Milosevic Read Online Free PDF Page B

society. For a few years at least, the rosy faces of the Young Communists and Young Pioneers that shone from Communist–era posters were modelled on real life. Communist states expended much energy on their young generation, regarding them as untainted by capitalist society. Pressed into the correct Marxist mould, they would be the building blocks of the new classless Yugoslavia.
    Even now, many adults in eastern Europe recall their Communist childhoods with nostalgia. As recently as the late 1990s, one of the best–selling CDs in neighbouring Hungary was
The Best of Communism
, featuring youthful choirs singing homages to Lenin, Stalin and various Marxist worthies. ‘After the war, when I was a young man, our generation was full of hope, even though the country was ruined,’ said Hungarian film director Peter Bacso. ‘We believed in a new world based on justice. I was so enthusiastic that when I was a young poet, I even wrote lyrics for the songs we sang in the summer camps.’ 11 Bacso later found fame exposing the absurdity of the one party system in his film
The Witness
, in which Communist Party officials claim that a lemon is the first Hungarian orange.
    At that time, in the 1950s and 1960s, Yugoslav young people were frequently drafted into labour brigades to build roads or railways. The working holidays were arduous, but enjoyable, bringing together idealistic youth of the different Yugoslav republics and foreign volunteers as well. Like the founders of the first kibbutzim, the young Communists believed that physical prowess was part of the process of building the new, socialist, man and woman. Roads and railways were more than a means of efficient transport, they bound the diverse nations of Yugoslavia together, linking republic capitals such as Belgrade in Serbia and Zagreb in Croatia, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Skopje in Macedonia. The road linking Belgrade and Zagreb was even known as the ‘Highway of Brotherhood and Unity’. Under Tito such projects were also a symbolof modernity. Even now Yugoslavia’s network of motorways is far more efficient than those in Poland or Hungary.
    So it was perfectly natural that the school students of Pozarevac would also be called to do their socialist duty. Together with her schoolmates, Seska Stanojlovic went to Slovenia to help build a motorway there. Slobodan helped organise the trip. But while the workers’ state of course had to be constructed that did not mean he personally had to wield a pickaxe, and he stayed at home. ‘Slobodan did not participate. He did not like to work, only to be a leader,’ she said. Years later Stanojlovic asked a local photographer if he had a picture of Slobodan in the youth work brigade at home in Pozarevac. He had such a picture, he informed her. It showed all the young people working, and Milosevic standing at the side.

2
Meeting Mira
Teenage Sweethearts
1958–62
    He is an extremely handsome man, a superior man with fine human qualities. He has strong feelings for other people, for their problems and needs. He is a good speaker, and he has a strong and natural inner stability.
    Mira Markovic, on her husband. 1
    Slobodan Milosevic was a loner, but his schoolmate Mira Markovic certainly liked the way he looked. She noticed that he always wore neat and clean clothes. He behaved properly and had good manners. He was well regarded by the school teachers, who even trusted him enough to fetch the disabled weapons used in military training classes.
    And Milosevic certainly knew all about Mira Markovic, a young woman with a powerful name. With her thick dark hair and luminous black eyes, she had a certain appeal, although she was not the most beautiful girl in school. She was a daughter of the most famous revolutionary family in Pozarevac. She lived in one of the grandest houses in the city, a fine mansion once owned by a Serbian duke, whose walls included Roman ruins. Both her parents, Vera Miletic