ABSTRACT
Within the narrative of life in the former Communist Bloc, socialist Yugoslavia was (and still is) always represented as “something else,” as a country with a relatively liberal lifestyle, open borders, free circulation of people, and an intensive cultural exchange with the world. Yugoslavia’s “authentic path to socialism”—a political project produced by a complex combination of historical circumstances marking the beginning of the Cold War—unquestionably belonged within the framework of communist ideology, but its approach was one of greater flexibility and an understanding of socialism as an essentially modern, experimental social model that has to be constantly adapted to the “level of self-awareness of the working class.” It was a state of permanent transition that critically marked life in socialist Yugoslavia and resulted in quite a specific historical experience of totalitarianism that was hard to compare— at least at the level of human freedoms and freedom of expression—with the experiences of the communist countries of the Western Bloc. However, such a radical break with Soviet political practice certainly would not have happened without the experience of the Second World War, when the Yugoslav Communist Party (YCP) organized and waged a war against fascism and almost singlehandedly liberated most of southeast Europe. Although an obedient member of the Post-War “communist brotherhood,” it could not accept just partial independence, and in 1948 the YCP was punished by being excluded from the international Communist Information Bureau. Almost immediately, the YCP started to suffer numerous, harsh, and pointless attacks by the USSR and other European communist parties that turned at the beginning of 1949 into a raging anti-Yugoslav campaign, reaching its culmination at the World Congress for Peace in Warsaw in 1950. 1 Rather restrained in its previous reactions to such events, the YCP decided to respond and to organize a countermeeting, the International Conference for the Defense of Peace, which was due to take place in Zagreb in 1952. By deciding to invite the most prominent left-oriented European artists, writers and cultural activists who were not members of pro-Soviet communist parties—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, for example—the YCP wanted to stress the profound difference between Yugoslav and Soviet political choices and to demonstrate a much broader and more tolerant approach to different positions on the European left. Apart from the translation of Sartre’s works, preparations for the conference also included the exhibition of French Modern Art arranged with the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. The international press coverage and the success of the exhibition—that was presented in the capitals of all the Yugoslav republics—transformed a politically motivated cultural event into a project of almost symbolic meaning, marking the beginning of the new era in official cultural policy. As early as the end of 1953, the Yugoslav government established a federal commission for “international cultural exchange,” which started to organize numerous traveling exhibitions of Yugoslav art in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and countries of the Western Bloc (after 1956), presentations of Yugoslav artists at major international exhibitions, and presentations of European modern art in Yugoslavia. Up to the end of the 1950s, there were at least twenty major surveys of Italian, French, Swedish, German, and American modern art presented in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, accompanied from 1956 by numerous exhibitions based on direct exchanges between Yugoslav and foreign museums or on private contacts; this soon became normal cultural practice, resulting in much more accurate information about the situation on the international art scene.
