Mark Hopkins
- 1969
Fellowship Title:
- Public Opinion in Eastern Europe
Fellowship Year:
- 1969
In One Serbian Village
Belgrade, Yugoslavia Reproduction of a painting by Martin Jonas Before we left for the village, my friend who had grown up there wanted to explain that it was neither large nor luxurious. His birthplace and home, he said, was a typical Serbian farm, small and poor, the land each year yielding through a combination of hard work and good weather a living for the family. Part of the reason was evident as we drove the 60 miles southward from Belgrade to the village. The two-lane asphalt and brick road began a mild roll, then rose and fell with regularity as we came into the hills. It is not land for corporate crops harvested by mechanized brigades which one finds in the flat wheat and corn country in northeastern Yugoslavia. Here, oxen, milk cows and horses are more plentiful than tractors. Smoke gray board or slat wagons lurch gently along the road, obstacles to cars and aggressive intercity buses. The men still seem to prefer the older Serbian dress—pants that resemble riding breeches, shoes of woven
Yugoslavia: Days of Disenchantment
Words … Deeds …From (the newspaper) Borba “You know,” a Yugoslav friend said during one of those earnest, late-night conversations, “our problem now is that we have no purpose, no cause, nothing that brings us together, nothing that excites us.” It was one of those honest and unencumbered remarks. No modifications, no “howevers” to dull the bite. It was the type of comment that professional nation-builders here would decline with a bulwark of statistics constructing a society on the move. Melancholy or despondency are not the best fuels for a developing country. And yet there is an air of intellectual weariness, of indifference and monotony. Perhaps the gray winter overcast takes a toll on the Belgrade spirit. Or the daily immersion in a city where on mornings the factory and train smoke occupies the low areas like a fog, and where the soot from soft coal fires and the exhaust from too many cars and buses packs the air. Or the steamy crush of people filling their string bags in the selfservice grocery stores, elbowing
The Yugoslav Economy: Reform and the Consumer
Yugoslavia’s drift toward a consumer economy, symbolized by growing car ownership, has transformed the Square of the Republic in Belgrade into a parking lot. It was a wholly typical Saturday on the Terazije. The streets emptying into Belgrade’s prime shopping intersection gave off mingled sounds of small Fiats, Volkswagens, Mercedes and lumbering British-made buses. The nearby Square of the Republic, once the leisurely preserve of pedestrians and now serving ignobly as a parking lot, was bumper to bumper. And only with luck could a driver find a vacant parking meter or sidewalk space along the curbs. Belgraders, out to satisfy their robust consumer appetite, surged in and out of shops in what was clearly a buying mood. In the main Beograd Department Store, for example, a mother sized up a full-length leather coat for her young daughter, a well-made piece of clothing, luxurious by any standards: price–700 dinars ($56 at the official exchange rate of 12.5 dinars to the dollar). On the floor above, the radio-TV section bustled with customers eyeing foreign and domestic products.
Yugoslavia – The Politics of Culture
Belgrade, Yugoslavia December 20, 1969 Dushan Ludvig in Borba These have been trying months for freedom in Yugoslavia. Many liberals fear, not without reason, that the political establishment is retrenching and that subtly and surely devices will be found to quell the most outspoken critics of the League of Communists and to mold the press into a more “responsible” instrument. The League, on the other hand, is conducting a two-theme campaign. It remarks at every turn that, of course, there can be no return to “administrative measures”—the euphemism for totalitarian rule. And, then, in tight conjunction, it proclaims against any forum for the ideas of nationalists, anti-socialists, chauvinists, Cominformists and other assorted deviants. The controversy is likely to linger on, rather than mount to one of those reverberating crescendos that everyone can understand as the finish of the score. To the outside observer, the debate over free expression may thus be the duller. But it is the more significant precisely because it continues, for that in itself testifies to an authentic, though undeveloped public
Yugoslavia on Balance
Dushan Ludvig in Borba Yugoslavia closes out the decade of the Sixties in a perplexed and searching frame of mind. Perplexed because the elaborate and ambitious economic reform undertaken in 1965 — the most recent of several experiments in charting a road between east and west — remains imprecise and uncertain. And searching, because there persists a greed for innovation among at least the “liberals” of Yugoslavia’s social managers. The result is that Yugoslavia is in a visible state of flux, a period of social instability in which no Yugoslav convincingly speculates on what the immediate years will bring. The economic system, a bewildering mixture of public ownership, state regulation and private entrepreneurship, is in a tenuous moment of transition to market socialism. Old guard politicians, the World War II partisan alumni who came into Belgrade from the hills to establish a new order, reasonably resist the fission activated by “self-management” of factories and enterprises since their once commanding authority is threatened. And therefore, economic reform inevitably has cleaved the League of Communists and various