Croatia by Marcus Tanner

Author:Marcus Tanner [Tanner, Marcus]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Croatia, Yugoslavia, war
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

‘Comrade Tito Is Dead’

The whole people has declared for unity, and the leadership which is not able to see that will lose the confidence of the people, and ought to lose it.

Slobodan Miloševi, 19841

The announcement by the federal presidency in the spring of 1980 ended four months of speculation about his illness. ‘To the working class, to the working people and citizens, to the people and nationalities of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – Comrade Tito is dead.’ It went on: ‘On 4 May at 15.05 in Ljubljana the great heart of the President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to beat.’ As the Blue Train carried his body from the Slovene capital through Zagreb to its final resting place in the House of Flowers in Belgrade, Croats caught their last glimpse of the man who had ruled them for thirty-five years. It was a suitably regal end for a man whom the great English historian A. J. P. Taylor considered ‘the last of the Habsburgs’, ruling over different nations by playing them off one against another and reining in their nationalist hostilities.2

In Croatia the twilight of Tito’s long reign was marked by continued political repression and relative economic prosperity. It was characteristic of Tito that he gave with one hand and took with the other. After purging the Croat Party of nationalists he then mollified many of those same nationalists’ grievances with the new Yugoslav constitution in 1974. The competences of the federal government were reduced to defence, foreign policy and a few economic instruments, Serbia lost more authority over the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, and the right to nominate officials to federal bodies was surrendered to the individual republics and provinces.

The leaders of the Croatian Spring were dispersed. Holjevac had died in 1970. Tudjman was jailed, as were many others. Tripalo and Dabevi-Kuar retreated into silence – the price for not being sent to jail. The authorities in the mid-1970s remained vigilant against the faintest hint of criticism. In a telling move the magazine Praxis was closed in 1975. The magazine, which had started in the mid-1960s, had given its name to a large circle of Marxist philosophers, some of whom were somewhat inaccurately labelled dissidents in the West. Not all were Croats, but the editor, Rudi Supek, was a Croat and the journal was based in Zagreb and printed in Sisak. The Praxis group bitterly opposed anything that smacked of bourgeois nationalism and had very poor relations with the Party leadership under Dabevi-Kuar and Tripalo. For that very reason they were patronised by Šuvar and the ultra-orthodox Communists who took over Croatia in 1971–2. Yet, even though Šuvar publicly praised the Praxis group, the magazine was shut down in February 1975.3

Repression was so efficient and opposition so splintered that Croatia appeared uncommonly calm from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. In 1985 one foreign observer even remarked that ‘the Croatian front of the national question has been unusually (and perhaps deceptively) quiet

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