Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity: The Urban Redesign of Ljubljana’s Beloved Trnovo Neighborhood, 1951–1989

By Veronica E. Aplenc

After the Second World War, Yugoslavia’s small regional cities represented a challenge for the new socialist state. These cities’ older buildings, local historic sites, and low-quality housing clashed with socialism’s promises and ideals. How would the state transform these cities’ everyday neighborhoods? In the Slovene republic’s capital city of Ljubljana, the Trnovo neighborhood embodied this challenge through its modest housing, small medieval section, vast gardens, acclaimed interwar architecture, and iconic local reputation. Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity explores how urban planners, architects, historic preservationists, neighborhood residents, and even folklorists transformed this beloved neighborhood into a Slovene socialist city district. Aplenc demonstrates that this urban redesign centered on republic-level interpretations of a Yugoslav socialist built environment, versus a re-envisioned Slovene national past or design style. This interdisciplinary study sheds light on how Yugoslav state socialism operated at the republic level, within a decentralized system, and on the diverse forces behind success or failure. With its focus on vernacular architecture, small-scale historic sites, single-family homes, and illegal housing, this book expands our understanding of the everyday built environment in socialist cities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781612498140

Veronica E. Aplenc

Veronica E. Aplenc is Senior Program Manager at the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She received her M.S. in historic preservation and Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the everyday built environment, historic preservation, and the intersection of the traditional with the socialist modern. Her work on the everyday built environment in socialist Yugoslavia has been supported by IREX and Fulbright grants. In addition to her scholarship, she has collaborated on international research teams, participated in international teaching exchanges, and serves as a preservation and planning consultant.

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IMAGINING SLOVENE SOCIALIST MODERNITY

CENTRAL EUROPEAN STUDIES

The demise of the Communist Bloc and more recent conflicts in the Balkans and Ukraine have exposed the need for greater understanding of the broad stretch of Europe that lies between Germany and Russia. The Central European Studies series enriches our knowledge of the region by producing scholarly work of the highest quality. Since its founding, this has been one of the only English-language series devoted primarily to the lands and peoples of the Habsburg Empire, its successor states, and those areas lying along its immediate periphery. Salient issues such as democratization, censorship, competing national narratives, and the aspirations and treatment of national minorities bear evidence to the continuity between the region’s past and present.

SERIES EDITORS

Howard Louthan, University of Minnesota

Daniel L. Unowsky, University of Memphis

Dominique Reill, University of Miami

Paul Hanebrink, Rutgers University

Maureen Healy, Lewis & Clark College

Nancy M. Wingfield, Northern Illinois University

OTHER TITLES IN THIS SERIES

Combating the Hydra: Violence and Resistance in the Habsburg Empire, 1500–1900

Stephan Steiner

Transleithanian Paradise: A History of the Budapest Jewish Community, 1738–1938

Howard N. Lupovitch

Finding Order in Diversity: Religious Toleration in the Habsburg Empire, 1792–1848

Scott Berg

Unlikely Allies: Nazi German and Ukrainian Nationalist Collaboration in the General Government During World War II

Paweł Markiewicz

Balkan Legacies: The Long Shadow of Conflict and Ideological Experiment in Southeastern Europe

Balázs Apor and John Paul Newman (Eds.)

On Many Routes: Internal, European, and Transatlantic Migration in the Late Habsburg Empire

Annemarie Steidl

IMAGINING SLOVENE SOCIALIST MODERNITY

The Urban Redesign of Ljubljana’s Beloved Trnovo Neighborhood, 1951–1989

Veronica E. Aplenc

Purdue University Press • West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2023 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

978-1-61249-812-6 (hardback)

978-1-61249-813-3 (paperback)

978-1-61249-814-0 (epub)

978-1-61249-815-7 (epdf)

Cover image: Trnovo’s redevelopment captured on Eipprova Road: high-rises (1980s) in distance, commercial buildings (likely nineteenth century) in middle, and Jože Plečnik’s Gradaščica River embankments (1929–1932) in foreground. (Photograph by author, 2013.)

To my family

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

1. VISIONS OF UPSCALE SOCIALIST MODERNITY

Above-Standard High-Rises in the Trnovo Neighborhood’s Historic Core

2. HIGH SOCIALISM’S PROMISES FOR SOCIALIST LIVING

Murgle’s Single-Family Homes and the Individual’s Paradise

3. WHERE THE SOCIALIST FOLK LIVE

Rakova Jelša’s Vernacular but Unsanctioned Architecture Pushes the Boundaries of the Socialist City in High Socialism

4. THE HISTORIC DISTRICT THAT WASN’T

History Revisited and Jože Plečnik’s Eternal Architecture Surpassed

EPILOGUE

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING A BOOK NEVER HAPPENS IN A VACUUM, EVEN THOUGH IT MAY BE ONE INdividual’s undertaking. This book has its roots in a dissertation that I began in the early 2000s, and then it blossomed into a new project as I expanded my data, dove into new scholarship, and essentially researched a new topic. It has been an exciting project to engage with, and I am indebted to many. The list here is too short to express my full gratitude but is a modest start.

During my doctoral studies, I profited from very good guidance by Brad Abrams and Bruce Grant. I have enjoyed and benefited from having some wonderful colleagues in the United States, including Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Heather DeHaan, Vladimir Kulić, Kimberly Elman Zarecor, Juliana Maxim, Brigitte LeNormand, Elissa Bemporad, and the late Mark Pittaway. In many conversations, they and a wider circle of colleagues have helped shape this project. In Slovenia, I have been fortunate to have thoughtful, terrific colleagues at all stages of this project, including Tatiana Bajuk Senčar, Mateja Habinc, Aleksander Saša Ostan, Tina Potočnik, Mitja Velikonja, Ira Zorko, and Tanja Petrović. I also value the many exchanges I have had with numerous colleagues at conferences in the United States and Europe; sometimes, even the shortest conversation can lead to important insights. I want my express my appreciation to Trnovo local historian Breda Cajhen for her generosity and enthusiasm. At the University of Pennsylvania, Jacquelyn Greiff and Hejia Wang were excellent graduate assistants. I also want to express my gratitude to colleagues in the Society for Slovene Studies for their early interest in my project, and to fellow University of Pennsylvania Kruzhok seminar members for their collegiality. A very special thanks goes to my writing partners for their invaluable engagement, friendship, and support over several years, especially Jessie Harper, Catrice Barrett, and Anika Wilson and Linda Lee of the Folk Gals Group.

A special word of thanks is due to the knowledgeable and helpful staff in two archives, the Ljubljana Historical Archives (Zgodovinski arhiv Ljubljana) and the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia, Ljubljana office (Zavod za varstvo kulturne dediščine Slovenije, območna enota Ljubljana). I also want to thank professional staff in the Department of Urbanism, City of Ljubljana (Oddelek za urbanizem, Mestna občina Ljubljana) for kind assistance early on.

I am grateful to Jon Wallace for his excellent thoughts on project conceptualization, writing, and organization at an early stage. A word of thanks, too, goes to copy editor Barbara Peck for her review of the almost-final version of the manuscript. Early versions of some chapters benefited from participation in summer Penn Faculty Writing Retreats in 2015 and 2016, and the collegiality extended by fellow participants was invaluable. Two anonymous reviewers for Purdue University Press provided in-depth commentary on a previous draft of this project and I appreciate their insights and engagement. The Purdue University Press’s editorial team also has my gratitude. They have been wonderful to work with.

Research for my dissertation was supported in part by a grant from IREX (the International Research & Exchanges Board) with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Department of State (Title VIII Program), and the IREX Scholar Support Fund. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed in this book. Additionally, research for my dissertation was supported in part by a Fulbright grant, within the Fulbright/IIE student programs, and by an SAS (School of Arts and Sciences) Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed in this book.

I am grateful to the following for permission to use previously published material.

Portions of chapter 1 and chapter 4 were originally published in a slightly different form in Veronica E. Aplenc, Held in Suspension: Competing Discourses on Urban Modernity in 1960s Slovenia, Yugoslavia, in Patrick Haughey, ed., Across Space and Time: Architecture and the Politics of Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2017), 207–32. Reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis Group LLC.

Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in Veronica E. Aplenc, Vernacular Architecture (Un)Defined for Socialism: Slovenian Dislocation from the Temporally Defined Past, in Papers from the International Scientific Thematic Conference EAHN 2015 Belgrade: Entangled Histories, Multiple Geographies (Belgrade: European Architectural History Network and University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture, 2018), 136–45. Reprinted by permission of EAHN.

On the personal front, special thanks—again—to my unforgettable great-aunt Vida Hribar-Jeraj. I am grateful for the intellectual exchange and lovely friendship I have enjoyed with my uncle, Dr. Primož Aplenc, and his family. Some of our conversations have directly influenced this project. I am also grateful for the enduring friendship and hospitality of Jožica and Franci Savenc over several decades. A wide circle of friends has cheered me on, even when there was yet another deadline, and I cannot express my thanks enough to the late Joe Clarke, Manca Podjed, Beth Spillman, Michelle Levister, Erin Hughes, Lidija Bavec Flotta, the Slack Mates, and so many friends from Philadelphia’s Clark Park area. My parents, the late Veronika Cankar-Aplenc and Andrej M. R. Aplenc, each influenced this project in their own indelible way. Finally, my brother Richard Aplenc, sister-in-law Tina Glišović Aplenc, and delightful niece and nephew have cheered me on with wonderful friendship and unforgettable encouragement. A loving thanks to them all.

INTRODUCTION

READING THE TRAVEL SECTION OF MAJOR U.S. NEWSPAPERS TODAY, A PERson could easily get the impression that socialism never came to many small cities and towns in Eastern Europe, that area roughly stretching east from Germany, across Central Europe, and into Russia. Generally best surveyed from the local castle, which is usually on a hill, these small cities often boast either Renaissance or baroque architecture in their downtowns, and occasionally a Gothic church. The large towns have similar historic architecture, but generally without the castle. After visiting the internationally renowned must-sees, such as Prague and East Berlin, travelers inspired by newspaper articles and television travel shows often set off in search of hidden gems or the real Eastern European cities.

Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is one such city. Built on the Roman colony of Emona and first written about in the 1200s, Ljubljana developed as a medieval market town in the southern reaches of the Habsburg Empire, about 230 miles (370 kilometers) south of Vienna and 150 miles (240 kilometers) east of Venice. Visitors can climb the ninety-five or so steps in the Ljubljana Castle Tower and gaze at a wonderful 360-degree view of the small city that unfolds in front of them. To the northwest, the twin peaks of Šmarna Gora hill mark the edge of town. Far past it, the Kamnik Alps jut into the sky, a geological reminder that Ljubljana lies south of Austria’s Alps—and just east of northern Italy’s Dolomites. On a clear winter’s day, the Kamnik Alps seem very close and even look as if they stand at the very edge of Ljubljana, within reach. Looking down from the castle toward the city, to the south Ljubljana’s small medieval core winds around the Castle Hill. Just beyond this street, the Ljubljanica River follows the Castle Hill for a piece, flowing past the downtown area from almost due south. It then splits into two arms (the Ljubljanica River and Grubar’s Canal) to encircle a large area including the Castle Hill, and reunites as a single river speeding away toward the east. Across the Ljubljanica River from the Castle Hill, a few small streets make up the rest of the historic core, each with a smooth, somewhat curving single façade. The Ljubljanica River has a lovely character in this area, and its 1930s embankments shift in tone and appearance thanks to masterful work by interwar architect Jože Plečnik. Plečnik’s striking architecture, dating from the 1930s to 1940s, stretches throughout the downtown and links his monumental buildings, Ljubljanica River embankments, bridges, and even public stairways into a cohesive whole, collectively known as Plečnik’s Ljubljana. Viewers standing on the Castle Tower will see the entire city open up, with the Krim mountain—a hill, really—in the far distance, the Ljubljana Moor—once an uninhabited marshy area—to the south, and to the immediate east, the Golovec hill. Between the historic core and the outer reaches formed by Krim, the Ljubljana Moor, and Šmarna Gora, the entire city unfolds. A few tall, but not sprawling office buildings mark the commercial downtown area, which reaches out to the city’s edges with wide, multilane thoroughfares that traffic speeds along. Railway tracks cut through the town center, including through its semiformal park, Tivoli. Far to the northwest and northeast, one can spy groups of high-rise apartment buildings, pointing tall like stands of trees—or, in case of the Stožice high-rises’ jagged roofline, like the mountains—in clearly defined residential districts.

The city of Ljubljana is full of residential neighborhoods, most of which took on their current appearance under socialism, and these neighborhoods figure as one of the best places to examine how socialism definitively shaped Ljubljana as a provincial city—a regional center—in mid- to late twentieth-century Yugoslavia. Among the districts that make up this now postsocialist small city, the Trnovo neighborhood has a particularly rich history.

By the eve of socialism in the Slovene capital of Ljubljana, the Trnovo neighborhood had come to enjoy some fame in the local imagination as a beloved, centuries-old, village-like settlement that appeared to capture an ideal Slovene world. Located at the edge of the capital’s historic core, the neighborhood had brushed up against modest modernizing forces from the 1600s to the 1930s. After the Second World War Trnovo challenged the imagination again: how would the new socialist state manage this historic, locally beloved, and complex site when building a future-focused, Yugoslav socialist society? This book explores how Slovene urban design professionals and residents interpreted modern socialist Yugoslav housing in multiple forms, handled historic architecture, and defined the vernacular built environment in Trnovo. In this exploration, it considers how Yugoslav ideals were primarily negotiated at the republic level, versus in conversation with a federal center. Taking a small unit of analysis—a single historic, multifaceted neighborhood—Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity examines how urban planners, architects, historic preservationists, folklorists (ethnologists) to a degree, and local residents together redefined Trnovo as an everyday socialist city district in a Slovene provincial socialist city.

CENTRAL CONCERNS: THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN MODERNITY AND THE EVERYDAY

Undergirding this study of architectural history are two concerns that derive from my home field of folklore studies¹ (known among folklorists as folkloristics) but that apply across the humanities and social sciences: first, the encounter of the modern with the premodern that came before, and second, what happens to the everyday within that encounter. Modernity is notoriously elusive to define—that state which Marshall Berman has argued leads to all that is solid melting into air and which Shmuel Eisenstadt has suggested can exist in multiple iterations.² Here I approach modernity with a well-established lens from folkloristics that has been foundational for the field. As articulated clearly in Charles Briggs’s and Richard Bauman’s study on language and ideology, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality,³ with references to Latour,⁴ the modern is juxtaposed with its immediate past; this past is understood as less developed, even primitive, and was broadly grouped under traditions by North American folklorists until the constructed nature of all tradition complicated the use of this term.⁵ The interaction of the modern contemporary with the past has generally brought cultural clashes and certainly played a part in struggles for cultural, social, and political power. Centers of power and their agents have historically attempted to define, control, and reshape holdovers from the past that appear to challenge the modern with which these centers of power and their agents define themselves. Examples include early folklorists educating Appalachians in the early twentieth century, which David Whisnant outlined in his study of the politics of folklorists’ encounters with Appalachia,⁶ and the socialist Slovak state’s management of traditional lace-making in the late twentieth century.⁷ Architecture has also seen such struggles in the twentieth century, as documented by historians seeking to understand why locals abandon a place they love, as described in Michael Ann Williams’s seminal study of Appalachia,⁸ or by sociologists outlining architects’ debates in socialist Hungary on the appropriateness of traditional architectural motifs on new, high-rise socialist housing—which were ultimately deemed not appropriate.⁹ While these encounters are often messy, it is through such interactions that the modern comes to be negotiated, shaped, and so defined by multiple parties.

The second concern that undergirds this book is the abiding interest of folklore studies in the everyday. While this focus might seem to contrast with some other scholarly disciplines’ apparent interest in the superlative, at their core both approaches seek to capture the essence of a topic. Put in simple language, folkloristics explores people, places, and beliefs that are in plain sight but often remain outside the scholarly gaze—perhaps because of what we might call the apparent informality of their subject matter. However, this very subject matter can provide rich insights that might not otherwise have surfaced. The power of the everyday to illuminate larger scholarly concerns is shown in studies of how Italian Americans’ everyday (traditional) religious constructions—from dining-room altars to art on the lawn—express transnational ties; or how well-established (traditional) forms of information exchange, such as rumors and gossip, shape women’s perceptions of HIV/AIDS in Malawi.¹⁰ In this book, that concern with the everyday leads to my focus on a provincial city, or regional center, in socialist Europe.

Turning to Eastern Europe, how socialist states have grappled with the past has been a central focus for scholars interested in getting a grasp on these states’ understanding, expression, and negotiation of modernity. Studies of Eastern European architectural productions have revealed that socialist states uniformly forged some form of continuity with the past, reinterpreted for socialist society. This book centers on an examination of this relationship, although not just for one profession (such as architecture) or one type of building (such as historic monuments), but for the array of new architecture, historic sites, housing, and professional beliefs found in a single city neighborhood. To do this, I bring the two central concerns described above to a study of the politics of architecture in an everyday neighborhood, within a provincial city in socialist Yugoslavia.

THE SOCIALIST CITY IN EASTERN EUROPE

After the Second World War, cities across Eastern Europe shared similar challenges when their societies underwent radical political change and adopted state socialism. These urban centers were to play an important role in the new societies: one of their key functions was to both reflect and build the new socialist modernity. For urban design professionals, this environment offered a unique opportunity to resolve the housing question that had concerned architects since the start of the twentieth century, with the introduction of a modern environment. This book approaches the construction of the socialist built environment as an expression of socialist ideology, following Steven Kotkin’s groundbreaking 1995 work in Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization versus using a stylistic visual analysis. Similar to other recent books on architecture in Eastern Europe,¹¹ my study is concerned with the built environment as an expression of the politics of architecture versus a national architectural style or building typology. In this vein, it rests on an analysis of professional discourse and actions, including those taken by agents of the state and city residents, in constructing a socialist city.

Scholarship on the Eastern European socialist city has burgeoned in the past decade, and much of this research has considered major capitals, cities renationalized after the Second World War, completely new towns, or model socialist settlements. Scholars have even put forward a term, second world urbanity, and established an eponymously named research group that explores the socialist city.¹² We know a great deal about national capitals and new towns, ranging from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia. Following population and border shifts after the Second World War, cities like Ukraine’s Lviv were unexpectedly renationalized, and federal capitals like Yugoslavia’s Belgrade and Romania’s Bucharest were rebuilt according to new visions of the modern city.¹³ As inquiry has grown into Eastern European socialist cities and their builders, it has become clear that their professional endeavors built on shared European foundations, as well as country-specific legacies.¹⁴ Throughout their work, design professionals negotiated with continuities in multiple fields, all while working to realize new ideals. Across the region, architects and urban planners clearly took socialism’s mandates and promises seriously, whether debating exactly what socialist realism meant in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) or designing panel housing in 1950s Czechoslovakia.¹⁵ Within this scholarship, work on socialist Yugoslavia’s cities¹⁶ has echoed a broader North American scholarly interest in major capitals and architecturally important work, as well as transnational networks, revealing broad similarities between the Yugoslav case and that of its socialist neighbors.

For architects and planners designing the socialist city, housing was a burning issue that urgently needed to be resolved. Housing had emerged as a pressing social and spatial concern in the late nineteenth century, and early twentieth-century architects hoped to solve it and related social issues through modern architecture and urban environments. After the Second World War, architects and planners in Eastern European socialist states focused intensely on housing, its characteristics, and the best way to create conditions for socialist living. With shared programs of industrialization, modernization, and the full realization of the individual, socialist states expressed high hopes for the everyday built environment where their utopian dreams—which citizens sometimes took as promises—would come true. Beyond theoretical concerns, this had highly practical implications because the political agendas of socialist states included providing housing and employment for all. In the Soviet Union, the state’s housing program began in the 1950s with requests for sacrifice as the state sought to provide a public good.¹⁷ In Yugoslavia, as in a few other more openly oriented countries, state housing programs also began as a public good in the 1950s, and then transformed into a consumer good in the 1960s as these states embraced state-sponsored consumerism and shifted housing costs to residents.¹⁸

THE PROVINCIAL AND THE VERNACULAR

While the socialist city is now better understood than it was before, attention has largely concentrated on sites of exemplary architecture, planning, or political prominence. This leaves the vast hinterland of provincial cities less well known. Like the studies mentioned above, this monograph views the built environment as a site of ideological negotiation, but it centers its attention on the provincial city, or regional center, with varied history. This type of city was highly representative as an urban settlement in socialist Eastern Europe, an area that in general was not heavily urbanized before the Second World War. Much of what we know about provincial cities focuses on a single profession, with planning and architecture the best explored, although a few books consider historic preservation,¹⁹ and sometimes relationships between center and periphery, as in the case of a few Soviet cities.²⁰

Drilling down, we find that these small cities entered socialism as complex sites, with long-standing neighborhoods full of old buildings, semihistoric architecture, historic architecture or the occasional monument, illegally constructed housing, areas locally termed slums, and everyday architecture. Such diverse elements in the built environment captured different aspects of a neighborhood’s multifaceted past. These intriguing districts thus challenged socialism’s core beliefs and called out for socialism to address them with its new definition of the modern. Too small to figure as national symbols, but significant enough to carry an important symbolic valence for residents, these neighborhoods escaped international attention and instead stood as the quiet vanguard in the negotiation of socialism. In essence, these districts figured among the most representative sites in Eastern European cities where professionals and residents defined socialist modernity for a local gaze. With their complex nature, they represent an ideal lens through which to consider how urban design professionals and residents defined through discourse and actions the socialist urban in a multilayered, historically charged, local context. While a few monographs address the development of individual neighborhoods, they generally have not dealt with a long-standing city district or focused on a provincial city. Instead, they usually have rounded out our understanding of exemplary sites in an internationally significant city, such as memory and erasure in a new neighborhood²¹ or historicizing architecture²² in East Berlin. Other monographs consider everyday architecture, but often from the perspective of architects’ debates,²³ and only a very few have written about illegally constructed settlements.²⁴ Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity addresses how socialist modernity was negotiated in a provincial city neighborhood, where urban design professionals grappled with the diverse architectural, planning, monumental, and vernacular aspects of a neighborhood that led residents to hold it so dear.

YUGOSLAVIA AND SLOVENIA IN THE POSTWAR ERA

Installing the socialist modern in cities had specific challenges in postwar Yugoslavia due to the unusual nature of its political system. Postwar or socialist Yugoslavia is known as the second Yugoslavia. The first Yugoslavia was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, established in 1918 following the First World War and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The population of this multiethnic state of south Slavs included Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, and Macedonians, just as the second Yugoslavia would. Although its federal capital was in urban Belgrade, the kingdom was predominantly rural, with a few cities and little industry. During the Second World War, the country was occupied by Italian and German fascist forces, and it saw intense, vicious fighting between the occupying forces and various opposition forces, as well as among some opposition forces. Ultimately, at the end of the war Josip Broz Tito’s communist partisan fighters emerged victorious as liberators, enjoying support from Western allies. When socialist or second Yugoslavia was established in 1945, the new state found itself facing the pressing need to modernize and industrialize, all while consolidating power. Although Yugoslavia first followed the Soviet model, Tito soon clashed with Stalin in the Cominform Crisis of 1948. In a daring move, Tito chose to launch Yugoslavia onto an uncertain path between East and West. He navigated this with exceptional skill, stabilizing the country by the early 1950s and solidifying its international position. Tito ultimately turned Yugoslavia into an international darling and even an alternative leader, as a founding member of the Non-Aligned countries. By the 1960s, observers both at home and abroad believed that Yugoslavia was closing in on what historians have termed the Yugoslav dream—an in-between version of socialism that many hoped might prove successful.²⁵ In local terms, the country appeared to be realizing brotherhood and unity, a communist wartime rallying cry, and what politicians often called our bright future did not seem far off. To the outside world, Yugoslav socialism looked to be smooth, chic, and successful.

However, the country was in constant political flux, with a new federal constitution adopted every decade—in 1953, 1963, and 1974—although consistently holding to Yugoslav ideology.²⁶ Yugoslavia introduced its own political structures, with self-management and an enduring decentralization among its hallmarks. Workers’ self-management, as conceived by Edvard Kardelj, a Yugoslav politician and economist of Slovene origin, created specifically Yugoslav political structures of self-governance. These structures created various decision-making bodies for citizens’ political participation in society, and they existed from the federal level down to the republic, city, county, and even neighborhood level. In the 1950s, some of these agencies were called councils, but by the 1970s others were confusingly termed local communities (krajevne skupnosti). When I use local community in this book, I refer to an official political body (within workers’ self-management) that operated at the neighborhood level and had decision-making powers. By the 1960s, a mixed planned and market economy, plus an increasing openness to the West, figured as additional hallmarks of Yugoslavia’s socialist, but non-Soviet, political and economic system. The Yugoslav economy grew fantastically in the 1960s. However, the country was already beginning to borrow significantly and launched a series of internal economic reforms aimed at stabilization. By the time of the oil crises of the 1970s, Yugoslavia was stagnating economically and experiencing internal political fractures. The federal constitution of 1974 introduced new complexity into the political and economic systems, such as bringing self-management down to the neighborhood level and restructuring companies into what were called basic units of associated labor. Following Tito’s death in 1980, a collective, rotating presidency failed to maintain unity, and the economy spiraled into terrible inflation. In parallel, expressions of nationalism began to rise, including those made by the Serbian communist politician turned nationalist, Slobodan Milošević. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia lost its special position as the land of the in-between, balanced between East and West. In 1991, Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia and was soon followed by Croatia and Bosnia. These actions were followed by the invasion of Yugoslav Army forces, first in a ten-day war in Slovenia and then in brutal, multiyear wars in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s.

Socialist Yugoslavia was made up of six republics with Slovenia the northernmost, and it shared borders with Italy, Austria, Hungary, and a sliver of the Adriatic Sea. While Slovenia was relatively homogeneous and quite distinct ethnically with its own language, it had no history of independent rule, having been part of larger political entities since the fourteenth century. Geographically it was a small republic, close in size to the U.S. state of New Jersey. Its population was also fairly small, numbering some 1.4 million