by Adam LeBor
In Pozarevac Stanislava Milosevic began to feel neglected. Her son visited less, preferring to spend his weekend in the capital with his girlfriend. The two women did not get on. Mira guarded her time with Milosevic jealously. She had a curious hold on him.
The other students joked about his devotion, said Tibor Varady, a contemporary of Milosevic at Belgrade University. If a Communist Party meeting ran over time Milosevic would rush to the telephone to tell Mira that he would be late. ‘We are a macho society, so this was observed with some cynicism,’ observed Varady, who was briefly Yugoslav minister for justice in 1992, before becoming a professor at the Central European University in Budapest. ‘His attachment to her was unusual. In Belgrade, in the 1960s, even if you were absolutely infatuated you would not show such an obvious sign of “weakness”. The Communist Party then was pretty much a male party, and he was politically aware of these implications, but the bond between them was very strong.’2
While still at university, Milosevic and Mira celebrated New Year with Ivan Stambolic and his girlfriend. Stambolic described Mira as ‘an unusual girl’, Nebojsa Popov said. She refused to drink a small glass of home-distilled brandy. Such a refusal is usually considered a serious snub across eastern and central Europe, where great pride is taken in turning the harvest of plums, pears or apricots into fruit brandy. ‘She said, “I don’t drink plebeian drinks”.’ Popov recalled. ‘This was a kind of quasi-aristocratic behaviour, ridiculous at those times. Maybe she was used to better things on Tito’s island of Brioni.’ And surprising, perhaps, for such a self-proclaimed leftist.
At university Mira sometimes seemed to live in a kind of regal parallel universe, a trait that would greatly increase over the next decades. Inconvenient or unwelcome aspects of reality would simply be blotted out. Popov remembered he first met Mira when he went to visit Milosevic when he was ill and stuck in his room in the student hostel. Mira had arrived empty handed, which was considered poor manners. ‘Slobodan complained he was hungry, so I asked Mira why she did not bring anything with her, as she knew he was ill. She calmly said everything was closed in Belgrade because it was Sunday. I said there were kiosks selling food in front of the residences. She said she had not seen them.’
After graduating from Belgrade University in 1964, Milosevic completed his year of national service, as every Yugoslav male was required to do. He was sent to the seaside town of Zadar, on the Croatian coast. Recruits at the college for junior army officers were given six months’ officer training before emerging as lieutenants. Milosevic did not greatly enjoy his time in the army. At university he got a nine or ten in most subjects but in military skills he only scored seven. Considering the later course of events in Yugoslavia this was quite ironic. As Dusan Mitevic noted: ‘The student who got his worst marks for pre-military training ended up as the commander-in-chief.’
Slobodan and Mira Markovic married in March 1965, while she was in her third year at university. (A daughter, Marija, was born later that year.) At the wedding, Ivan Stambolic was Milosevic’s kum, which is the equivalent of best man, but kum has a deeper, Balkan, intensity. It means something like blood brother, that the two men are bonded for life. Photos of them together show Milosevic looking uncharacteristically happy, embracing his friend. Mira was more troubled about Milosevic’s friendship with Ivan Stambolic. She wanted all of Slobodan for herself. She was jealous of Milosevic’s ties with Stambolic, said Popov. ‘That got on her nerves. It was her ambition to be a Pygmalion. If someone was to make something out of that little boy, it would be her, not Ivan.’
Mira made the trek from Belgrade to Zadar as often as she could. An incident on one visit has now entered Yugoslav folklore. Walking across the main square of Zadar, together with a cousin, Mira saw a picture of Tito in a shop window. ‘That’s where my Slobodan’s picture will be one day,’ she reportedly said. Her cousin was startled. At this time, barely twenty years after the end of the war, Tito was considered unassailable, a leader whose place was assured for years to come. Mira herself described it as ‘an ordinary fiction’ and denied it took place. ‘It is like if I one day said I would have blonde hair. Everything you read like this is not true.’3
At this time Yugoslav politics were turned upside down. In 1966 Tito sacked his former partisan comrade, Aleksandar Rankovic, the Serb head of the UDB (the domestic secret police) for twenty years. Rankovic, like every intelligence chief in a Communist country, was an extremely powerful figure. A former tailor with little education, Rankovic approved neither of Yugoslavs travelling abroad nor of western tourists – who surely included spies – being allowed into Yugoslavia.
Tito was introducing economic reforms. These liberalised the Yugoslav economy, based on the principle of workers’ self-management. Instead of rule by western capitalists or Soviet-type bureaucrats, the factories would belong directly to the workers. But such idealism was hard to implement when there were no clear principles defining the system, and it did not observe basic economic laws of supply and demand. Tito’s reforms aimed to loosen state control, and allow some firms to keep more of their hard currency profits. It was a kind of ‘market socialism’, and a logical step in the country’s liberalisation.
Many believed that Rankovic was obstructing Tito’s plans. The Yugoslav military counter-intelligence service, known as KOS, had put Rankovic under surveillance. The evidence they presented to Tito was enough to convince him to sack Rankovic. This was KOS’s revenge for Rankovic’s purge of 1948 when he had removed supposed Stalinists from the military. Rankovic was even accused of bugging Tito’s bedroom.
More significantly, the fall of Rankovic, and the subsequent political easing, released much deeper stresses in the Yugoslav state. In the Croatian capital Zagreb restless nationalists saw the sacking of Rankovic as a signal. They declared that Croatian was a separate language from Serbian. Yugoslavia’s official language at that time was Serbo-Croat, unified and codified by Joint Agreement signed by Serbs and Croats in 1850. The language was written in Latin in the Catholic Croatian lands, while in Orthodox Serbia and Montenegro the Cyrillic script predominated. In the late 1960s, Croatian nationalists sought to maximise the slight differences in Serbian and Croatian usage. But the fact remains that the language is linguistically one, with different ‘variants’ evolved in different historical circumstances. In the Balkans, as throughout the world where language helps define national identity, these are political, not linguistic questions. By 1971 a wave of popular patriotism had swept through Croatia, a period known as the ‘Croatian Spring’. Just as medieval theologians had discussed how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, Croat intellectuals agonised in nit-picking semantics over the wording of the definition of the Croatian nation, meaning basically whether or not the Serbs who lived in Croatian territories could be considered Croats. In Belgrade there were increasing fears of civil unrest, and worse. The Croatian Communist Party was purged, the nationalist leaders, among them future president Franjo Tudjman, were imprisoned.
In the Albanian-majority province of Kosovo, Rankovic had been hated for running a pure police state, with much harsher repression than in the rest of Yugoslavia. Kosovo Albanians made up about three-quarters of Kosovo’s population, but unlike Serbs or Croats, they did not have their own republic. Kosovo was merely a region of southern Serbia, ruled from Belgrade. It was one of the poorest regions in Yugoslavia, left behind in the waves of modernisation further north. Most government officials, and almost all of the police, were Serbs. The Serbs were fearful that the Kosovo Albanians were plotting either to unite with the neighbouring ultra-Stalinist regime of Enver Hoxha, in Albania, or to secede from Yugoslavia by force.
With Rankovic out of the way, repression eased. Kosovo Albanian nationalist prisoners were released and rehabilitated. An Albanian language university opened in the capital Pristina, and contacts began with Albania itself. Kosovo Albanians were appointed to the police and government positions. Massive state subsidies poured in from Belgrade. Embold
ened by their success. Kosovo Albanian nationalists drew up long-term plans for secession and eventual independence.
In Belgrade, the opening to the West and the financial aid that flowed in had inevitably brought in its wake other contributions. The theoretical journal Praxis began to challenge Marxist orthodoxy. In 1968, as in Paris, London and Berlin, student riots erupted on the streets of the capital. They condemned the war in Vietnam and demanded that Yugoslav universities be turned into revolutionary Marxist institutions. Such scenes in a Communist country, even liberal Yugoslavia, were unimaginable. The situation was slipping out of control. There were dangerous precedents. In Hungary students had been in the vanguard of the 1956 revolution that had eventually triggered a Soviet invasion.
The Serbian political leader Petar Stambolic, uncle of Ivan, demanded that Belgrade University be closed down and the troops sent in. Tito, the grandmaster of Balkan politics, appeared on television. He declared to an incredulous nation that not only did he support the students, but if their demands were not met, he would resign. The joyous students went home. It was a move of deft duplicity. A fortnight later Tito demanded that the professors around Praxis magazine be sacked, for ‘corrupting’ Yugoslavia’s youth. The attack on Praxis heralded a massive purge of reformist Communists, known as the Serbian liberals. Like Mikhail Gorbachev more than a decade later, they wanted a greater role for the nascent market forces in the economy, more freedom of speech. ‘Tito was afraid. He thought this was the result of bad foreign influences, that intellectuals and technocrats were challenging the power of the party and leaning towards western democracy,’4 said Aleksandar Nenadovic, a former editor of the daily newspaper Politika.
The liberals lost. They had progressive, modern ideas, but the hardliners had the army, parliament and the police. With hindsight it is clear that the defeat of the Serbian liberals was a key moment, both in the history of Yugoslavia and in the subsequent rise of Milosevic. Had Tito allowed further liberalisation, no matter how cautious, he would have strengthened those who wanted to further modernise and westernise Yugoslavia. Instead he reverted to Communist authoritarianism.
With his military service out of the way, Milosevic had began working for the Belgrade municipal government. Meanwhile Mira gained a doctorate in sociology at the University of Nis in southern Serbia, which later landed her a post as professor of sociology at Belgrade University. The family moved to a small one-room flat in New Belgrade, among the concrete tower blocks that had been built to ease the capital’s chronic housing shortage after the Second World War.
Tito’s Yugoslavia in these years, the early 1970s, was a very different place from that of the early post-war era. The cult of Tito was unchallengeable, but even after the defeat of the Serbian liberals, his dictatorship was a soft one compared with orthodox Communist countries. Life was very different from East Germany under Erich Honecker, where mines and sharpshooters guarded the Berlin Wall, or Ceausescu’s Romania where flats were unheated for months on end, women were required to have five children, and abortion and contraception were banned.
To some extent, Tito’s relatively lax dictatorship was shaped by national temperament. Such terms are hard to quantify, but Yugoslavia was essentially a Mediterranean country. Across the Balkans, as in Spain or southern Italy, life was lived at a slower, more relaxed pace. Great value was placed on human relationships. This was especially true in the more southern and eastern Yugoslav republics such as Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, with their Ottoman heritage. It was even true of Slovenia and Croatia, too, if to a lesser extent, though they were also prone to occasional outbursts of Germanic rigour. If anything, the Communist system of state planning accentuated Yugoslavia’s mañana syndrome: the state would provide, things would sort themselves out, and there was always time for another coffee, cigarette, and a chat. In short, there was simply little or no national appetite in Yugoslavia for a Soviet-type intrusive regime.
For many Yugoslavs these were the golden years. Although inflation ate away at people’s earnings, families began to acquire the requisites of modern urban life: washing machines, fridges and televisions came to even remote villages. Access to hard currency made them the envy of their Communist neighbours. Tito may even have won free elections, had he risked holding them, said Tibor Varady. ‘Most university students believed in the philosophy of the non-aligned movement, and life was improving in those times. Real wages were climbing year after year, and whether it was because of good economic policies, international loans or other assistance, we were far ahead of any other eastern European country.’
Out of the political arena, in everyday matters, Yugoslavs enjoyed an atmosphere of comparative laissez-faire. There was an unspoken accord between the state and its subjects: as long as the monopoly of the Communist Party was not challenged, and the correct protocol of obeisance was observed, things would be as comfortable as possible. The key difference between Yugoslavia and other communist states was that Yugoslavia had open borders. A country with open borders can no longer be described as a dictatorship as its citizens are free to leave. The question is whether they will come back.
During the 1970s hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs left for the car factories of Germany and Austria, and the construction sites of the Middle East and Asia. As guestworkers they usually lived in dormitories, several to a room to save as much of their wages as possible and send funds back to their families. But when their contracts ended, they did come home, often bringing enough money to build a house. Across the country, stacks of bricks and lumber soon piled up by churning cement mixers. Concrete skeletons sprouted across fields and verges. Once ramshackle villages boasted streets of modern multi-roomed villas, all paid for with wages from BMW and Mercedes, and the Gulf oil states.
Mira recalled those halcyon days: ‘The country in which I lived when I was a high school student, a university student, where my children were born, was a wonderful country. First of all because it was one of the rare societies that was aware of the perspective lying ahead. We had a very good life and it was for example then, but we were sure that it was going to be an even better life tomorrow, that was our vision.’
The traffic at Yugoslavia’s borders was two way. Under pressure from Croatia and Slovenia, the two most westward-looking republics, the country opened up to mass western tourism. Visitors from all over Europe poured in to enjoy Croatia’s beautiful beaches and archipelago of islands dotted across the Adriatic, Slovenia’s lakes and mountains, and Bosnia’s tranquil Ottoman architecture. English and German were widely spoken. The exodus of guestworkers, the mass influx every summer of foreign tourists, and the western loans on which the economy increasingly relied, also subtly changed Yugoslavia’s political atmosphere. It was no longer credible, or even desirable, to attack the West as imperialists, planning to destroy the workers’ paradise.
‘We were building a more human, a better form of socialism, because we were squeezed between the East and the West. Our country was described as a salon, or entry-chamber of Communism. That’s how the West spoke about us. For a long time I thought that Yugoslavia could serve as a model for the establishment of European union, for connecting the countries within Europe some time in the future,’ said Mira. ‘I hoped to write a lot, and have beautiful children. Also, I hoped for a lot of friends, and to have an open home that would always be filled with people. And as far as I was concerned, that was the case.’
In Pozarevac, Milosevic’s mother Stanislava had few visits from friends or family. She became increasingly depressed until, in 1974, she hanged herself at the family home, at the age of sixty-two. She had been passed over for a promotion at the school where she taught, and it is possible that her fractured marriage, and the departure of Slobodan and Borislav, had counted against her. ‘Stanislava was a very ambitious Communist, and she was in line for a promotion. But in the end she did not get it, and one reason was that she had been left alone, with no husband and no sons living with her,’ said Dusan Mitevic.5
/> Although Stanislava had long been separated from her husband Svetozar, his suicide ten years earlier had also profoundly affected her. She spent much time reading, but her eyesight began to fade. Milosevic rarely visited. Just as with Ivan Stambolic, Mira was jealous of Milosevic having any other close emotional ties. ‘People who know them say that when Stanislava went to visit Slobo in Belgrade, Mira left the apartment the minute Stanislava stepped inside,’ said Milica Kovac.6
The death of his mother was one of the few occasions when Milosevic is known to have shown emotion. According to Ljubica Markovic, Mira’s half-sister, Slobodan blamed himself for her suicide. ‘My mother later told me that Slobodan was completely upset, and said he was guilty, that he didn’t go to visit her enough, she was lonely, that he should have given her more time.’7 Apparently Mira’s response to the news that Stanislava had committed suicide, and to her husband’s grief and self-recrimination, was icier. ‘My mother told me that Mira told Slobodan to put it out of his head, that it was nothing to do with him, and that it was his mother’s decision,’ said Ljubica. Mira herself said she had nothing but praise for her mother-in-law. ‘It was terrible for Slobodan when she died, because she was his mother. She had some heart trouble, but she was not very old. She was still active in school. She was a proud and modest woman, who was very diligent and dedicated to her sons. A brave person and a serious one. I had and still have the best opinion of her.’
