One of the challenges in writing history lies in the ability to present material without assigning contemporary values or ideology to historical actors. When the Cold War ended by the beginning of the 1990s, the Communist ideology as refined and espoused by Vladimir Lenin had largely eroded as a viable worldview across the globe, especially as a post-Maoist China embarked on serious economic reforms that deemphasized central economic planning. We cannot assume, though, that Marxists during the period under consideration were cynics or that their policies would not have persisted for many more years to come. In this regard, I agree with James Cronin, who writes that “taking ideology and the contest of social systems seriously therefore means recognizing differences and choice without acceding to the definitions proffered by partisans.”1 As a result, because political leaders in Yugoslav had no idea that their state would collapse in 1991, I think that we do them a disservice by examining everything through the lens of destruction, ethnic hatreds, personality cults, and the like.
Because this monograph focuses on the people within the Yugoslav regime, it relies primarily on archival sources that illuminate what party members said—both to each other and to the public. The Open Society Archive in Budapest has compiled a wealth of sources from the Cold War, which governments published, collected, and used in an effort to understand what lay on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Radio Free Europe played a critical role during this time in bringing together data from Eastern Europe and using it in research reports and government communications. Included also in the Open Society Archive are transcripts from news reports on radio, television, and original newspaper and journal clippings. Such sources have helped me understand how some regular Yugoslavs interacted with the policies of the regime (if only passively), alongside what types of things the government encouraged for general consumption. Not all newspapers carried patriotic stories about how great the Yugoslav People’s Army was or how ready the Yugoslavs were to defend their country against outside aggression; some articles instead spoke about the concerns the government had with respect to its ability to rule. What is included and excluded lends tremendous insight about how leaders saw public participation as a force of strength and change.
Certain specific pieces of my argument rely on how foreign politicians—chiefly in the United States and the Soviet Union—reacted to Yugoslavs during the Cold War. For the American perspective, I have been fortunate to discover that the
Western researchers have only recently begun to view these Communist Party documents in breadth; some of this information gives us additional perspectives that can help to expand our understanding of broader Cold War historiography, by both confirming and challenging other scholarship on issues described in this manuscript. Since the governments of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States have made research by foreign scholars exceedingly difficult in virtually all of the former Soviet archives, assumptions and arguments about the Cold War must once again work around an increasingly diminishing stock of hard evidence. My research at the archive in Belgrade, though, has revealed a small treasure in not only Yugoslav–Soviet relations from both perspectives, but also lent significant insight into distinctly Yugoslav topics.
Finally, with the addition of newspaper accounts of the events—major Yugoslav papers such as Borba, Komunist, Vjesnik,
James Cronin, The World the Cold War Made: Order, Chaos, and the Return of History, (Routledge, 1994), p. 7. This notion of treating the ideology at the time as a serious item has regained attention among scholars. Most recently Stephen Kotkin’s new multi-volume biography on Stalin takes this approach. Kotkin articulated this stance at a talk at Arizona State University entitled “Stalin: Ideas, Power, Geopolitics,” 6 February 2015.