From Comrades to Consumers
ter, who are unsettled by an unsmiling and staring old man who lives across the street from them. It is only at the end of the story that they learn how the traumas of the war have affected him. His housekeeper tells them how he lost both his legs in the war, is confined to a wheel- chair, and can only raise his hands with difficulty. Owing to his injuries, it is also difficult for him to smile and, since his beloved Partisan son enrolled at the military academy, he is only really happy when he receives a letter home. Nevertheless, the story has an uplifting ending.
The siblings meet the old man and hold his hand and the next day he waves to them, smiling from his window. The second, by Slavko Bjažić, told the story of Jure, a brave Partisan commander, who perishes bloodily fighting a desperate single-handed struggle against the Nazi occupier on the Croatian coast.2
For the Yugoslav regime, the dilemma of what to read on holiday was far from being simply a matter of individual taste. In fact, ques- tions about leisure and vacationing were profoundly ideological, with the different kinds of reading material featured in this children’s holi- day magazine accurately reflecting the two faces of leisure time and vacationing in communist Yugoslavia. On the one hand, the Yugoslav government wanted to give workers, peasants, and the emerging mid- dle-classes a well-deserved break from the rigors of post-war life. On the other hand, until the beginning of the 1960s, the Yugoslav govern- ment was committed to the creation of a new person who would have a strong socialist and Yugoslav consciousness, free of all ethnic enmity.
At the time these stories were published, thirteen years after the end of the Second World War, memories of the occupation were still strong and emotions raw. It was in the shadow of genocide and the Holocaust that the communist-led resistance had been born. In the immediate post-war era the communist government attempted to imbue the mass- es with a national and ideological consciousness that would expunge the memory of the fratricidal conflicts of the past four years. In the People’s Republic of Croatia, the authorities faced formidable chal- lenges in healing the divisions between Croatians and the native Serb population, given the wartime persecution of the Serbs at the hands of the Croatian Ustasha regime. Nonetheless, the communist authorities
70 Rory Yeomans
2Obluk (1958, pp. 3–5, 31) and Bjažić (1958, pp. 34–7).
From Comrades to Consumers 71 believed that tourism in Croatia could be used to facilitate reconcilia- tion between the communities and create a common identity. How this idea evolved in Croatia and why it was ultimately unsuccessful helps to explain why it failed in the wider Yugoslav context following the col- lapse of communism.
From the inception of the Yugoslav state in 1945, its political lead- ers and cultural commissars understood something which has only recently been realized by western scholars: the social, ideological, and political importance of tourism. Decades before western writers began to produce studies challenging the frivolous image of tourism as a
“residual category devoid of political significance and entailing fringe economic activities of a candyfloss and (ironically) Mickey Mouse kind,” Yugoslavia, like other communist regimes in Eastern Europe, was taking its values seriously.3 And long before scholars had decided that tourism was not just “an aggregate of merely commercial activi- ties” but also an “ideological framing of history, nature and tradition,”
which helped to understand “just what is happening in the ‘normal’
society,” the Yugoslav regime was using tourism and leisure in an attempt to construct consciousness, legitimize ideology, and shape everyday life and attitudes.4
In communist Yugoslavia, tourism and leisure and wider political, social, and cultural currents were integrally linked. In conventional histories, the former Yugoslavia is portrayed as a state moving seam- lessly and rapidly from Stalinism and socialist realism to consumerism and westernization in which ideology, except in the form of mobilizing slogans and official rhetoric, became increasingly unimportant. Never- theless, the popular western image of Yugoslavia from the 1950s onwards as a different kind of communist country—a hybrid between the East and the West, socialism and capitalism—should be viewed with cau- tion. True, Yugoslavia, following its brief experimentation with indus- trialization and collectivization, was more economically liberal, more open to the rest of the world, and more “western” than other Eastern bloc countries. But less stringent travel restrictions, a greater diversity of opinion, and an emergent consumer culture were also features of life
3Walton (1997).
4MacCannell (1992) and Urry (1990). Similar arguments are also made by Nash (1996) and Löfgren (1999).
72 Rory Yeomans
in many east European states by the middle of the 1950s. This seems to have been lost on many western observers of the period: travel writ- ers, in particular, were apt to propagate the myth of Yugoslavia as a uniquely liberal communist state, bridging the gap between the Stalin- ist oppression of the East and excessive capitalism of the West. To western eyes, the variety of its landscapes—its sun-drenched beaches, blue seas, and ancient picturesque ruins—as well as its handsome, friendly population, in contrast to the supposed drab uniformity of the Soviet bloc, were emblematic of its relative freedoms and quixotic ide- ological innovations.5
They exaggerated the differences, however. Not only were such sights and pleasures available in many of the other more orthodox communist countries of Eastern Europe, but Yugoslavs were not nearly as amenable to free-market style consumerism as foreign observers believed. While ordinary citizens would invariably opt for “western”
values in terms of culture and standards of living, at the same time, their version of the good life meant the repudiation of western con- cepts about market forces and social differentiation. By resisting west- ern-style economic and political reforms, Yugoslavia’s synthesis of East and West produced a paradoxical kind of thinking in which “the most consumer-oriented of the socialist states also saw the most lively critique of consumerism.”6The history of tourism in Yugoslavia in the post-war era mirrored these contradictory responses. In the period immediately after the Second World War, there was a short-lived utopi- an experiment with tourism as a vehicle of national and political ide- ology to create a new Yugoslav socialist citizen. This was quickly abandoned and tourism was thereafter used by the government as a means of bringing a taste of the good life to the ordinary citizen, legit- imating it in the eyes of the population. The idea of tourism as pleas- ure would also, it was hoped, attract foreign tourists and bring much- needed hard currency into the country. Yet the commercialization of tourism and holiday-making also aggravated tensions, revealing a degree of hostility to the very consumer society on which Yugoslavia’s economic prosperity was founded. In the late 1960s, in an atmosphere
5See, for example, Sidgwick (1954, esp. pp. 68–76); Welsman (1954, esp.
pp. 11–13).
6Bracewell (2006).
of political and national turmoil, the idea of tourism as ideology returned, albeit in a limited form. Nonetheless, like the Yugoslav state whose evolution it both mirrored and helped to shape, its appeal was never likely to be anything other than transitory.