I don't have their book, but I do have a print of Socialist Modernism in the Former Yugoslavia [0]. It overlaps a lot in terms of photography and aesthetic but lacks the story.
[0]: https://urbanicagroup.ro/ushop/publications/album/socialist-...
https://archive.org/details/sovietbusstops0000herw
Edit: I see that the book about Spomeniks and the one linked above were actually both released by the same publisher — Fuel.
> there were many in Yugoslavia who refused to fully integrate into this communist-led multi-cultural society [...] During the hey-day of Yugoslavia, this resentment and anger was very much kept in check by the Yugoslavian government's intense efforts in stamping out inter-ethnic retaliations, nationalism or religious hatred in any form, accompanied by the intense promotion of the ideals of 'Brotherhood and Unity'.
— to me read like they celebrate the Yugoslav communists. Would be curious to know if it's just me, or others also share the impression.
FWIW Yugoslavia was open to tourism during the Cold War. My father drove from the UK to Dubrovnik with a friend in the 60s. I retraced part of that trip about 5 years ago. I'd have seen more had this site and book been available, but I stumbled on a few of the places on their map.
Not on their map is Zeljava [1] which was an airbase with extensive underground tunnels under a mountain on the Bosnia/Croatia border. At the time, a few parts of it were cleared out with bits of spares amongst the debris. There is a UXO hazard away from worn pathways. This is highlighted by the mine signs. I think there have been a few accident since the war in the 90s, but inside there was a bigger risk from falling concrete (look up for blast door). Recent photos [2] show it has been cleaned up a lot.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDeljava_Air_Base [2] https://www.scmp.com/photos/today-photos/3238875/once-secret...
Some might argue with this but it's notable that a majority wanted out of Yugoslavia and Serbia was willing to use force to stop that.
In my travels, those who think of the communist era as "the good old days" are usually those who had a relatively privileged position in those times and were affiliated with the communist party and often Serbian. For most people communism was an oppressive system that delivered little in the way of quality of life compared to democratic states and repressed personal freedoms.
Full disclosure: I'm an ethnic Croatian.
The reason why Balkans is such a shit-show for centuries is in the similar mentality of the people living here, embodied in the saying "God, please make my neighbor's cow die"; mentality, language and culture of Croatians, Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenians is 90% the same.
There is a reason why Yugo-nostalgia is such a thing in this region, and a great great majority of regular folks did not have anything against any of their neighbors, were mixing like crazy, and in a lot of cases living their best lives then - until politics and power struggles of very few, pushed by the West as well, destroyed most of what was good. Of course SFRJ had a lot of traits of communist regimes, in forced culture and "unity" aspects that were bothering people to some extent (not unsimilar to how those exist even in modern Germany, for example), but that was definitely not the main reason for the failure of the federation.
In the manufactured scenario that lead to the breakup, Milosevic gained a disproportionate number of votes in the federation, through basically taking over the political top of other members - but a lot of people also note how it was Croatia that was disproportionately favored by Tito for decades before and it created the "unequal" sentiment - just to advance the point that finger-pointing is always a thing and not useful for the discussion. If we were any smarter and had less self-absorbed and everyone-else-is-to-blame mentality , we would have formed at least economic alliances between the former Yugoslav countries not long after the breakup - in the end, we're all pretty much the same idiots, and got played. (Also, to clarify, I'm Croatian).
What divides us is infinitely smaller than what unites us, and yet nationalists poisoned minds with what Freud called the narcissm of small differences.
Croats always claimed Serbs dominated Yugoslavia, while Serbs always claimed the opposite. The result was war and poverty.
Yugoslavia was nothing like the USSR, with much higher freedom of expression, an economic system based on coops competing on a market and freedom to travel.
For what it's worth, I'm also ethnic Croatian.
I could tell you’re Croatian the moment I read that line.
Don’t you feel that, given the history of Serbs and Croats taking turns oppressing and/or massacring one another, that’s a bit of a simplification?
> Operated by the governing Ustaše regime, Europe's only Nazi collaborationist regime that operated its own extermination camps
> It quickly grew into the third largest concentration camp in Europe
> Unlike German Nazi-run camps, Jasenovac lacked the infrastructure for mass murder on an industrial scale, such as gas chambers. Instead, it "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind", and prisoners were primarily murdered with the use of knives, hammers, and axes, or shot
> Ustaše regime having murdered somewhere near 100,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945
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Flower Monument on Spomenik Database: https://www.spomenikdatabase.org/jasenovec
