Rev Left Radio - Yugoslavia: Socialist Construction in the Balkans

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

In this episode, Aleksandra Kolaković joins Breht to discuss the history of socialist construction in the former Yugoslavia. We discuss the formation of Yugoslavia, the communist partisans and their fight against fascism during WW2, the rise, rule, and legacy of Josep Broz Tito, "Market Socialism", daily life for workers in Yugoslavia, the Tito-Stalin split and beef, and much more! This is a controversial chapter of socialist history, but also a fascinating and essential one! Enjoy!  Outro music: 'Maljčiki' by Idoli Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. I have a very special episode for you today, one that I'm very excited for, one that's long overdue. I have on my friend Alexandra to talk about Yugoslavia, socialist Yugoslavia, Joseph Broz Tito, the split with Stalin, all of the history surrounding it leading up to the collapse. It's an absolutely fascinating history of an element of international socialism that I don't think always gets the attention that it deserves. It's very interesting. I mean, it's very prime for certain sorts of sectarianism as well, right? This is a complicated history. The split between Tito and Stalin in particular led to a lot of bad blood on both sides after the fact,

and it still trickles down into various left-wing Marxist sectarianism today. but this is a fascinating history that's really crucial for the socialist left to study and to understand. And I could not have had a better guest for this episode. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Alexandra on socialist Yugoslavia, Joseph Broz Tito, the Stalin split, and so, so much more. Enjoy. My name is Alexandra Kolakowicz. I'm a first-generation Canadian. My parents immigrated from Yugoslavia. My mom came a little earlier than my dad. He joined her here in the mid-80s. My mom is actually from the same county as Tito in Croatia. It's a really rural kind of like the shire area of Croatia and former Yugoslavia. The joke is that the bears deliver the male. So my dad's side are Serbs from Bosnia. And for anyone who's confused about what that means, hopefully I can clarify in the episode. My dad's side of the family, they joined the partisans during World War II. And I'm not so

caught up on my mom's side, but I'm also not a scholar or an academic by any means. I'm just a working class woman. I come from a manual labor and manufacturing background. And I'm excited to do this episode because I think of Yugoslavia as a kind of family ghost, like a benevolent, family ghost, almost like a, like a grandparent who passed away before you got to know them, but whose impressions are still felt everywhere in your daily life. My paternal grandmother, my baba, she's always referred to herself as Yugoslavian. Many of my family members insist on it because that's how they feel. That's how they identify. It's unnatural for them to pick allegiances along ethnic lines. And I myself am a product of what they call a mixed

marriage. So that's between a Serb and a Croat in my case. And through family marriages and godparents, et cetera, my family has Bosnian Muslims, Slovenians. So they're not ethnically homogenous at all. And that made it weird to grow up in the 90s when ethno nationalism defines so much of the Balkan identity. And I definitely experienced that in the diaspora in Canada. And it was really hard for me growing up to reconcile that people could be driven to such hatred when they're in my own family, you know, Serbs, proats, Bosnians, we loved each other, genuinely. And I don't know, that might seem like simplistic or sentimental, but it made me want to understand all of it as I got older, what was at play, you know, what happened. And on the political side of things, I'm a

communist, and that was informed as much as my family's background as joining the workforce myself. And, yeah, in talking with other communists and friends, some of them know about Yugoslavia. Many have a lot of questions, though. So I'm hoping we can answer some of them in the episode because I think Yugoslavia is an important microcosm in a lot of ways to understanding universal challenges that face the struggle for socialism. And that's about it. Yeah, well, first of all, welcome. It's an honor to have you here. I love the fact that, you know, you're a working class communist. You're not in an ivory tower. You're not necessarily an expert, but you have this very felt and lived connection to, you know, the former Yugoslavia, to its people, to its struggles.

that's beautiful. That's what RevLeft is all about uplifting regular working people and saying, we can tell our own stories. You know, not that academics are, you know, scholars or credentialed experts are bad. Of course, we have them on all the time. But I specifically love the chance to get, you know, working people talking about their history. And that's what this is going to be. So, so welcome. And, you know, this is a, this is long overdue. I mean, I've been running this podcast now for over five years. We've covered many, many instances of the attempt to build socialism in different context in different countries. And Yugoslavia was a part of the world and a history that I personally knew very, very little about. I had heard of Tito. I knew that, you know,

there was a place called Yugoslavia, which no longer exists. But that's about the extent of my knowledge for a very long time. And it was actually in, you know, deep preparation for this episode that I personally myself became fascinated in this topic. But I also know, as you alluded to, that it can be kind of confusing if you don't I mean if I just told the average listener right now picture the Balkans in your head I don't think if you're not from that area I think it's just a blank spot on your mental map for a lot of people not everybody and so that's why I think the first thing we should talk about is kind of giving an overview of what Yugoslavia was importantly what countries used to be a part of it because it was a federation of six republics and sort of how long it lasted so before we get in the details can you give us this basic over review of what exactly Yugoslavia was for our listeners? Sure. Yeah. I always get like a puzzled look when I say my family is Yugoslavian because really technically that's the best way to describe it. And so I'm used to giving this spiel. But the region of Yugoslavia in the Balkans geographically, it's situated to the west of Italy across the

Adriatic Sea. In the north, it's bordered by Austria and Hungary. On the east side, you have Romania and Bulgaria. And in the south, there's Greece and Albania. And all of these cultures have definitely had an influence on the Balkan region of Yugoslavia itself. Socialist Yugoslavia was comprised, like you said, of six republics. And those were Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia. And then Serbia was further divided into, it had two autonomous regions within it, Voivodina and Kosovo. So to give, I guess a historical background on what led up to socialist formation. And for centuries until the early 20th century, it was dominated by two major empires that colonized

the area, which might surprise some people. I don't think that imperialism and colonization is something that's generally thought of as existing within European history. It's more something that they exported. But in the case of the Balkans, they were absolutely colonized in the north by the Austro-Hungarians, who ruled mainly in Croatia and Slovenia, and then the Ottoman Empire controlled at various points, different parts of Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia.

And in that long period of imperialism, starting in the 1300s, the religious makeup of the region also changed. So it comes to represent three major religions. You have Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims. Moving forward, I guess, because that's the, you know, you could get into the nitty-gritty of the imperialism.

history in the Middle Ages, but geopolitically, things majorly shift in the Balkan wars of the late 1800s, where several of these Balkan regions were fighting the Ottoman Empire for independence. And from that war, Serbia gained an independent state. And then, of course, the next major event is in 1914. There's the assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo. And that led to World War I and the fall of both the Austrian and Ottoman Empire. after World War I, the kingdom of Yugoslavia is created. That's nominally united all of the regions, but in actuality it was ruled by the

Serbian dynasty as a constitutional monarchy. And this put a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of the other republics because it was a form of Serbian hegemony when they had just come out from under the yoke of these two empires. So this is also the period starting in 1919 when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia has formed. many veterans of World War I, including Tito, had spent time in Russia and experienced the revolution. And so they brought all of that back home. And then I guess the next major event is World War II.

It breaks out and out of that turmoil in 1945, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, acronym by SFRY or J, is born. And it lasted from 1945 until 1992. So technically that's 47 years. generation. Yeah, fascinating. Now, it would be helpful for some people, and I'm kind of obsessed with maps myself, but to just look on your phone or whatever, the area of the Balkans, or you can look up the former Yugoslavia to see these countries. I'm going to say them again, just so they stick in people's heads a little bit better. So the former Yugoslavia in the north,

kind of sort of coming down is Slovenia and Croatia. On the western part is Bosnia and Herzegovina. on the east of that is Serbia and then in the south is Montenegro and Macedonian and these are just general cardinal directions but they sort of like Croatia dips down along the coast etc so that's just kind of an idea again these are six republics so it's just very helpful for people to get at least a visual of the Balkans

if not a visual of former Yugoslavia itself and this is also an area that is a hot spot for you know ethnic and religious tensions or at least it could be under certain conditions and that's part of this story as well which you know, we will get into. But yeah, the fact that World War I started in this area is also completely fascinating because World War I led inexorably to World War II, and that's the rise of, you know, the Cold War and the rise of, you know, socialist Yugoslavia, et cetera. So it's just a

very interesting history that we could spend an entire episode just talking about the lead-up to, you know, the formation of the socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. But let's drill down a little bit on the details here. Now that we have a basic overview that you so well put forward. So after World War 1, you know, the kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slavines was established, which would become simply the kingdom of Yugoslavia by 1929. This was, as you said, a constitutional monarchy. But this only lasted until World War II. Can you talk more specifically about the invasion of Yugoslavia by Germany and the access powers in 41? Because this invasion, occupation, and resistance, you know, of the communist partisans is really crucial to the rest of this story. So can you kind of talk about that

and how the kingdom of Yugoslavia just eventually became the socialist federal republic of Yugoslavia? Yeah, absolutely. It's very much like a crucible for what would become socialist Yugoslavia because up until World War II and within World War II, it's the story is factionalism, right? And it's the crucible of World War II that produces this unified sense among the people. So I guess to provide some context for the lines that get drawn during World War II and the actors who are in the region, the whole Balkan region had a predominantly peasant population. So there were obviously areas of industrialization, especially in the north and in major cities. And in those places, students and workers were being radicalized and organized by, at that

time, the outlawed Communist Party. But the peasantry were leading seriously destitute lives. And the King, as kings do then and now, didn't care. He doubled down amidst rising discontent from Croatian peasants and ended up declaring a dictatorship. He disbanded parliament. In contrast to that move, the nascent fascist movement in Croatia. They were called the Ustache. They knew exactly what to do with the grievances of Croatian peasants. They funneled it into ultra-nationalist rhetoric, along with the intellectuals and clergy. They stoked calls for an independent, racially pure Croatian state and revenge on the Serbs for their hegemony. So in 1934, the king of Yugoslavia is assassinated in Marseille through a collaborative effort between the Ustache and an independent

organization from Macedonia. And so the king is killed. Fascism is growing in Italy and Germany and now Croatia. Many prominent Yugoslavian communists in this period were receiving training and education in the USSR and attempting to evade authorities in secret operations. at home and abroad, among these is Tito, and that's his actual nom de plume from this time. His real name is Josip Broz. He became leader of the Communist Party in 1939. In 1941, the Serbian Prince Regent, who's been put on the throne to replace the dead king, he's weighing his options like economically and politically, and ends up signing a military pact

with Hitler, and this incites protests in the capital of Belgrade, and it leads to a coup in which he's deposed and his underage nephew takes the throne. And this nephew, he reneges on the promise to Germany. So as a result, the access powers react by invading and that monarch flees in exile to London. He also takes the national treasury with him, which is of note. So Yugoslavia is promptly parceled up and it's occupied by the access powers. The Eustache are given control of all of Bosnia and parts of Serbia and Croatia to enact their like truly fascist horrors. They go on to systematically murder hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and political rivals of any ethnicity, people of all ages. And so at the same time, a Serbian army is formed in support of the absent Serbian royalty.

And they're called the Chetniks. So the forces facing the general population during World War II in the Balkans are nationalists Serbs who want to restore the very unpopular monarchy, Nazi occupiers, and domestic homicidal fascists. And of course, the partisans are heroes. They are the resistance organized by the communists. The partisans, in contrast to all the other forces, they were determined to fight for unity and brotherhood among the people. That became the motto. And for peace and cooperation against any enemies and all odds.

So that was very distinct in comparison to the other forces. Here was a resistance to oppression, composed of peasants and workers, men and women. I actually had a relative who was part of the, women's anti-fascist front. And that was a key element of organizing the partisan effort. So they're fighting for like an entirely new, truly liberated and united Yugoslavia. And they gained support, especially among the peasantry. And if it's okay, I just wanted to say like there were many acts of unbelievable defiance and bravery that came to like really shape the national consciousness after the war. There's the story of Leparadich. She's just one of the

better known anti-fascists. She joined the partisans at the age of 15. She was volunteering to help transport wounded soldiers from the front lines. In 1943, she's just 17 years old, and while she's attempting a rescue of women and children, she gets captured and tortured by the Nazis. She's 17, but she refuses to give up any information. And so they sentence her to hanging, and her last words become immortal in Yugoslavia. She says, I'm not a traitor. of my people. Those whom you are asking about will reveal themselves when they have succeeded in wiping out all of you evildoers to the last man. And with that, they executed her. And so there are so many, like the anti-fascist aspect of, because it's what unified all the partisans,

even in communist Yugoslavia, the popular front and what it represented was just an enormous part of the identity. And there are so many monuments to the anti-fascists in the Balkans. I encourage people to look it up. They're really beautiful, interesting buildings, and of course, what they represent is beautiful as well. So by 1942, the partisans have liberated several areas and had formed the wartime legislative body of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia.

And this was committed to a democratic, multi-ethnic federation. The following year, they declared the new Federal People Republic of Yugoslavia. The partisans, along with the Red Army, liberated Belgrade in 1944. And many fascists were able to escape in the end. Some of them used the infamous rat lines and continue to plot among the diaspora against Yugoslavia in all the decades to follow. And those who died were made martyrs by this nationalist fascist emigrate community. The allies who originally supported the royalists, they were forced to recognize the legitimacy and influence of the partisans in the Communist Party because they'd amassed such a huge army by the end of the war. And they

had all of the popular support. Britain and the U.S., though, they were still holding pretty vital cards in the form of really desperately needed aid to the war-ravaged nation, and also that treasury that the king had absconded with, which belonged to the Yugoslavian people. And so under these conditions, Tito agrees to have representation of the monarchy in the provisional government, but they're completely outmaneuvered by the communists leading up to the elections. And on November 29th, 1945, the king transfers his power and recognizes Tito as prime minister, and socialist Yugoslavia is officially born. Wow. Yeah, so absolutely beautiful. A few things to say. One is that, yes, the partisans, the anti-fascist and the communist partisans are absolutely heroes of socialist history. And, you know,

we are absolutely 100% on their side in this fight. The other two major factions, as you said, are the nationalist Serbians, which are royalists called the Chetniks, who were, am I correct in thinking that they teamed up with the partisans in the anti-fascist fight, but were outmaneuvered during and after that such that they lost to their power? Yeah, well, they were inconsistent, right, ideologically. They were confused. They were against the Nazi occupation, but then also against Cro-A. And so this was like kind of a back and forth of revenge between the Ustash and the part and the Chetniks, sorry. And so among the people that didn't inspire a lot. I mean, first of all, they represent like a really unpopular monarchy. But beyond that, even for the Serbs who had been tortured and killed by the Ustash and the Nazis,

they just, they couldn't compete because they were so inconsistent and kind of opportunistic with the unified vision that the partisans represented in an end up. binding people around. I see. Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you have the Chetniks, the communist partisans, and then the Nazi occupiers teaming up with the Ustache, right? And the Ustache is this fascist movement out of Croatia primarily, correct? Yeah, completely out of Croatia. It was born out of the Croatian peasant party. They kind of, as I said, there was that kind of discontent among Croatian peasantry under the kingdom of Yugoslavia when it was with Serbian rule. and the Croatian Peasant Party had figures within it who, you know, as fascists do now, saw that, saw that anger and discontent and saw that no one was listening.

And so gave them the scapegoats that were useful to them and fomented this anti-Serbian, anti-Jewish, anti-communist racial purity line that then dominated the party and became, they were, the, That part that the Ustashah controlled in the Balkans during the war was called like the independent state of Croatia. But it was all a sham, obviously. Absolutely. Okay. So those are the forces and then the partisans come out on top. This is in every way, given the Nazi occupation, a national liberation struggle that was successful. So, you know, for everybody listening, that is a lot of the context to the rest of this conversation.

And now I want to move on to Tito, right? As you said, it's just a nickname. his real name is Joseph Bros. And he rose to prominence in large part due to his really amazing leadership of the communist partisans in their resistance movement against fascist occupation and eventually became a widely loved communist leader of Yugoslavia up until his death in 1980, about 10 to 12 years before the official collapse of Yugoslavia. So can you talk about who Tito was as a person, sort of how he rose to power, and what made him such an effective leader of his country. Yeah, I think like growing up with a Yoslavian family, you have to, you know, you grow out of,

you have the hangover of the love and adoration that people had for Tito. And then, you know, you become an adult and you have to decide for yourself. But I can say as an adult that I am also a huge admirer of Tito. And not to be superficial, but also definitely in the top five most stylish socialist leaders in world history. I think he was the only person allowed to smoke a cigarette in the white house right yeah i was just going to say he was also very cheeky you know like the he um for people who don't know the white house the anecdote is that he was visiting nixon and he lit up a cuban cigar and uh someone you know purportedly told him like oh uh president tito uh no one smokes in the white house and he said to them oh blessed are you

to be non-smokers and just kept going so uh yeah he definitely he he personified a lot I think the aspirations of many Yugoslavian people but also crucially he was an every man I think you know he had a very luxurious lifestyle and tastes but despite that or aside from that he was very very much loved and I will say there's a great movie called Tito and I it's a comedy from the 80s and it looks at the combination of kind of manufactured institutional reverence but also the genuine love that Yugoslavians had for him He definitely loomed very large over the collective consciousness. And so, what can I say about Tito?

Yes, his real name was Yossipros. He himself was born to a mixed marriage of Slovenian-Croatian parents in the village of Kumrovets. And at that time, that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a young man, he was active in the labor movement. He was a metal worker in a locksmith. He participated in strikes and May Day actions. He was distributing materials. and he gets conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army shortly before the war.

And during World War I, he's captured as a prisoner of war by the Russians. And this is how he finds himself in Russia during the revolution, where he's actually active with the Bolsheviks. He's in the Red Guard. And so he returns home after all of this turmoil of the war and eventually joins the newly formed Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was formed in 1919, and by 1921, When Tito is a part of it, it's legally banned.

In this kind of interwar period, he's fired from several jobs and jailed for his communist activities, but that doesn't diminish his participation in the party at all. I love this about him instead of, like, he's honestly just like getting denied jobs, getting fired from jobs, going to jail. He has a young family. It's not going well for him. And instead of giving up, he becomes a professional revolutionary. He doubles down.

This begins a period of arrests, of serious prison time. He's using fake identities in this time in clandestine operations. He's organizing. He's writing under his nom de plume, tito. That's where it comes from. It's just a nickname. And he's also traveling to Vienna and the USSR where he's receiving training and recruiting volunteers for the Spanish Civil War.

He's also very instrumental in trying to resolve factionalism within the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. So he's extremely active. He's rising up in the Communist Party. but also crucially doing work within the country. And this is also the time where he begins his close friendship with Edward Cardel. He's the Slovenian communist who becomes very prominent in the Communist Party

in socialist Yugoslavia. In the purges of the 1930s, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Gorkich, he's killed. And this is the point where Tito becomes the new leader of the party. It's based on his extensive credentials and also by the fact that he remained largely in Yugoslavia in this dangerous period, whereas the executive committee of the party had been functioning from outside the country. So we've gone over World War II, but the Tito-led Communist Party organizes the partisan resistance. They form proletarian brigades, and they successfully

fight for liberation of this new multi-ethnic federation. I will say that it's significant and often, I would say, like downplayed next to Cuba and China, Che and Mao, but the Yugoslavs under Tito We're technically the first example of a successful peasant-based guerrilla war against neo-colonial oppressors and reactionaries. And as a leader of the people, I would say Tito is especially effective as role. He was kind of role-modeled a new kind of masculine leadership that was very different to understandings of like patriarchy or, you know, rulers from the region historically. In contrast to Stalin or even fathers in most Yugoslavian families at the time, Tito's persona was portrayed kind of through friendliness. He was like a guardian and a teacher. The word for comrade in Serbo-Croat is actually, it means friend.

I've read a quote somewhere that I liked. It said that one was supposed to believe him not on the grounds of fear, but love. I would say that distinguished his approach to being a leader of the country. Obviously, it goes without saying that this wasn't everyone's experience. He was also among the most punitive communist leaders, especially during the period after split with Stalin. In the Informed Biro era, thousands of communist supporters of the USSR were imprisoned and tortured on the island, known as Goli Otok or Naked Island.

As a domestic and international figure, Tito perfectly represented the maverick nature of Yugoslav communism, though. He was a diplomat, but he was also his. own man. This meant that he wasn't not only like the east, but especially the West, were wary of him and kind of unable to maneuver or make predictions with confidence because he didn't tow any, the line of either superpower. On a domestic front, there was the children's organization called the Pionieri or Pioneers. And this is where kids starting at age seven would take a pledge to Tito and Yugoslavia. It's a very sweet pledge. They also commit themselves to all

peace-loving nations and people of the world. And it functioned as a kind of communist brownies or boy scouts. And there was also a national holiday called the Day of Youth. This was celebrated on the 25th of May. It's another example of Tito being cheeky. The Nazis mistakenly thought that the 25th of May was his birthday and tried to assassinate him on that day. And so it became a national celebration.

So children from all over Yugoslavia, they would run relay races with these batons that contain letters from the youth presented to Tito. In fact, even after his death in the fall of Yugoslavia, there was like a website on the internet where people would write letters to Tito still as I guess a kind of form of solace or comfort just into like the virtual ether.

I don't know if the website is still around. Yeah, and then also there's the non-aligned movement. He formed strong connections with leaders of nations who are also struggling against colonialism and the global south, and distinctly he was a European champion and ally of that cause. He was very strict on squashing overt nationalist tendencies, and I would say the project of communism, it relied on the cooperation and efforts of the whole nation, like that goes without a doubt. But Tito is the head of the nation. He embodied the strength and the resolve and the

principles of Yugoslav unity and brotherhood that the project relied upon. By and large, the people were immensely proud of their leader and what they had accomplished with him at the helm. A common slogan was, Tito is ours and we are Tito's. Yeah, that's awesome. It's very interesting, fascinating stuff. A few things to say before we move on. We're definitely going to get more into the, I mean, we've alluded multiple times to the split that's coming between Stalin and Tito, and that goes down the ages to affect certain communist views of Tito to this day. So we will get to that. I do want to shout out two other podcasts that are friends of the show. Both Cosmonaut and Hampton Institute have released podcasts in the last week or two on Stalin in particular. It kind of

deep dives into Stalin, but coming from, you know, both Marxist communists, but different probably perspectives on Stalin. And of course, there's that old infamous Rev. Left episode on the Marxist-Leninist view of Stalin. So if you're interested in all of that, you know, I'd point you in that direction. We will get into that in a little bit. One of the things that you mentioned that we will get into later as well is this is the level of assassination attempts against Tito. It's almost Fidel Castro levels of surviving assassination attempt after assassination attempt. And that alone gives you a certain sort of bravado to your personality to be able to, I mean, from both, as we'll find out, Stalin and the far right was the subject of targeted

assassination attempts and survived all of them. So that's, that's very fascinating and whatever you ultimately think about tito this cannot be denied he was an effective deeply committed and widely respected communist um and he stayed that way regardless of any disputes one might have with his uh with titoism as it were which we'll get to in a bit um but yeah so just all of that in the back of your mind as we go forward we're going to continue to delve into some of these things including the non-aligned movement which i find to be fascinating and it has really interesting connections with uh anti-colonial struggles in the Global South in particular. But I still want to continue talking about Yugoslavia and a huge

part of the history of Yugoslavia from its establishment as a monarchy, then as a socialist republic, up until its tragic collapse into Balkanization in the 90s, was the project of attempting to unite people across ethnic identities and nationalisms. Now, you yourself said that your family's relationship to these ethnic nationalist divides weren't necessarily felt as these huge ontological divides between human beings, but at other times and other conditions, these divisions could sort of inflame themselves and create real problems. And one of Tito's accomplishments was up until his death, the ability to navigate these different desires and different interests. So can you talk about this broader project of uniting ethnic identities

and nationalisms, the different ethnicities and dividing lines involved? And then what Tito in particular contributed to this? Yeah, it's been a big part of my life because growing up here, I mean, I have like a fairly Serbian last name, but my mother's Croatian. And, you know, after the war, I would have people who would assume that I was one or the other and then learning that I'm half actually from the enemy side just completely changed their reaction to me. And so I've been also just living in Canada, which is so multicultural ideas of nationalism and national identity and what it means and what place it should have in people's lives, I've always been thinking about that.

But specifically for the Balkans, I think it's very heartbreaking because the region was divided mainly along religious lines, and that has its root, of course, in circumstances and historical developments. You always get kind of weird nationalists who have ancestral fantasies, the same way some people do about Vikings, like imagining a pure and valiant people. denied their true glory, which is rubbish in reality. As per usual, it was material circumstances that informed people's identity, not some kind of innate essence. So first I want to say that Slovenian and Macedonian, they're distinct languages. But Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin differ in the same way that English dialects and accents do. So like Londoners and Texans,

same language, some different words, but everyone can understand each other. Secondly, for a bit of background, no former Republic of Yugoslavia was homogenous ethnically. In each region, you could find minorities of the other regions and religions to lesser and greater degrees, but there was no like homogeneity. No nation could, no republic could claim to be, you know, strictly one. To get a bit into the background, though, broadly speaking, once, and like, forgive me for going into a bit of history, but the hatred that you see in the 90s is so intense. that I feel it's important to tell people a bit about where it comes from. So there are these tribes in the Balkan region,

and once they adopt Christianity in the Middle Ages, the first divide is obviously along religious lines. Croats and Slovenians belong to the Holy Roman Empire, which is Catholic, and then Serbs, Montenegrins, and Macedonians end up with the Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Christianity. And then you throw in another aspect, which is that Bosniaks, were Slavs in Bosnia who followed Islam after the conquest of the Ottoman Empire. So the Bosnian history is distinct because the division can find its roots in this Ottoman

conquest. Under the Ottoman rule, Serbs and Croats who converted to Islam could obtain certain privileges and protections that weren't afforded to the Christian peasantry. So many people obviously converted and this created a class division on a religious basis. Likewise, in Kosovo, the Ottomans conquered what was the seat of this medieval Serbian kingdom in the 1300s. And so the religious demographics were permanently altered. And so this is the nature of like its imperial history, right? You have all these fluctuations in religion, in ethnic identity because of these imperial forces. So it's a very broad history, but suffice to say, nationalists of every group mythologize various aspects to their benefit

and the colonized people have always struggled to preserve and maintain aspects of their culture in this imperial period. Uprising for independence happened throughout the reign of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire, but by the time socialist Yugoslavia has formed, the issue was creating a material reality that would inform and support the ideal of brotherhood and unity among people. You know, you can't, I feel especially with communism, it's not a matter of coercion from top down, obviously. There has to be evidence in people's lives of the ideology that you're working towards. So there were a few challenges on that front.

They were significant because the Northern Republic, Slovenia and Croatia, they were considerably more developed industrially than those in the south. This is like Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia. Immediately after the war, there was a lot of enthusiasm for this vision of progress and togetherness. And people were really proud of defeating fascism and winning their liberation. through all this sacrifice. But of course, it's post-war period. More sacrifices still needed to be made for the country to modernize, to increase production,

to realize this vision of stability and security and equality that was given to workers and peasants. And not only that, but the recent war had created fresh wounds between groups on top of their ancient strife. So it was an enormous undertaking to undo these cultural memories and these associations, these prejudices. Legally, all citizens had the same rights in Yugoslavia and protections under the law, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or religion. Among the youth, especially, the party saw kind of like the greatest potential for instilling

this needed sense of a common goal and shedding the old divisions. One of my favorite examples is that millions of youth from every republic were immobilized in what they called youth work actions, and my grandma was one of them. After the war, she comes from a small village in Bosnia, and she gets, sent to Belgrade the capital city in Serbia, which had been extensively bombed. And for three months, she worked and lived alongside kids from all over Yugoslavia to help rebuild the city. She's wheeling like wheelbarrows of rubble. You know, whenever I would complain as a teenager, she would just bring up that story to tell me that I didn't have it rough at all. But also, she took immense

pride in this like rebuilding of the country. And she was, you know, she was away from home with other children identifying for the first time with people who weren't just part of her family or village. So it was a really important effort on a national scale. Likewise, at school, children's field trips were intentionally organized so that, like, you would go to regions other than your own. You would never kind of have like a field trip to a local area. It would always be to another, another republic. And military service was done outside of one's local area as well. Immediately after the war, poor peasants and refugees from all over the republics were given land that had previously belonged to Germans or collaborators. So in all these kind of like

institutional organized ways, people were encouraged to integrate and bond beyond their ethnic and religious identities. Culturally, educationally, this was hugely disseminated right from the start in all the kind of ways you would expect. They have magazine and newspaper articles, music, through workplace organizations and meetings, national holidays, monuments. They, you know, because the material challenge was so great from a cultural and ideological level politically as much as they could, they tried to encourage this sense of unity and brotherhood that would transcend nationalist hatred. There was also an implementation of shock work.

I think that was more, obviously it's to boost production, but, also to encourage pride among citizens along socialist lines as opposed to a kind of patriotism. And everywhere, the motto was brotherhood and unity. The measure of a person was in their actions, not in reactionary stereotypes. But if it's okay, I just want to like consider this from a Marxist perspective specifically because I think obviously it didn't ultimately hold. And the issue is pretty clear in that attitudes and norms, they can be influenced by culture, but they're created and they're calcified through the relations in the means of

production, right? And in that regard, there was unevenness that left the door open for nationalism to rise again. Because the northern republics were more developed and had suffered less damage to infrastructure in the war, they saw the other poorer regions as kind of holding them back. They resented the distribution of resources that went to trying to get the less developed republics up to speed and on par. And all the republics, aside from Serbia, had not been independent for centuries. So now the project was getting everyone to believe that they were stronger together, a kind of like microcosm of internationalism. But people wanted the proof in the pudding. They were faced with economic fluctuations and growing pains. And obviously in that

condition, some reverted to the behaviors that had served them under imperialism. They looked out for themselves. I just, I think it's interesting because it's like a problem that's faced by communist parties everywhere in the sense that, you know, Engels and Colentai wrote about the fact that morality, a communist morality, it can't be prescribed or like insisted upon. It can't be frozen in amber. It's like ultimately produced by and informed through people's material conditions. And so all communist countries start out with a kind of massive moral and cultural hangover from the previous capitalist feudalist system. And on top of that, they face a deluge of capitalist propaganda, this kind of like shallow but seductive comparisons

from without. If you think of Cuba, what they face today, it's like the same story. So in that environment, there's just a very pressing need for people to adopt the values that would strengthen a socialist society, but often in the case of Yugoslavia and elsewhere, these new countries are recovering from war. They're facing external threats. There's a gap between what they want to achieve and what is possible at present, like the USSR faced in the 1920s. And in that gap, old ideas are competing with the new. So to sum it all up, I guess, people were definitely united around defeating the fascists and liberating themselves. and there was huge pride around that. But ultimately, communism in Yugoslavia,

it wasn't really afforded enough time for the spirit of unity and brotherhood to replace the old morality among the demographic populations. The economic equality it inherited from colonial rule was also not evened out in that short period. So it made the project kind of weak to anti-communist scapegoats and nationalism.

And it's incredibly sad because the mentality of kind of we should look out for our own and others are a burden to us, it won out on the national scale, but it's also obviously like the mode that each independent capitalist state now functions on in which the ruling class looks out for themselves, which is not a contradiction to the logic of capitalism because it's internalized by the masses because they're coerced by their conditions. But in contrast, socialist values, they can't be implemented in a top-down way. They rely on people in order to succeed because it's like a system of

cooperation, equality, and sharing. So I think, I hope that answers the question. But yeah, it was a constant battle between these reactionary nationalist prejudices and hatreds and having people commit to and act according to the socialist ideals that were foundational to the country. Yeah, to answer the question and more, I think that was an absolutely fascinating trip through very complicated topics and your Marxist analysis is really on point and really wonderful because, you know, without that Marxist analysis, you can sort of float off and be untethered from reality. And one of the ways in which that manifests specifically in the Balkans and, you know, with Yugoslavia and its collapse in general is this ancient hatred's thesis. It was really

popularized in the book Balkan ghosts by the journalist Robert Kaplan, who insisted he was writing a travel log book, not anything deeper than that, but the Clinton administration apparently got their hands on it, and it shaped their non-intervention, I think, on behalf of Bosnian Muslims, and Robert Kaplan since has been, you know, sort of going out of his way to say, I never intended this to be, you know, anything that policymakers should resort to. But his thesis in that was like, you know, these conflicts and the collapse and balkanization of Yugoslavia is inevitable based on these ancient hatreds, but what you advance is actually a Marxist analysis of internal uneven development and certain conditions that can exacerbate or give rise to these older moralities, as you put

it, which I think is much more explanatory than this sort of idealist idea that inherently these conflicts are so deep that they can never be solved. So huge props to you on that. Another thing that I find really interesting about this part of the world in general is the different presences of major religions. And in Yugoslavia, it's extra fascinating because as you said, you have the Roman Catholicism, you have Islam, and you have orthodoxy. And that is, I think, just three amazing, you know, religions with fascinating and often beautiful, if not sometimes tragic histories. But, you know, they could, and they have at times lived together in complete peace. So this idea that these beliefs inherently tear people apart or there's no way to unify

white people because of them is a mistake. And I really appreciate your analysis. I'm correcting that. I just also have to say that this idea of down to the countryside or this mixing of different people, different ethnicities, different nationalities, purposefully through policy is very, very interesting. And, you know, America, the American society, I think, could use something like that where rural and urban communities have some project to work on together or some ability to talk to one another and be in the presence of one another such that it can break down a lot of very harmful stereotypes that although we're not necessarily as rattled with these ethnic divisions as the former Yugoslavia might have been still have deep, deep racial

divisions, geographic divisions, religious divisions. And it's in a lot of ways, because of the underlying rot of capitalism, of course, exacerbating these divisions and drilling them down and making them more prominent. But I like that idea of specifically trying to enact policies where people can break through stereotypes by coming together face to face and working on a shared project. I think that's beautiful. And it's been tried in various ways in different countries to varying degrees of success. But certainly an interesting idea.

Now, let's go ahead and talk about Yugoslavian socialism, right? Because a major element of it under Tito was, as we've referenced, it's infamous maverick or independent streak, right? Not towing the line of Moscow like other socialist republics to its east, while also not allowing itself to be absorbed into NATO and the U.S. sphere of influence to its west. Tito was diplomatic, well-liked among his peers in other countries, east and west, and oversaw a form of socialism, sometimes called market socialism. That was markedly different from the more highly centralized forms of state socialism emanating out of the Soviet Union proper. So what was socialism like in Yugoslavia?

what made it different and what were some of its successes? Well, I mean, it's market socialism and also, you know, worker self-management is definitely a point of contention amongst Marxists. But hopefully I can explain the kind of challenges that brought about the need for these systems or the perceived need. So the post-war period in Yugoslavia, it saw a lot of growing pains for the party itself, but also the nation, obviously, in terms of figuring out and refining, like, how to industrialize, manage and distribute resources and work. I mean, like, the area, the whole Balkan region had been

seriously, the South especially, which had already been under industrialized. So there were similarities, but also many differences in the circumstances the Yugoslavian communists face versus what, let's say, the Soviet counterparts had after the revolution. A key difference is that the main base of party support due to the war was the rural peasantry because it was a guerrilla-style warfare. They were often in the countryside. As I said, Yugoslavia was predominantly populated with peasantry and not industrialized workers. They were in pockets. So as such, the party had to figure out what to do about the problem of intensifying industrial production, not just extending it. So, you know, you can only make the workday so long. Also, that's not exactly the vision of

communism that everyone signs up for. So how do we get more out of the work that we do? It also had to match the kind of democracy and consideration that workers were expecting. So from this, there are experiments in the countryside as well. They try to collectivize and bring more women into farm management, which is really interesting. Because it was kind of a twofold effort and experiment. One is obviously to have greater agricultural yield, but also because, because these rural populations had a lot of kind of reactionary culture left over.

It's the beginning of socialist Yugoslavia. So it had to be, you know, it was an attempt to address kind of more traditional gender roles that were at play in rural areas. And the anti-fascist women's front was like instrumental in this. But there were serious issues with kind of funding and resources to do that and also deep, deep-rooted cultural challenges in this post-war landscape. And so collectivization wasn't going well either. And the party was aware that any major discontent on the part of workers or peasants could seriously threaten their fragile new nation. And not seeing the logic and copying the Soviet model to their own specific circumstances and facing uncertainty and major rifts in terms of their economic social. support from the East and the West. The party starts to experiment with methods of worker self-management.

And this is an attempt to incentivize kind of increased output and more of a direct stake in success of the nation's development from the workers themselves. It's also trying to eliminate inefficient bureaucracies, a kind of withering away of the state. That's the vision. It was a response. It was kind of like a tweak and a long line of tweaks to their changing economic and political circumstances and an attempt to kind of make the state and the economy more flexible and adaptable to pressures. So, you know, it's living communism. They couldn't, they didn't want to just copy and paste what the Soviets had done, but the Soviets themselves hadn't copied and pasted.

They were, you know, they created, you know, Marxist Leninism. So this worker self-management, market socialism, it was kind of a system where enterprise was a mix of state, private, and worker ownership and investment where workers maintained the majority of ownership, but competed with others on the market. Workers were also allowed to seasonally work in the West, which distinguished them from their Eastern Bloc counterparts. I'm kind of wary of being like deterministic about it. It's hard to say whether it was the right choice for Yugoslavia. It did in some ways mean general allegiance could coalesce around republics, which often specialized in certain industries and traded with each other, which is not necessarily good because

it opposed identifying with the nation as a whole. And workers themselves were at risk of adopting certain perspectives that weren't good in the national interest. Like if you're allocating wage bonuses from profits, it's not really in your interest to increase employment. The more people who are working in the factory, the smaller the slice of the profit pie is for you. But it was a part of the Yugoslav vision to kind of borrow what was useful from other models, adapted to their own conditions, they were, you have to say about them that they were constantly willing to adapt an experiment. This approach overall was a challenge to any brand of imperialism. It's difficult to say what would have happened in terms of the Cold War if the perception

of Yugoslavia, which it had up until this adopting the system, was as the most radical and loyal state to the USSR. If that hadn't changed and it had gone on this independent path, then the story of the Cold War definitely would have been different as well. It did provide a model to other nations, especially those in the non-aligned movement who were fighting colonialism. It inspired Gaddafi and Ben Bala to a great extent. It's seen in some elements of current Cuban economic policies and also in Dengist reforms in China. So it definitely had some merits. Yeah.

And so I want to skip ahead to a question that's later about Titoism because I think it would fit in much nicer here than later in the conversation. So you're talking about this more experimental approach where, you know, market. are open, but workers are engaged in profit sharing and self-management. This drew, you know, accusations of council communism and Trotskyism and other things. They were more interested in maybe political liberalization or democratization, I heard from one source. So what, it's all that in mind, and also this idea that we'll talk about when it comes to Stalin and Tito's dispute is this idea that Tito asserted that Yugoslavian socialism should be built focused on the local conditions of Yugoslavia, not necessarily, as you said, this copy and paste from the Soviet Union or letting the Soviet Union in Moscow in particular reign over and basically be an executive branch of sorts to this Yugoslavian socialism.

So it's much more experimental, much more open. And then so what is Titoism then, right? So is Titoism an actual real tendency on the left? or is it more of a slander than anything? Or how are we to understand Titoism, if that's even a thing? Yeah, I think it depends on who you ask for sure. Some people would be fiercely proud to call themselves Titoists and others would absolutely use it as slander.

I do think that it doesn't deviate from Marxist-Leninism as much as maybe people are given to understand. But it is a distinct approach to Marxist-Leninism for sure. it was born of and kind of defined by pragmatism in the face of reality, I would say. That's like just being realistic about the circumstances at hand. The pre-World War II, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, they were devout adherence to Marxist Leninism and to the USSR as the motherland of the revolution, because as I said, many of the communists had actually experienced the Russian Revolution firsthand.

They went so far as to not even making any decisions on the national question in Yugoslavia, because at the time, it was still a point of contention between Lenin and Stalin. So Lenin's approach in Russia was in itself an adaptation, an adaptation of Marxism. At the time, it itself didn't meet Marx's conditions for revolution. And so the Ugo communists, they would come to kind of assess their own country through the same lens of adaptation, not dogmatic prescription. This kind of perspective, I think it's really, as I said, formed in World War II, the partisans are primarily organized on anti-fascist lines.

Their political ideology, it's more diverse. They're unified and motivated by the terror of Nazi occupation because not every partisan was a communist. They were organized by the communists, but what brought all of these different people together was their common enemies. And so the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, they recognize this,

and they downplayed being an explicitly ideological vanguard. This ambiguity is key to establishing as broad a base as possible centered on this anti-fascism. And so this is definitely a deviation from Lenin's concept of the vanguard and its responsibility, but not, I would say, crucially a contradiction of the need for adaptation in order to survive or succeed, which I feel Lenin would agree with, not to put words in his mouth. There are also similarities between kind of Tito's dream of a multinational federation

developing from one that had been dominated and subjugated and Lenin's disapproval of Russian chauvinism. So after World War II, there are these reforms and actions that mirror Lenin's new economic policy. This is kind of like decentralization and it results in the worker self-management system that I talked about. And it was key to Yugoslavia overcoming issues of insubordinate workforce and challenges to industrialization. And there's absolute parallels with Lenin's approach in the post-war communism period. There were also councils formed at every level of urban and rural life to give workers more control in the hopes of withering away the state and inefficient bureaucracies.

I'm not saying it was entirely successful, but it also wasn't entirely hierarchal or non-democratic. And Lenin about his own new economic policy said, quote, that it was a long-term strategy applied for an indefinite period, end quote. So as long as survival dictated the need for it. And to compliment that Tito was quoted as saying about the purity of their politics or accusations of revisionism that, quote, we are not concerned with whether they are called socialist or not. We need more bread to increase agricultural production. We are trying to find a means of getting it, end quote.

I think this realism, whatever Marxists make of it, is the key to Titoism. You know, he knew the fragility of the project that they had. succeeded in founding, and all he cared about was getting the job done, having people fed. Because he also knew that if the more disgruntled that people would become in this fragile coalition of republics, nations, religions, identities, the greater threat was to the communist project. And so, yeah, definitely, I think tithuism is in line in many ways with Marxist-Leninism. I think it just has an extra emphasis on realism and pragmatism. Yeah. And I do appreciate the idea that, you know, socialism is going, its construction will look different in different parts of the world. Now, we're in a very, they were in a very heated time. You were, you know, had these two major blocks, the emergence of the Cold War, the end of World War II. Lots of huge swaths of Europe were in ruins. These are not ideal conditions to build socialism under. Things are challenging. They're different. But this experimental, pragmatic approach for its successes and failures,

shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as inherently revisionist or anti-Marxist or whatever. Did Tito face criticism from other communist thinkers and leaders? I know you mentioned Ocha and I don't even know how to say his name. I think it's Hocha or whatever. Trotsky, anybody else, were there any other commentaries on Titoism as it was happening that you're aware of? Yeah, for sure. It's out of left field, but yeah. No, yeah, we can talk about it later as well, but within his own party he faced because

many of the Yugoslavian communists were staunchly in support of the USSR and Stalin. And so it created a schism not only in the communist bloc, but also in the party itself. And then the kind of influence of the common form and other geopolitical activities meant that, you know, the eastern block and their leaders definitely picked sides. and Tito was very much isolated until the formation of the non-aligned movement, which I know we're going to talk about later. But, yeah, Titoism was absolutely a slander, regrettably kind of the only championing you can find of it if you do a quick Google search is from Trotskyists. But, yeah, it was the power of the USSR that in the time when their relations were especially frosty, Titoism, was not a positive term at all. Yeah, and at that time, you know, at that time the slander of the use of the word Trotskyism was very, like, are you on the side of the USSR and Stalin or not?

And if you're not, or you're perceived to deviate, you will be slandered with the label Trotskyism, whether or not Tito thought of himself as a Trotskyist or was doing Trotskyist things as sort of beside the point. It was meant to be like a binary. You're on that side or you're on this side. You're not doing things like, we want you to do. do them. Therefore, you're a Trotskyist, a transgressive, somebody that's, you know, a wrecker or whatever. I mean, even to this day, if you're on the communist left, you know how insanely sectarian and nitpicky people can be, even outside of, we're not building socialism. We're just arguing online and still at some of the most vile groups you can, you know, interactions you can have online. So this is nothing new on the left. Yeah, to be clear, I don't, I didn't mean it in any slanderous way. I meant that people who were coming from a Marxist

Leninist perspective, if they were trying to get a nuance to take on Titoism, basically all you can find is this kind of divisive rhetoric of either it was the most garbage concept and it was, you know, like extremely detrimental to socialism or go Tito, he spat in the face of Stalin, you know, it's not very nuanced at all, except I did find some very good materialist takes in light of recent Soviet documents that have been released. So hopefully we can talk about that later too. Yeah, very interesting. Okay, well, one more question about Yugoslavian socialism before we get into Stalin proper and then the non-aligned movement. And this question is sort of zooming into a street-level view of Yugoslavia, which I know is something that you wanted to make sure that we touch on. What was daily life like for the average working person in Yugoslavia during the high points of its existence? Yeah, I'm very happy to talk about this because I'd really like to use my grandma and my dad's side of the family in general as an example. because I think that their life, their lives were just extraordinary compared to what came before and what came after, specifically how I live in the West, but also the reality in the current neoliberalized economies of the Balkans.

So my grandparents on all sides come from farming. They're from small peasant villages. My paternal grandma only completed school up to grade six because the war broke out when she was 11. And so even if the war hadn't happened, though, the prevailing mentality at that time was that as the peasant woman, she wouldn't need much formal education. She would be a farm wife. The big decisions and an economic foundation would come from her husband. So in World War II, her father and other relatives joined the partisans. And as I mentioned earlier, after their victory, she spent three months in the capital away from her family, doing all kinds of manual labor to help rebuild the city, things that she had never done as a village girl.

When she marries my grandfather, they moved to a suburb of Sarajevo, and she starts working in a local factory, and that's where she would work her whole life. To give a picture of the different socialism made in lives like hers, almost everything was organized through a person's workplace. So my grandparents got their apartment through a system of seniority that assessed every worker's need, based on the family side, you know, their situation. A fund was established through the factory that was put towards building housing for the workers, among many other. things. Initially, while housing was being built, my grandparents shared an apartment with another family. They divided it according to their respective sizes. But once the other family obtained their house, the apartment was all hers, and she adored it. I mean, like, she still talks about it to this day, and she really laments leaving it. She'll tell me about the curtains, what the

view was from the balcony. You know, it wasn't, obviously, I feel that all communist architecture gets a bad rap, but I think our generation especially can appreciate the feeling of having your own home that also you and your co-workers work towards like these were homes that were built off of the labor of all of these people there was an immense amount of pride in it so through worker management at her factory the profits were also distributed according to the planning needs for the factory the workers funds and then any pure profit left after that was distributed among the workers so some years she got two months salary in bonus that way which is just incredible to me she was enormously proud of earning her own money and of being her own woman because

she was economically independent of my grandfather and there was no precedence for that in her family before and it was a very good thing because my grandpa loved to switch jobs when she was pregnant with her first child he quit a well-paying position for only two days because he didn't I think what he said at the time was I can't take orders from anyone dumber than me I think we don't know that feeling but I mean like every job I've ever worked I'm not even a particularly smart person, so that's... Sure, yeah. But like, imagine, like, that level of security.

Like, he lands a great paying job. His wife is pregnant, and he's just like, no, not for me. So, and it was because he knew he wouldn't be homeless or destitute. He had options. And furthermore, what's really amazing is that the country provided not only free education to youth, but any upgrades in education for adult workers were also covered. So he was initially like a tool and dye maker, but he went back to school to be trained in mechanical engineering, completely covered. And so my family, they lived and they worked alongside Muslim Bosnians, Croats, Roma.

My grandmother expected my dad and his sister to have the house ready when she got home from work. They were expected to prep dinner and share the tasks equally, which was also unheard of in her youth. So in all these very material ways, the next generation is being shaped to be completely different from their parents. and their grandparents. She lived a walking distance from work, which is extremely common at the time. And so she got around by foot in public transit. And workers also often had, I mean, this is where it gets into like paradise levels for me. Seaside motels and other kind of like vacation resorts that were paid for through the company.

It was part of that company funding. And so they could go there with their families in the summer and kind of rotating schedules. And seaside vacations became like a national summer pilgrimage. for all of Yugoslavia. It was like a right. And you accrued your vacation time at work over the guaranteed two weeks at the rate of one day for every year of work. So if you were at a place for 20 years, that amounted to three extra weeks of vacation or five weeks in total. And as a kid, my dad got rheumatic fever. And for the following three years, he spent one month of every summer at this kind of like coastal health spa. It was a sanatorium for children whose ailments

benefited from a seaside environment. And that was completely covered through health care as well. He loved it. Like, you know, I mean, he's here he is like suffering from this like respiratory problem. But he, he's by the sea with all these other children. His parents, like his parents would just drop him off. It just seems like such a caring, considering it really, it really touches me because I know the challenges that that whole nation faced post-war and to put such a precedence on like the care and security of the citizens. I can understand why everyone was so proud or majority. So yeah, back to my family. My dad did extracurricular music and sports at no cost. He learned the French horn, Greco-Roman wrestling. He did his military service in Croatia.

He went to university for free, including the food and accommodation. This is unique to Yugoslavia. They had free travel. So he went to, sorry, by free travel, I mean freedom of travel, not paid for. That would have been extra. But he went to Italy and he even moved to, like he would go to Italy frequently to go shopping. He even moved to Paris at one point on a romantic whim. And so there was a lot of freedom comparative to the other eastern bloc countries.

His first job was as an accountant in his 20s, I wish he was given a company car. And my dad said he never knew exploitation until he came to Canada. He only knew of it as like a concept. And so he moved here because he fell in love with my mom. She was already living here with a relative and she'd come back to Yugoslavia on a holiday. She herself was from a historically very poor rural area, but she'd also attended university. my dad's sister, my aunt, she married a Bosniak man, so a Bosnian Muslim. Again, like these relations were much more uncommon before socialism, especially for the

peasantry, this level of like integration, of mixed marriage, of mobility. My dad himself wasn't very politically involved at all. He didn't do like the youth work action that my grandma did. When I asked him about it, he said he was too busy having fun. So that gives you a good indication. and I think a different image of life under communism than what we're told in the West. And I mean, I'm not going to, you know, it's not entirely rose-tinted. There was obviously like a black market.

There were corrupt individuals. There were petty criminals, but crucially, no grand petty bourgeoisie. But the project, the general aim of socialism that the republics worked towards, it gave the masses an increase in security and quality and equality of life that hasn't existed since. And they achieved all that in such a short period of time, socially provided health care, child care, education, housing, control over workplace decisions, freedom of travel, media from all over the world. You know, it wasn't like a ban on rock and roll or anything. In contrast, just to wrap it up, like, I'm in my 30s. I rent an overpriced apartment. Homeownership is totally

out of reach for me. I had to work through school and still ended up with debt. I spent my formative adult years and low-paying jobs with no benefits. If I wanted to travel, I had to use credit cards for sure. I tried to upgrade my training, actually, during the pandemic when we were in lockdown, and the state cut off my unemployment insurance because I was trying to get a better job. So, yeah, that's what life was like at street level, not for everyone, because as I said, that there was unevenness in the development in the country for sure, especially the further down you go south. There were definite problems with poverty, but it was a scale. And I think my family as coming from a peasant farming background represents a kind of, definitely represents a common,

common story for lots of people in Yugoslavia. It makes me jealous on one hand. It's fascinating on another. I'm like you. I have three children. It's hard to find fucking formula for my baby right now. I never had health care in my life. You know, we're not even anywhere close to being able to buy our own home. Like, that's just on an increasingly distant horizon. I've never, I had a child at 19. I've never had child care, and I have about $60,000 in debt just to get an education.

My dad, for example, paid taxes his entire life. He died waiting for his disability, that they never approved, and he was fighting for that for the last two years of his life. And he was just, you know, a conservative guy, a believer in capitalism, you know, a guy that came to age during the Reagan era, he believed in this system. He believed in America, you know, and at the end of his life, when he needed his country to help him out the most, they left him to fucking rot. And that really, at the end of his life, really changed his perspective on this country.

But, you know, it seems like those people had more freedom and democracy than anything I've ever experienced here in the United States. And they were able to achieve amazing achievements after a brutal continent spanning world war, resistance movement, occupation, you know, people dead, cities destroyed, and they're still able to achieve that level of dignity in the lives of working people. And this is, you know, this is different from socialist republic to socialist Republic, you know, some were better than others. But one thing is for sure, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of states like Yugoslavia are tragic for all of humanity. They are losses of advances made by the working classes, imperfect as they were, as messy as

they sometimes were, as brutal as they sometimes were. They were true material advancements for working people. And when those countries were destroyed and annihilated and replaced with some of the most brutal forms of capitalism, those people acutely suffered from that reintroduction of brutal capitalism. But I would argue humanity as a whole suffered from those tragic collapses. And our job now living in the wake of that and the triumphalism of the capitalist West is to fight to retain that history, those narratives, that tradition, claim it as our own and continue to try to rebuild some of the things that our grandparents, really, were able to build in these different countries. So, uh, you did an amazing job breaking, breaking that down. And it's really

important to kind of zoom in, as you said, and what was it actually like? We can talk in these high, jargony philosophical terms about socialism, but does it materially uplift the people or not? And in this case, at least for some people, at least for a period of time, it certainly seemed to do that. Um, but now I think it's, oh, go ahead. Yeah, anything to follow up? Oh, no, I just wanted to say that like, um, even now when they do polls in the former Yugoslav republics you know um people are nostalgic for Yugoslavia there's a lot of support um for tito depending on which region you ask and you know it'll often be dismissed as kind of just romanticized nostalgia like they don't know what they're talking about or it's you know just

uh longing for youth which i think is really condescending people aren't dumb they know that things were afforded them then that aren't now and the things that were pitted against the the communist system, namely inflation, unemployment, national debt, all of those things still exist under capitalism without any of these supports. So yeah, I just, I find it interesting the way that it gets downplayed and as a kind of emotional response to a very concrete reality that people assess. Absolutely. And just the last thing to say is just the inherent dignity of workers controlling or having a democratic say in the means of production, in their workplace, Going into work, knowing that you are, you know, an equal with the people around you, working together to better the lives of all of you, not simply taking orders from some fucking asshole who happened to luck into this position and get paid shitty wages, feel completely alienated from your coworkers, from your own products of your labor and from yourself over time.

Just the introduction of democracy to the workplace, one socialist idea brings a huge amount of basic dignity to people. And if you bolster that with a broader social safety net and, you know, you allow people to move between different jobs at the drop of a hat, I don't like the way that boss treated me. I'm going to go get a better job over here. Like, those are options I've never fucking had. Even though capitalists told me tell all of us our entire lives, you don't like your job, go get another one. You don't like working at McDonald's, go try working at Burger King. There's no option. Yeah, our only supposed freedom. Exactly. Yeah, it's grotesque. So I found that very fascinating. But now let's go ahead and move on to what I think is the fun question. I think this is absolutely fascinating this split between Tito and Stalin. So now that we have plenty of context about Yugoslavia, its history, its forms of socialism, let's talk about its relationship with the Soviet Union. So how did this relationship start and how did it eventually sort of devolve into a split between Tito and Stalin. As you said, Tito was in Russia during the revolutionary period. He was a Bolshevik. You know, these are deep, deep ties. So what happened here? And how did it necessarily play out? I'll start with saying that it was the first schism in the communist block, which is huge. And officially it occurred on the 28th of June, 1948. That's when the common form accused the Communist Party of Yugoslavia of deviating from Marxist Leninism. There were also other criticism of

its economy and state structure. But this was preceded by a lot more history. Immediately before this, there were a series of letters between the two parties. They were kind of disputes along ideological lines. But the ideological aspect isn't the whole story, I would say. It was useful to both the USSR and communist Yugoslavia to emphasize the ideological aspect after the split. But there were definitely other political power plays involved. So until the split, the communist party of Yugoslavia believed that they were being true to the spirit of Marxist Leninism, even if the relationship with the USSR was never entirely harmonious. For example, in 1943, Stalin was against the founding of the provisional government in Yugoslavia. Then in 1945, he wasn't on board with

Yugoslavians' claims to Trieste. That's a town along the Italian border. And both of these times, it was because he saw these actions as potentially destabilizing to his relationship with the allies. And that aspect of Stalin's actions towards the Yugoslavians is pretty central. So in the immediate post-war period, Communist Party of Yugoslavia was overwhelmingly dutiful in its intention to follow the Stalinist model of centralization and industrialization to a T. It was evidenced in all of their planning, in economic, educational, judicial, like across all fronts, they were copying Stalinist's model. They were so much so that they were seen as most ardent of all eastern bloc countries in their pursuit of socialism, especially to Western powers. They thought that, you know, you get this like extremely loyal satellite of the USSR and very radical. After the war, there was this intense collectivization, as I talked about, and eradication of collaborators in opposition.

Tito was noted for that amongst all the socialist leaders in Eastern Europe. He went very hard on collaborators. And so this was a strong demonstration of their intent, their commitment to eradicating capitalism in the country. And so when the Common Forum was initially founded in that, 1947, the Ugoes were actually praised as a role model for other nations. The purpose of the common form was kind of to consolidate the control and direction of European socialist nations. At the same time, a Balkan alliance led by Yugoslavia was being considered by the nations of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia. I'll try to explain without getting into

the geography too much, but Greece is after the war is in a civil war. war with the communists against the monarcho-fascists of Greece. And so this has like, this is a threat to all the other Balkan nations in terms of like their territorial integrity, but also interference from the West. It's just like it's a very dicey situation. So what ensues from this on the Yugoslavian side is mainly a vying for influence in Albania. The Albanians initially sought for Kosovo to join them because in Kosovo there's a large Albanian population. But the proposal by Yugoslavia was for the Balkan states to become a

federal unit. So for Albania to join Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Greece, the logic being that Yugoslavia had a significant army, and this would solve many problems concerning the territorial disputes and nationalist threats. This alarmed Moscow, who sought greater oversight over the whole region, as these kinds of unifications had the potential to escalate cold war tensions. So Tito decides to aid the Greek communists in their civil war. He makes plans with Albania to send divisions to the Albanian border to defend aggression from Greek monarchos fascists. And he's doing all of this unilaterally. He's not consulting Stalin or the Soviets. And the USSR is extremely pissed about this because it's a renegade move that could definitely provoke the West, especially Britain.

And then Dmitrov in Bulgaria, also of his own volition, makes a speech about Balkan unification, and this upsets everyone. And so because he's kind of, you know, getting ahead of everyone, what the Yugoslavs want, what the Russians are intending. And so a meeting in Moscow is called where there's an argument over supporting Greece based on their probability of winning. The Soviets don't think the Greeks will win. the Yugoslavs think that with enough support, they should be able to. And so it kind of had more to do with Stalin's disapproval of Yugoslavia, acting independently, not so much the threat of provoking, in the case of Greece, in the threat of provoking the Western powers, because the USSR supported East Germany and Czechoslovakia, even though it had a similar potential for Cold War escalation.

So it's really that Yugoslavia is trying to throw this support with, consulting the USSR. So Stalin proposes a smaller union of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, which would have to have deference to the Soviets. And this is initially agreed upon, but in a secret meeting, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia decides not to go through with it. And for the first time, the Politburo of the Yugoslavian communists, they openly criticize Stalin's positions. So up until this point, like they are genuinely, they think that they're doing Marxist Leninism. You know, they don't see that they're, they've never considered themselves to be a satellite of the USSR, to be under their control. They thought of them as allies and that

they, you know, shared a general vision. There could be dissension, but the, you know, all I mean to say is that the split is definitely a surprise. So shortly after, in the spring of 1948, Moscow circulates the common form resolution. This is the bomb. This is the letter that accuses the Communist Party of Yugoslavia of deviating from Marxist Leninism. The letter is decidedly heavy on ideological differences instead of mentioning any of these political power plays. And so Tito finds himself between a rock in a hard place. He's facing internal pressure from those supportive of the USSR,

an external threat from everywhere. He's completely isolated. And this results in the Inform Bureau period. For anyone who doesn't know, informed bureau period was where Tito took the, or identified correctly and incorrectly people who were supportive of Stalin and the USSR in the Communist Party and sent them to Goliotok for torture and to be imprisoned. Not everyone got sent to Goliathok, obviously,

But it was definitely a crackdown on supporters of Stalin, namely because he couldn't have this schism within the country. I'm not like a justifying or I'm simply explaining the situation. You know, this is a massive split. And my dad's neighbor actually was a, he was one of the youngest, he was in the military with the partisans. And he was one of the youngest officers, I believe, or a general. he had some titled position. But it was basically he got to that position because of his military prowess and capability, not because he was any kind of like a theoretician or, you know, had great understanding of economics.

And so in this informed beautiful period, he sided with Stalin and the USSR because in his mind, oh, well, the Red Army helped us during the war, you know, like that's as deep as his analysis went. And as a result, he was removed from his position. You know, he was removed from the military and it really, it really messed him up. He became an alcoholic. And so it was a very difficult period in the whole country's history for sure. There was also an excellent film called When Father was a Way on Business that has to deal with this period. So back to the split, the Soviets blockade Yugoslavia.

They're hoping for a decline in Titoism that would bring the nation back under Soviet control. Many executions were conducted on those accused of being Titoist by the USSR. Albanian and Bulgaria in this environment do a sharp turn towards Moscow. And at this point, Yugoslavia stopped sending aid to the Greeks. So that is the Tito Stalin split. Stalin dies in 1953. And there's a Belgrade declaration with Khrushchev in 1955. This is kind of like an easing of relations.

It recognizes Yugoslav socialism. And I would say that like everything that happens in Yugoslavia post-1948 is one way or another a response to the common form resolution. Like it sets Yugoslavia on the course of independence and distancing from either block while aligning with third world nations committed to anti-imperialism. There's absolutely no question that they wouldn't have struck that route if this hadn't happened. Yeah. And this is very messy. It gets very deep. Again, that whole episode could just be.

this split. I know in 1949, there was even an amassing of I think Bulgarian, Romanian, and Soviet troops on the Yugoslav border. This was escalating very intensely. And I want to read this part from Wikipedia because I found it to be very interesting and get your thoughts on it. It says this.

It says, the assumption in Moscow, this is at the amassing of troops on the border. This is at the height of sort of this really precarious, like, how far are we going to take this beef thing going? And the quote is, the assumption in Moscow was that once it was known that he had lost Soviet approval, Tito would collapse. I will shake my little finger and there will be no more Tito,

Stalin remarked. The expulsion effectively banished Yugoslavia from the International Association of Socialist States, while other socialist states of Eastern Europe subsequently underwent purges of alleged Titoist, as you said. Stalin took the matter personally and arranged several assassination attempts on Tito, none of which succeeded. In one correspondence between them, Tito wrote the following. And this is absolutely wild when I found this. Tito wrote to Stalin, stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle. If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow and I won't have to send a second. So this escalated to the possibilities of war and then the active assassination attempts of one another on the parts of Stalin and Tito. And there's even, I even read this and I'm not saying this is true. I'm just asking if you have any thoughts on it whatsoever. Some speculation that. that Stalin's ultimate death, I think, was, you know, ratcheted up to a stroke or something,

but that that might have been a result of a poisoning at the behest of Tito. Is there any legitimacy to that, or are you aware of that line of inquiry at all? I do not know. In fact, I mean, I wouldn't put it past Tito, but I can't confirm or deny. But I think that because there were such, because the issue of Balkan Federation

was such a strong part of the Tito's Island split, but that almost would seem too much of like a power play between the two of them and almost petty, you know, that like in later representation from either side, it had to take on these kind of grand ideological tones to justify because it was a major loss to Yugoslavia. economically it was devastating and and also in that time post the split Yugoslavia had to you know rely on Western aid and how do you square that with your

population when you're meant to be communist and all this kind of stuff and so there was definitely a project of on both sides of framing it in a way that would make either seem like the ideological victor or like you know the valiant one um and And, yeah, whereas I think genuinely that obviously both of them were, communism is a living thing and both of them were more or less operating along the communism that they thought would succeed. And the allegiances that they thought would be beneficial. Because, I mean, that Balkan Federation, it came to pass. Like, all of those regions did suffer from nationalistic threats and would have been stronger together.

So, yeah. Very complicated stuff. Well, this post-split also opened up the door to the non-aligned movement. And this was really fascinating. This is, of course, during the Cold War era, there's two big blocks. There's the Soviet Union and there's the U.S.-backed West. And this non-aligned movement was Tito's way of carving out a third path that didn't take either side. Because even after the split, as you say, there's some aid coming in from the West.

The West is sort of like giddy that like, oh, maybe we can get, you know, Yugoslavia on our side here. but Tito obviously didn't want to, you know, fully join them either. And the non-aligned movement kind of came out of that. So what was the non-aligned movement? What was the motivation behind it? And how did that idea play out? I find this part very interesting. Yeah, I love the non-aligned movement.

I think it's a pretty feel-good movement. So I'll just call it NAM while we're talking. It was an answer to being positioned between two superpowers. After this split, it was a way to enable kind of flexibility. and influence in the global politics and not be left isolated and dependent on kind of like the calculated benevolence of either block, you know, not subjected to their whims. In many ways, it was a predecessor of multipolarity, I would say, that we're seeing today. I came across a quote from Mearsheimer that I really liked that relates to this. He says, survival dominates other motives.

Once a state is conquered, it's unlikely to be able to pursue its aims. So it's kind of like you can be, it's fine to be, as you said, like in a tower and theoretizing when your survival is assured. But when it's not, you look for any means possible to maintain the project. And so NAM was another way for Yugoslavia to survive and offer a model for survival and cooperation to the other nations struggling against imperialism. The positioning of Yugoslavia was pretty key because neither block wanted to, as you said, drive it into the arms of the other. Yugoslavia had a really strong military, and it was bordered on one side by eastern socialist nations and on the other by NATO nations at this point. So the U.S. was willing to give aid to Yugoslavia with very few strings attached, as long as the impression that it was kind of a thorn in the Soviet side

continued. And, you know, Yugoslavia used this to its benefit, definitely, strategically. From those kind of circumstances, Yugoslavia embarks on this opening of a market for trading economically and politically with countries of the global south who are experiencing, you know, an immense surge in anti-colonial sentiment and movements and governments. And so Yugoslavia is distinct among the European nations for having its own experience with resources being plundered by foreigners of imperial domination and of successfully overcoming those challenges and navigating the issue of multi-ethnic, multinational states. All this gives it a common ground with the global South. The non-aligned movement was about affirming the right to independence of each nation.

It was a commitment to peace and anti-colonialism, neocolonialism, or otherwise. In this way, it was fundamentally more opposed to America's global interests than those of the Soviet Union, obviously, because who was representing neocolonialism and is still representing neocolonialism on the global scale at that time, it was America. And this allegiance between the non-aligned movement countries. It was strengthened through economic, cultural, and scientific cooperation. It wasn't understood as kind of like a monolith of ideology, but more a unity of objectives. And the inspiration for NAM came from the Bandung conference that was organized by Sukarno in 1955. The following year, Nasser of Egypt and Nehru from India and Tito meet on the Bruni

islands in Croatia, and they sign an agreement for committing to collective security on a global scale. And so those are the baby beginnings of NAM. In 1961, the first conference is held. There are 25 countries in attendance from all over. You have Indonesia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Lebanon, Nepal, Sudan, Yemen, Ghana. Sorry, I meant to say Iraq, not Iran. In 1973, there was a very concrete demonstration of the non-aligned movement's power. There was a protest against the fourth Arab-Israeli war and the OPEC nations, all of which were non-aligned movement members except for one, quadrupled to the price of oil.

So this was the beginnings of the new international economic order as well. Culturally, one big achievement of NAM was its program for students from membering nations. They were able to study in all the other non-aligned member states. actually when I was growing up in my town there was a pharmacist who was Indian he worked at the local pharmacy and he spoke perfect Croatian and that's because under the non-aligned movement he went and studied in Zagreb for like much of his youth and there was a lot of this my aunt as well went to work as a nurse in Libya and so there was all this kind of like cultural exchange there was Nunap the non-aligned news agency pool and that sought to address the imbalance world news. It gave greater circulation to the third world perspective. This was initiated and funded by Tan Yug. That's the official news agency of Yugoslavia. So they would send their, you know, trained technicians and journalists to train others in Africa and the global south. And then all of this media would be circulated amongst the non-line member states. All of this kind of culminates for Tito

in 1979 in Havana at the sixth summit of the non-aline movement. It would end up being his last international trip, actually. And at the time, he was the sole surviving founding member of the non-aligned movement in attendance. There was a big divide between Castro and Tito. The former argued for a natural alliance with the USSR based on Lenin support for anti-colonialism. The other camp with Tito emphasized the non-alignment central, which is like central to their ethos. I looked at the speeches from the Sixth Summit. They are very explosive.

I definitely encourage listeners to look at the at the speeches, not just from Tito and Castro, but from the other country members. Certain countries left, like it was very controversial. But yeah, that was the non-aligned movement. It was an effort for all of these nations. It can definitely be understood as multipolarity.

It was all of these nations who were struggling against colonialism, who didn't want to depend on either the, West or the USSR for their development, but to try, but to recognize the right and the sovereignty of each nation to pursue liberation and peace in their own way. Yeah. Yeah, very interesting movement in history. You mentioned the Bandung Conference on Gorilla History, our other podcast. We just unlocked an episode we did on Patreon originally, but now it's on our public feed covering the Bandun Conference. So if you're particularly interested in that, go over to guerrilla history and check that out. There's, you know, there's the interesting huge amounts

of assistance. Yugoslavia gave to anti-colonial movements that came out of this non-aligned movement. That's very interesting. And he co-founded it. It's worth mentioning that it started as this like the initiative of the five. Tito co-founded it with Egypt's Nassar, India's Nehru, Indonesia, Sukarno, as you said. And then Ghana's Kwame Nakruma. So this is a very interesting political development, and it helped, you know, Yugoslavia definitely established strong ties with a lot of these global south countries. So, yeah, again, a whole bunch of history here that we could unpack. I think you did a wonderful job giving us the summary of it, and I think it's an interesting historical movement that deserves more investigation, and specifically those splits

at the last one between, you know, whether what's our relationship to the USSR, etc. I think all of that is worth diving into. But, you know, we've been going for a long time. We could talk forever. I really, really appreciate you coming on. The information that you have is absolutely in depth and fascinating. And on top of everything, you have a great podcasting voice. It needs to be said. But, yeah, but zooming in here towards the last question or two, how did Tito die and what sort of happened in the wake of his death? Well, there is footage, not of Tito dying, obviously, but of what happened when it was announced. that I've, I think a lot of people, whether they were born, lived in Yugoslavia or not, if they have Yugoslavian heritage they've seen, because it was, you know, it's absolutely on par with JFK for Americans. So Tito died on May 4th, 1980 at 305 p.m. specifically. He was just shy of turning 88. He had been ill for some time. He died to gangrene as a complication of his diabetes. As I said, there's really haunting footage of the TV announcement. as well as a specific moment when his death was announced at a football match that was happening at the same time. It was between a team from Serbia and a team from Croatia.

People run onto the pitch midgame to give the information and the announcement is made and there's just this eruption of grief. You can see like the players are openly sobbing. The crowd is in tears and they spontaneously break out in a song dedicated to him. It's like 50,000 plus people singing Comratito, we swear to you. from your path, we will never depart. You know, that's just like an entirely spontaneous emotional response to this man who meant so much to the national consciousness. So his funeral is held eight days later.

It's the largest state funeral in history. I think more than anything, the list of attendees shows what Tito meant on the international level. It's wild. Like, it sounds like the worst party party. planning or seating arrangement, you could imagine, because he, you know, he achieved so much diplomacy and the struggle for people's liberation that no head of state when he died could be seen to be in defiance of it. There were 128 out of the 154 UN member states. East and West Germany were there. The Soviets, China, India and Pakistan, Japan and North Korea.

Fucking Margaret Thatcher is there. There's representation from the Catholic Church, Bobby McKee of the IRA. There's leaders of all kinds of revolutionary movements. There's Yasser Arafat from Palestine. There's Abdullah Uchal and from Kurdistan. His death brought everyone together in place, obviously not in perspective, but in place for sure. Leading up to his death, though, there were worries domestically and internationally about what it would mean for the fate of Yugoslavia. People knew that he was the glue of the nation's goodwill towards each other. And so their fears were pretty legitimate. His collective leadership in the face of his passing seemed to be the solution. It was actually functional in his declining years. That was the governing method that

they used. There were changes to the presidency of the federal republic in 1974. So it meant that each republic and autonomous province had one representative in the presidency. And the League of Communists also followed a similar system of representation. I don't think I explained, but because It was a federation of republics. There wasn't one communist party. Each republic had its own communist party that was together in the league of communists. So efforts were made to curb like the kind of legislative possibility for nationalism to rise while respecting the democracy that these republics expected.

But the dangers outlined at his death, I think are pretty telling because most of them were realized. They were worried about Soviet intervention or subversion, but that wasn't really likely because the Soviets were just coming out of Afghanistan. There was also poverty and rising separatism in Kosovo, which Tito himself identified as the main issue as well to keeping Yugoslavia unified. Income in Kosovo at the time per capita was one third that of the rest of Yugoslavia and one seventh that of Slovenia, which was the richest republic. So there was definite disparity and discontent. There was the rise of Islamic nationalism in Bosnia. There was the fact that old conflicts hadn't been eradicated within one generation. I mean, Tito ruled for 35 years.

Yugoslavia would end up existing for 47. What they accomplished was incredible. But when you consider what they had, the foundations that they had to rebuild from, a lot of the rot in the foundation had still remained. And this was intensified by the emigray community. there were economic rivalries as I mentioned between the regions and there was also fascist ultra-nationalist emigree groups that were organizing acts of sabotage and terror within the country and lastly is being increasingly dependent on Western loans in a time of global recession so

this is when you know everywhere's facing inflation high gas prices and Yugoslavia was no different they had rising unemployment and they were worried that this was going to result in political stability, which it did. Yeah, it absolutely did. And that is definitely an episode for another time to covering, you know, what happens in the early 90s, mid-90s and how Yugoslavia eventually broke up in a brutal, brutal way. What was, as the last question here, what was Tito's legacy in Yugoslavia and beyond? And really, how should we on the communist left today understand him and his contributions to international socialism? Well, I hope everyone forgives me for being a bit emotional or sentimental in my assessment. But I would say that like the legacy for

Yugoslavia for the Balkan republics and the states that now exist for communists for the world actually is one in the same. The issues that plagued socialist Yugoslavia, to me, they're a microcosm of what we face on a global scale currently. Like we have the threat of fascism that's rising across all nations. We have ancient hatreds that need to be overcome on a domestic level, on a global level. We have socialism between nations. We have uneven development that can't go on and resources that can't be hoarded while others go without. We have imperialists trying to carve up the world. And all of this is just going to be exacerbated by climate change. So I think that Tito's approach of realism and adaptability, and on

the insistence of unity and kinship with all peace-loving people, with everyone struggling for liberation, is essential if we're going to have a fighting chance of escaping the barbarism of upcoming decades, especially instead of jealously guarding our differences, which we can see on the left and in general, I think we have to be looking to have solidarity on as broad a base as possible. As you were saying before, I can't believe that infighting or microscopic feuding over historical details and interpretations that happens on the left. It's as if we're all in power already, and it's just a matter of refining the ideology. It's like very removed from, you know, the fact that we're fighting for our lives.

And so I think the legacy is that we have to be as hell-bent on survival and security for the working class, for the poor, for those facing colonialism and imperialism, to have solidarity despite the unevenness that exists on a global scale. despite our old prejudices, to build movements and coalitions wherever possible that will lead to the Yugoslavian dream of unity and peace, but for everyone. And I think also the fact that when communism comes under critique, it's important to remember that the project itself is what's important. The aim is what's important.

Humans are fallible. Our experiments with it will be fallible. But capitalism is afforded endless reform. and the aim of the project itself is garbage. And so, you know, to really champion our own path to socialism on a global scale. Beautifully said, Alexandra, I absolutely agree with you. And I think that is a beautiful way to end this episode. Yeah, is there any last words you want to say?

I know you recommended Tito and I as a film. And then I think you said, when father was away for business as another film for that period of time we discussed earlier, anything else you would recommend for anybody that wants to deepen their knowledge on this front after this episode? Sure, I love Yugoslav film a lot actually over the decades. There are many great films. There's one interesting one that's called Young and Healthy as a Rose, and it was perceived at the time as kind of a critique of the communist, quote-unquote, regime. It was made within the country though and it's kind of like a rock and roll new wave um movie in like godar style but in with age and perspective i think it's actually a very telling um uh warning to the future

of yugoslavia yeah interesting and is there any plugs you want to you want to plug before before we go uh no i would like to say thank you to all of my comrades uh who helped me get prepare for the episode and who gave me support. I was pretty nervous. So thank you, everyone. Absolutely. And thank you so much. This was an absolutely fascinating, wonderful episode, and I'm very, very grateful that I had you as a guest to do it with. So thank you so much. And let's have you back on some time in the future. Thanks, Brett. Bessna's O'i

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