[LINK] "Oh, Yugoslavia! How They Long for Your Firm Embrace"

[rfmcdonald]

Dan Bilefsky's article in The New York Times, "Oh, Yugoslavia! How They Long for Your Firm Embrace" examines the phenomenon of Yugonostalgia, the phenomenon of nostalgia on the part of many people in the former Yugoslavia for Tito's Yugoslavia and its various achievements.

Critics of Yugonostalgia--and there are many--say it is driven by a dangerous and anachronistic fringe of crybabies who crave the social safety net of the Communist era and the cult of personality of Tito while ignoring the poverty, the rabid nationalism and 1,000 percent inflation of the 1990s, not to speak of the political repression and the censorship.

"I am puzzled by this nostalgia," said Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenia’s foreign minister. "People say it was not so bad, that socialism was more human. But everyone was egalitarian in the former Yugoslavia because everyone was poor. Yugoslavia was a dictatorship."

For others, however, being Yugonostalgic means going back to a time of multicultural co-existence before Yugoslavia collapsed, before the autocracy of Slobodan Milosevic and before the Balkan wars of the 1990s in which at least 125,000 people died. "Yugonostalgia expresses the pain of a severed limb that is no longer there," said Ales Debeljak, a prominent Slovene cultural critic.

In Velenje, a onetime socialist model town in Slovenia still known by some as "Tito’s Velenje," a statue of Tito dominates the town square. Vlado Vrbic, a local historian, said Slovenians were Yugonostalgic because even if Tito kept tight control at home, Yugoslavs enjoyed free education and health care, open borders, a job for life, interest-free home loans, generous pensions and, above all, peace.

"The Yugoslav passport was the best in the world, and you could travel anywhere," said Mr. Vrbic, who at 16 hitchhiked from Ljubljana to India. "In the former Yugoslavia, the pension was guaranteed, so you didn’t need to save anything and the workday ended at 2 in the afternoon."

Peter Lovsin, the lead singer of a punk band in the former Yugoslavia, agrees. Mr. Lovsin, who also founded Yugoslavia’s best-selling sex magazine in the late 1980s, argued that Yugonostalgia was an outgrowth of the former Yugoslavia’s heady mix of laziness and relative liberalism. Mr. Lovsin, whose lyrics 'Comrades, I don’t believe you' became a subversive anti-Communist anthem in the late 1970s, said the band was never censored.