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Articles on Yugoslavia

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Serbian election: another win for the Serbian Progressive Party will threaten peace in Europe

Aidan Hehir , University of Westminster

After the Cold War: Why COVID-19 infection and death rates were so high in eastern Europe

Raluca Bejan , Dalhousie University and Kristina Nikolova , University of Windsor

EU plans to set up a new court to prosecute Russia’s war on Ukraine – but there’s a mixed record on holding leaders like Putin accountable for waging wars

Victor Peskin , Arizona State University

Conflicts over language stretch far beyond Russia and Ukraine

Stanley Dubinsky , University of South Carolina ; Anyssa Murphy , University of South Carolina ; Harvey Starr , University of South Carolina , and Michael Gavin , University of South Carolina

As Ukraine war deepens great-power divisions, a revitalized non-aligned movement could emerge

John Ciorciari , University of Michigan

Montenegro was a success story in troubled Balkan region – now its democracy is in danger

Marc L. Greenberg , University of Kansas

From Macedonia to America: Civics lessons from the former Yugoslavia

Keith Brown , Arizona State University

The ICC’s rejection of Bemba’s compensation claim points to need for reform

Tonny Raymond Kirabira , University of Portsmouth and Leïla Choukroune , University of Portsmouth

40 years of Laibach – is this Slovenian avant-garde band the most controversial in rock history?

Andrew Dawson , The University of Melbourne

Kosovo: disputes continue 20 years after NATO bombing campaign

Jaume Castan Pinos , University of Southern Denmark

Ratko Mladić convicted – but justice hasn’t entirely been served in the Hague

Anna-Marie Brennan , University of Liverpool

Ratko Mladic, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, to spend life in prison for genocide and war crimes

Melanie O'Brien , The University of Queensland

Ratko Mladić: orchestrator of the brutal siege of Sarajevo

Kenneth Morrison , De Montfort University

Ratko Mladić’s conviction and why the evidence of mass graves still matters

Melanie Klinkner , Bournemouth University

When Bosnia was torn apart, football clubs were ethnically cleansed along with the population

Richard Mills , University of East Anglia

How the spectre of Yugoslavia looms over EU’s handling of the refugee crisis

Irial Glynn , Leiden University

Bosnia’s 25-year struggle with transitional justice

Brian Grodsky , University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Cinema opens a dialogue about coming to terms with Balkans’ past

Danica Jenkins , University of Sydney

Dreams of a good life: why the US election reminded me of Yugoslavia

Carna Brkovic , University of Regensburg

Beyond the ICC crisis: is there an alternative path for Africa?

Amanda Cabrejo le Roux , Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Related Topics

• Bosnian war
• International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
• Ratko Mladic
• Srebrenica massacre
• Yugoslavian war

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• Published: 06 December 2023

Yugoslav science during the Cold War (1945–1960): socio-economic and ideological impacts of a geopolitical shift

• Maja Korolija   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7714-4761 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  913 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Two ideological views on science dominated the Cold War era: one of a free and apolitical science, and the other emphasizing partisanship in science, associated with the Western and Eastern Blocs, respectively. This study offers a specific perspective of important elements belonging to these scientific positions, as it reveals their entanglement with geopolitical and socio-economic processes of the (semi)peripheral Yugoslav socialist system during the Cold War period. After the Second World War, and before its break with the USSR in 1948, Yugoslavia tended to emulate Soviet ideology in all aspects of society, including science. In the period following this break, the Yugoslav socialist regime, at least initially, leaned heavily toward the Western Bloc. By comparing Yugoslav science before and after the break with the USSR, this study provides insight into the consequences of the geopolitical shift and socio-economic transition of the Yugoslav socialist system, primarily in terms of the model of scientific organization, financing, and scientific discourse. Exposed to the dynamics of decentralization and, to a larger extent than before, market forces, Yugoslav socialism after the break with the USSR adopted a specific form, namely Socialist Self-Management. Herein, I show that this led to the emergence of novel organizational and discursive tendencies in Yugoslav science, which were compatible with certain aspects of the perspective of science as ‘pure’, autonomous, and apolitical.

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Introduction.

During the Cold War period of intense geopolitical and ideological conflict between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR), science held an immensely important position in both blocs (Graham, 1993 ; Leslie, 1993 ; Pollock, 2006 ; Wolfe, 2013 ). In accordance with the Manichean approach that dominated international relations, science in the Cold War was characterized by two dominant ideological views.

One involved the concepts of autonomous, value-neutral and apolitical scientific endeavors (e.g., Polanyi, [1962] 2000 ; Merton, [1938] 1973 ), prevalent in the US and among its allies. Mutually different philosophical positions, diverse regarding certain questions about the nature and role of science in society, as well as not always necessarily directly connected with Cold War (e.g., Merton), nevertheless found their place in the Cold War ideological struggle for the soul of science and its representation (see e.g., Wolfe, 2018 ; Aronova, 2012 ). In this struggle it was asserted, and not only by philosophers and scientists (see e.g., Kartman, 1945 ), that the only way of preserving the integrity of science is the exclusion of “communist science”, as well as the negation of its scientific character, which was more than often denoted as ideological, and consequently as pseudo-scientific (see e.g., Popper, [1945] 2011 ; Kartman, 1945 ).

The other was that of the Soviet Bloc, which emphasized “partisanship” in science, or class-conscious science (e.g., Lenin, [1909] 1977 ; Rubinstein, [1931] 1971 ). According to this perspective, the idea that science can and should be independent in relation to society whose part it itself is—is not sustainable. In a capitalist society which is intertwined with opposed class interests, the science is essentially in the service of the particular interest of “the ruling class“—“the bourgeoisie“, whose final goal is the preservation of the existing order of inequality. In order for this to be changed one needs the class-conscious science: science that is, according to this view, in service of the working class (e.g., Lenin, [1909] 1977 ). According to Marx, if the working class is led by its own objective interest, it strives for classless society (Marx, [1848] 1986 ). Therefore, it is necessary, for the science to correspond with general social interest, that it is in the service of the interests of working class (e.g., Lukacs, 1971 ).

In reality, both blocs, however, deviated significantly from their stated viewpoints on the nature and role of science. Science in the USSR, for example, was frequently influenced by the Bolshevik state apparatus (Krementsov, 1997 ; Gerowitch, 2002 ; Pollock, 2006 ), which failed to adequately articulate working-class interests in the USSR (e.g., Bettelheim, 1976 ; 1978 ; 1996 ). Moreover, owing to research on the nature and role of science in the West, attention is now increasingly being called to the ideological function of the discourse on free and apolitical scientific research, as well as the use of science by the Western Bloc during the Cold War (Greenberg, 1999 ; Reich ( 2005 ); Krige, 2006 ; Wolfe, 2018 ).

The nature and role of science in the context of the transition of the Yugoslav regime following its break with the USSR provide fertile ground for research on the two ideological perspectives during the Cold War. In this analysis, I will not address the concept of ideology solely through an ideology-critique prism, which views ideology as false consciousness, but rather in conjunction with an ideology-theoretical approach, which provides an analysis of the mechanisms, processes, and structures that enable the hegemony of certain ideas (Gramši, 1980 ; Rehmann, 2015 ).

In this regard, I present basic ideological insights regarding science in Yugoslavia before and after its break with the USSR Footnote 1 , with particular focus on the developments in the Yugoslav socialist system following its separation from the USSR. These insights allow us to trace the emergence of specific elements in line with the autonomous science perspective and their impact on the dominant scientific discourse, scientific organization, and financing in socialist Yugoslavia. In this way, I hope to create space for further consideration and contextualization of Yugoslav “socialist science” during the Cold War, as well as to investigate a different—(semi)peripheral—perspective on the nature and role of both “autonomous” and “partisan” ideological positions on science during the Cold War.

At the end of the Second World War in Southeast Europe, after the anti-fascist partisan movement led by the communists, with Josip Broz Tito at the helm and alongside allied forces, defeated the Nazis and abolished the monarchy, Yugoslavia initiated the construction of a new, socialist, system. This system was built on the foundations laid by the Popular front with the general support and assistance of the USSR, whose socio-political model was emulated by Yugoslavia (Petranović, 1980 , pp. 376–398; Životić, 2015 , pp. 11–17). Unlike other satellite states in the Eastern bloc, Yugoslavia was positioned as an independent center of communist power, much to the displeasure of Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union’s at that time. In 1948, an international crisis caused Yugoslavia to leave the Eastern bloc after the USSR accused it, among other things, of reintroducing capitalism and nationalist tendencies (Bakić, 2011 , p. 25; Čalić, 2013 ; IB Resolution Footnote 2 ).

The West viewed “Tito as the greatest dissident of the new era”, assessing that he “made a dent in the monolith of the communist unity by standing up to Stalin” (Bogdanović, 2013 , pp. 147-148). Therefore, despite the ruling socialist ideology in Yugoslavia, the US decided to aid the war-ravaged and devastated country under the threat of attack by the USSR (Jakovina, 2002 , p. 32; Čalić, 2013 , pp. 228, 236). These circumstances led to Yugoslavia opening up to the Western Bloc (Bogetić, 2000 ; Jakovina, 2003 ). To maintain its socialist ideology oriented toward workers’ control while exposed to the dynamics of decentralization and, to a greater degree than before, market forces, the Yugoslav socialist system evolved into a specific form—that of Socialist Self-Management (Čalić, 2013 , p. 238).

This situation introduced novel approaches to the organization and financing of science in Yugoslavia, altering official views on the nature and role of science and scientists. I explore the effects of the geopolitical shift of socialist Yugoslavia, after its break with the Eastern Bloc, toward the Western Bloc. I analyze the impacts of socio-economic changes that followed on Yugoslav science, caused by Yugoslavia’s shift from a planned to a (controlled and incomplete) market economy, in terms of the scientific organization model, financing, and official scientific discourse. Through the comparison of science perspectives in Yugoslavia prior to the Tito-Stalin split in 1948 and after, I show that novel elements in Yugoslav “socialist science” were compatible with certain aspects of the perspective representing science as ‘pure’, autonomous, or apolitical. Considering the context of the Cold War struggle for hegemony and the dominant ideological perspectives of science during this period, I find the case of Yugoslav science useful as an additional, (semi)peripheral example of these viewpoints, entangled with the international position, as well as structural and political changes of the Yugoslav socialist system.

Through mapping the ideological changes in Yugoslav science after the break with USSR, blurred lines and merging between “autonomous” and “partisanship” representations of science are emphasized in this article, despite their proclaimed sharp opposition during the Cold War. Thus the space for research of the nature of these concepts within specificities of geopolitical and socio-economic context of Yugoslavia is opened. Although it is doubtlessly connected with relation of main actors in this period—USA and USSR—the ideological framework of Yugoslav science is, first of all, a consequence of the specific way of adaptation of Yugoslav state to Cold War, as well as of the need for a greater independence in this turbulent time. Through analysis of the dynamics of relation between science and ideology in the case of Yugoslavia, the elements of state or party intervention are imposed as a key factor in formation, but also limitation of both scientific freedom and scientific partisanship. On the basis of insights during research, I try to answer the question regarding the existence of the need for additional and deeper investigation of the relation between science, ideology and state in various socio-political contexts during the period of the Cold War.

Yugoslav science prior to the Tito-Stalin split

I begin with an analysis of the aspiring organizational and financial model, as well as the official stand on the nature and role of science in Yugoslavia before its break with the USSR. The period in question is one in which the ideology of Soviet science held hegemony. Nominally, the Soviet perspective insisted on the importance of political and economic conditions for scientific development, planning principles, the unity of theory and practice, as well as the class-conscious character of science, specifically its partisanship (e.g., Lenin, [1909] 1977 ; Bukharin, [1931] 1971 ; Graham, 1967 ). Only after science is openly placed in the service of the working class (proletariat) can its social function be associated with “universality”. For Marxists in general, the interests of the proletariat correspond to “universality”, i.e., the general interest of society, to which science cannot fully contribute as long as it serves the capital under the guise of “autonomy” (Marx, [1856] 1969 ; Marx, [1848] 1986 ). In the USSR, partisanship in science, on a practical level, implied the influence of party politics on scientific activity (Krementsov, 1997 ; Gerovitch, 2002 ; Pollock, 2006 ). However, several critics on the left argued that certain Bolshevik party decisions, in reality, were not always aligned with the objective interests of the working class (e.g., Cliff, 1963 ; Goldman, 1996 ), which was also shown by academic researchers (e.g., Bettelheim, 1976 , 1978 , 1996 ; Graham, 1996 ).

Soviet model of scientific organization for a war-ravaged country

After the Second World War, Yugoslavia was an economically and culturally underdeveloped, war-ravaged, and poverty-stricken country with a weak foundation for industrialization. Thus, industrialization, as well as educating the population became “the people’s task” (Bilandžić, 1985 , pp. 112-114; Čalić, 2013 , pp. 227-233). “The inherited backwardness was best illustrated by the number of illiterate inhabitants, which was 44.6 % before the war, and 56.4% among the female population, according to the 1931 census” (Bondžić, 2018 , p. 201). The insistence on modernization in society also had an ideological dimension; it was a crucial requirement for building and further developing socialist relationships in Yugoslav society, which the country was striving for at the time. The first five-year plan reflected the Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s (CPY) attempt to reinforce the concept of communist modernization (Obradović, 1994 , p. 41), with science playing an important role in general social development (Ristić, 2013 : 342, 349, 350). The task of scientific institutions was to “produce Marxist scientific youth who would master the knowledge and technological and technical procedures for the achievement of the plan for early industrialization and electrification of the country, in addition to other plans” (Bondžić, 2018 , p. 203). The ruling system’s political ideology dictated a dominant perspective in society in terms of the nature, role, and desired model for organizing and financing science.

Up until the break with the USSR, authorities and scientists in Yugoslavia propagated the Soviet approach to scientific Footnote 3 and socio-political issues, opposing “various deficiencies” inherent in what they deemed to be “bourgeois science”. This view was reflected in Tito’s speech delivered in 1947, on the occasion of him being named an honorary member of Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, Croatia (JAZU). Among other things, Tito noted that scientists in the past were oftentimes exploited, just like other workers. As an example, he mentioned Yugoslav-American inventor Nikola Tesla “whose scientific findings enriched many American and other capitalists enormously, [but who] died as a poor man without any means” (Tito, 1959 , p. 209). He stated that in a socialist society, scientists enjoy “limitless possibilities” for their work, as well as respect and care from the people, who hold power and thus the means of production in such a system (Tito, 1959 , p. 209). Tito concluded that in Yugoslavia, “as it has already been accomplished in the USSR, science […] is becoming the people’s property because the people benefit from its results” (Tito, 1959 , p. 210).

Before Yugoslavia ceased political and scientific cooperation Footnote 4 with the USSR, its preferred model of scientific organization was that of the USSR. This was evident in early 1948 at the founding meeting of the Yugoslav Council of Academies, where the Council was tasked with “leading and supervising scientific and artistic institutions across the country. To coordinate this work, a Council of Academies should be formed as part of the federal government.” The Council was “the advisory organ of the federal government regarding scientific and artistic work of federal importance, a coordinating structure for scientific and artistic work of all three academies (Serbian, Slovenian, and Croatian), a body that represents our country in international scientific and artistic organizations.” It was also decided that “[t]he Council would communicate directly with the Presidency of the Government, and that its budget would be part of the Government’s budget…” (Korolija, 2017 , pp. 1162-1163; Meeting of the delegates of Yugoslav republics’ academies, 1948 ; CIA Report, 1954 ).

The institution to assume such a role in the USSR was the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. From a hierarchical point of view, the Academy was a key scientific institution under the direct jurisdiction of the Council of People’s Commissars (effectively the Soviet government). Universities and other institutions served as mediators between the Academy of Sciences and social life, while scientific work was mostly planned and supervised by the Academy. Such a centralized and planned organization aimed to coordinate scientific institutions and enhance the compatibility and cooperation of ‘pure’ science and praxis (Guins, 1953 ; Graham, 1967 ; Korolija, 2017 , p. 1163). Therefore, it is not surprising that publications such as The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (1945), which promoted the Soviet model of scientific organization and partisanship in science, were translated, published, and distributed in Yugoslavia at the time. During this period, scientific activity in Yugoslavia was “funded directly from the federal and budgets of federal republics” (Blagojević, 1982 , p. 316).

The Soviet approach to scientific issues in Yugoslavia during this period was also evident in the discourse that dominated public discussions on the topic, especially in journals of scientific and propagandist nature (see e.g., Miloradović, 2012 ; Duančić, 2019 ; Bondžić, 2010 ).

Promoting the concept of Soviet science

After the war and before the break with the USSR, the Journal of the Society for Cultural Cooperation of Yugoslavia and the USSR Footnote 5 (Yugoslavia-USSR) was published in Yugoslavia, as an important tool for the establishment of Soviet ideological hegemony. (Miloradović, 2012 , pp. 201–217). This journal represented “the most effective and most permanent” product of the work of the Society for Cultural Cooperation of Yugoslavia and the USSR . It was issued from November 1945 to June 1949 (Miloradović, 2012 , p. 208). The journal featured propaganda articles glorifying the achievements and ideas of the Soviet way of life, including its military, economy, science, and culture. As this study also examines scientific changes in the context of dominant economic tendencies, I present the prevailing economic perspective at the time, which was also propagated through this journal.

In line with its ideological role, the journal presented the Soviet economic model, specifically the principle of planning , as one of the “most important economic laws in the development of the socialist mode of production” (Nikolin, 1948 , p. 8). A clear example of the glorification of planned economy is an article Footnote 6 criticizing, one might even say mocking, the discovery of “free planning” by the then-ruling Labor Party in Great Britain (Strumilin, 1947 , p. 4). The topic this text deals with is the decision of the UK Labor government to nationalize only hard coal mines and English banks, while as for the rest of economy it chose to focus itself on studying of it, making of “the prognosis for the future” and creating of economy plans, as well as appealing the employers to fulfill them. From the standpoint of Marxist-Leninist view on the economy this was evaluated as a naive political idea, because it is based on the presumption that capitalists shall act against their own objective private interest for the sake of the general interest of the society and the workers. According to Marxism-Leninism the interests of workers and capitalists are economically opposed. That is why those who advocate the interests of the working class, according to this perspective, require nationalization and state planning within the economy (see Lenin, 1918 ). In accordance with this position Vlajko Begović, a prominent Yugoslav political figure and president of the Federal Planning Commission of Yugoslavia, presented the view that a “[s]tate economic plan is the basic element for managing the economy” (Begović, 1946 , p. 14).

When it comes to the concept of a planned economy, it is important to note that at this time, it was given substantial consideration in the context of scientific activity in Yugoslavia and its connection with the economy. Accordingly, the documents of the Committee for Schools and Science within the Government of Yugoslavia from 1947 state the following:

“The ever-increasing demand and necessity of planned management raises the issue of planning in the field of scientific work, planning scientific institutions, coordinating their work, closer connection with the tasks of the economy and building the country, as well as planning of cadres.” [Establishment of the Committee for Scientific Institutions, 1947 ]

Moreover, based on the Decree of the Committee for Scientific Institutions, Universities, and Higher Education Institutions passed in 1947, the Committee was established “for the purpose of planning scientific work, as well as establishing a unified management of scientific institutions, universities, and higher education institutions and planned education of senior professional cadres…” (Decree of the Committee for Scientific Institutions, Universities, and Higher Education Institutions, 1947 ).

Returning to the journal Yugoslavia-USSR (1946), I refer to an article Footnote 7 by Yugoslav professor Đurđe Bošković about Soviet scientists, who had spent some time in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY), and whose work “demonstrated how far science had progressed in the USSR”, compared to the science that was “independent of society.” Bošković saw this as one more reason for Yugoslav science to become “the most reliable instrument in the service of life, society, man – science in which theory and practice merge into a condensed and indivisible whole…” (Bošković, 1946 , p. 40). The stance was clear: Yugoslavia must emulate the USSR’s “Leninist-Stalinist” model of science. The model’s stated objective was to blur the line between theory and practice, specifically “pure” and “applied” science, and bring about its synthesis in the general interest – that of the working class. The Marxists (see e.g., Bernal, [ 1954 ]1971), who linked this division within science to Western view on its nature and role in society, most often have seen it as artificial, especially from the standpoint of history of science; which is not an attitude reserved only for the theory of Marxist orientation (see e.g., Gooday, 2012 ). From the way how dynamics of the relation between science and society in socialist society was understood, within the scope of applied sciences, there emerges an idea about the need of planning the research of scientific topics relevant for concrete needs of the existing society, and not “only” the focusing on application of already existing “pure” science in practice (see e.g., Graham, 1964 ).

The extent to which Yugoslavia attempted to emulate this model and the position of science it aspired to achieve is evidenced by the position presented by communist thinker and chairman of the Committee for Science and Education of the FPRY Government Boris Ziherl, likewise published in the journal Yugoslavia-USSR ( 1948 ). In his praise for Lenin, Ziherl emphasized his enormous contribution to social sciences, as his “teachings and works erased” the division between exact (natural) sciences and inexact (social) sciences, “demonstrating” that social phenomena can also be studied with exactness, with revolutionary social practice serving as “the scientific criterion that confirms or rejects the propositions of social science” (Ziherl, 1948 , p. 4). More precisely, Marxism, according to this perspective, is a social science

“whose objectivity stems from its class character; it is the science of the most revolutionary class in history, a class that is not only not interested in maintaining itself as a class but one that is fighting for the abolition of itself as a class, for the abolition of classes and class differences as such, and the establishment of a classless communist society.” [Ziherl, 1948 , p. 6]

In this context, Ziherl points out that Lenin “indicated that in a class society, where hostile classes with different interests and different worldviews stand against each other, science cannot stand above classes, and that thus there is no such thing as a classless, impartial, nonpartisan, ‘objective’ science” (Ziherl, 1948 , p. 4).

Thereby, partisanship in science represents the basic conceptual difference between the class-positioned perspective and the so called autonomous, value-neutral scientific elements that dominated through the ideology of science perspective associated with the Western bloc in that period. Emphasizing the impossibility of apolitical science in a society (and about a society) marked by conflicting class interests implies that, from a Marxist standpoint, the discourse on independent science was more of a false consciousness than a genuine desire for true objectivity. (Bernal, 1939 ; Lukacs, 1971 ; Korolija, 2020 )

However, the Marxist perspective didn’t negate the possibility of scientific objectivity. Marx alone “seems to claim something like scientific objectivity for his own theory” (Railton, 1984 , p. 813). Marxist critique of science in bourgeois societies is based on the premise that ruling ideas in class organized capitalist society are always the ideas of the ruling class. Thus, the function of dominant ideas within the system of social inequality is reflected in the fact that the interest of the ruling class which, from the Marxist point of view, is always a particular interest, is represented as common interest. That is why the ideas of a ruling class are seen as universal, rational and valid. According to Marx “modern industry […] makes science a productive force distinct from labor and presses it into the service of capital” (Marx, [1867] 1967 , p. 361). In bourgeois society, in the final instance, the science also reflects dominant material relationships (see e.g., Marx, [1846] 1974 ). In this way it represents particular interests – only the interests of the ruling class, which implies that it cannot entirely be in the service of true objectivity, which for Marxists is always universal, that is in relation with general interest of society (e.g., Marx, ([1848] 1986 ); Lukacs, 1971 ).

This means that the class oriented science is in the service of the interests of the largest part of the society—the working class. According to this perspective, true objectivity is achieved not only by examination, but also by placing science at the service of working-class interest, i.e., the class which strives to destroy class established social relations and to abolish itself, all with the goal of creating a classless society, which according to Marxist theory represents the general social interest. In this way, through connecting with social universality, and not to particularity, the universal character of science and the scientific objectivity, according to Marxists, become possible (e.g., Marx, ([1848] 1986 ); Lenin, ([1909] 1977 ); Bernal, 1952 ; Bernal, 1953 ; Lukacs, 1971 ).

Researchers noted that in the USSR “[t]he special connection […] between Marxist philosophy and science […] allowed for the expansion of Marxism into the natural sciences, both theoretically and institutionally” (Aronova, 2011 , p. 179). A similar connection is observed in Yugoslav natural science journals published before the break with the USSR. Accordingly, the first two issues of the Yugoslav popular science journal Priroda ( Nature ) (February 1945 ), re-launched after the war by the Steering Committee of the Croatian Natural History Society, were clearly critical of the notion of “science for science’s sake”. The journal’s ideological character was described as being close to the “People’s Government”, while the journal’s founders (“our anti-fascist-natural-scientist”) advocated for the connection between science and social practice.

The journal Nauka i priroda ( Science and Nature ) was founded by natural science societies and researchers and was aimed at “all those” who wanted “to complete and enlighten their knowledge of the natural sciences with a materialistic understanding and interpretation” (Editorial staff, 1950 , p. 713). Apart from presenting achievements in the natural sciences, the journal made it known that its task was to clarify the role that “ science plays in the construction of socialism and the achievement of the five-year plan” (Editorial staff, 1950 , p. 713). An article Footnote 8 in this journal discusses Lenin’s criticism of “idealistic deviations” in the interpretation of recent scientific findings (seemingly incompatible with materialism), warning the reader that a “good natural scientist” does not necessarily make a “good philosopher”. In addition, there were warnings about “relativism” and the “traps of anti-scientific tendencies” that lie in wait for “inconsistent materialists” (i.e., those who are not dialectical materialists) (Maksimov, 1949 , pp. 243–244).

There was furthermore a tendency to shape humanities and social sciences following the Marxist-Leninist paradigm. This is evidenced by brochures from the Science and Society series, which were published in Yugoslavia in 1946 and promoted a Marxist-Leninist outlook on social science and philosophy, as well as their role in society. Accordingly, in there one finds criticism of the attempt by “some scholastics or mechanists to turn philosophy into empty, detached reasoning, with nothing in common with human practice…” (Pavlov, 1946 , p. 64).

Despite Yugoslavia’s relative autonomy in comparison to other countries of the Soviet Bloc, it nevertheless aspired to follow the Soviet model of scientific organization, financing, and views on nature and the role of science in society. This was viewed as a sharp criticism of autonomous science and the continuous emphasis of the necessity and advantages of the principles of planning, partisanship, unity of theory and practice, and a highly centralized organization—which Yugoslav officials, as well as some scientists, saw as important traits of Soviet science. Nevertheless, as Tito and Stalin ceased cooperation in 1948, the Yugoslav scientific sphere also faced significant consequences.

Although, if looked at formally, the process of implementation of the socialist system according to Soviet principles lasted during a relatively short period, the mechanisms and effects of this process were rather noticeable in Yugoslav society in a longer period, even after 1952, when a different socio-political system was officially established—the Socialist Self-Management (see e.g., Kuljić, 1998 ).

Structural and ideological shifts in Yugoslav science after the break with the USSR

Following the sudden, bitter, and tumultuous break with the USSR, resulting in an exceedingly hostile relationship with the entire Eastern Bloc, Yugoslav foreign policy underwent critical changes, notably, an opening to the West (Bogetić, 2000 ; Jakovina, 2003 ). Despite this shift, Yugoslavia maintained its own socialist ideology (which differed from that of the USSR) (Jović, 2003 , pp. 130–131; Bakić, 2011 , p. 26; Čalić, 2013 , pp. 234–252), and accordingly, science in Yugoslavia remained under the dominant influence of socialist ideas (e.g., Najbar-Agičić, 2013 ). Despite the fact that Yugoslavia never abandoned socialist ideology, the geopolitical shift towards West contributed, to a certain extent, to the strengthening of “the pragmatic course of Yugoslav foreign politics” (Kuljić, 1998 : 258), which was reflected in internal socio-political and cultural circumstances in the country. Herein, I analyze the emergence of novel scientific tendencies in Yugoslavia as well as their certain compatibility with concepts as ‘pure’ science, autonomous science, or apolitical science, associated with the representation of the Western ideological perspective during the Cold War. The intention of this work is not to exclusively point out the changes and imply their (in)congruence with Marxist-Leninist ideological assumptions regarding science, but also to discuss the importance of certain geopolitical and socio-political dynamics when these changes are at issue.

To better comprehend changes in the official ideas governing Yugoslav science and its organization and financing in the Cold War context, I begin with a summary of the basic assumptions of ideas of ‘pure’, autonomous, or apolitical science. This view holds that science should be independent of society, because the pursuit of knowledge is its most fundamental value and goal, whereas the insistence on planning and centralization subordinates science to the state (e.g., Polanyi, [1962] 2000 ; Merton, [1938] 1973 ). According to sociologist Robert Merton, the scientific ethos, autonomy, and validity of scientific knowledge are all interconnected in such a way that “freer scientific communities who have institutionalized ideals of ‘pure’ science are more likely to produce true knowledge” (Panofsky, 2010 , p. 142). In other words, a scientist must be “free to do good science” (Krige, 2006 , p. 146). This is not how the West viewed scientists in the USSR, which was characterized as a totalitarian system in the western Cold War discourse. This ideological demarcation was often used, ostensibly for professional reasons, to discriminate against scientists of communist affiliation in the West (see Krige, 2006 , pp. 115–153). The concept of a “party line” was presented as a “key factor that distinguished Western from totalitarian science” (Wolfe, 2018 , p. 32). Because political demarcation was transferred to the level of ‘pure’ professionalism, the idea that intellectual merit, rather than political preferences, was the deciding factor in selecting scientific projects – this could have been considered a determinant of American science during the Cold War, although reality was somewhat different (Wang, 2002 ; Krige, 2006 ; Aronova, 2012 ; Wolfe, 2018 ).

The split with Stalin in 1948 initiated the process of ideological transformation in Yugoslavia, whose important developments occurred in the early 1950s with the inauguration of the new ruling paradigm – that of Socialist Self-Management (Jović, 2003 , pp. 130–131; Čalić, 2013 , pp. 238–242). After the break, the USSR went from being a socialist ideal (celebrated in all social spheres as the opposing force to the capitalist West) to an example of “state capitalism”, under which the working class was “far worse off than in most backward capitalist countries” (Tito according to Rajak, 2011 , p. 25). Footnote 9

Weakening of the Soviet organization model in Yugoslav science

The novel tendencies that emerged after the break with Stalin brought about structural changes in Yugoslav society, but also problems on multiple levels. Importantly, changes at the economic level had a significant impact on science. Decentralization of the economy began even before the formal introduction of “workers’ self-management” (Šetinc, 1978 , p. 25). As early as 1952, at the Sixth Congress of the CPY, Footnote 10 there were open appeals to weaken the state influence on Yugoslavia’s economic system in favor of a freer market. The involvement of Boris Kidrič, the President of the Economic Council of the Government of Yugoslavia and member of the Secretariat of the Executive Committee of the Central Committee of the LCY, is particularly noteworthy in this sense. According to him, “the new economic system should be based on objective economic laws and avoid administrative suppression of those laws to the greatest extent possible” (Kidrič, 1952 , p. 130). Socialist Self-Management in Yugoslavia was closely intertwined with calls for less state interference in the economy, in contrast to an important element of Marxist economic theory – the planned economy. The Yugoslav leader, Josip Broz Tito, speaking of workers’ self-management at the Sixth Congress of the CPY in 1952, stated that “true democratic management begins where state control over economic affairs through its apparatus ends” (Tito according to Šetinc, 1978 , p. 25).

The extent to which market reform in Yugoslavia was pursued, even though “it supported dynamics that generated social inequalities” (Lebowitz, 2012 , p. 165) is evident in Tito’s later criticism of the reform: “certain forces and exaggerated idealization of the effect of the law of value and free supply and demand” (Tito, 1958 , p. 56) are to blame for the population’s lack of supplies: “Here, one forgets that planned socialist production necessitates more or less planned distribution of products, greater control of the market and prices” (Tito, 1958 , p. 56). According to Leon Geršković, a prominent Yugoslav jurist and participant in the drafting of all of Yugoslavia’s constitutions from 1946 to 1974, the contradiction between “planned economic management and the unrestrained market mechanism characterizes the whole economic mechanism in Yugoslavia” (Geršković, 1958 , p. 20).

This socio-economic transformation of the Yugoslav system brought about changes in the financing of scientific research. “[F]ollowing the enactment of the Federal Law on the Organization of Scientific Work in 1957 and the establishment of the Federal, Republic, and Provincial Funds for Scientific Work, the process of establishing a more direct relationship between science and the users of its services began” (Blagojević, 1982 , p. 316). Although scientific activity was still government-funded, science began to be supported “through special social funds or direct contracting with economic actors and other users” (Blagojević, 1982 , p. 316). In other words, novel socio-economic tendencies arose within Yugoslavia, with further integration into the market economy, which influenced science, bringing about changes in terms of financing that were in line with the economic turn.

Moreover, these tendencies led to the weakening of centralization in the very model of scientific organization. A good example of this was the substantially reduced role of the Council of the Academy of Sciences in the management and supervision of scientific activity. At the meeting of the delegates of Yugoslav Academies in 1959 , it was decided that the Yugoslav Council of Academies would terminate its role as the leader and supervisor of scientific and artistic work in the country, and cease being the advisor to the federal government regarding scientific issues. This meant that the Council lost its position Footnote 11 defined by the above-mentioned founding meeting. Thus, the Council was left with the role of a representative at international events and loose coordination between the Yugoslav republics’ Academies. They were also, to an overwhelming degree, responsible for their own funding. At this meeting, it was decided that for the financing of scientific activities, the Council must address the federal council in charge of scientific work. Hence, the federal budget would cease to directly finance scientific activities (a reversal of the decision previously made at the founding meeting of the Council in 1948), shifting the financial burden to the republics’ Academies (Korolija, 2017 , p. 1167-1168; Meeting of the delegates of Yugoslav republics’ academies, 1959 ).

On the basis of the effects of socio-economic changes in scientific sphere, in terms of organization, which to a great extent (still) remained in accord with Soviet principles of centralization and planning, one may notice that in the case of Yugoslav science the process of decentralization in organizational sphere have matched the new impulses of deregulation in economic sphere. Decentralization, which in itself is not necessarily opposed to socialist theoretical principles (see e.g., Supek, 1971 ), but also not opposed to ideological representation of the values of Western science, here is related to introduction of economic deregulation. In this way the science in Yugoslavia, in structural sense, due to geopolitical shift of Yugoslavia in 1948, demonstrate the socialist adaptation to geopolitical and socio-economic, socio-political processes, which in the given period of Cold War is more in accord with proclaimed values of the Western bloc.

Change in the official discourse of Yugoslav science

Geopolitical and societal dynamics after the break with the USSR likewise influenced the nature of the dominant scientific discourse in Yugoslavia, which was mainly defined by the Cold War context. On a theoretical level, the concept of more autonomous science was propagated (Ristić, 2013 ), which marked certain deviation from the thereto dominant view that science must be in a close bond with the realities of society. Structural changes in Yugoslavia’s economy were brought about by request from the West (Bogetić, 2000 , pp. 14, 15, 90, italics added ), Footnote 12 in the context of weakening the planned economy and introducing a market economy, which in ideal-typical sense is linked to liberal ideology (Hunt, 1981 ). These correlated with changes in certain aspects of science. At first, these changes were structurally relatively subtle and occurred at a slower pace. However, in the speeches of Yugoslav party officials and ideologues, these changes were considerably more explicit and could be detected shortly after the break with the USSR. This was evidenced by the party’s dissatisfaction with Yugoslav (scientific) publications, due to the inclusion of translations of articles authored in Russian, etc. In accordance with some new political changes that took place in 1948, journals had to be directed toward a more local perspective (Duančić, 2019 , p. 69).

At the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of CPY held at the end of 1949, the Party’s leadership demanded that in ideological and scientific activity focus be placed on the study of the so-called Yugoslav experience. This was accompanied by a softer stance on the part of the Party leadership toward academic workers, subjects of “bourgeois” ideology, who, before the break with the USSR, were seen as a major problem and obstacle to the construction of socialism. Such an approach now became “sectarian”. (Petranović, 1988 , p. 319) In this context, Milovan Đilas, Footnote 13 an important party official and ideologist, in 1949 asserted that it was “necessary to vigorously suppress the wrong, sectarian attitude toward old experts and old scientific and teaching staff” (Đilas, 1985 , p. 312). At issue is a certain weakening of the idea of philosophical struggle understood necessarily as class struggle in theory by Marxists-Leninists see e.g., Lenin, ([1909] 1977 ). In the same speech, Đilas criticized the USSR’s administrative apparatus, as well as the exaggerated planning in education and science (Đilas, 1985 , pp. 288-289).

The insistence on weakening of centralization and other elements of the Marxist-Leninist ideological line in science is likewise reflected in Đilas’s view of the role of the Ministry of Science and Culture (MSC) Footnote 14 and the Committees for Science and Culture, asserted also in 1949. According to him, “[t]he MSC should limit its activities to solely federal educational, cultural, and scientific matters and the appropriate federal institutions” (Đilas, 1985 : 308), as well as general supervision of republics’ institutions, convening conferences, etc, while “[e]verything else should be left to the republics” (Đilas, 1985 , p. 308). In other words, Đilas was in favor of ridding the MSC of the role of “administrative and bureaucratic leadership.” Đilas believed that this would help the development of science and culture by “reducing bureaucratization.” The Third Plenum of the Central Committee of CPY marked an undeniable formal ideological break with the cultural model of the USSR (Dimić, 1988 , pp. 241-245). Thus, in the eyes of Yugoslav authorities, the organizational model of the USSR went from being the most efficient organizational model to the most ineffective one shortly after the break.

That same year (1949), a party official and key Yugoslav ideologist Edvard Kardelj Footnote 15 (in his acceptance speech to the Slovenian Academy of Sciences) talked about the “anti-scientific” tendencies of the USSR, which “turned science into bureaucracy lackeys” (Kardelj, 1950 , p. 4). Such criticism of Soviet bureaucracy (and its attitude towards science) was characteristic not only of the opposing camp during the Cold War (e.g., Polanyi’s criticism) but also of political organizations whose criticism of Stalin’s regime remained affirmative of Lenin’s teachings (e.g., Trotskyist organizations). In accordance with this it seems that changes within socialist Yugoslav science, especially in the context of the critique of USSR, represent an attempt of overcoming what was often emphasized as one of the main negative aspects of Soviet science, which prevents its scientific development—the extremely bureaucratic system of USSR.

Bošković ( 1981 ) noted that Kardelj declared science to be autonomous from the state apparatus. This is particularly evident in Kardelj’s words that “true science in our country cannot serve anybody or anything other than truth and progress, and such a role of science is especially useful for our people’s, socialist state” (Kardelj, 1950 , p. 6). Kardelj’s speech represents a negation of Soviet science in stating that:

“we can talk about partisanship in science only in the sense of its social, class determination of human knowledge. In contrast to that, however, the creators of the pragmatist concept of ‘partisanship’ declare as truth all that in their short-sightedness they consider useful for a certain political tactic and socio-economic practice, while in reality confusing their desires and needs for objective truth.” [Kardelj, 1950 , p. 4]

In other words, Kardelj ( 1950 ) rejected partisanship in science as a perspective in which science is part of the “state apparatus”. Accordingly, Bošković ( 1981 ) wondered whether Kardelj “ generally rejected the concept of partisanship by specifying the conditionality of knowledge in this way” (Bošković, 1981 , p. 3).

Kardelj criticized the cult of Soviet science (in the first place Soviet social science), which he referred to in his speech as the “theory of Soviet science’s leading role”. In this regard, he stated as early as 1949 that “recently, some people have crossed the threshold of ridiculous trying to justify that role” (Kardelj, 1950 , p. 5). Kardelj went on to elaborate (1950) on his remark by claiming that the authors of this theory do not present concrete results of Soviet (social) science, but only refer to “some kind of right of inheritance”, by which he means “that only the leading cadres of the USSR are able to provide for the whole world the final and conclusive determinations of certain social phenomena, anywhere on the globe” (Kardelj, 1950 , p. 5).

At the same time, Kardelj’s speech declared that the road to freedom of intellectual creativity was paved in Yugoslavia:

“We feel that our scientific workers must be free in their work. Particularly because without differing opinions, scientific discussion, critique, and verification of theoretical positions in practice, there will be no progress, nor will there be a successful struggle against reactionary concepts and dogmatism in science. Our scientists must address scientific issues courageously and without awe in the face of petrified dogmas.” [Kardelj, 1950 , p. 6]

This marked the beginning of a new relationship between science and creativity in Yugoslavia in general (Dimić, 1988 , p. 255; Kašić, 1989 , p. 210).

The freedom of scientific creativity in Yugoslavia, conditionally speaking, proclaimed after the break with the USSR, was a result of the country’s political choices and decisions. Similar observations were made on American scientific freedom during the Cold War, which “had to be constructed and maintained through a series of political choices” (Wolfe, 2018 , p. 2). In this sense, when analyzing the nature of science in Yugoslavia, it is necessary, at least roughly, to contextualize the aforementioned processes of shaping Yugoslav science towards greater autonomy after the break with the USSR. This should be done while keeping in mind that the entanglement of politics and science is a feature of the Cold War in general (see Solovey, 2001 ; Oreskes and Krige, 2014 (eds), Aronova, Turchetti ( 2016 )), and not unique to socialist systems.

The proclaimed change in the social position of science that Kardelj announced is Titoist, i.e., an ideological break in the sphere where a political showdown between Yugoslav leadership and the USSR was taking place. The “official line” character of this anti-Soviet speech was evident, as it was published in multiple places, including the scientific journal Science and Nature in 1950.

Đilas ( 1951 ) continued to criticize the ideology of the USSR while advocating for “socialist democracy”, which he primarily opposed to “bureaucratism”. He compared Soviet ideology to dogmatism, emphasizing its lack of scientific and dialectical rigor, and argued that its subjects are “those who learned Marxism from Stalin rather than [learning about] the process of transforming reality from Marx himself…” (Đilas, 1951 , p. 6). Moreover, he appeared to believe that scientists in Yugoslavia do not need to be Marxists, because science is a progressive social force in and of itself thanks to the unrestrained materialism, even when scientists

“know nothing about Marx, nothing about dialectics, nor are they even willing to completely abide by quotations as such. Moreover, in the fight against religion, mysticism, idealism, vulgarity, non-science […] they are our allies in action! But not allies in the usual, political sense. For, we will win even without these allies. It’s not about that! It is simply about an easier or a more difficult victory, and essentially: about the development of science, breaking down all of those barriers that impede or may impede its development, which for us in a concrete situation is identical to inhibiting the development of socialism.” [Đilas, 1951 , pp. 14 -15]

Marx and Engels, as well as Lenin, criticized this particular view of scientists and science as inconsistently materialistic and non-dialectical, claiming that such a position eventually leads to a politically reactionary, i.e., idealist philosophical camp (Marx, [1846] 1969 ; Engels, [1877] 1947 ; Lenin, [1909] 1977 ). Prior to the Second World War, it was precisely the CPY that criticized heterodox scientists and philosophers who considered themselves Marxist-Leninists and expressed views in a similar spirit, deeming them to be revisionists (Kovačević, 1989 ).

Issue no. 10 of the journal Science and Nature (1949) featured a speech by renowned Yugoslav communist and the Minister of Science, Rodoljub Čolaković, delivered at the first Congress of Yugoslav mathematicians and physicists, at the time when the break with the USSR began to be felt in all areas. In contrast to its former unity with the USSR, socialist Yugoslavia now displayed a distinctively unique interest in “our way of building of socialism” (Čolaković, 1949 , p. 574). Despite Čolaković’s emphasis on the role of science in building a socialist society and his insistence on the connection between science and practice, his views on science, such as the one that “major scientific and cultural issues cannot be solved by any administrative measures” (Čolaković, 1949 , p. 573), demonstrate the abandoning of the idea of Soviet science and orientation toward greater autonomy in science. As for the journal Science and Nature , one could clearly see in the letter by the editorial staff to readers in 1954 that it was subject to certain ideological change. In the address, the role of science in building society is no longer stressed, with the propagation and popularization of natural sciences becoming the journal’s only task. In the same year, the journal became an organ of various scientific societies, “independently published and distributed…”, while the new editorial board was made up of these societies’ members (Editorial staff, 1954 , p. 50).

However, in an announcement made in 1959 (multi-issue volume 1–10), the journal’s editorial board informed its readers and subscribers (from whom the publication partially funded itself) that the journal, “due to the reduction of subsidies after 1956 and their subsequent complete removal, had to be published irregularly at first, before temporarily ceasing publishing…” (Editorial board, 1959 ) This occurred precisely during the aforementioned processes of decentralization in the model of scientific organization and increased autonomy in financing, and after the state loosened control over the economy. These types of difficulties often revealed systemic problems with Yugoslav form of Socialist Self-Management. According to Rudi Supek ( 1971 ), a Yugoslav Praxis Footnote 16 theorist, the issue was not decentralization as such, but rather an unrestrained market economy, which only intensified class tensions in society, created an insufficiently functional economy, etc. In other words, according to Supek ( 1971 ), not only was there a weakening of the “centralized administrative planned economy in Yugoslavia, but also of every development planning concept (regardless of whether it was implemented “from above” or “from below”)” (Supek, 1971 , p. 354).

Novel Yugoslav approach to science

In 1952, the journal Pogledi ( Views ) was launched “to meet the need to address issues in social and natural sciences, particularly those that affect the creation of a complete scientific worldview and the building of socialist culture more directly” (Editorial staff, 1952 , p. 1). The journal incorporated and promoted a Marxist humanist approach to scientific and philosophical issues. Criticizing the “phenomenological and positivist interpretation of reality” as well as the “purely pragmatist attitude to truth, morality, and individual freedom,” the editorial staff concluded that these were negative tendencies, corresponding only to “undemocratic and inhumane social practices” and appearing not only in the context of “decadent bourgeois philosophy but also in Soviet revisionism of Marxism” (Editorial staff, 1952 , pp. 1–2).

In contrast to the “authoritarian” and “ideologically discriminatory” approach, the journal’s editorial staff promoted “open dialog” and “battle of ideas”. The fact that this approach to scientific issues was essentially consistent with the new official state line was demonstrated by the Resolution of the Sixth Congress of CPY, which was also reported on in Views , owing to its relevance for schools and scientific institutions: “The Congress also points out that preventing a clash of opinions could only hinder the development of science and culture” (Editorial staff, 1952 : 65). Another issue of the journal confirmed that “there is no doubt that our entire social development, and thus activities at the highest scientific research and teaching institutions, is heading toward greater autonomy…” (Editorial staff, 1953 , p. 285).

An example of the continuation of this process in Yugoslavia in social sciences was the establishment of the Sociology Group at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade in 1959, as this department was frequently marked by tensions with “dogmatic Marxism”, for which sociology was often viewed as a “bourgeois” and reactionary discipline (Bogdanović, 1990 , p. 23). Another similar case was that of sociology in the USSR, where the situation began to change after Stalin’s death (Weinberg, 1974 ; Osipov, 2009 ).

In accordance with these ideological conditions in scientific and cultural spheres it is useful to consider the case of psychoanalysis too, which “generally speaking […] did not fare well in most of the Marxist-Leninist world” for historical as well as ideological reasons (Savelli, 2013 , p. 262). “Western radical and politically engaged psychoanalysis generally existed on the social and political margins” (Antic, 2022 , pp. 7–8). Savelli ( 2013 ) points out that psychoanalysis in Yugoslavia, in which there was greater intellectual freedom than in the rest of Eastern Europe, despite all obstacles that it encountered, nevertheless managed to inform the psychiatric practice to a larger extent (for example in relation to social problems of alcoholism and suicide). Regarding the examination of the specificity of Yugoslav psychiatry as related to East-West division, it is worth mentioning that it was the profession which incorporated the influence of Marxism, that is of Communist ideology. But, a partial Westernization of the discipline occurred too, and in following years there were also some anti-colonial tendencies - as such it also had an active role in these processes (Antic, 2022 ). On the other hand, an important aspect of it, which was also very noticeable, was the aspiration to actively participate in modernization processes both of its own profession and of society in general, with the aim of revolutionizing the consciousness of individuals, but also of the family and social relationships in general within Yugoslav society, and in a wider sense to act in the direction of progressive, humanistic, creative values (Antic, 2022 ).

The specificity of Yugoslav science, initiated by the break-up with USSR and by the initial firm turn towards the West, is also well attested by the case of Yugoslav biology. Before the break-up, Yugoslav biology, following its role model – USSR, had a tendency to conform itself with Michurin’s biology and the Lisenko’s doctrine. However, due to the change of geopolitical circumstances in 1948, the process of de-Stalinization in Yugoslav biology begun. The particularity of this process may be seen in the fact that Yugoslav michurinists had opted not for rejection of Michurinst biology, labeling it as Stalinist deviation, but “carefully weighed its political and ideological implications, trying to negotiate the Stalinist origins of Michurinist biology with political and ideological reconfiguration in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia.” (Duančić, 2020 , p. 159). As for this topic there was no Party directive from above, but there were, besides “negotiations within a scientific community”, also “negotiations of the scientific community with the party”, which didn’t show any particular interest for that situation (Duančić, 2020 ). During the 1950s an intensification of scientific research appeared in Yugoslavia, as well as greater possibilities for cooperation and visits of young scientists in institutes in the West. This “proved to be more important for the withering of Michurinist biology than the Yugoslav political and ideological distancing from the Soviet Union” (Duančić, 2020 , p. 187). In this way, within the socialist system with more freedom than in the Eastern bloc, the popularization of Michurinist biology in Yugoslavia, which during Cold War represents the first socialist state renegade from USSR, was finished only around 1956 (Duančić, 2020 ).

After Stalin’s death, there were some improvements in the relationship between the USSR and Yugoslavia, albeit this relationship was subject to numerous changes in the years and decades to follow. However, despite the USSR’s desire to return Yugoslavia to the “socialist camp”, this did not happen (Dimić, 2014 , pp.10–19). This initial short-term normalization of the relationship between the USSR and Yugoslavia had no significant ideological consequences for the official scientific discourse in Yugoslavia, as evidenced by Tito’s speech, delivered at the Seventh Congress of the LCY, in which he once again emphasized the positive effects that reduced bureaucratic interference had on scientific work.

“The gradual liquidation of bureaucratic interference in anything and everything has liberated our scientists, artists, cultural workers, and pedagogues from former bureaucratic impediments and provided them with an opportunity for unhindered creative work.” [Tito, 1958 , p. 80]

A good indicator that dominantly socialist science in Yugoslavia continued to open to the West was the fact that, during that time, the US Information Agency of the American Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, published the journal Nauka i tehnika (Science and Technology ) ( 1957 – 1958 ) in Serbo-Croatian language. This monthly publication covered advances in American science, medicine, technology, and economy. An important factor in Yugoslavia’s ideological positioning at the time was the development of the policy of non-alignment , in which Yugoslav president Tito played a key role (Rajak, 2011 , pp. 107–108).

Milentije Popović ( 1960 ), a prominent Yugoslav official, once Minister of Foreign Trade and Finance and President of the Federal Council for Scientific Research, confirmed Yugoslavia’s official deviation from Soviet scientific principles, claiming the impossibility of Soviet-style planning in science. Providing an example of using science to solve problems related to corn production, Popović stated:

“Therefore, we can - and we must - use a program to direct scientific and research efforts towards solving the corn problem , but we cannot plan what we will, what we should (and whether we should) discover” [Popović, 1960 , p. 8].

Popović goes on to state that he aims to overcome one-sidedness and find a middle way between “free science” and “planned science” - viewpoints he believed only seem to be opposed (see Popović, 1960 , pp. 9–16). He undoubtedly introduced the elements of “free science” into the Yugoslav scientific discourse, which clashed with certain aspects of the perspective of Soviet scientific activity, particularly in his emphasis on the importance of freedom of scientific work and his understanding of the nature of “pure science” (see Popović, 1960 , pp. 8–9). Popović further deviated from the idea of Soviet “planned science” later in the text, when he tackled the specific problems of organizing scientific work in manufacturing, agriculture, etc., in Yugoslavia at that time, claiming that these organizational forms “cannot be predefined” (Popović, 1960 , p. 54). Popović distinguished between two ways of financing in Yugoslavia: the first phase, characterized by full budget financing of scientific institutions, “which lasted for several years after the liberation” (Popović, 1960 , p. 56) and coincided with the period of the highly centralized model of scientific organization in Yugoslavia; and the second phase, which began after the break with the USSR and aligned the organization of science in Yugoslavia with market logic.

“In this regard, it is planned that, in principle, scientific and research organizations be as independent in their work as economic organizations, and that the method of distribution of scientific institutions’ income be aligned with the system of economic organizations, with the exception that scientific institutions will return the entire amount of contributions to their funds.” [Popović, 1960 , p. 59] Footnote 17

In Kardelj’s acceptance speech to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts given on February 22nd, 1960, in which he talks about social sciences and their importance for the continuing development of a “self-managed socialist society”, he stressed at the very beginning that science

“should not be a servant to a certain political practice or certain ruling ideological notion. It sets its own tasks and goals, based on the needs and tasks generated by living social praxis, current human realities, and the development of science itself.” [Kardelj, 1981 , p. 7]

Kardelj’s entire speech was riddled with references supporting the idea of free science, independent of political influences, but also a science that “must not become a mere abstraction”, which is a real threat if one “loses sight of people’s praxis”, because “the end result of the multifaceted process of scientific research finds application in people’s praxis” (Kardelj, 1981 , p. 10). One gains the impression that Kardelj attempted to connect the perspectives of an autonomous and socially engaged science in his address. Looking into this connection, however, it appears that it comes down to the role of science in society being to encourage certain institutions to carry out socially relevant research (Kardelj, 1981 , p. 10), which is a practice that is also present (with some differences) in “bourgeois” societies.

The connection between US’s economic demands and the change of the discourse about the nature and the role of science in Yugoslavia refers to the context of Cold War struggle for ideological hegemony i.e., the soul of socialist science. In this case the process, created through geopolitical shift towards West goes in the direction of an attempt of “limitation” of socialism in science, which points out to instrumental function of ideal-typical Cold War representation of Western science when semi-peripheral country such as Yugoslavia is at issue. However, the fact that Yugoslav system nevertheless retains socialist ideology not only mitigated this process, but these changes, with the help of Party control and its officials, are articulated in such a way (as far as it was possible) to remain in accordance with basic Marxist postulates, understood in a much broader sense than in USSR. Bearing in mind Savelli’s ( 2018 ) analytical categories of ideology “by design”, “where professional knowledge was theoretically guided by ideological considerations” (Savelli, 2018 , p. 2) and ideology “by default”, that is, “events and knowledge” shaped “by the fact that they unfolded” in a certain ideological context, “but were not necessarily guided by that ideology” (Savelli, 2018 , p. 2), it is necessary to investigate what does their use tells about the process of establishing the ideological frame of Yugoslav science. In the context of geopolitical shift, Yugoslavia, alongside with its socialist science, found itself in Western, ideologically hostile bloc, thus facing its socio-economic demands. The changes concerning the view on nature and the role of science in Yugoslav society can be seen, in this context, as partially informed through liberal-democratic ideology “by default”. Nevertheless, regarding these scientific changes, the internal control and the tendency toward socialist articulation of the discourse implemented by Yugoslav Communist Party, as a conductor of the process, at least nominally, imposed socialism “by design”.

The discussion about the position and the role of Yugoslav science in the context of relation between the science and the state, can be seen also as a confirmation of Forman’s ( 1987 ) and Kevles’ ( 1990 ) insight of how the changes of science-state relationships during the Cold War weren’t “just” intellectual in their nature, but were also political. In practice, in both of the blocs proclaimed model of science, either “autonomous” or “partisan”, did not exist. Nevertheless, socio-economic demands and pressures for the purpose of the domination of bloc’s ideologies were in fact Yugoslav reality. In this way, the specificity of the ideology of Yugoslav science was to a great extent the result of the process of formation and adaptation of Yugoslav state to Cold War, its effects on politics and culture, as well as the Yugoslav need for bigger independence, which was framed by a specific variant of socialist ideology.

Through the combination of critical approach to ideology and theoretical-ideological approach, and in the context of Cold War struggle for hegemony, the instrumental character of these different representations of the role and nature of science in society in the service of spreading of proclaimed ideological principles of politically opposed blocs is implied in this work. Through consideration of “autonomous” and “partisan” ideological scientific perspectives, as well as their mutual interaction, in the context of Yugoslav geopolitical and socio-economic dynamics one can also notice the tension between mentioned scientific Cold War views on science, which, in Yugoslav case, was resolved though certain deviations from Soviet idea of science. Although differences, it is unquestionable, within scientific practice in the context of the Cold War were overemphasized, especially if bearing in mind obvious bloc deviations from discursive principles in practice, the case of science in Yugoslavia points out to certain real i.e., practical differences, expressed foremost on the level of financing and organization of science, but also articulated within official discourse about nature and role of science in society. Through researching Cold War ideology of science in Yugoslavia, this work points out to the fact that dominant differences, in their core, between Soviet and Western idea about science are, in case of Yugoslavia, basically in direct connection with various economic dynamics, that is, the Soviet idea of planned, centralized economy as opposed to the idea of market economy. In this sense, if (in)compatibility of these two views on science in the context of one society is considered, it seems that it is necessary to start from more fundamental dealing with socio-economic dynamics within concrete social conditions. In other words, the case of science in Yugoslavia that we have discussed in this work shows us that we have to take into consideration, in a greater extent, the possibility that in relations between these two scientific perspectives there are not only philosophical questions, but also socio-economic processes.

It is necessary to pose the question of what does the relationship between science and state, on the example of science in (semi)peripheral Yugoslavia during Cold War also tells about the nature and role of science in this ideological context in general? The confirmation of the extent in which the Cold War science was related to the state can be also seen on the example of socialist Yugoslav science. However, for its specificity in relation to bloc science one is supposed to look firstly in ideological dissidence from USSR, as well as in a rather distinct geopolitical shift towards Western bloc by ruling Yugoslav party and state structures, immediately after the break with Stalin. The very fact that changes in ideological understanding of the nature and role of science in Yugoslav society were initiated by Party officials, and essentially carried out through the principle “from above downwards” informed the ideological framework of Yugoslav science even when it implied advocating larger autonomy of science in socialist Yugoslav society. This does not mean that scientists had no freedom at all in their work (e.g., Duančic, 2020 ), but that this scientific freedom, just as the scientific partisanship, was formed and limited essentially by state projects and needs regarding the nature and role of science in a concrete society, which was formed, just as the science itself, in the Cold War climate. The state, and not the society (or working class) and its fundamental needs, is the one which in final instance created the ideological framework of the science during Cold War, its “autonomy” as well as its “partisanship”. Consequently, socio-economic and ideological impacts of a geopolitical shift of Yugoslav science makes it necessary to enter more deeply and in a more interdisciplinary way into attempts of examining and defining what Forman ( 1987 ) would call “true path” of science, as well as noticing of the importance of historical dynamics regarding the changes in relation to the nature and role of science in society (e.g., Kevles, 1990 ). At issue here is a need for differentiating the elements of system and separating the concrete structure, which in the final instance limits (most often led by its own interests) the freedom and social engagement of science. While taking this into account, it is necessary to analyze reasons for (dis)agreement and (im)possibility of applying the concepts of “autonomous” and “partisan” science in practice, (according to their basic proclaimed principles), and to derive them from broader and more clearly differentiated historical, sociological and philosophical analysis of the relationship between state, science and society during Cold War.

Conclusion and outlook

In the context of two dominant ideological views on science during the Cold War, I examined changes in Yugoslav science after its break with the USSR, in terms of the organization model, financing, and scientific discourse. Through comparison of the governing standpoints on science in Yugoslavia prior to the Tito-Stalin split in 1948 and after it, I show the compatibility of these changes with certain aspects of the perspective of science as autonomous and apolitical. Market forces and their control, as well as (de)centralization, (de)bureaucratization, and changes in the international position of Yugoslavia in the Cold War context proved to be elements of particular importance in this analysis. Understanding their relation to Yugoslav science allows us not only to position it more clearly during the Cold War, but also to better comprehend the nature of the ideological framework that supported various dynamics of de-Stalinization of specific scientific issues in Yugoslavia. Footnote 18 These elements are still structurally and politically relevant to date. They underline science as an activity woven into social processes. In accordance, these insights could be useful for a better understanding of today’s dynamics between science and society.

By contextualizing the nature of these changes in Yugoslav science, while presenting the dominant ideological views on science during the Cold War and considering how both sides deviated from their proclaimed principles, the question arises as to what these changes can tell us about the nature and role of “autonomous” and “partisan” perspectives of science during this period? Bearing in mind the importance of the Yugoslav geopolitical shift for the issues dealt with in this study, it seems that for a more complete insight into the nature and roles of these views it is necessary to approach them in the context of the struggle for ideological hegemony during the Cold War. Judging by the examples provided by Yugoslav science in this era, the analysis is incomplete without considering the socio-economic changes and contradictions of the society in question. For Yugoslavia, this was embedded in the case of a socialist country that after 1948 turned to the Western Bloc. These unusual Cold War circumstances made Yugoslav science in this period an interesting case for research.

It is evident that the earlier simplified ideas of science in the West and the East are mostly mundane today (Kojevnikov, 2004 , p. 46; Aronova, 2011 , pp. 198–199), and that science in both blocs was politicized. However, this study suggests, though Yugoslav science was socialist, that it is possible to observe some objective changes in terms of the scientific organization model and financing, as well as in the official and dominant discourse of Yugoslav science. Those changes were in accordance with the ideas associated with Western science and occurred after the geopolitical shift towards the West. Perhaps a more thorough analysis of the practical and cultural factors that influenced certain aspects of science in Yugoslavia would allow us to draw a broader picture of the relationship between science and ideology in the Cold War? This would require expanding this research with additional and more detailed examples of concrete scientific practice. In this regard, in the future, I see the need for further research into the roles and positions of science that are not limited to the Cold War’s major actors. I believe that the specificities of certain (semi)peripheral societies’ experiences during this period would be fruitful to gain novel insight into this subject.

When dealing with the USSR in this study, the reference framework involves the USSR up until Stalin’s death (1953).

The Resolution of the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties concerning the state of affairs in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, passed on June 28th, 1948 .

A good example of a Soviet view of science, propagated by scientist, is the publication of Yugoslav biologist Vojin Gligić: Borci za bolju berbu i žetvu (Fighters for a better harvest, 1945 ).

For scientific cooperation of Yugoslavia and the USSR see Bondžić 2010 .

Časopis društva za kulturnu saradnju Jugoslavije i SSSR-a (Journal of the Society for Cultural Cooperation of Yugoslavia and the USSR)

O uslovima socijalističkog planiranja (On the conditions of socialist planning)

Sovjetska nauka kroz sovjetske naučnike (Soviet Science through the lens of Soviet scientists)

Lenjin i prirodne nauke (Lenin and natural sciences)

For criticism of the USSR see also The Congress of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia, 1952 , pp. 260–273.

At the Sixth Congress, Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) changed its name to the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY). It modified its role to adapt the Party to new conditions in society – “Socialist Self-Management” (for more on this see Šetinc 1978), sometimes referred to as “workers’ self-management”.

Position that was established following the model of the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union.

For more detail about the effects of the Yugoslav economic reform after the break with the USSR from a Western perspective see: CIA Report The Fiat-Soviet Auto Plant and Communist Economic Reforms, The Yugoslav Economic Reform, pp. 43–47, (March 4th 1967 ).

Milovan Đilas (1911–1995) is probably most famous for his dissident Cold War engagement and the book The New Class (1957). However, during the period described in this segment, Đilas occupied very high positions in the party, including the ideologically immensely important position at the helm of AGITPROP (Party organ in charge of agitation and propaganda) (Dimić, 1988; Bogdanović, 2013).

For more on the MSC see Bondžić, 2004 : 144–148.

The pre-war Slovenian communist Edvard Kardelj (1910-1979) evolved into a key ideologue of the Titoist system of Socialist Self-Management after Yugoslavia’s break with the USSR. Through his political and ideological work, Kardelj critically shaped the new socio-political system of Yugoslavia (Jović, 2003).

Praxis was a Marxist humanist journal (1964–1974) and dissident circle of philosophers and social scientists in Yugoslavia.

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This manuscript has undergone several revisions, and I appreciate all the valuable and constructive feedback that has contributed to its improvement. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (Contract No. 451-03-68/2020-14/200053).

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Korolija, M. Yugoslav science during the Cold War (1945–1960): socio-economic and ideological impacts of a geopolitical shift. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 913 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02414-2

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YU Rearview Mirror: Ways of Remembering Yugoslavia

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In this text, I tackle an impossible task: I address Yugoslavia from the perspective of “memory studies,” a currently very propulsive interdisciplinary field at the productive intersection of historical anthropology, sociology of time, cultural studies, and transition studies. Several questions immediately arise. Which Yugoslavia is to be studied: Karad̵ord̵ević’s (1918–1941), Tito’s (1945–1991), or Milošević’s (1992–2006)? Or all three, as a single package? Which kind of remembrance will we talk about: collective or personal? Of cultural memory, of political memory, or of memoir, that popular but factually unreliable literary genre? Will we focus on official, institutionalized memories or on unofficial, minority memories; on established or subversive memories?

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The Croatian Constitution even involves a ban on entering into associations with other states “if such association leads, or may lead, to a renewal of a Yugoslav State union or to any form of consolidated Balkan State.”

Since 2005, it covers all six former Yugoslav republics.

With an important difference: for diplomats, the term “Western Balkans” signifies states of the former Yugoslavia minus Slovenia plus Albania, whereas roadmaps refer to all seven Yugoslav successor-states.

Since 2013, all of these republics with the exception of Slovenia.

Since 2008, at the beginning, it involved Montenegrin, Croatian, and Slovenian clubs.

Also known as the ABA league: since 2001, it has involved clubs from all former Yugoslav republics.

And continues, “that Yugoslavia in a cultural sense not only did not fall apart, but cannot fall apart, not even with help of nationalism of the worst kind” (Jergović 2010).

In other words: “the remembrance is an image entangled among other images, a generic image taken back into the past” (Jergović 2010, 71).

Furthermore: memory “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation”, whereas history is “reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.”

“History is the memory of states,” Henry Kissinger observed on one occasion (Kissinger 1973, 331).

In the center of Banja Luka, 47.06% street names were “Serbified,” as well as 30% in the suburbs and 9.68% rural place names. Prior to the Bosnian war, 30.8% were named after ethnically neutral persons, 28.1% after Serbian, 21.2% after Muslim, and 13.7% after Croatian persons. After the war, Serbian persons dominated with 69.4%, while the share of ethnically neutral names decreased (20.3%), as did the share of Croatian (3.2%) and Bosniak (1.1%) names.

For a comparison of their transformations during the transition, see edited volume by Šarić, Gammelgaard, Ra Hauge (2012).

Here, let me mention the film Sretna zemlja (Goran Dević 2009), which follows parallels in the May pilgrimage of Ustaša movement followers to the Bleiburg commemoration, and that of Titonostalgics to Kumrovac, to celebrate Tito’s birthday.

The first was edited by Drago Jančar (Nova revija, Ljubljana, 1998), and the second written by Srdjan Cvetković (Evro book, Belgrade 2014).

Let me mention but a few: Iris Adrić, Vladimir Arsentijević, Đorđe Matić (ed.), Leksikon Yu mitologije (Rende, Belgrade, Postscriptum, Zagreb, 2004); Renate Hansen-Kokoruš (ed.), Facing the Present: Transition in Post-Yugoslavia – The Artist View (Verlag Dr. Kovač, Hamburg, 2014); Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Norton, London, New York, 1992); Dejan Novačić, SFRJ – Moja dežela (Orbis, Ljubljana, 2003), Lazar Džamić, Cvjećarnica u Kući cveća – Kako smo usvojili i živeli Alana Forda (Naklada Jesenski i Turk, Zagreb, Heliks, Smederevo, 2012), Tanja Petrović, Jernej Mlekuž (ed.), Made in YU (Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 2016) and Martin Pogačar, Fičko po Jugoslaviji – Zvezda domačega avtomobilizma med cestami in spomini (Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 2016).

Counter-memory therefore “looks to the past for the hidden histories excluded from the dominant narratives” and “forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past” (Ibid.: 213, 214).

www.tvojstav.com/results/dMaf5fZx1hhhY8EMWdtN , accessed December 25, 2015.

www.jutarnji.hr/velika-anketa-jutarnjeg-lista%2D%2D-20-godina-nakon-jugoslavije/955249/ , accessed December 25, 2015.

http://documents.mx/documents/20-years-after-1991-the-tale-of-two-generations.html , accessed December 26, 2015.

www.tvojstav.com/results/rVs2THlu1DWhQv0mZVkM , accessed December 26, 2015.

www.tvojstav.com/results/k7sB0O4hgsxrrXS8ux0T , accessed December 25, 2015.

www.mojevrijeme.hr/magazin/2015/04/hrvatska-i-bih-slozne-u-sfrj-se-zivjelo-bolje/ . Accessed 25 December 2015.

A permanent exhibition at Ljubljana’s Museum of Recent History is titled Slovenci v 20. stoletju ( Slovenians in the 20th century ). To my mind, it has several serious flaws. For instance, one panel describes entrance into Yugoslavia as involuntary: “ Unification within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes occurred on 1 December, 1918, on a centralist basis and contrary to wishes of the majority of Slovenes .” The aforementioned exhibition Temna stran meseca is partially integrated into the exhibition, rightly emphasizing and criticizing the violence exerted by the system against its adversaries, but in a very tendentious manner (items are annotated in the following style: “ Bolshevist racism or Party heaven and Party hell ” or “ Rule of the Secret Political Police ,” and party leaders are called “ red barons ”). Products from Slovene industry of the time are thrown together into an industry composter , and a photograph from the 1980s depicts a line in front of a store , implying shortages. The period of the battle for independence, democratization , and Europeanization is depicted uncritically, firmly sticking to the official interpretation of history, with no mention of new injustices or problems (such as the rise of xenophobia, the degradation of the welfare state, tycoon takeovers of once common property, new—to use the same expression— barons , social and political unrest, repatriarchalization, pauperization, and exclusions of the Erased, discrimination against the Roma people and other minorities, the barbed wire to keep out refugees, installed in 2016, and under-representation of women). Sadly, it is more an apology for current circumstances than a (self-)critical glance backward.

Its full name is The Museum of the Macedonian Struggle for Sovereignty and Independence – VMRO Museum – The Museum of Victims of the Communist Regime . It greatly resembles the House of Terror in Budapest and the Museum of Communism in Prague.

Examples are Serbian documentary series SFRJ za početnike (screenplay by Radovan Kupres, since 2011) and documentaries V vojni in revoluciji (Ana Bilankov 2011) and Moja Jugoslavija (Miroslav Nikolić 2004) about the imaginary “fourth Yugoslavia.”

A good case in point is the Croatian television series Crno-bijeli svijet (Goran Kulenović, since 2015).

For Slovenian case studies, see Hofman (2015) and Velikonja (2013). I conclude that the most common memory narratives in such musical productions are antifascism, multiculturalism, social justice, Tito, solidarity, and socialist easy living .

To mention the most resonant plays: Pula-based Leksikon YU mitologije (Oliver Frljić 2011), Ljubljana-based Jugoslavija, moja dežela (Ivica Buljan 2015), Belgrade-based Rodjeni u Yu (Dino Mustafić 2012) and Ljubljana stand-up mono-comedy by Perica Jerković Rojen v Jugi (2009).

During my fieldwork-based research into collective memory of Yugoslavia and Yugonostalgia, I read books from museums and memorials of “those times” in Croatia, BiH, and Serbia. Let me quote several indicative notes: “This should be preserved and should never be forgotten,” “Thank God that someone is taking care of old memories for future generations to see what I saw,” “Beautiful memories of SFRY! Good old times!!!” and “We must never forget what we have lived with.”

Interestingly enough, the term Yugonostalgia only refers to the second Yugoslavia, not the first (or the third, in the case of Serbia and Montenegro). Kuljić cites the results of a public opinion poll conducted in Serbia in 2010: 81% of respondents chose the socialist period as their preferred answer to the question “Which period was the best in your country?” Only 6% chose the 1990s and 3% opted for the interwar period (Kuljić 2011, 129).

For a case study of Yugonostalgia among the diaspora, see Hadžibulić and Manić (2016).

The Croats have received apologies from Montenegrin President Milo Djukanović (in 2000), Serbian-Montenegrin President Svetozar Marović (2003), and Serbian President Boris Tadić (2007 and 2010). The Bosniaks have received apologies for crimes committed by the Serbian side by Serbian presidents Boris Tadić (2004) and Tomislav Nikolić (2013), while Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić laid flowers in the Potočari memorial complex in 2015; to acknowledge the wrongdoings of Croatian politics towards Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, Croatian President Ivo Josipović also apologized in 2010. The Serbs received apologies from Croatian Presidents Stipe Mesić (2003) and Ivo Josipović (specifically for the crimes in Paulin Dvor in 2010). Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović began the series of apologies for crimes committed by the Bosnian army against other nations (in May 2000), and was followed by BiH Presidency member Bakir Izetbegović (2010).

The attack was, according to the annotation, “ inspired by severe manipulation by the public media ”; it was “ one of the darkest aspects of Montenegrin history .” Massacres in Bukovica in Štrpci are also mentioned.

Two experts in the field have written on the matter: Jurica Pavičić from Split (2016) on Yugoslav Partisan film in general and Peter Stanković from Ljubljana (2005) on the sample of 26 Slovenian Partisan films.

For example, Na svidenje v naslednji vojni (Živojin Pavlović 1980) or Gluvi barut (Bato Čengić 1990).

For instance, Rdeči boogie ali Kaj ti je deklica (Karpo Godina 1982), Otac na službenom putu (Emir Kusturica 1985), Moj ata, socialistični kulak (Matjaž Klopčič 1987), and Tito i ja (Goran Marković 1992).

Such as the films directed by Želimir Žilnik and Dušan Makavejev since the 1960s.

For instance, the film Dolga temna noč (Antun Vrdoljak 2004) and particularly Četverored (Jakov Sedlar 1999), the second part of which was first featured on Croatian national television just before the 2000 elections, to supposedly prevent voters from voting for the left.

The present themselves as the female peace group of feminist-antimilitarist inclination.

Directed by Hajrudin Krvavec.

This point is demonstrated clearly by New York cultural studies scholar Marita Sturken (2007) in the case of US popular cultural memory.

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Velikonja, M. (2021). YU Rearview Mirror: Ways of Remembering Yugoslavia. In: Ognjenovic, G., Jozelic, J. (eds) Nationalism and the Politicization of History in the Former Yugoslavia. Modernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65832-8_15

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Conflict in post-war yugoslavia: the search for a narrative.

This essay offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia.

Top Image: The author and her children exploring remote battle zones in the mountains separating Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro, 2019.

In the fall of 1946, four Catholic Slovenes in Dezno, Slovenia stormed the home of a local Communist official, also a Slovene, and demanded that he turn over documents and food in his home. When the official refused, the men “beat him with the butts of their rifles” and stole what they wanted. As they departed, they set fire to his home and left a receipt that stated the Anti-Communist Army of Slovenia had requisitioned his goods and destroyed his documents. 

The note ended with the phrase: “Freedom to the people, death to the Communists!” The slogan was an explicit reworking of the Communists’ own wartime slogan, “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” By deploying the same rhetoric, the ideological enemies were claiming they legitimately represented the will of the people.

Across Yugoslavia, similar events occurred throughout 1946. In northeastern Bosnia, a group of armed Muslim men stormed the home of the local Communist chief, also a Muslim, ransacking his house and shooting at his son, who jumped through a window and ran for his life. In Kosovo, an Albanian killed the head of the Communist party, also an Albanian, in the doorway of his home: the assassin was part of an organized guerilla army that did not think Kosovo should be governed by Yugoslavia. In Serbia, armed insurgents, known as Chetniks, holed up in the mountains, often drawing on the support of priests and peasant networks to survive. In Croatia, wartime fascists refashioned themselves as “Crusaders” defending Christianity and the nation against Communism.

Socialist Yugoslavia courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Across the Balkans in 1945 and 1946, and indeed, much of Eastern Europe, armed conflict and civil resistance was widespread. World War II officially ended in Europe in the spring of 1945 , when the German army retreated under pressure from Allied forces and local partisans. Occupation governments and quisling regimes collapsed, their many supporters either fleeing into hiding or facing prosecution. But the war’s supposed end was hardly a settled matter. 

While the world would mark Victory Day (V-E Day) in Europe after Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945 in many parts of Europe, local conflict persisted long after the last Wehrmacht  tanks rolled away and foreign statesmen proclaimed peace. In the post-war transition, multi-sided civil conflict challenged the fragile European peace. While these conflicts were not unrelated to violence that occurred during World War II, they had a different character and different goals. In the absence of international war, they became understood as distinctly local—and in western mindsets, they seemed strange and complex. They did not fit easily into historical narratives about World War II and its aftermath. And so they were often ignored or forgotten by historians.

This article offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia, a country that has gone down in history as having defeated the Nazis, and whose immediate post-war story is largely forgotten because it did not fit into the narratives that historians had crafted of the new end of war and the peace that followed. It introduces both the moral and historical complications of studying this period and suggests some new ways to understand the aftermath of World War II.

World War II in Yugoslavia

In April 1941, Yugoslavia was attacked and dismembered by the German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian armies, each of which occupied or annexed different parts of the state. The Axis partners also sanctioned a new fascist ally, the Independent State of Croatia, whose territory included most of what is today Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Croatian state was run by the Ustashas, radical right Croat nationalists who introduced a racial and genocidal campaign similar to the one in Nazi Germany, targeting groups they deemed racial ”others”—Jews, Roma, and Serbs—as well as political enemies.

Political boundaries in Yugoslavia during World War II courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As the Axis armies arrived, the Yugoslav government fled to exile in London, its future uncertain. Armed resistance to foreign occupation and to domestic and international fascists commenced immediately. The two most well-known resistance armies were the Chetniks, who evolved from the remnants of the official Yugoslav army and supported the reintegration of Yugoslavia under a Serbian nationalist rubric, including the reinstallation of the Serb King, and the Communist Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito, who adopted a wartime ideology of anti-fascism, “brotherhood and unity,” and the reunification of war-torn Yugoslavia within the framework of a socialist state. 

The two resistance armies fought each other, even as they fought the same foreign and domestic enemies. The Partisans built a formidable army and comprehensive political and social system, besting their rivals. With support from the Allies, they systematically drove the Germans out of the Balkans. In 1945, they helped to win the war and promptly sought to reunify Yugoslavia.

Importantly, the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1941 was not universally detested, and the Partisans’ victory in 1945 was not universally embraced. Many people had welcomed Yugoslavia’s collapse and were empowered within Hitler’s new European order. These people came from various religious, ethnic, national, and political groups. Their reasons for supporting the collapse of Yugoslavia or the occupation regimes varied, but generally included some combination of having felt marginalized, robbed, and disenfranchised by the interwar Yugoslav state. They sought a stake in redefining the region’s political boundaries and its political character, and they hoped that participating in Hitler’s new European order would offer them a chance to do so.

From its foundation in 1918, the first Yugoslav state had faced widespread internal opposition. Some groups, such as Kosovar Muslims and certain Slovene and Croat nationalists, did not consent to being part of Yugoslavia and felt the state was forced upon them against their will. Many Montenegrins, who had their own state before 1918, balked at the dethronement of their king and the loss of their sovereignty. Even some people who supported the idea of Yugoslavia—understanding the South Slavs as a nation that should have national sovereignty—disagreed on the form and structure of the state, leading to political infighting and violence. The interwar Yugoslav government responded to this wide-ranging opposition with a combination of repression, authoritarianism, censorship, and policing.

For people who disliked the Yugoslav state, the rise of Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and the expansion of Hitler’s European empire in the 1930s offered the possibility of a different political future. This possibility became a reality in 1941, when the Axis powers restructured the political order of southeastern Europe and empowered some of the disempowered. While many people became disillusioned by fascist ideology, political marginalization, mass violence, ruthless occupation policies, and civil war, they did not come to consensus on what the best political alternative would be.

The cruelty and viciousness that characterized mass violence in wartime Yugoslavia has been well documented. The Ustasha regime went down in history as one of the most brutal Nazi satellite states. As historian Rory Yeomans has shown, in addition to imprisoning Jews, Serbs, and Roma in brutal concentration and death camps, the regime sent death squads into the countryside to burn down villages and slaughter Serbian civilians with “axes, knives, scythes, and mallets, as well as guns,” locked people in churches that were set on fire, and threw bodies, sometimes alive, into mass graves. 

As insurrection grew and civil war escalated, they strung up bodies along the streets, desecrating the dead as a warning to the living. In Nazi-occupied Serbia, the German occupation regime instituted one of its harshest reprisal policies in Europe, executing 100 civilians for every German killed by the resistance. Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and suspected Communists were put to death in mere months, after which the remaining Jews were systematically deported to German camps and killed. 

Meanwhile, Chetnik units terrorized Muslims in Eastern Bosnia, burning villages, raping women, massacring civilians, and burying bodies in mass graves. Partisan units adopted a similar tactic with the Italian population in Istria, Dalmatia, and the Julian March, massacring civilians and throwing their bodies into cavernous, rocky sinkholes, known as foibe . 

This is merely a selection of examples to give a sense of the scope of the mass violence perpetrated in the conflict. While historians and Balkan politicians regularly debate which side killed more people and in which ways, for our purposes, what matters most is the understanding that civilians across wartime Yugoslavia experienced terrorizing forms of state-sponsored and insurgent violence, producing mass trauma and fear.

The brutality of war convinced some people who had initially supported the Axis powers to switch sides: the Partisans’ platform of “brotherhood and unity” through social revolution was understood by many as the antidote to genocidal nationalism. But as the war ended and the new regime consolidated power, people doubted if a return to Yugoslavia or a socialist revolution would fix prewar problems, end discrimination, and create avenues for fair representation. Questions abounded. What would reunification and a socialist state mean for one’s political, property, and civil rights? How would the post-war state treat people who had worked for, sympathized with, or profited from the wartime regimes? 

Some people feared political retaliation at the hands of their former enemies. Others expressed concern about the redistribution of wealth. Significant numbers of religious folks—Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox Christians—worried that the Communists would dismantle the religious underpinnings that had shaped the region’s social, cultural, and legal norms. Although the Communists initially promised religious freedom, the radical atheistic policies of Stalinism were well-known, and people were worried.

In spring 1945, it was by no means clear that post-war Yugoslavia would become a solidly Communist state. In the months after V-E Day, foreign diplomats and local politicians debated the political future of the region, as did the Yugoslav government-in-exile, which had made its wartime home in London. Would the Serbian King be restored to the throne and a royal democracy established? If so, would it look the same as the interwar Yugoslav state? 

Many members of the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London hoped so. But the transitional government refused to allow the King to return to the country until a vote was held on whether the monarch would be revived. On the ground in Yugoslavia, many wondered: Would there be free and fair elections, as the British and Americans desired, and how would they be organized? What would be the difference between liberal democracy and socialist democracy? Early signs in summer 1945 pointed to the real possibility of a free political system: in local elections, opposition candidates occasionally beat those put forward by the People’s Front, the political organization dominated by the Communists.

But by the fall of 1945, it had become clearer that the Communist leadership had no plans to loosen its grip on power. Unlike other parts of Europe where the Allies had done the lion’s share of work to defeat the Germans, the Yugoslav Partisans knew that they had won, legitimately, and they expected to define and shape the country’s future form. In the public eye, they held jubilant celebrations and parades, opened schools and other institutions, published newspapers, and held local elections, hoping to consolidate victory through legitimate means. Liberation from the Nazis was celebrated as a collective victory. 

Partisans liberate Sarajevo, April 6, 1945, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Communist-led transitional government paired these tactics with more sinister ones: the suppression of oppositional organizations and the removal of their leaders, an expanding secret police apparatus that investigated and documented anti-state and anti-Communist activity, individual and mass arrests, imprisonments, trials, and an expanding culture of fear. People were arrested on a variety of charges, from egregious crimes against humanity during World War II to more mundane charges, like hiding grain or price gouging. Those found guilty lost political and civil rights, including the right to vote. Many received prison sentences or time in forced labor camps. Some were executed.   In November 1945, in the country’s first national elections, the Communists won with about 90 percent of the vote. They did so through impressive and widespread propaganda, coercion, the removal of political enemies, and election fraud. They promptly established the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, a polity that drew upon a Soviet model. Their political plan involved the removal of class and political enemies and the consolidation of control in the hands of the Communist Party. 

Economically, the regime introduced campaigns for nationalization and industrialization that aimed to eliminate private ownership, redistribute wealth, and elevate the working-class and peasantry. The Communists’ social revolution was grounded in ideals of class, gender, and national equality, which would be realized by eradicating deep-seated patriarchal networks and strong religious-based cultures, and replacing them with expansive educational, cultural, and social welfare structures as well as instituting a universal, secular legal code. All of this was put into motion over the winter of 1945-1946.

Across Yugoslavia, people panicked. This panic quickly manifested in acts of subterfuge, dissent, and underground opposition movements, street protests, strikes, uprisings, and armed resistance. By the summer of 1946, endemic armed conflict had spread to different corners of the state.

The escalating conflict in 1946 was complex and multi-sided, and has proven difficult for historians to describe and categorize. Some armed insurgents had been fighting consistently since World War II ended, refusing to lay down their arms and accept Partisan victory or the new socialist state. This included well-known groups such as the Serb Chetniks, whose leader, Draža Mihailović evaded capture until March 1946.

Captured Chetnik soldiers courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It also included bands previously associated with Balli Kombëtar, a nationalist Albanian army, which continued to wage war in Kosovo, Montenegro, and the Sandžak and had connections to nationalist fighters in Albania.

Balli Kombetar forces enter Prizren 1944, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Post-war insurgency took on a different character in Slovenia and Croatia, regions that had been distinct fascist polities during the war. Small bands known as “Crusaders,” ( Križari , Croatian; Križarci , Slovenian), incorporated wartime military and institutional structures and deployed them for a guerilla war against Communists. In the spirit of the Allied victory, Crusader units claimed to be advocates of democracy and religious freedom, but many members had violent fascist pasts. 

The Croat Crusaders, who expanded to every corner of Croatia and also into Bosnia and Herzegovina, brought together Ustashas, Croat nationalists, political dissidents from the interwar Croat Peasant Party, and a range of Catholic refugees and civilians, often under the leadership of a former Ustasha officer. While many Crusader units operated independently, they can hardly be seen as informal bandits, anarchists, or rogue criminals: units often had their own priest, kitchen, dispensary, and auxiliary personnel, as well as a uniform. There were even efforts to create a flag. 

The British estimated in fall 1946 that roughly 27 percent of the Croat population in Yugoslavia supported the movement. Their unofficial leader was a former Ustasha general, Vjekoslav Luburić, who had overseen the country’s notorious concentration camps and orchestrated the vicious public murders of men and women, old and young, in Sarajevo at the end of the war. . (I write about this campaign in my book, Sarajevo, 1941-1945 ). Importantly, however, not all Croats involved with the Crusader movement were war criminals and former fascists. People who supported liberation and had sympathized with or even fought with the Partisans also joined.

The Slovene anti-Communist front similarly integrated fascists, former members of the wartime Slovene Home Guard (also referred to as the White Guards), religious Catholics, and Slovene nationalists, some with violent wartime pasts, others without them. The movement became especially attractive to Slovene members of the Partisan army who had fought on the side of the Allies, but then changed their minds in the early months of the Communist consolidation of power. The Slovene movement steadily expanded into fall 1946 when, according to British reports, there were two mutinies in the Yugoslav army to the south of Maribor, Slovenia; in one, soldiers allegedly killed their political commissar and defected to the anti-Communist army.

Importantly, these insurgencies were not static. Alliances changed, as did membership. People had various motives for joining one group or another, with individual interests and circumstances often dictating whether people would fight, flee, or bide their time until dynamics became clearer. For instance, among the Chetnik units that continued fighting in post-war Serbia, Montenegro, and eastern Bosnia, some espoused a pan-Yugoslav agenda, while others fought for a distinct Serb nationalist cause. Some Kosovar Albanian guerrillas appeared to be more anti-Yugoslav than explicitly anti-Communist; national categories could prove more salient than ideological ones. 

In Macedonia, the Greek Civil War trickled over the border, and bands of Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgarians could be found fighting each other as well as fighting Yugoslav Partisans. Former members of the Ustashas and Chetniks, two groups that fought each other during World War II, found themselves guardedly working together or operating with something of a gentleman’s agreement. For many, this was a war against Communism. But it was also a battle over the legitimacy of socialist Yugoslavia.

A third subset of armed opposition is even more difficult to pin down. Whereas the Chetniks, Crusaders, and Ballists were fighting for a different political vision for the region, other smaller groups seemed to be fighting against the Communists, but without a defined idea of what should replace them. We find within this category Slavic-speaking Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sandžak, who fought in defense of Islam, as well as Turkish-speaking Muslims in Macedonian cities, who allegedly formed a clandestine movement called Yücel with support of the Turkish consul in Skopje. The Yugoslav courts sentenced three Yücel leaders to death in January 1947 after convicting them of charges of organizing unrest, espionage, preparing terrorist acts, and encouraging Muslims to resist the new Communist regime.

Violence spanned the spectrum from militia skirmishes to sabotage of railroads and state infrastructure; it also included attacks on Communist politicians and members of the armed forces. Many groups imitated the successful strategies of the wartime Partisan movement. They formed small armed units based in rural and mountainous regions, intermittently sneaking into cities where they participated in acts of sabotage and connected with activists and dissidents who provided material resources and moral support, and then fled to the forests or mountains to evade capture. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRAA) reported in 1946 that 30 percent of all of its materials in the country were captured en route to their designated location. 

Mountains and the Uvac River, outside of Užice, Serbia. Photo by Matthew Worsnick.

Not all resistance took the form of insurgency or sabotage. Acts of protest and dissent included private activities, such as the infiltration of schools to provide a counter curriculum, recruiting people to different movements, and publishing and disseminating anti-Communist materials. At home, people secretly listened to Radio Europe and Radio Ankara, hoping for a Cold War rescue story. Some savvy members of the political elite reached out to foreign contacts, hoping for foreign intervention. Some workers went on strike.  Some peasants rebelled to fight grain acquisition, most famously in Cazin in 1950. 

Religious institutions also spearheaded campaigns of opposition. Priests led prayer services that warned of the dangers of Communism and encouraged parishioners to engage in a direct fight against the national government. Clandestine madrasas combined Islamic education with anti-Communist teachings. The relationship between civil resistance and armed resistance at this moment has not been adequately explored by historians, but we know that networks tended to include both armed and unarmed dimensions.

Yugoslav State Propaganda and Policies

Tito’s regime understood that they were at war. Initially, the Communist leadership viewed insurgents exclusively as remnants of their wartime enemies. In 1945, they hunted down, arrested, and tried anti-Communists on the grounds that they were war criminals—that is, people who had committed crimes against humanity during World War II. But their narrative was flawed. Many anti-Communists took up arms for the first time only after the war. By 1946, regional Communist party reports described an influx in new recruits to oppositional movements that included demobilized Partisan soldiers who were angered by the absence of paychecks and material resources or who felt betrayed by the revolutionary policies being introduced.

By March 1946, the Yugoslav secret police had taken into custody more than 7,000 members of the Yugoslav Armed forces, whom they accused of crimes ranging from treason to sympathy for the enemy. The internal purges were critical for establishing control. As historian Christian Nielsen has shown, the regime developed a complex secret policing strategy for tracking down and liquidating war criminals and guerrillas. Police skillfully turned communities against one another by offering amnesty to informers and publicizing the names of witnesses in trials: citizens were forced to choose to be either a witness or collaborator, an informant or a criminal. 

Trials were often broadcast on radio and over loudspeakers in small towns, ensuring that even the illiterate understood what was happening. Public humiliation tactics included publishing names of the so-called criminals and ostracizing their family members. Both the alleged criminals and their families learned “to keep quiet,” as historian Max Bergholz argues, fearful of retaliation from both government and community.

Destroying civilian opposition proved tricky. Initially, many Communist officials believed idealistically that citizens engaged in oppositional activities because they were poor, starving, unemployed, and uneducated. Towns, villages, and infrastructure had been destroyed.  Disease and famine were rampant during and after the war. Communist officials hoped that by building schools and factories, creating jobs and training opportunities, and connecting people to food, housing, health care, and material resources, they could demonstrate the benefits of socialist modernization and discourage resistance.

Ruins in postwar Yugoslavia. Image courtesy of the ICRC Audiovisual Archive, V-P-HIST-03173-09 .

They were certainly on to something: as people settled into new lives and had access to more material comforts, resistance subsided. But in 1946, this was also an underestimation of people’s understanding of the crux moment in which they lived. In both literate and illiterate communities, in towns with electricity, schools, and newspapers, and also in villages without these things, in areas with significant numbers of former fascists, and even in areas where the Partisans had garnered a lot of support, people were willing to take up arms to fight the burgeoning communist state. 

Hoping to sever recruiting pipelines, Tito’s regime especially targeted people who provided, or might be able to provide, moral leadership for resistance groups. In addition to arresting and putting on trial prominent military and religious leaders, such as the Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović and the Archbishop of Croatia, Alozije Stepinac, the Communists targeted mid-level elites, such as local politicians, wealthy merchants who had financial resources at their disposal, intellectuals with anti-Communist attitudes, and religious personnel. The latter were seen as especially dangerous because their networks spanned far and wide, especially in rural areas. In late 1945, for example, Catholic priest Ivan Čondrić found himself accused, among other things, of being an organizer for a “terrorist, crusader group” in Sarajevo, Zenica, and Busovača. Other Catholic priests shared his fate, convicted as enemies of the state and members of “Ustasha-Crusader” organizations.

Similar tactics were used against Orthodox clergy. The Party targeted Orthodox priests, reporting in 1946 that 90 percent of Orthodox priests opposed the regime. One priest found with the Chetniks, for example, was shot on the spot; others received lengthy prison sentences for merely sympathizing with the movement. In a public effort to sever Muslim communities from their traditional leadership, the regime arrested, humiliated, and imprisoned members of the ulema , Islamic legal and religious scholars, as well as men and women considered to be Islamic activists. Partly as a public warning, partly as a means of cutting ties between communities and religious leaders, the regime held show trials for important leaders in every confessional group, and executed some as a warning to others.

As they continued to consolidate power, the Communist regime depicted opposition as both illegitimate and insignificant. The state-controlled media in 1946 and 1947, as well as subsequent historical and political writings about the era, described a conglomerate of bandits, terrorists, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries in the service of the Communist movement’s villains: the clergy and the rich. Word choice in the reporting was crafty and deliberate: “bandits” implied criminality without proof. “Terrorists” had an international connotation as illegitimate rebels. “Reactionaries” and “counterrevolutionaries” served a post-war narrative, wherein the world was divided into fascists and anti-fascists. Anyone who was an anti-Communist was, by virtue of the semantic and ideological context, a fascist. And vice versa.

Missing Stories

As a historian, I have always been fascinated by histories that seem to be missing from public memory and historical accounts, or whose specifics seem fuzzy and uncertain. I remember coming home from the local archive in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina after reading local reports about violence in 1946, and saying to my husband: I think I may have found a civil war today. 

In the years after, I sought out clues as I pursued research for other projects, sifting through foreign consular reports, Yugoslav secret police files, municipal Communist Party records, war crime investigations and trial transcripts, memoirs of activists, rebels, and émigrés, and reports from various international bodies. United Nations reports held in New York City, for example, describe Catholic guerrillas in northern Croatia and in Dalmatia, including some who fled under cover of night across the Adriatic, hoping to find refuge in Italy. 

British consular officials in Sarajevo describe armed rebels in Bosnia and Macedonia. Local officials in provincial towns like Novi Pazar, Tuzla, and Pazin carefully documented regional insurgencies, while the Yugoslav War Crimes Investigative Commission and the subsequent trial records detailed thousands of incidents with enough contextual understanding to shed light on different movements. Historians call the conflict in neighboring Greece a civil war. But how do we categorize what was happening in Yugoslavia?

Despite the obvious existence of armed insurgents and a widespread anti-Communist front in 1946 and 1947, finding specific details on who participated, how units organized and were structured, and what different groups hoped to achieve, proved hard to decipher. I read books by historians such as Melissa Bokovoy, Jozo Tomasevich, Zdenko Radelić, Husnija Kamberović, Ivo Banac, Carol Lilly, and others mentioned in this text. But most historians focus on one aspect or particular group within this larger landscape of post-war violence: we remain without an overarching narrative that encompasses the scope and complexity of conflict in post-war Yugoslavia.

There are a few reasons for this. First is a methodological one. Most historians rely on primary sources found in archives, which are depositories of documents, oral testimonies, photographs, and other records. It is no secret that governments create and fund most archives. Consequently, they select what to keep and how to organize it, and thus tend, often unconsciously, to reinforce familiar and acceptable narratives. This is why we tend to find a larger number of government reports than potato receipts in state archives (though I once giddily waded my way through boxes of potato receipts from 1941, interspersed in which I discovered office notes related to the Holocaust).

In post-war Yugoslavia, the communists formed the government and thus took over and created archives. Consequently, the vast majority of post-war historical records are organized according to their institutions, agendas, and frameworks. For nearly a half-century, they chose what to document, preserve, and catalog, and also decided who would get access. The government funded archives, museums, and state institutions dedicated to researching the Communist Party, the history of workers, and the Partisans’ role in the war. It also invested time and money into publishing hundreds of volumes of documents and memoir testimonies on these themes. 

These volumes told a particular narrative: that of Partisan victory, “brotherhood and unity,” and mass support for the socialist Yugoslav state against a foreign, fascist body. The narrative was reinforced through thousands of state-sponsored memorials and monuments that presented a unified public image of World War II. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City recently held a major exhibit on architecture in socialist Yugoslavia, featuring photographs and even models of many of these monuments. 

By contrast, there was no archive of the anti-Communists. There was no museum for bandits, reactionaries, or insurgents. Many of the movements purposefully avoided creating any documents, erasing themselves in fear of getting caught by the secret police. Those who participated rarely left memoirs and testimonies about it, unless they escaped and went into exile, in which case they tended to be writing to persuade foreign audiences, rather than seeking to objectively document personal experiences. The names of people who fought against the Nazis and Ustashas, but not as Partisans, were rarely engraved on stone (though in a few cases, towns sneakily added them).

The fragmentation and heterogeneity of the post-war armed insurgents and civil resistance movements in Yugoslavia also made it difficult to create a narrative arc. Since there was no single movement, there was nothing to materially stitch together a comprehensive story. How do we put members of the fascist elite in the same story as peasants who fought for the Partisans, but then protested the requisition of their grain? Do civilians who fell victim to Yugoslav massacres belong in the same category as war criminals who the Communists killed alongside them? People like war stories that have easily identifiable groups and clear-cut good guys and bad guys. The multi-sided, unnamed, ethically complex, shifting movements of post-war Yugoslavia are harder for us to understand and to connect to.

Further confusing the stories that we have told ourselves, the Allies did not know what to do with the anti-Communist resistance. These movements did not fit neatly into their post-war plans either. The Partisans had been aligned with the Allies and their victory was central to the Allied victory. Many Allied officials believed that they deserved to be treated as the area’s legitimate government. At the time, both US agents working for UNRAA, and diplomats in the British foreign office, were accused of being overly sympathetic to the Communists. But importantly, the Communists had proven themselves useful allies, especially in investigating and prosecuting the war. 

As early as 1944, representatives from the Communist movement in Yugoslavia began documenting war crimes and identifying war criminals, collecting more than 1.5 million documents, witness testimonies, and photographs that the United Nations would rely on to identify and prosecute war criminals who had fled Yugoslavia and gone into hiding. In the post-war years, the Allies worked closely with Yugoslavia’s War Crimes Commission on several investigations and important trials, thus lending the commission—and the socialist government—international legitimacy. Much of the postwar resistance had questionable wartime pasts, which created international stigmas that persist to this day. Indicative of the persistence of this particular narrative, a quick wikipedia search for “anti-Communists” in Serbia or Croatia directs the reader to the subcategory “fascists.” 

Starting in the 1980s and continuing into the 1990s, historians and politicians in the Balkans have challenged Communist erasures and re-inserted the anti-Communists into their national histories, often with the intention of inverting blame. These new narratives perpetuate, by clearly inverting, the conceptual dichotomies of “good” and “evil” created in postwar Yugoslavia—this time, the Communists are evil and their opponents, the “anti-Communists,” are good. Known locally as “revisionism,” local historians rewrote the history of World War II and the postwar, depicting the Communists as morally compromised and the anti-Communists as righteous. Within the new system, one’s credentials for or against Communism have become, in many mindsets, more important than one’s complicity in the Holocaust or other crimes of mass violence.

To Name a War

No community in post-war Yugoslavia went unaffected by the conflicts that persisted in the post-war years, just like no community went unaffected by World War II. And yet, there is no consensus on what, precisely, this conflict was or what it should be called. How do we describe conflicts like those in the Yugoslav case, where multivalent and locally inflected groups aligned against an inchoate state and party structure? Was this a civil war, and if so, was it a continuation of war from the early 1940s or something different? 

The well-known sociologist of Eastern Europe, Jan T. Gross, has argued for thinking about a period of social revolution from 1938-1948 in Eastern Europe. But the few attempts to do so in Yugoslavia—calling this a long era of civil war—have tended to do so in the service of constructing a moral equivalency between crimes of the Nazis and crimes of the Communists, and thus feel unsavory and agenda-driven. If done differently, labeling the era a multi-sided civil war might make sense, since at stake were questions of sovereignty and legitimacy. But then we run into the problem that there were many different “groups,” if we can even call them all “groups,” and they had vastly asymmetric power relations, structures, and goals: do we include a group of four bandits in the same narrative as an organized armed insurgency?

And was this an insurgency, is that the best term? Insurgents are usually understood as groups that seek to establish control over local populations by combining war-making with state-building tactics, such as social services and economic incentive. The anti-Communist movements in post-war Yugoslavia had neither physical control over huge territories nor the capacity to build alternate state institutions. On the contrary, they operated within society, within the same institutions and political frameworks that the Communists occupied, at times within the Communist Party and Yugoslav army itself.

Other terminology has moral implications that can be understood only in the particular context of the late 1940s. Take, for example, the term “guerilla warfare.” As the Cold War emerged, the idea of guerrilla warfare became associated with leftist guerrillas fighting colonialism and capitalism, whereas anti-Communism became fused with fascism and Nazism, a moral crime in the eyes of the world. “Resistance,” similarly, is too tinged with the ethical implications of the Second World War to sit comfortably with historians, especially because many anti-Communists were complicit in gruesome war crimes.

The complexities of the battle lines in post-war Yugoslavia, along with the disparate motives of different groups (and the many different individuals within those groups), have made it easy for western audiences to throw their hands up and say that Balkan history is just too complicated, or too violent, or too foreign to really understand. But to quote a recent tweet by the historian Elidor M ë hilli:

"Whenever there are Balkans kerfuffles—which is often—one hears: “This place is so complex, hard to understand.” The ‘this is very complex’ move can seem like a cover for not bothering with it."

Elidor Mehilli

All histories are layered and complex, and it is up to those of us who know these places to do the hard work of peeling back the layers and trying to make sense of what was happening. I’d like to suggest that by reckoning honestly and directly with the complexities of post-war violence and anti-Communist movements in 1945-46, even as we still try to piece it all together, we can begin to understand this conflict in a new light. 

The conflicts of the 1940s cannot simply be seen as an extension of World War II, nor as a Cold War story of ideological competition, nor can they be distilled into a narrative of national competition, vendettas, and score settling, as so much of Balkan history is mistakenly framed. Instead, these conflicts need to be analyzed as part of a much bigger history of state-building in modern Europe, an extension of a struggle that began in the nineteenth century over how to take apart Europe’s great land empires and carve them up into sovereign states, and continued through two international wars and a wide-range of twentieth-century political experiments. In such a reframing of the post-war conflict, we might uncover and examine the multivalent sides of conflict, re-evaluate our categories of fascists and anti-fascists and of communists and anti-communists, and develop new historical narratives that seek not to silence opposition, but rather to clarify and understand.

Meet the Author

Emily Greble teaches History and East European studies at Vanderbilt University, and is the author of Sarajevo: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe  (Cornell, 2011) and Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe  (Oxford, 2021). She lives in Nashville, TN with her husband and two sons.  

This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

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Closing the Information Gap on Yugoslavia's Complex Struggle and Crises

Journal article

Mønnesland, Svein (2000) Closing the Information Gap on Yugoslavia's Complex Struggle and Crises, Security Dialogue 30 (4): 504–506.

Svein Mønnesland

Yugoslavia from a historical perspective and perspective of research on Yugoslavia

• December 13, 2017

The break-up of Yugoslavia and the wars that were waged on its territory stopped, or at least slowed down the continuation of such research. Under the impact of nationalism as the new dominant ideology, historiography also got a new ideological value. Insisting on topics that were not given (sufficient) attention in socialism was not problematic in itself. What was problematic was the way how they were approached and the way in which and the reason why some topics stopped being of interest. Historical revisionism, denial, selectivity and tendentiousness of approach and method have become the new and prevailing historiographic paradigm.

The recent publication of a book entitled ”A Historical Perspective of Yugoslavia” constitutes the end of only a phase of a research project that has been ongoing over the past years and that gathers (mostly) historians from former Yugoslav countries. Of course, in this specific case, it is a project that was initiated by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, but the ”project” of research, analysis and examination of various topics that have a common denominator – ”Yugoslavianism” and ”Yugoslavia”, has not started several years ago or after the break-up of the country. On the contrary, the mentioned topics intrigued various profiles of researchers throughout the existence of Yugoslavia. Irrespective of the time or social and political circumstances and motives of such research, it is of great importance today and may in no case be neglected. What should be particularly emphasized is the fact that the so-called ”Yugoslavian experiment” was of interest also for numerous foreign researchers, irrespectively of their economic and political background.

The break-up of Yugoslavia and the wars that were waged on its territory stopped, or at least slowed down the continuation of such research. Under the impact of nationalism as the new dominant ideology, historiography also got a new ideological value. Insisting on topics that were not devoted (sufficient) attention in socialism was not problematic in itself. What was problematic was the way how they were approached and the way in which and the reason why some topics stopped being of interest. Historical revisionism, denial, selectivity and tendentiousness of approach and method have become the new and prevailing historiographic paradigm.

Croatian historians succumbed to the atmosphere in which the recent past was seen through the daily political prism (or the prism of political machinations). In other words, Yugoslavia (whether during the monarchy or the period of socialism) is a country that has always represented a ”dungeon of peoples” for Croats. Everything that was happening in Yugoslavia was to the detriment of Croats and no experience could be considered a positive one, because the negative ones were much more powerful. However, in spite of the prevailing ”Croatocentric” narrative that was born at the beginning of 1990s, and in spite of the lack of funds that would support the research of ”Yugoslavian topics”, some Croatian historians, just as their colleagues in other former Yugoslav countries, started refusing to obey. Individual and group meetings, discussions, projects of interest and ”disobedient” researchers started taking place. National researchers started participating in international projects. The result of this are publications that no society in general nor national historiographies looked benignly upon, as a contribution to a better understanding of the past. In spite of strong pressure and continuing lack of financial support, the very research and teaching about Yugoslavia from a historical perspective has become probably one of the best organised and designed ”projects” that connects historians, ethnologists, sociologists, political scientists and other interested experts from countries that used to be part of the common state, which disappeared in the meantime.

The project, which resulted in the book ”A Historical Perspective of Yugoslavia”, as well as the website on which papers that were not included in the book were published, constitutes one of the largest projects about this topic in terms of the number of collaborators and their works. The fact that the mentioned book and portal are at the same time an excellent source of information, inspiration, motivation and a starting point for new research and new projects due to the comprehensiveness of the topics, quality of work, interdisciplinary nature and multiperspectivity, is of particular importance.

 Hrvoje Klasić, D.Sc.

Department of History, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 113 great research paper topics.

General Education

One of the hardest parts of writing a research paper can be just finding a good topic to write about. Fortunately we've done the hard work for you and have compiled a list of 113 interesting research paper topics. They've been organized into ten categories and cover a wide range of subjects so you can easily find the best topic for you.

In addition to the list of good research topics, we've included advice on what makes a good research paper topic and how you can use your topic to start writing a great paper.

What Makes a Good Research Paper Topic?

Not all research paper topics are created equal, and you want to make sure you choose a great topic before you start writing. Below are the three most important factors to consider to make sure you choose the best research paper topics.

#1: It's Something You're Interested In

A paper is always easier to write if you're interested in the topic, and you'll be more motivated to do in-depth research and write a paper that really covers the entire subject. Even if a certain research paper topic is getting a lot of buzz right now or other people seem interested in writing about it, don't feel tempted to make it your topic unless you genuinely have some sort of interest in it as well.

#2: There's Enough Information to Write a Paper

Even if you come up with the absolute best research paper topic and you're so excited to write about it, you won't be able to produce a good paper if there isn't enough research about the topic. This can happen for very specific or specialized topics, as well as topics that are too new to have enough research done on them at the moment. Easy research paper topics will always be topics with enough information to write a full-length paper.

Trying to write a research paper on a topic that doesn't have much research on it is incredibly hard, so before you decide on a topic, do a bit of preliminary searching and make sure you'll have all the information you need to write your paper.

#3: It Fits Your Teacher's Guidelines

Don't get so carried away looking at lists of research paper topics that you forget any requirements or restrictions your teacher may have put on research topic ideas. If you're writing a research paper on a health-related topic, deciding to write about the impact of rap on the music scene probably won't be allowed, but there may be some sort of leeway. For example, if you're really interested in current events but your teacher wants you to write a research paper on a history topic, you may be able to choose a topic that fits both categories, like exploring the relationship between the US and North Korea. No matter what, always get your research paper topic approved by your teacher first before you begin writing.

113 Good Research Paper Topics

Below are 113 good research topics to help you get you started on your paper. We've organized them into ten categories to make it easier to find the type of research paper topics you're looking for.

Arts/Culture

• Discuss the main differences in art from the Italian Renaissance and the Northern Renaissance .
• Analyze the impact a famous artist had on the world.
• How is sexism portrayed in different types of media (music, film, video games, etc.)? Has the amount/type of sexism changed over the years?
• How has the music of slaves brought over from Africa shaped modern American music?
• How has rap music evolved in the past decade?
• How has the portrayal of minorities in the media changed?

Current Events

• What have been the impacts of China's one child policy?
• How have the goals of feminists changed over the decades?
• How has the Trump presidency changed international relations?
• Analyze the history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.
• What factors contributed to the current decline in the rate of unemployment?
• What have been the impacts of states which have increased their minimum wage?
• How do US immigration laws compare to immigration laws of other countries?
• How have the US's immigration laws changed in the past few years/decades?
• How has the Black Lives Matter movement affected discussions and view about racism in the US?
• What impact has the Affordable Care Act had on healthcare in the US?
• What factors contributed to the UK deciding to leave the EU (Brexit)?
• What factors contributed to China becoming an economic power?
• Discuss the history of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies  (some of which tokenize the S&P 500 Index on the blockchain) .
• Do students in schools that eliminate grades do better in college and their careers?
• Do students from wealthier backgrounds score higher on standardized tests?
• Do students who receive free meals at school get higher grades compared to when they weren't receiving a free meal?
• Do students who attend charter schools score higher on standardized tests than students in public schools?
• Do students learn better in same-sex classrooms?
• How does giving each student access to an iPad or laptop affect their studies?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Montessori Method ?
• Do children who attend preschool do better in school later on?
• What was the impact of the No Child Left Behind act?
• How does the US education system compare to education systems in other countries?
• What impact does mandatory physical education classes have on students' health?
• Which methods are most effective at reducing bullying in schools?
• Do homeschoolers who attend college do as well as students who attended traditional schools?
• Does offering tenure increase or decrease quality of teaching?
• How does college debt affect future life choices of students?
• Should graduate students be able to form unions?

• What are different ways to lower gun-related deaths in the US?
• How and why have divorce rates changed over time?
• Is affirmative action still necessary in education and/or the workplace?
• Should physician-assisted suicide be legal?
• How has stem cell research impacted the medical field?
• How can human trafficking be reduced in the United States/world?
• Should people be able to donate organs in exchange for money?
• Which types of juvenile punishment have proven most effective at preventing future crimes?
• Has the increase in US airport security made passengers safer?
• Analyze the immigration policies of certain countries and how they are similar and different from one another.
• Several states have legalized recreational marijuana. What positive and negative impacts have they experienced as a result?
• Do tariffs increase the number of domestic jobs?
• Which prison reforms have proven most effective?
• Should governments be able to censor certain information on the internet?
• Which methods/programs have been most effective at reducing teen pregnancy?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet?
• How effective are different exercise regimes for losing weight and maintaining weight loss?
• How do the healthcare plans of various countries differ from each other?
• What are the most effective ways to treat depression ?
• What are the pros and cons of genetically modified foods?
• Which methods are most effective for improving memory?
• What can be done to lower healthcare costs in the US?
• What factors contributed to the current opioid crisis?
• Analyze the history and impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic .
• Are low-carbohydrate or low-fat diets more effective for weight loss?
• How much exercise should the average adult be getting each week?
• Which methods are most effective to get parents to vaccinate their children?
• What are the pros and cons of clean needle programs?
• How does stress affect the body?
• Discuss the history of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
• What were the causes and effects of the Salem Witch Trials?
• Who was responsible for the Iran-Contra situation?
• How has New Orleans and the government's response to natural disasters changed since Hurricane Katrina?
• What events led to the fall of the Roman Empire?
• What were the impacts of British rule in India ?
• Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?
• What were the successes and failures of the women's suffrage movement in the United States?
• What were the causes of the Civil War?
• How did Abraham Lincoln's assassination impact the country and reconstruction after the Civil War?
• Which factors contributed to the colonies winning the American Revolution?
• What caused Hitler's rise to power?
• Discuss how a specific invention impacted history.
• What led to Cleopatra's fall as ruler of Egypt?
• How has Japan changed and evolved over the centuries?
• What were the causes of the Rwandan genocide ?

• Why did Martin Luther decide to split with the Catholic Church?
• Analyze the history and impact of a well-known cult (Jonestown, Manson family, etc.)
• How did the sexual abuse scandal impact how people view the Catholic Church?
• How has the Catholic church's power changed over the past decades/centuries?
• What are the causes behind the rise in atheism/ agnosticism in the United States?
• What were the influences in Siddhartha's life resulted in him becoming the Buddha?
• How has media portrayal of Islam/Muslims changed since September 11th?

Science/Environment

• How has the earth's climate changed in the past few decades?
• How has the use and elimination of DDT affected bird populations in the US?
• Analyze how the number and severity of natural disasters have increased in the past few decades.
• Analyze deforestation rates in a certain area or globally over a period of time.
• How have past oil spills changed regulations and cleanup methods?
• How has the Flint water crisis changed water regulation safety?
• What are the pros and cons of fracking?
• What impact has the Paris Climate Agreement had so far?
• What have NASA's biggest successes and failures been?
• How can we improve access to clean water around the world?
• Does ecotourism actually have a positive impact on the environment?
• Should the US rely on nuclear energy more?
• What can be done to save amphibian species currently at risk of extinction?
• What impact has climate change had on coral reefs?
• How are black holes created?
• Are teens who spend more time on social media more likely to suffer anxiety and/or depression?
• How will the loss of net neutrality affect internet users?
• Analyze the history and progress of self-driving vehicles.
• How has the use of drones changed surveillance and warfare methods?
• Has social media made people more or less connected?
• What progress has currently been made with artificial intelligence ?
• Do smartphones increase or decrease workplace productivity?
• What are the most effective ways to use technology in the classroom?
• How is Google search affecting our intelligence?
• When is the best age for a child to begin owning a smartphone?
• Has frequent texting reduced teen literacy rates?

How to Write a Great Research Paper

Even great research paper topics won't give you a great research paper if you don't hone your topic before and during the writing process. Follow these three tips to turn good research paper topics into great papers.

#1: Figure Out Your Thesis Early

Before you start writing a single word of your paper, you first need to know what your thesis will be. Your thesis is a statement that explains what you intend to prove/show in your paper. Every sentence in your research paper will relate back to your thesis, so you don't want to start writing without it!

As some examples, if you're writing a research paper on if students learn better in same-sex classrooms, your thesis might be "Research has shown that elementary-age students in same-sex classrooms score higher on standardized tests and report feeling more comfortable in the classroom."

If you're writing a paper on the causes of the Civil War, your thesis might be "While the dispute between the North and South over slavery is the most well-known cause of the Civil War, other key causes include differences in the economies of the North and South, states' rights, and territorial expansion."

#2: Back Every Statement Up With Research

Remember, this is a research paper you're writing, so you'll need to use lots of research to make your points. Every statement you give must be backed up with research, properly cited the way your teacher requested. You're allowed to include opinions of your own, but they must also be supported by the research you give.

#3: Do Your Research Before You Begin Writing

You don't want to start writing your research paper and then learn that there isn't enough research to back up the points you're making, or, even worse, that the research contradicts the points you're trying to make!

Get most of your research on your good research topics done before you begin writing. Then use the research you've collected to create a rough outline of what your paper will cover and the key points you're going to make. This will help keep your paper clear and organized, and it'll ensure you have enough research to produce a strong paper.

What's Next?

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Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

Ask a Question Below

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Bolgari, Alexandr. "Comparative Analysis of the Secessions of Kosovo and South Ossetia and Their Subsequent Independence Recognition." Kent State University Honors College / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ksuhonors1304034301.

Chen, Xi Ying. "Actions and constraints of the European Union as an international actor : the case of Former Yugoslav crisis." Thesis, University of Macau, 2011. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2555595.

Williams, John. "The concept of legitimacy in international relations : lessons from Yugoslavia." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1997. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/34673/.

Hadzi-Jovancic, Perica. "Economic relations between the Third Reich and Yugoslavia, 1933-1941." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/271132.

Mandalenakis, Helene. "Recognizing identity : the creation of new states in former Yugoslavia." Thesis, McGill University, 2006. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=102808.

Heuser, Beatrice. "Yugoslavia in Western Cold War policies, 1948-1953." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1987. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:fabf0ed5-37c7-44ba-8908-863fdc824763.

Harmon, Gail. "War in the Former Yugoslavia: Ethnic Conflict or Power Politics?" Thesis, Boston College, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/587.

Carter, David John. "International law and state failure : Somalia and Yugoslavia." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2000. https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/193199/.

Milovac-Carolina, Sanja Marie. "The Romantic zeitgeist in post-Cold War international relations and the disintegration of Yugoslavia." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2006. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1868/.

Reitz, Julianne M. "Tito's Balkan Federation attempts : the immediate factor in the Soviet-Yugoslav split of 1948." Virtual Press, 2003. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1265457.

Khan, Ausma Zehanat. "The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, an analysis of the legal basis for its operation." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1996. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/MQ26335.pdf.

Pupavac, Mladen. "The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia : analysis of its contribution to the peace and security in the former Yugoslavia and the rule of law in international relations." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2003. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11533/.

Csehi, Jason Alan Shambach. "When two worlds collide the Allied downgrading of General Dragoljub "Draža" Mihailović and their subsequent full support for Josip Broz "Tito" /." [Kent, Ohio] : Kent State University, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=kent1258151570.

Lamont, Christopher. "Coercion, norms and atrocity : explaining state compliance with international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia arrest and surrender orders." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/283/.

Schreiner, Ann Marie. "The British Labour Party and the break-up of Yugoslavia 1991-1995 : a historical analysis of Parliamentary debates." Thesis, University of Chichester, 2009. http://eprints.chi.ac.uk/821/.

Johns, Alana. "Transitivity and grammatical relations in Inuktitut." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5334.

Whittingham, Matthew. "The self and social relations." Thesis, University of Kent, 2014. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/47434/.

Sabisch, Petra. "Choreographing relations : practical philosophy and contemporary choreography." Thesis, University of Greenwich, 2009. http://gala.gre.ac.uk/5650/.

Branigan, Philip. "Thematic and aspectual relations striking the balance." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5202.

Campbell, Colin. "A social constructivist analysis of civil-military relations : US-Mexican bilateral military relations, 2000-2008." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2008. http://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/1189/.

Mathieu, Gabrielle. "Les relations franco-québécoises de 1976 à 1985." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/7504.

Kenny, Amy. "Domestic relations in Shakespeare." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/42121/.

Malik, Hamdi. "Media, gender and domestic relations in post-Saddam Iraq." Thesis, Keele University, 2018. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/5102/.

Mocnik, Josip. "United States-Yugoslav Relations, 1961-80: The Twilight of Tito's Era and the Role of Ambassadorial Diplomacy in the Making of America's Yugoslav Policy." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1206322169.

Kaimanovich, Vadim, Klaus Schmidt, and Klaus Schmidt@univie ac at. "Ergodicity of cocycles. 1: General Theory." ESI preprints, 2000. ftp://ftp.esi.ac.at/pub/Preprints/esi936.ps.

Marazopoulos, Christos. "Constructing the Western Balkans : understanding the European Commission's regional approach from a constructivist perspective." Thesis, University of Bath, 2013. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.607143.

Kerkhoff, Sebastian. "A General Galois Theory for Operations and Relations in Arbitrary Categories." Saechsische Landesbibliothek- Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Dresden, 2011. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:14-qucosa-73920.

Charette, Monik. "Some constraints on governing relations in phonology." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75950.

Zeemering, Eric S. "Who collaborates? local decisions about intergovernmental relations /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3274249.

Sanfilippo, Antonio. "Grammatical relations, thematic roles and verb semantics." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/6585.

Madariaga-Vignudo, Lucía. "Refugee-Aboriginal relations: a case study of a Canadian inner city." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=66680.

Reed, Cara. "Becoming a profession : crafting professional identities in public relations." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2013. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/46084/.

Baggott, Erin Ashley. "Three Essays on U.S. - China Relations." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493282.

Pourabdollah, Amir. "Theory and practice of the ternary relations model of information management." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2009. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10708/.

Aslantas, M. Ercan. "The European states system and Ottoman-Russian relations, 1815- 1856." Thesis, Keele University, 2012. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/2720/.

Telford, James. "Workplace industrial relations in the general print sector covered by national bargaining." Thesis, University of Hertfordshire, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2299/1999.

Riley, David Daniel. "UK-US relations and the South Asian crisis, 1971." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2016. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/99792/.

Rahbek-Clemmensen, Jon. "Beyond 'the soldier and the state' : the theoretical framework of elite civil-military relations." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2013. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/782/.

Sulejmanovic, Selma. "Russia And The Kosovo Conflict: 1998-2008." Master's thesis, METU, 2008. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12609472/index.pdf.

Nantel, Pierre. "Relations entre régime hydrologique et climat : le cas de la rivière Nation du Sud, Ontario." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5158.

Campbell, Ian D. "Pollen-sedimentary environment relations and late holocene palynostratigraphy of the Ruby Range, Yukon Territory, Canada." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5188.

Robertshaw, Sam. "Reconstructing society-military relations in post-Soviet Russia." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2012. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3814/.

Ranitovic, Ana. "Why do they call it Ras̆ka when they mean Sandz̆ak? : on the synchrony and diachrony of identities in southwest Serbia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1459bcc0-0c7b-41d3-ae22-7ff8cd2848c8.

Sezenler, Olcay. "Religion In International Relations And Interfaith Dialogue." Master's thesis, METU, 2010. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12611683/index.pdf.

Matthiessen, Alison Ruth Cordell. "The Role of Public Relations during the Implementation of New General Education Curricula." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/71693.

Adams, Ruth. "Structure-composition-property relations in B-site deficient hexagonal perovskite systems." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2010. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/9697/.

Tremblay, Brun del Re Claude M. "L'utilisation agricole des sols : relations entre des vérités-terrain et des valeurs densitométriques d'images aériennes infrarouge-couleur." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/5336.

Milliogullari, Ali. "The Socialist Workers Self-government And It&amp." Phd thesis, METU, 2007. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/3/12608980/index.pdf.

Okot, Betty J. "The social dimensions of post-conflict land relations and policies in Acholiland, northern Uganda." Thesis, Keele University, 2017. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/4156/.

Feklyunina, Valentina. "National images in international relations : Putin's Russia and the West." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2010. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1391/.

Ukraine's pilots are flying high-risk 'wild weasel' missions first developed in the Vietnam War by the USAF, says defense analyst

• Ukrainian pilots fly dangerous "wild weasel" missions to suppress Russian air defenses.
• Advanced US-supplied missiles have played a critical role in these missions.
• The arrival of F-16 fighter jets will help level out Russia's air superiority.

Pilots in Ukraine's Soviet-era airforce, a fraction of the size of Russia's , are using a tactic first developed by the US Air Force to contest the skies above the 600-mile frontline.

Videos in recent months appear to show Ukrainian pilots conducting so-called "wild weasel" missions.

The strategy involves jet pilots luring enemy antiaircraft defenses into targeting them with their radars. The radar waves are then traced back to their source, and the Ukrainian pilots retaliate with weapons like the US-made AGM-88 High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARMs) before the Russians can lock onto them with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).

Eastern Ukraine, a Ukrainian Air Force MiG-29 Wild Weasel fires off an AGM-88 HARM towards a Russian radar. pic.twitter.com/5MGYcfaRmt — OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 15, 2024

Since mid-2022, the US has supplied Ukraine with HARMs, which have provided Ukrainian pilots with Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) and Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses (DEAD) capabilities.

New footage showing an early Ukrainian SEAD mission using US-supplied and integrated AGM-88 HARMs. UkrAF Su-27 Flankers would fly at near treetop level behind the front before launching off their HARMs. (Summer ‘22) pic.twitter.com/IOeu7hzUxW — OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) February 8, 2024

The US Air Force pioneered SEAD tactics in the Vietnam War. So-called wild weasel aircraft were tasked with destroying enemy air defense radars to clear the way for attack aircraft to fly through.

The wild weasels had radar receivers to locate enemy air defenses and were initially armed with bombs and later special missiles that could target radar.

The term "wild weasel" originated from Project Wild Weasel. This US Air Force anti-SAM strategy used direct attacks to suppress enemy air defenses, according to the National Museum of the US Air Force.

These missions, originally called "Project Ferret" — a reference to the small predatory mammal that enters its prey's den to kill it — were renamed Project Wild Weasel so as not to be confused with the code-name "Ferret" that was used during World War II for radar countermeasures bombers.

HARM is the latest of these air-to-surface missiles: a projectile of around 770 pounds, with a range of some 90 miles. These missiles can locate and strike enemy radar even after the radar systems have been turned off.

HARM has been used in wars in Libya, Iraq, and former Yugoslavia, The Economist previously reported.

This experience is being put to use in Ukraine.

"Ukraine clearly is learning from Western military thought," Frederik Mertens, a Strategic Analyst at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, told Business Insider. "Ukraine is putting great emphasis on SEAD and DEAD missions."

These missions can be "very dangerous," especially for wild weasels, he said. But the Russian air defenses are a "key target."

"This game is worth the candle," Mertens said.

But, he added Ukraine's tactics "go far beyond the classic wild weasel missions of Anti-Radiation Missile equipped aircraft."

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From special forces raids to land-launched missiles like GMLRS and ATACMS as well as UAVs of all sorts, "Ukrainians use all weapons, troops, and systems they have at their disposal to suppress and destroy Russian air defenses," Mertens said.

Adapting Western weapons for use in Ukraine

The difficulty of adapting HARM for Ukraine is due to the incompatibility of old Soviet-era jets, such as the MIG-29 and the Su-27 fighters, with modern Western technology.

Last month, US Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante told reporters at a Washington, DC, conference that Ukraine had been using iPads in an attempt to make Ukrainian jets compatible with Western weapons.

He described how Ukraine's aging fighter planes could now take many Western weapons and get them to work on their aircraft as they were "basically controlled by an iPad by the pilot. They're flying it in conflict like a week after we get it to him," he said.

Ukrainian Air Force Su-27 Flanker Wild Weasel operations, seen here conducting multiple low level standoff strikes against Russian radars with US-supplied AGM-88 HARMs. pic.twitter.com/7CosjXFNkO — OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) April 21, 2024

Since making the necessary adaptations, Ukrainian pilots have fired hundreds of HARMs at Russian air defense radar systems. However, their technique has changed, Justin Bronk, Senior Research Fellow for Airpower & Technology at the London-based think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told BI.

"While they initially achieved a number of successful kills against Russian SAM systems and radars when first introduced; Russian SAM operators quickly adapted their tactics," Bronk said.

Now, HARM launches serve "a suppressive rather than a destructive purpose."

When launched, "the missiles force Russian SAM operators to turn off their radars and relocate to avoid being hit by them," Bronk said. "This leaves a short window within which other strike systems like HIMARS rockets or Storm Shadow missiles can get through to nearby targets with much less risk of being intercepted by the Russian SAMs."

Awaiting F-16s

While modified Soviet-era fighter jets allow Ukrainians to use HARM missiles, the modifications do not allow Ukrainians to make the most of all their features.

"It doesn't have all the capabilities that it would on an F-16," Gen. James Hecker, commander of United States Air Forces in Europe, said previously during a roundtable at the Air Force Association's Air, Space Cyber conference.

Therefore, the delivery of F-16s will be crucial for increasing Ukrainian air control.

Earlier this week, the Netherlands announced plans to start delivering its F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine this autumn, Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said during a press briefing in Vilnius.

Denmark previously said it would begin transferring its aircraft in the summer,

"Dealing with Russian GBAD [Ground Based Air Defense] will be crucial to enable future Ukrainian air strikes once the F-16 fighters arrive," Mertens told BI.

While the delivery of such a small number of F-16s should not be overestimated, Mertens believes they could significantly impact Crimea.

"Crimea is vulnerable: the Russians have relatively limited maneuver space on the peninsula, resupply is dependent on the Kerch bridge, and here Putin has a lot to lose both politically and militarily," he said.

"If a limited number of fighters can have a real impact, it is here."

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