Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

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> Albania was even within eastern communist block considered utter shithole run by mad paranoid guy.

I may be wrong, but just across the northern border of Albania, things may have already been very different. Every time I visit a country of the former Yugoslavia, I get the feeling that Josip Broz Tito (the de-facto dictator of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980) is still respected, even idolized by some. As a German, this always surprises me, because the leader(s) of Eastern Germany (Ulbricht and Honecker) are today mostly ridiculed as bureaucrats without a trace of charisma. Tito certainly was an interesting character, and was the only leader of the communist block to challenge the leadership of Stalin. Again, I really have no first-hand experience and may be wrong, but my parents regularly traveled through Yugoslavia (mostly through today's Slovenia, Croatia and Montenegro) in the 70ies and 80ies. They mostly stayed in cheap private holiday apartments, often eating dinner / breakfast with the owner families, and didn't get the impression that this was a particularly bad place to live in. AFAIK, it was also pretty straightforward for citizens of the former Yugoslavia to leave the country / travel to the West (at least this was explained to us by an older woman in Croatia who had traveled through France as a student in the 70ies to learn the language).

Things weren’t set in stone - Yugoslavia in the 1950s (agrarian reforms, Goli Otok, and similar events) was quite different from the Yugoslavia of the 1980s. In the 1950s, many people escaped to Italy in small boats on stormy nights. Ten to fifteen years later, a significant number of people emigrated legally to Germany as unemployment was high, and the state realized it was better to receive hard currency from gastarbeiters than to deal with their discontent at home.

And Tito was no ordinary dictator, it would be interesting to see how he would navigate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West. That, combined with Yugoslavia’s brief economic prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s, is why Yugoslavs were one of the European nationalities embarking on the Istanbul–Kathmandu trail, and in discovering Bali as a mass-tourist destination alongside Germans and Nordics.

That everything went to shit around the time that Tito declined and died (though correlation is not necessarily causation), does much to explain the nostalgia that you will still occasionally meet. However, that nostalgia has been challenged in recent decades through the wars and their aftermath. Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar nationalism regard, for different reasons, Tito’s pan-Yugoslav project as inimical to their respective national interests, and nationalist rhetoric has a firm grip on many sectors of local media.

>The passport, as Yugoslavia was a non-aligned country, allowed its holders to travel very widely, not just to the West.

Why does “A Guide to the Serbian Mentality by Momo Kapor” say that they were not permitted to travel internationally?

That is correct. Tito is very loved and respected even now, and not just by older generations but rather pretty much even younger folks think he was a great guy. He's considered great because he managed to unify the whole balkan slavic block (despite religious differences), and there were even talks to bring Bulgaria into Yugoslavia, however Stalin objected and that never happened. People love him because he wasnt a shitty dictator, he didnt abuse his power, and he fought off both the nazis and the fascists. After Tito died, Yugoslavia went on a downfall, both economically and socially. There was also ofcourse a lot of foreign meddling.

They were different. My parents (form former soviet commie bloc) tried in vain to get approval from secret service to travel to Yugoslavia, you literally had to have special stamp in the passport on the border or ciao or worse.

Traveling of whole family with small child was seemed risky due to possibility of family escaping to the west. Heck, we couldn't travel easily even within bloc itself.

I’ve heard this all too. My father grew up and lived in the former Yugoslavia. He’s since spoken about how well regarded Tito was and the opinion many had that he played a big hand in keeping Yugoslavia united whilst he was alive. He’s also talked about how Yugoslavia was sort of a buffer zone between the east and west and so a lot of freedoms were available to citizens there that weren’t in the full on communist countries. E.g when he was younger he did some work trips to Germany and on top of earning deutschmarks had a side hustle smuggling back jeans and records to sell.

Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.

> Oh yeah and my folks gave me the impression growing up that Albania was scary as hell back then.

My best friend for a while in elementary school was a girl from an Albanian refugee family. Even she, an eight-year old, had only scary things to tell about Albania, mostly told to her by her parents and grandparents I guess.

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