavs were eagerly participating in a burgeoning culture of consumerism that made their society quite unlike anything else in the contemporary socialist world. Not much earlier, however, a Yugoslav version of consumer society would have been all but unimaginable. In the years from 1945 to 1950 the country looked much like any other communist state. This was a period of authoritarian political control and centralized economic decision making. But beginning in 1950 the Yugoslav leadership set out on an exceptional new path. The next fifteen years would see the establishment and elaboration of an innovative new system of “workers’ self-management,” accompanied by decentralization , liberalization, and the first tentative moves toward the adoption of market mechanisms. These tendencies would be intensified during a third phase that began in 1965, when new legal reforms brought about a more far-reaching engagement with the market. For most of the next decade and a half Yugoslavs would enjoy a dramatic increase in living standards and the further loosening of party control. Along 1 LivingIt Yugoslavia’s Economic Miracle Sources for the epigraphs, respectively: Ivo Košutić, “Želje počinja sa fridžiderom” (interview with farm wife Maca Mankas from the village of Lekenik in the Sava river valley), Svijet no 24, 15 December 1966, 8–9, at 8; Pero Zlatar, “Vremeplov standarda,” Svijet no. 23, 1 December 1966, 4–5, at 5. 20 冷 Chapter 1 with these developments came the consolidation of a vital and influential advertising and marketing industry that had emerged shortly after the reforms of the early 1950s, a process explored in detail in the next two chapters. As a result of the work of these advertising specialists and the new political and economic climate, this period also witnessed the development of something truly extraordinary in the socialist context: a rich, complex, and lively mass culture that, according to its critics, amounted to nothing less than a Yugoslav variant of consumer society very much akin to the classic phenomenon seen in the developed West. The Yugoslav economic miracle would unravel quickly at the end of the 1970s, however, and with Tito’s death in 1980 the final dissolution of the Yugoslav Dream began. Economic hardship now mixed with growing regional and ethnic tensions and a resentment toward the lingering authoritarianism of communist leadership to produce a situation in which almost everyone in the country was, in one way or another, seriously dissatisfied with the status quo and impatient for change. It is easy to overlook this fact now, but not too long before, many ordinary Yugoslavs had been fairly content with their lot: certainly eager for more freedom and opportunity, and hungry for even more of the prosperity they had quickly learned to enjoy, but when all was said and done, not so aggrieved that they voiced any demand for radical, systemic change. In short order, by the late 1980s, such demands were everywhere, and they were fueled to no small degree by the developments detailed here: the distinctive Yugoslav experience of modern consumer culture. Command Performance: Consumption and the Planned Economy, 1945–1950 For the first five years after the Communists took power, however, Yugoslavia was not the kind of country where citizens could make demands on their leaders, at least not without running great risks. Yugoslav governance, in fact, looked very much like its counterparts elsewhere in the emerging Soviet bloc: strict, centralist, and oppressive. The country’s population and its infrastructure had been devastated during the war, the result both of conflicts with the occupying forces of the Axis and of internecine warfare among various...

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