ABSTRACT
In contacts with the most responsible Soviet representatives a tone of disparagement towards the Yugoslavs as a people was noticeable, disparagement of our culture, complete ignorance of our history and our way of life. For instance, Zhdanov once asked Djilas whether opera existed in Yugoslavia. There were twelve opera houses in Yugoslavia, and Yugoslav composers, Lisinski for instance, had been writing operas more than a century ago. It was not merely a matter of belittling our culture, our language, and our press in words, but also in deeds. The Soviet representatives in Yugoslavia proposed that we should include as many Russian songs in our radio programmes as possible. Had we accepted their suggestion there would have been two or three times as many Russian songs as Yugoslav. They also asked us to increase the number of Russian plays in our theatres. We have always esteemed Gogol, Ostrovsky, Gorki, but we refused to flood our theatres with third-rate modern Soviet plays. As for films, in 1946 they imposed on us a block booking contract, so that we had no choice of the films they sent; and we had to pay the rental in dollars, at three, four, or five times the prices we paid for films from the West. Thus we got Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet for about two thousand dollars but for Exploits of a Soviet Intelligence Agent we had to pay some twenty thousand dollars.
