Milosevic Read Online Free PDF

transformed from a sleepy provincial settlement into a bustling regional centre. Pavements were laid, roads were asphalted and buildings went up. More shops opened, and eventually, a department store.
    The town’s cinemas reflected Yugoslavia’s position perched between east and west. Cinema–goers could watch
Dial M for Murder
, westerns with Doris Day or admire Marilyn Monroe, as well the best of the 1950s Soviet film industry. ‘From the early 1950s we felt that we were back in Europe. We listened to Radio Luxembourg, especially at night. We knew about the latest new films, American, British and French new wave. We talked about films and music like young people in the west,’remembers Seska Stanojlovic, a childhood friend of Slobodan Milosevic, and now a journalist with the Belgrade liberal news weekly
Vreme
. The two first met at the age of five, on a school holiday to the eastern Serbian mountains. Like all Yugoslav children they played not cowboys and Indians but partisans and Germans. Plenty of women had fought with the partisans, but Stanojlovic, like every girl, was forced to play a nurse. Slobodan was almost certainly a partisan.
    In many ways Titoist Yugoslavia in the 1950s resembled austere post–war Britain. The state always provided just about enough, but luxuries were rare and there was little choice. Clothes and shops were drab. As Stanojlovic noted, everyone had but one of everything. But nobody froze or starved, even if supper was often bread covered with dripping or home–made jam. There was no television or central heating. Boilers were fired up with wood and coal, to warm enough water for a bath. Yet there was a feeling of optimism in the air, that fundamentally Tito was steering a good course, and life was getting better.
    Although Stanojlovic’s family were members of the haute bourgeoisie, who had once owned considerable property, as a schoolgirl she was a loyal Communist. ‘My mother and my grandmother were quite rich. We had a big house and some land, but it was nationalised. My grandmother was angry, but I was a small child, and I just accepted that we were growing up in this kind of society. We accepted this idea of a new society, that we were all equal, as something normal, that this is how we have to grow up.’
    Slobodan’s doting mother attempted to fill the vacuum left at home by the departure of her husband. Stanislava Milosevic became the centre of her son’s childhood universe. Stanislava was an ambitious woman for her children as well as herself. Other mothers made do with whatever clothes were to hand when they dressed their children for school. But Stanislava took care every day to send Slobodan out in a fresh white shirt, like a junior version of the Communist official she hoped he would be. The serious young boy made few friends at school and avoided sports. ‘Stanislava was a protective and dominant mother. Slobodan did not even go to the gym in case he sweated and caught a cold,’ says Milica Kovac. Milosevic gained the nickname ‘silky’. He never got into a fight, or raided the orchards in the lush farmland around Pozarevac. Friendless and fatherless, mocked for his weediness and unwillingness to join the rough and tumble of the playground, the young schoolboy instead took refuge in his studies. Milosevic spent hisspare time writing for the school magazine and working for the pupils’ Communist youth organisation. And still, there was something different about the young Slobodan. Not exactly a star quality, but an aura of, at the very least, unusual determination. ‘Slobodan was his own person,’ said Seska Stanojlovic. ‘He was an excellent student. Even at that time it was clear to me that he was absolutely devoted to his personal ambitions.’
    In this more cynical age it might seem hard to believe, but Yugoslavia’s first post–war generation really believed it was constructing a new