ABSTRACT
As an embodiment of a monolithic ideology and an authoritarian power which subordinated all aspects of people’s lives (everyday, social and artistic) to itself, the totalitarian state vested new meaning in the concept of identity. As an invention of modernity, identity involves the responsibility with which individuals have been entrusted to construct themselves with the help of mentors and experts, and thus to cope with insecurity1 by fi nding a place of stability and security. In the hypertrophic modern project of socialism, the stability and security of identity was to be achieved by the system, the state, ideology and propaganda, rather than by the individual. Thus, the individual was transformed into a mechanism identical to the system and judged in terms of the system’s values. The stability of identity was a projection of the stability
of the system. In other words, the identity (of the socialist person) had nothing to do with the subject’s self-formulation process (in constant interaction with culture) through his/her body, race, sexual orientation, religion, views, hobbies, occupation and values. Identity was constructed entirely through the discourse of ideology and was restricted to the set of norms of the modern project of communism, which spread over a whole socio-political era for the countries of South East Europe. Identity manifested itself through one’s belonging to the socialist project – on a family, community, party and state level. The state turned out to be in the position to completely satisfy the individual’s need for community through the totalising communist ideology which “in its essence [was] a mechanism for attaching the individual to the entirety of the big community”.2
