May 25 Yugo-nostalgia, not
A former Yugoslav friend writes:
May 25th was celebrated as Tito’s birthday, and was known as Youth Day. They used to take us out of school to wave flags at the runners carrying “best birthday wishes from students, peasants and workers of Yugoslavia” hidden in a baton. Students, peasants and workers started running a relay around the country around May Day, passing the baton hand to hand every couple of hundred meters — it was a huge honor to be a carrier. Factories would stop for a shift and schools would close while workers and students lined the streets to greet the passing baton. Every evening at 7:30, the daily news, which was mandatory viewing for all, would first show that day’s leg of the relay and all the happy workers and peasants celebrating.
Weeks of celebrations culminated on May 25th, at the Stadium of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Belgrade, where the baton would be handed to Tito, by a breathless Stakhanovite or his student equivalent. This one is Tito’s last birthday, in 1979. The lyrics of the song are: “Tito, Tito is our Sun. Tito, Tito is our heart. There is no end to our joy and one love binds us all. Tito-Party-Youth-Action.” Action refers to “work action” – unpaid physical labour that we performed for the motherland, digging ditches, picking corn, laying railroad tracks.
The determined young Albanian woman recites our collective wish: “that you continue to navigate the ship of our state for many more years with a steady hand and a clear eye.” The commentator gushes about the air being “charged with love, respect and gratitude.” The birthday boy manages to string a few semi-coherent short sentences.
I was in the audience. I was over the moon. Within a year, Tito dies. Life changes.
This helps explain how those same people lined up behind new leaders a decade later, and killed and died on command.
All the more glory to those who refused, and who still refuse today, to be led in the wrong directions.
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The Albanian girl wasn’t so far off in wishing Tito a happy birthday, and many more – according to one of his Croatian friends, the writer Krleza, Tito was attempting to strengthen Kosovo’s position in Yugoslavia as a preliminary step towards removing it from Serbia’s control. It was becoming clear that, with the high Albanian birthrate of the time and Serbian out-migration in search of better economic conditions, the Serbs would eventually be outnumbered not only in Kosovo, but in parts of Serbia proper, making Serbian control of Albanian-majority areas increasingly problematic. Tito’s methods of supporting inter-ethnic good relations (for example, by insisting that the executioners of the unreliable in the early years be of the same ethnic group as the victims) may not meet international standards, but he certainly realized the potential harm these relations could cause. At least compared to today’s Serbia, Yugoslavia was united, prosperous, respected in the world under Tito – why wouldn’t the Serbs especially feel nostalgia for his rule?
In the early 70’s, before “Normalization” was fully implemented, I spent a summer in Slovakia. I left to meet up with friends in Yugoslavia for a couple of weeks, and it was like coming out of a pressure-cooker, one I hadn’t consciously been aware of while wandering around Bratislava and the Slovak countryside. That American scholars and ordinary Yugoslav citizens thought that the system was working doesn’t seem so improbable.
I was only two months old when Tito died, so I can not talk much about the “youth-actions”. But, I am not sure how does that explain the atrocities that happed after his death in former Yugoslavia.