By Zlatko Kramarić*
The conduct of some Croatian communists at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s is difficult to understand without an awareness of the complete collapse of a world/political construct in which they had lived comfortably for decades. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the public execution of N. Ceausescu, the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the breakdown of the existing party monopoly clearly showed that Yugoslav communism no longer had a historical future. The events at the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), at the end of January 1990, definitively confirmed this diagnosis. In this context, the Croatian party leadership, headed by Ivica Račan, simply had to call multiparty elections, because they were aware that, through their “policy of silence” and their rotten compromises, generally made at the expense of their own people, they had lost all the people’s trust. They also knew that they had neither the will nor the strength to adequately oppose S. Milošević’s increasingly aggressive policy. This was also the period when the Serbian community in Croatia began to “awaken,” encouraged by the “happening of the people” in other parts of Yugoslavia. Political differentiation within the party led to changes in leadership in provincial and republican structures. Popular tribunes called for a “rally of truth” to be held in Ljubljana on 1 December 1989 as well. In parts of Croatia, Serbian nationalist symbols and rhetoric were openly asserted. Therefore, the decision of the Croatian communists to call multiparty elections was a logical consequence of all their bad policies and mistaken strategies. From 1971 onward, following the collapse of the “Croatian Spring,” Croatian communists pursued a policy of avoiding confrontation with Belgrade, Croatian Serbs, and federal institutions; they were prepared to make every possible concession at the expense of vital Croatian national interests. They were also aware that they would lose the elections in the spring of 1990 and would thus leave all existing political and other problems to the winners, the Croatian nationalists, the “party of dangerous intentions.” Yet they were convinced that this government would be short-lived, because it would be unable to resist Milošević and the JNA. The anticipated failure of the new government would then lead to a return to the previous, initial state of affairs, thereby creating all the conditions for them to regain power. But the events that followed the elections did not unfold according to their “primitive” scenario, because, following their old and familiar habit, they underestimated the depth of the changes taking place in Croatian society.
From today’s perspective, more interesting than their electoral defeat itself is the question of what the Croatian communists actually expected to happen after losing power. Some of them apparently counted on the political transformation not being permitted without resistance from the federal institutions, especially the JNA, whose leadership during the 1980s increasingly advocated a centralist, unitarist conception of Yugoslavia. Here we will merely recall the fortunately unsuccessful military-political plans of Admiral B. Mamula (this Croatian Serb was also a “Croatian cadre” in the federal institutions, and, as far as we know, I. Račan even offered him the leading position on the list of Croatian communists in the parliamentary elections in the spring of 1990). Fortunately, none of his diabolical plans came to fruition. He was a military man who, in the mid-1980s, seriously believed that a “military coup” was the only way out of the Yugoslav crisis. Through such an action, the JNA planned to abolish the Presidency of the SFRY. He thought very poorly of this political body. Had this unfortunately happened, that military action would have dealt the final blow to any idea of a democratic Yugoslavia. Yet, although this Yugoslav Pinochet failed to achieve his ultimate aims, he nevertheless succeeded in turning the JNA into an independent political actor, which only a few years later would end up in increasingly pronounced ideological alignment with the Serbian political leadership, its interests and plans.[1]
In this sense, it is possible to speak of a paradoxical political calculation: part of the old Croatian communist nomenklatura agreed to a (temporary) loss of power because they were more than convinced that, after the necessary confrontation between the federal center and the new Croatian government, an opportunity would open for their triumphant return to the political scene. (That is what would happen only on 3 January 2000!)[2]
It is precisely in this detail that the most important element of their miscalculation probably lies. Namely, they were unable to understand that Croatian society itself had become the historical agent of change. Croatian youth, citizens who went to the polls, people who accepted the risk of political pluralism and then defended, without compromise, the democratically expressed will, demonstrated that Croatia’s political future could no longer be negotiated among the Croatian party cabinet, Belgrade, and military structures. What had been supposed to be a matter for political elites became a matter of the articulated will of the Croatian people. That is why the greatest paradox of that period is that those who were convinced of a return to the old relations/order, with the intervention of its last guardians, the JNA, never experienced that return: history took an entirely different path. (And many of them are still unable to recognize that path. The political wanderings of all their political leaders after I. Račan testify to this unequivocally. To be fair, Račan himself did not recognize that path in time. Had he done so, then on 25 June 1991, when Croatian independence was proclaimed, he would not have demonstratively left the parliamentary chamber, because his party’s amendments had not been accepted by the parliamentary majority. Yet Račan’s problem that day was not that he failed to understand the concept of Croatian sovereignty, but that he was not then prepared to accept its ultimate political consequence – Croatia outside Yugoslavia! Clearly, even after all the painful and tragic experiences of Pakrac, Plitvice, Borovo Selo, the proclamation of the SAO Krajina, and so on, he was unwilling to give up on some new “Yugoslav synthesis.” That is a legitimate political position, but in the context of the time it was, to say the least, suspect and demonstrated a fundamental failure to understand the subtle distinction between democratic transformation and national independence.)[3][4][5]
The conduct of individuals from cultural and public life can also be viewed within this broader pattern, among whom the “Šerbedžija case” can serve as a kind of paradigm. His departure/flight from Zagreb to Belgrade in 1991 should not be reduced to some cheap, disqualifying political label. (Nor, for that matter, should the departure of Mira Furlan, which truly was not politically motivated, because at the time the actress knew absolutely nothing about politics. Had she, by some happy chance, known something about it, then on 5 December 1991, after the fall of Vukovar and the daily shelling of most Croatian cities, she would not have written an open letter to the citizens of Zagreb but would have addressed it to some other citizens, some other political actors. In her case, it was simply the gesture of a nervous actress who understood nothing, who, even off stage, in the public sphere, continued stubbornly to play one of her theatrical roles because she was unable to distinguish harsh reality from characters such as Medea, Antigone, Ophelia, Enka… And she should not be blamed too much for that. Admittedly, there were also those who interpreted her inappropriate gesture in an extremely negative way.)[6][7][8]
Unlike M. Furlan, the “Šerbedžija case” is much more complex. Unlike his colleague, he is a politically literate person. As for his decision to flee Zagreb, it was the decision of an ordinary and timid calculator, for whom moral integrity in life was apparently not a value worth taking too seriously. Journalist T. Čadež also drew attention to this characteristic of his, writing in Jutarnji list that Šerbedžija “was well paid for what Manojlović refused.” It is particularly interesting that this year’s production at Brijuni, R. Harwood’s “Taking Sides,” addresses this archetypal dilemma: can an artist remain autonomous in a totalitarian system if he continues to work within its institutions? In that play, W. Furtwängler, the great German conductor and director of the Berlin Philharmonic, in his defense after the end of the war, during the denazification process, before the American Major S. Arnold, says that he agreed to continue working for the sake of music, the German cultural tradition, and the musicians he wanted to help, not for Hitler. His defense rests on the idea that art is not politics: “I was not a Nazi, but I was their artist!” His “prosecutor,” Arnold, asks him a simple question: if, through your unquestionable authority, you performed before the regime and its audience, did you not thereby give it legitimacy? In other words, how did you expect to be apolitical in a political system that seeks to politicize (and control) everything?[9][10][11]
But Šerbedžija’s conscious choice at that time illustrates a broader phenomenon: at the moment when the old political order was definitively collapsing, some people from the former Yugoslav cultural space tried to withdraw, did not want to take risks, wanted to preserve their comfortable position and “wisely” wait for the final outcome of the war. In a 1991 interview, Šerbedžija explained his departure in terms of personal reasons and a feeling that the Yugoslav world he had known was falling apart. However, in that interview he did not specify that by this he meant exclusively his own projection of that world, because if that world was falling apart in Zagreb, then it was probably falling apart in Belgrade as well?! In other words, he left us owing an explanation of what lies behind that insufficiently defined “Yugoslav world.” Although we could speculate about the hidden political motivations behind that flight from a “dangerous war zone” to less dangerous places, to relatively peaceful Belgrade, we will consciously refrain from such speculation, which could lead us to mistaken conclusions and also to some rather unpleasant questions. For this actor often and willingly speaks about peace, democracy, dignity, civil society, reconciliation, and political responsibility. He also openly supports certain political and social movements. That is his inalienable right. But his public activity is also subject to an important democratic principle: if a public figure has the right to speak critically about social reality, then others have every right to analyze both the words and the actions of that public figure. Not in order to deprive that person of the right to hold an opinion, but because moral authority and immunity are not something acquired once and for all. No one has the right to monopolize those categories.[12]
Furthermore, it is impossible to deny that the comrades did not forget his earlier merits, and so one of the first decisions of the coalition government of 3 January 2000, in which our liberal party also participated, more as a not particularly necessary political ornament—but let it be there, just in case, since there is no harm in having more heads—was the decision of Prime Minister I. Račan and Minister of Culture A. Vujić to award the island of Brijuni to this “returnee,” a recent voluntary exile, a “spoiled party son,” where this artist would continue his interrupted work on a “Yugoslav cultural republic,” presenting himself as a man who was simultaneously “from here” and, equally, “outside these borders.” Thus Brijuni, that self-proclaimed Ithaca to which, after ten years of wandering through the “wildernesses of Yugoslav history,” our unfortunate Odysseus returned, became a space where the now somewhat more politically experienced Odysseus would continue some of his earlier Yugoslav cultural projects, such as KPTG (in cooperation with Lj. Ristić, another unfortunate Yugoslav), as though nothing epochal had happened in the meantime in this part of the world. And just as Croatian communists overnight became social democrats, so the KPTG project was transformed into the Ulysses Theatre, which would each subsequent year offer a very limited audience new productions of Euripides, Shakespeare, Weiss, Sophocles, Krleža, Brecht, Beckett, Williams, Štivičić, Lukić, Vonnegut, Harwood… This theatre was intended to combine ancient myth, European modernism, political theatre, and the experience of totalitarianism and wars in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.[13][14][15]
Ultimately, perhaps the most accurate way to describe it is as the great miscalculation of an immature and impermissibly illiterate political generation. Some Croatian communists were convinced that they would lose the multiparty elections in the spring of 1990, but far more important was the fact that they did not believe in the permanence of the victory of their political opponents, the Croatian nationalists. And when that nevertheless happened, they must have been shocked by the determination and courage of Croatian youth, that unrepeatable combination of energy, motivation, love, faith, and will that succeeded in doing the impossible: defending the homeland against a much more powerful army, against part of its own citizens, and against the skepticism openly expressed from the very first days of the establishment of the new democratic government in Croatia by parts of the international community… It is an indisputable fact that a large part of the Croatian communists genuinely believed that the old communist system would survive, because they counted on the strength of the federation, the powerful JNA, the (international) political weight of Belgrade, and geopolitical relations in the world. (It should be borne in mind that America and Europe were also closely following the ongoing political processes in the Soviet Union: everyone was wondering what would happen if the Soviet Union itself collapsed, so that part of the Croatian communists/social democrats naively thought there was a high probability that, after the lost elections and the inability of the new government to deal with all the political and other problems within the country, and even more so with those in its immediate surroundings, some form of order would be re-established in which they would continue to have the decisive say.) However, what they failed to foresee was the mobilizing power of Croatian society and the fact that 1990 opened such a historical rupture that it could no longer simply be closed. Above all, that “closure” could not be achieved through those political programs, clichés, and narratives about “brotherhood and unity,” about a new “Yugoslav synthesis,” and so on, which had long since become exhausted and which no one took seriously anymore. Our comrades, nor their political children—from all sorts of activists and newly minted communists to Labourites and feminists—simply fail to understand that the old political world did not retreat in order to return; it retreated because it had lost all historical legitimacy.
Admittedly, they were neither the first nor the last to make a “political miscalculation,” but the problem is that all of us are still paying dearly for those “miscalculations” today.
Footnotes
[1]For more on this, see our book, I poslije Tita – Tito [And After Tito – Tito], HSN, Zagreb, 2025.
[2]Some Croatian communists/social democrats did not understand that democratic transition means not only accepting elections but also accepting the consequences that follow from that fact. For if multiparty democracy is accepted, then one must also accept the possibility that voters may change not only the government but also the existing state framework.
[3]On that day, one of the SDP representatives requested that, alongside the Croatian anthem “Lijepa naša,” the Yugoslav anthem “Hej Slaveni” also be performed?!
[4]The honor of the Croatian communists/social democrats was to some extent saved by representative Marko Vlašić-Čiče from Čara on the island of Korčula!
[5]In this context, the “Yugoslav synthesis” was no longer supposed to be a compromise between different national (Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian…) interests, but rather an attempt to reconstruct, once again, a historically exhausted political formula, merely under a different constitutional name. It should be noted that the communists at the time seriously believed that merely changing the name could also change the existing reality and existing relations within society!
[6]We do not like this phrase, because it irresistibly reminds us of the contents of secret-service dossiers!
[7]At the beginning of the 1990s, director L. Zafranović and writers G. Babić, D. Ugrešić, S. Drakulić, R. Iveković, and others also left Croatia. Some of them, such as G. Babić, permanently, and some only temporarily. Thus, these days L. Zafranović has made a film in Belgrade about Jasenovac, about Croatian fascism, with financial support from Serbian fascists. It would be interesting to see how the Serbian authorities would react if this director had happened to offer them a screenplay about the crime/genocide in Srebrenica!
[8]We mean the inappropriate text about the actress’s intimate life published in the Zagreb weekly Globus at the beginning of 1992!
[9]Jutarnji list, 18 November 2013. In that article, the journalist referred to the fact that Belgrade actor M. Manojlović refused all those stereotypical roles of “villains from the East” – Russians, Serbs, generals, and so on – unlike Šerbedžija, who readily accepted such roles and, if the journalist is to be believed, was well paid for them. Admittedly, accepting a particular role is not automatically a moral failing, just as refusing one is not proof of moral superiority. But every choice says something about the person who makes it. As for us, we see nothing wrong with R. Š. making films in which he played “villains from the East,” but we regard it as a serious moral problem that this actor agreed to act in the film Dezerter, by Ž. Pavlović, made in 1992, in which devastated Vukovar served as the actual setting. The issue here is not at all whether R. Š. was in Vukovar during filming. We are asking a completely different question: what does it mean to play a particular character (in this film, a Yugoslav officer) at a moment when the reality from which that character emerges has not yet ended? Of course, an actor is not responsible for the actions of his character. Playing a JNA officer does not mean being an officer. Playing a criminal does not mean committing a crime. But there is another kind of responsibility – responsibility for an artistic choice and its context. This is a question of the ethics of acting itself! Just as an artist/actor has the right to portray what is morally unacceptable, society also has the right to ask what that artistic act means at a particular historical moment.
[10]W. Furtwängler (his position greatly reminds us of the concept of internal emigration – remaining in the country, refusing to accept the ideology, but continuing to live and create within a criminal system) is essentially saying before the court: I did not serve the regime, I served music! And D. Arnold replies: But the regime used the fact that you were among them as well. There is no doubt that the prosecutor represents the political ethics of the victor, coming from a world that, after victory, seeks to establish a clear boundary between good and evil, responsibility and guilt. This topic is by no means simple and encompasses a whole range of aspects, from the moral to the existential!
[11]The relationship between artists and political power is particularly sensitive in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. The question arises: can an artist claim to be “outside politics,” can artistic activity be neutral in the face of totalitarian power, and where does artistic autonomy end and moral responsibility begin?
[12]R. Šerbedžija publicly supports the student movement in Serbia. That is a legitimate civic position. But such engagement raises the question of standards. If we speak of democracy and governmental accountability, does the same standard apply to everyone? If we speak of victims, are all victims equally important? If we speak of a civic state, are the rights of all communities (national, religious…) equally protected in such a state? If we speak of coming to terms with the past, are we prepared to confront our own part in that past as well?
[13]We do not belong to those who relativize this fact to the point of excess, claiming that the Ulysses Theatre on Brijuni has become one of the most recognizable cultural spaces in the region. None of these advocates disputes that it is Croatian territory, in the Croatian state, but they believe that this space has simultaneously become a place where individuals and cultures that once belonged to the same political community have met again. And there is nothing illegitimate in that fact, because state and cultural borders are not one and the same. Furthermore, none of them disputes that Croatia became an independent state and defended its independence in a defensive war, but they argue that this fact does not in any way imply that everything created in the preceding Yugoslav cultural space must be rejected. For these reasons, they see Ulysses as a post-Yugoslav, rather than a Yugoslav, project. Defenders of the project believe that Ulysses does not restore the former state or advocate the restoration of the former political community, but seeks to preserve some cultural ties that survived the collapse of the state. (They do not say which ties!) In their view, this is a legitimate and valuable cultural ambition. And, after all these “arguments,” the question still remains: so what? On the present-day (ir)relevance of the “Yugoslav cultural space” for Croatian culture, we share the view of S. Lasić, which neither I. Mandić nor B. Buden have managed to refute with convincing arguments. In some of our earlier works, we added to Lasić’s thesis about the utter irrelevance of the Yugoslav cultural space some of the texts of A. G. Matoš, among which “Oko Lobora” would be a paradigmatic example of that irrelevance. See Z. Kramarić, Jugoslavenska ideja u kontekstu postkolonijalne kritike [The Yugoslav Idea in the Context of Postcolonial Critique], Meandar, Zagreb, 2012.
[14]For more on this, see our book, I poslije Tita – Tito [And After Tito – Tito], HSN, Zagreb, 2025.
[15]T. Čadež called that theatre “a fashionable summer theatre for the post-transition elite.”
*Zlatko Kramarić is a Croatian publicist, author, and diplomat, currently serving as Ambassador to Albania. Formerly a university professor and politician, he is known for his work in literature, cultural studies, and regional history.
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