Yugoslavia Quotes

“Wikivoyage: Yugoslavia”

“Wikicommons: -inline”

“Wikisource: Portal:Yugoslavia”

“Nikola was belligerent
And always wore a dagger and a frown,
With not enough refrigerant
In all the world to cool his temper down.”

“I am puzzled by this nostalgia. People say it was not so bad, that socialism was more human. But everyone was egalitarian in the former Yugoslavia because everyone was poor. Yugoslavia was a dictatorship.”

“The peoples of Yugoslavia do not want Fascism. They do not want a totalitarian regime, they do not want to become slaves of the German and Italian financial oligarchy as they never wanted to become reconciled to the semi-colonial dependence imposed on them by the so-called Western democracies after the first imperialist war.”

“Think well about this, dear brothers and sisters, and you will see that we should have been in a state of terrible chaos, in a fratricidal war, in a country which would no longer be Yugoslavia, but be only a group of petty little states fighting among themselves and destroying each other. But our people do not want that to happen.”

“Yugoslavia is, with Iran, the only country which under difficult, not to say agonising, circumstances stood up to Joseph Stalin. It was not easy to unite ethnic groups or to modernize a country like Yugoslavia, and it must be acknowledged that Marshal Tito achieved something extraordinary. May God grant that his successors be as capable as he.”

“Common wisdom today has it that Yugoslavia was a doomed experiment. In the 1990s, ill-informed Western journalists reporting on the Yugoslav implosion wars wrote of the “centuries-old conflict between Serbs and Croats" — when the real genesis of Serb-Croat hostility really only reached back to the rise of nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

“The great experiment in this Slavic nation was based on a noble idea. Its proponents thought that south Slavs, that is to say people with much in common, especially their languages, who lived in a great arc of territory from the borders of Austria almost to the gates of Constantinople (now Istanbul), should unite and form one great strong south Slav state.”

“None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together, but we have to create our history — our Yugoslavian socialist history, that is unique, in the future — that is our path; not touching the national rights of the some republics to preserve their own traditions, not at the expense of, but in the interest of the whole community, to mutually complete each other. That is what we want, and not the destruction of our unity.”

“Because the Russians, thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece of Finland, a piece of Rumania, a piece of Poland, a piece of Germany and, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and East Berlin - I except Belgrade where the regime is unique thanks to the energy and courage of Marshal Tito.”

“Capitalism has been fully restored in Yugoslavia, as is well-known, but this capitalism knows how to disguise. Yugoslavia portrays itself as a socialist state, but of a special kind, as the world has never seen it before! The Titoites even boast that their state has nothing in common with the first socialist state which emerged from the socialist October Revolution and which was founded by Lenin and Stalin on the basis of the scientific theory of Marx and Engels.”

“It should be immediately noted[,] that the use of the adjective “federal” in the official name of [Yugoslavia] was mere window dressing—just as was its supposedly non-aligned role in the confrontation between the Soviet bloc and Western democracies. In that case, “federalism” did not mean “decentralization,” but rather a federation of local centralisms. As for Yugoslavia’s fictional “third position”—which tried to present itself as a different kind of Communism while remaining thoroughly Communist—it [had] in fact served to surreptitiously draw neutral countries into the sphere of influence of the Soviet bloc, acting as a strategic proxy.”

“The Yugoslav system of combined central planning and self-management at the enterprise level had worked well enough in the early stages of economic development in the 1950s and 1960s, but not in the more intensely competitive international situation of the 1980s. As in the other European socialist states, real living standards began to stagnate and then decline. According to some calculations, real personal income declined by one-quarter over the period from 1979 to 1985, by one-third in the decade from 1979 to 1988. To the extent that the Yugoslav regime had staked its legitimacy on providing ever higher standards of living for the population, stagnation and decline had nearly immediate political consequences.”

“The state of the South Slavs—cobbled together from Serbia and the southern part of the vanished Austria-Hungary—that emerged in 1919 was the result of both accident and hasty, often desperate choices. It was not even clear what the delegation or the new country it claimed to represent should be called. Made up of Serbia and the southern parts of the vanished Austria-Hungary, it eventually took the name Yugoslavia. The Peace Conference, contrary to what many people believed since, did not create Yugoslavia—it was already created by the time the first diplomats arrived in Paris. Seventy years later, the powers were equally unable to prevent its disintegration.”

“There was a hierarchy of material conditions in the communist world. The Yugoslavs, with the closest commercial links with the West, did best in the range and quality of goods available. Next came the East Germans, followed by the Hungarians and the Poles. Citizens of the USSR trailed in after them; and, still more galling to Russian national pride, the Georgians and Estonians in the Soviet Union enjoyed better conditions than those available to the Russians. The stereotypical Georgian, in the Russian popular imagination, was a swarthy ‘Oriental’ who smuggled oranges in large suitcases from his collective farm to the large cities of the RSFSR. That fruit could be an item of internal contraband speaks volumes about communism’s economic inefficiency.”

“In comparison with other Eastern European countries, Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s seemed like a model of prosperity. A visitor in the 1970s and very early 1980s could see well-stocked shops and markets and many houses in varying states of construction, the labor provided by the owners themselves on weekends and vacations, the money accumulated from the marks they had earned as workers in Germany. But the oil shocks of the 1970s led to severe inflation. Indebtedness spiraled upward, greatly burdening the economy, while unemployment rose into the double digits. In some areas, like Kosovo, close to one-quarter of the workforce was unemployed by the early 1980s, also because West Germany, long an outlet for surplus Yugoslav labor, began to limit and even repatriate foreign workers.”

“Yugoslavia - initially known as 'The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes', which named only three of the country's seventeen or more ethnic groups - was another hodgepodge. The Serbs had dreamed of a South Slav kingdom that they would dominate; as if to make that point, the new state's constitution was promulgated on June 28, 1921, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo and of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand's assassination. In reality, Yugoslavia was an uneasy amalgam not just of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, but also of Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Turks - not to mention Czechs, Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukrainians.”

“Yugoslavia was itself the flawed creation of the ruin of empires in 1918, dominated until the Second World War by the Serbian monarchy yet comprising Muslim Bosnians and Kosovan Albanians, Orthodox Montenegrins and Serbs, and Catholic Croats. Out of the brutal ethnic slaughters of the two world wars, the long-serving dictator Marshal Josip Tito, whose Partisans had liberated Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation, had created a strong regime, using his own charismatic personality and, less well-known, terror, secret police and concentration camps. Yet Tito controlled the deadly ethnic feuds of the Balkans and gave his peoples almost 30 years of peace and order. But the revolving presidency implemented after his death in 1980 left a stewing ethnic cauldron lacking a strong hand to control it. Milošević filled this vacuum with his death squads, condottiere and psychopathic warlords, coordinated and financed at his personal command.”