BELGRADE (25 page)

The break with the Soviet Union was the defining moment in Yugoslavia’s post-war development. The leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was committed to introducing a Soviet-style of government, genuinely believing in its advantages over the pre-war system. For most communists the break represented a crisis of direction in which they had to re-examine their Marxist principles. In the process many found themselves increasingly attracted to the idea of workers’ co-operatives with less involvement from central administration in the day-to–day running of industry.

The first law on workers’ councils was introduced in 1950. Designed to hand more responsibility for financial decisions to the factories themselves, it was a tentative move away from Soviet-style central planning in which government ministries gave out directives on matters of production, pay and investment. Some have seen this as an attempt to establish a true workers’ democracy in which the state would wither away as superfluous. Fred Singleton sees a more pragmatic Tito behind the decision: “Tito did not accept the idea simply because it was a fulfilment of a Marxist dream. He did so because he saw that it suited Yugoslav conditions in 1950, by presenting to the workers a credible alternative to the Stalinism which had failed them in 1948.” If the first councils were largely symbolic since real power at all levels in the country was still in the hands of the Communist Party, the system of self-management as it was termed developed through the ensuing decades and became a distinct feature of Yugoslav political identity.

Over the next 25 years self-management went through numerous changes, each stage contributing to the drive for greater decentralization and encouraging mass participation in all spheres of public life. In his book,
Self-Management on Trial
, Milojko Drulović summarizes the aims of the system “to allow the greatest possible participation of the individual in management and direct democracy”. Workers elected delegates to represent their interests in the workplace. Factory councils would then elect delegates to the next tier consisting of a group of enterprises, or factories, operating locally. From there another delegation would be sent to the next tier through to the republic and federal levels, each delegate team representing the level immediately below.

A similar system operated in the political sphere beginning with the lowest tier of political representation, the communes, through to the city, republic and federal authorities. At each stage there were opportunities for delegates in the economic and political structures to meet and discuss issues of common concern. In May 1974 it was reported that some 700,000 people were serving as delegates.

In the latter stages of self-management attempts were made to include all institutions, including education and health. The Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade was organized like other universities around the world: academic staff elected a dean; heads of department were responsible to the dean, policy and budgets were decided at Faculty Boards, with student representation where appropriate. Another tier of delegated committees was bolted onto this fairly standard set of practices to involve others with an interest in the running of the Faculty. Ancillary staff were represented, since salaries and wages were determined by councils in a manner similar to those in factories. Delegates came from local political structures and local enterprises—as their taxes helped finance the facility—as well as from textbook publishers and other institutions in the educational sector. Agreements had to be reached by consensus, so decisions often stood for months waiting for all parties to agree a common policy. The Faculty, in the terminology of the time, was known as a Self-Managing Community of Interests. Self-management was regarded by some as a utopian aspiration of maximum democracy and by others as bureaucratic and too cumbersome to operate efficiently.

The renewed socialist Yugoslavia also turned more to the West, introducing selected aspects of free market economics, decentralizing the processes of decision-making, and handing more powers to the individual republic governments. The Communist Party changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia as a symbol of its new role—to act by persuasion and example rather than insisting on its place in the vanguard of the revolution. The country opened its borders, its citizens being amongst the very few in the world who did not require visas for travel abroad to either Western or Eastern Europe. About one million Yugoslavs had jobs as temporary guest workers in Germany, France and Switzerland, regularly sending remittances home. Yugoslavia, meanwhile, was admired for its liberal government policies and apparent lack of dissent, and its Adriatic coast was a favourite destination for western holidaymakers. The country represented the most successful example of socialist doctrine anywhere, acting as a bridge between the two most powerful blocs in the world.

In many ways, all this was a dream. Economic success was built on easy loans from abroad, not an increase in productivity or capacity. Political harmony relied on two factors. Firstly, the federal government bought the support of the republics by a careful distribution of the largesse available to it from foreign money. Secondly, the same government was quick to pounce on any real threat to central authority. There emerged a paradox whereby the League of Communists appeared receptive to greater freedoms, especially in the economic sphere, but at the same time never intended to relinquish its monopoly on political power. In the 1950s Milovan Đilas, a leading figure from the Partisan movement and the postwar government, was imprisoned for publishing abroad his views on the need for internal reform and to allow political pluralism. In the 1960s a group of philosophers at the Universities of Zagreb and Belgrade gathered around the journal
Praxis
, which represented a humanist view of Marxist ideology, opened a debate with more orthodox Marxists and were critical of some official lines. The Belgrade
Praxis
group showed some sympathy for the students who protested in the city in 1968, the only student protest in Eastern Europe. The episode came to an end after Tito made a personal appearance on television promising to meet the students’ demands. Afterwards, however, the tolerant approach to the Praxis group was replaced by a campaign to oust them from their posts.

In 1971 the leadership of the Croatian League of Communists was purged in response to its calls for even greater decentralization and its increasingly nationalist sentiments. The League of Communists decided that it was time to re-assert its central authority and action was taken to remove other rogue elements in other republics. The head of the Serbian League of Communists, Marko Nikezić, lost his position for being too much of a liberal. Self-management operated by alternating sticks and carrots, and it worked very well for a time.

The Tito years also resulted in a distinctive non-aligned foreign policy. Many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America were emerging from their colonial past and mistrusted the actions of the world’s two most powerful alliances. The idea for an organization of nations not committed to either NATO or the Warsaw Pact came from talks between Tito, President Nasser of Egypt and President Nehru of India in 1956 held on the Yugoslav president’s island of Brioni. The first conference of the Non-aligned Movement was held in Belgrade in 1961 with representatives from 25 countries.

Tito successfully found an international role and strengthened Yugoslavia’s position, as Fred Singleton comments:

The Belgrade summit conference of non-aligned nations in 1961 was a triumph for Tito’s policy of steering a careful route between the two power blocs. Neither side dared offend him too much, lest they drive him into their opponents’ arms. His popularity amongst the Third World countries, which his vigorous denunciations of the neo-colonialists greatly enhanced, also strengthened his position in dealing with the big powers. Neither could afford to alienate the champion of the Afro-Asian nations, over whose destinies both sides were struggling to gain control. Therefore, both offered non-aligned Yugoslavia economic aid and diplomatic support.

Attitudes in Belgrade, meanwhile, did not differ from those anywhere else in Yugoslavia. Most people got on with the daily routine of their lives, a few made careers out of being seen and heard in various committees, a small minority would question the taboo areas of public life. Direct criticism of President-for–life Tito was not permitted, nor were attacks on the basic principles of the system, self-management and non-alignment. The police, the army, and the decision to open Goli Otok in 1948 were also nogo areas for open discussion. Those who went too far would be discouraged by being denied better apartments or losing their jobs. The system avoided highly visible and controversial action against individuals whose case might attract international attention, preferring to hand out pensions rather than prison sentences. Yet the fact remains that the system was mostly benign; the vast majority of Yugoslavs were loyal, enjoying a higher standard of living than elsewhere in Eastern Europe and an open-door policy toward the West.

Nikola Pašić Square is located at the beginning of King Alexander Boulevard as the road curves round from Terazije. From the end of the sixteenth century a large mosque, the Batal-džamija, stood near or on today’s square. By the middle of the nineteenth century, after Knez Miloš began plans for development on Terazije, the old mosque was clearly situated in the growing Serbian district. Miloš faced a very difficult decision, for the Ottoman authorities wanted to include it within their jurisdiction. He resisted their attempts as a matter of principle, but unwilling to antagonize them over the issue, he made no effort to demolish it. The building was simply neglected and the site became better known as a market for trading livestock, which was otherwise forbidden in the town’s Big Market. Consequently, the space in front of the Batal-džamija was known as the Cattle Market (Marvena pijaca), from the Serbian
marva
, cattle or livestock, and
pijaca
, market. The area around was planted with corn and a winding track connected it to the Town Gate district below. Miloš’s son, Knez Mihailo, toyed with the idea of converting the mosque into the state archive after the Turks left the city in 1867, but his untimely death led to a change in plans and the old building was pulled down in 1869.

After the First World War the Cattle Market was renamed after one of Serbia’s famous generals of the time, Vojvoda Mišić, only for the communists to rechristen it after their own heroes as Marx and Engels Square (Trg Marksa i Engelsa) in 1954. The name Nikola Pašić Square was adopted in 1992, adding yet another historical figure to the list of those who have been inscribed on this particular landmark.

Nikola Pašić (1845–1926) was one of the leading Serbian politicians of his age. As a young student in Zurich, sponsored by the Serbian government, he was influenced by radical political ideas and there he met the Russian anarchist Bakunin. On his return to Serbia he moved in those circles closest to the young socialists of the 1870s. In 1878 he was elected to the Serbian National Assembly and founded the People’s Radical Party, with a political programme based on universal suffrage, popular sovereignty, parliamentary government and decentralization of the state. These aims were threatened by the Austrians who wished to subordinate the interests of Serbia to their own plans, and by King Milan who did not care for the nuances of parliamentary rule. The Radicals encouraged an armed uprising, the Timok Rebellion of 1883, which was successfully put down. Pašić fled to Bulgaria and was sentenced to death in his absence. He later returned and took up the reins of the People’s Radical Party once again and, with the support of a parliamentary majority, introduced the 1888 constitution. By the beginning of the twentieth century, older and more experienced, he also became more conservative in his politics. Favouring the rule of King Alexander Obrenović, he worked alongside less liberal factions in order to secure continuity and stability in government.

His actions alienated some of the younger members of his own party. With the change of dynasty in 1904, Pašić became the single most influential figure in Serbian politics until his death just over twenty years later. He supported the aims of the Balkan peoples to establish their own nation states during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913. He was the Serbian government’s chief representative during the next war and at the Paris peace conference in 1919. As one of the architects of the 1921 constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, he earned the animosity of many Croats who favoured a greater degree of autonomy from Belgrade. Even so, his ability to negotiate and compromise eventually led to a political alliance with the leader of the Croat Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, in 1925. Pašić’s death the following year removed one of the few politicians who might have made a difference to the Serb-Croat quarrels facing Yugoslavia.

The square was not properly constructed until the twentieth century as part of the general plan for regulating the flow of traffic more efficiently around the city centre. Furthermore, it occupied a prestigious site close to the Old Palace and other government buildings. It was decided to build a new National Assembly (Narodna skupština) above the square in 1907. It was finally completed in 1936 and was followed two years later by the main post office across the road. The architectural evolution and context of the square then took on ever larger and more grandiose turns.

At the end of the Second World War the communist government expanded on this theme with an addition of their own, demolishing the low buildings separating the back of the square from Terazije in order to construct the huge semi-circular shape of the House of Trade Unions (Dom sindikata) as the base for the Central Committee of Trade Unions. This organization did not really represent the interests of workers, but was responsible for ensuring access to health treatment, running holiday hotels, and in particular acting as a conduit through which government and party organizations could communicate with ordinary citizens. The House of Trade Unions was completed in a typically socialist-monumental style, with its clean lines and huge proportions announcing it as a spectacle in itself. The principles governing such architectural planning removed excesses of ornamentation and eradicated any indication of a private or intimate space. Its minimalist intentions reduced outward appearances to the display of ideological purity and strength.