bout the same as living in Iraq or Syria today..or maybe Europe in a frw months when more countries pull out

Living in Europe at the end of WW2 – where no effective police force existed – was hell itself! Only rampaging armies and revanchists

30 million Russians died and as the Sun would put it, ’twas the Red Army what won it, innit!

When I hear a yank. Say if it wasn’t for us you’d be speaking I say if it wasn’t for the Russians you would be speaking German.

Tiso in Slovakia.

Thanks Adam. That’s him.

You got over 30 red thumbs for your comment. The world is full of idiots.

In all fairness it was a very successful and peaceful country for the next 40 years… post communism and especially post war they’re all worse off now… some more than others obviously

The peace was enforced by the iron grip of Marshal Tito. Lets not be fooled because he wouldn’t join with Stalin and join the Warsaw pact. His grip on power was as strong as any of the contemporary communist leaders of his time. And the peace only started to crack and break down after his death.

Peace was enforced by the iron grip of Marshal Tito. Don’t be fooled just because he didn’t join the Russians in the Warsaw pact .His grip on power was as strong as any of the contemporary communist leaders of his time. And only after his death when the party started to loose its grip on power did the cracks in the peace start.

Mick, not exactly. I have lived in the former Yugoslavia for quite a while now, and Serbia (parts of, but notably Belgrade) was also Austro-Hungarian,and Ottoman, at different times, Northern Serbia such a Vojvodina is clearly Austro-Hungarian in its make up. The Serb’s owed no allegiance to the Russians, more so to the Partizans, which is why Tito didn’t join the Warsaw pact, and instead, spurned the USSR by forming the non-aligned movement.

Completely agree with you Elvedin. Yugoslav’s (most of them) had a quality of life far far better than Irish people had over the course of Tito’s rule.

I would have thought what you (Mick) say is indisputable. Once the people had a choice, the country fell apart.

Most people here disagree. That says more about them than Yugoslavia though…

Padraic, this is like saying that it’s better to have one leg bitten off by a shark than two. While Yugoslavia was doing better than some of their neighbours and perhaps Ireland (although I would question this assertion) it was still an economic basket case. The countries that succeeded Yugoslavia are not doing much better these days. They never had a proper economy and have had no chance of developing one. At the end of WW1 they were plunged into an orient-like kingdom (Serbs leading the show knew no better having spent 800 years under Turks). And then after WW2 they went for a faulty economic model. Now they are joining another project on the verge of failure – EU.

Padraic in your time living in the region… how many people had positive things to say about “the good old days” ?

There was a quality of life and employment levels which none of the six countries will reach for a long time..

My grandmother lived through poverty after ww1 period… through world war 2 and through the latter years of her life in communist Yugoslavia… she moved to Ireland in 96 after the yugo war ended… until she died she had a portrait of Tito on her wall… which is still in the house… simply because the happiest and most peaceful days of her life were in that time… both periods before and after were characterised by war, exile, etc…

Whether you agree with communism (I don’t) is irrelevant here… but coming from people who lived in that time my grannies and my parents generation… those were the days…. no one cared who was Croatian Serb Bosnian or who was Orthodox Christian, Catholic or Muslim… it was irrelevant my dads best friends growing were a mixture of these people… this alone leaves a huge legacy for Tito from people from that region…

Irrelevant of how it appeared to the rest of the world… all former Yugoslavians get nostalgic and talk and sing of the good old days! And why wouldn’t they?

Also Dom in terms of economy and employment… communist Yugoslavia was nearly a self sufficient country… everything from matches to cars was manufactured at home and exported not imported like these days which happens to result in large percentage of employment… which is the other around now

Elvedin, I do not care whether a country is self sufficient or nt. That only matters in times of war and in fact looking at the history the ties when more countries strived towards being self sufficient were usually leading to wars.

As to your rosy picture of former Yugoslavia, my memories are quite different. I remember crappy products like washing machines from Montenegro and cars from Serbia which were constantly breaking down. Home electronics whrom Croatia were not any better. The only reason we had this junk in our homes was that it was impossible to import anything decnt.The fact remains that the entire eastern block failed to produce a single toaster that someone would buy out of their free will. I also remember hyper inflation towards the end of this failed experiment.

Finally, my grandma also had a picture of Tito until the day she died. But she was a semi-literate country girl probably just like yours. Comrade Tito had special appeal to this particular audience and also to Bosnians who will be eternally grateful to Tito for creating them as a nation state. In fact, Bosnians were so crazy for Tito and all things Yugoslavian that they were still singing praise to the Yugoslav Army in Sarajevo while that Tito’s beast was already killing them on the outskirts of Bosnia.

@Dom

I am speaking of quality of life and yes is was better. It’s pretty much what everyone here says. Regardless of the economic model (which was unsustainable) I am speaking of quality of life.

As for poorer, yes, Slovenia is the exception, but you comments about Croatia are wrong. Outside of Zagreb, and maybe the more affluent tourist driven coastal areas, most of the country is much poorer, Croatia is broke and they are selling their motorway network to the Chinese as we speak. I drive about the countryside quite a bit here and also speak Serbian/Bosnian well so, I am pretty clued in as to what is going on here. I also work in the private sector, so I am genuinely participating in the real life economy here, not some NGO international ogranisation ‘project’.

As for Yugoslavia, on Tito’s birthday, Sarajevo hosts a huge party with fireworks. Yugo nostalgia is rife.

@ Padraic,

I am not sure where exactly is that you live / work, sounds like it’s Bosnia. No surprise there about their nostalgia for the ex-Yu because today they’re worse off.

Croatia did not have a motorway system (except the Zagreb-Belgrade route which was crappy and semi-finished) during ex-Yu so it’s a great achievement that they built one in the last 10 or so years. All the economic data today is better than it was during ex-Yugoslavia so it is not true that the quality of life was better. You will find few Croats crying for the old days. But you will find plenty of Bosnians and Serbs who miss the old federal transfers.

Mark, to claim that the citizens of ex-Yu countries are much poorer than they were before Yugoslavia broke apart is a blanket statement correct in some cases and incorrect in others. For sure Bosnians, Macedonians and some parts of Serbia are poorer but Slovenia and Croatia are doing better than before, Slovenia quite a bit better. Southern countries no longer benefit from federal transfers and their standard of living has been reduced. Bosnia was ravaged by war (Croatia too but to a lesser extent) and still suffers from divisions which hamper economic efforts. Bosnia today has GDP per capital levels of a Third World country. All ex-Yu countries still suffer from rather excessive bureaucracies, red tape and huge state involvement in economic activities. But let us not be fooled with pre-breakup GDP per capita figures. Those who trust statistics of former communist countries, do so at their own peril. This is largely so due to the way the output was calculated in planned and semi-planned economies.