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The Yugoslavs
The Yugoslavs [Jan 01, 1978] Doder, Dusko
- GenresHistory
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
2 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
About the author
Dusko Doder
17 books8 followersDusko Doder was an American journalist. He was the head of the Moscow bureau of the The Washington Post from 1981 until 1985.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 2, 2013
Fascinating artifact.
I found this book in a dusty corner of a city library in central Bosnia. Written in 1976, four years before Tito died, it is a freeze-frame artifact of a disappeared era.
Doder, educated in America, was born in Yugoslavia and speaks Serbo-Croatian. He was posted to Belgrade as the Washington Post's East European bureau chief for three years in the early 70s, with the resources, prestige, and access afforded by that position.
The book is a combination journalist's memoir and salon-on-paper. Most of it consists of dialogues with locals, high and low, urban and peasant. One of his featured interlocutors is Milovan Djilas, the hardline Stalinist who was Tito's intellectual, propagandist, and chief lieutenant from the late 30s until he was purged in 1953 for morphing into a sort-of Social Democrat.
Doder is a good storyteller and writes with the clarity of a trained journalist. So the book is engaging reading.
Yet, there is a quaintness and superficiality about his portrait of the country that seems innocent in hindsight. He gives much attention to what was then called "ethnic tensions," but he frames them almost entirely in Serb vs. Croat terms. He barely mentions Bosnia, which was the main battleground of the 90s war, or its 2 million Muslims, who were its main victims.
The rise of the consumer culture, he opined, was "making the country more united, in spite of itself." The main issue that would confront the post-Tito leadership, he rather innocently reassured us, was how to cope with the popular demand for more freedom. "I do not share apocalyptic views held by many Western experts about Yugoslavia's future; she will most likely survive Tito's departure without major turbulence."
Doder plainly had an enriching three years of wine, rakija, and dialogue. But he missed that the apocalypticals were right.
I found this book in a dusty corner of a city library in central Bosnia. Written in 1976, four years before Tito died, it is a freeze-frame artifact of a disappeared era.
Doder, educated in America, was born in Yugoslavia and speaks Serbo-Croatian. He was posted to Belgrade as the Washington Post's East European bureau chief for three years in the early 70s, with the resources, prestige, and access afforded by that position.
The book is a combination journalist's memoir and salon-on-paper. Most of it consists of dialogues with locals, high and low, urban and peasant. One of his featured interlocutors is Milovan Djilas, the hardline Stalinist who was Tito's intellectual, propagandist, and chief lieutenant from the late 30s until he was purged in 1953 for morphing into a sort-of Social Democrat.
Doder is a good storyteller and writes with the clarity of a trained journalist. So the book is engaging reading.
Yet, there is a quaintness and superficiality about his portrait of the country that seems innocent in hindsight. He gives much attention to what was then called "ethnic tensions," but he frames them almost entirely in Serb vs. Croat terms. He barely mentions Bosnia, which was the main battleground of the 90s war, or its 2 million Muslims, who were its main victims.
The rise of the consumer culture, he opined, was "making the country more united, in spite of itself." The main issue that would confront the post-Tito leadership, he rather innocently reassured us, was how to cope with the popular demand for more freedom. "I do not share apocalyptic views held by many Western experts about Yugoslavia's future; she will most likely survive Tito's departure without major turbulence."
Doder plainly had an enriching three years of wine, rakija, and dialogue. But he missed that the apocalypticals were right.
July 17, 2013
Having befriended a number of Bosnian refugees, having been related by a brother's marriage to a Bosnian Serb and having long been interested in the non-aligned movement, I, upon the break-up of Yugoslavia, began reading everything I could find about the country and its history including a biography of Tito, histories of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Djilas' various memoirs, the Germano-Italian occupation, the Partisan resistance etc.
Doder, later one of the prominent biographers of Milosevic, wrote this modern overview of Yugoslavian society before Tito's death. It is worth reading precisely because it antedates the war and the rather smug wisdom of some later writers exploiting the benefits of hindsight.
Doder, later one of the prominent biographers of Milosevic, wrote this modern overview of Yugoslavian society before Tito's death. It is worth reading precisely because it antedates the war and the rather smug wisdom of some later writers exploiting the benefits of hindsight.
October 27, 2024
Dusko Doder's 'The Yugoslavs' came into my life by a chance stop at a little
free library in my neighborhood. Doder is a Yugoslav-born american who spent 3 years living in Yugoslavia in the 1970s as a Washington Post journalist. I thoroughly enjoyed the book because I’ve been on a long quest to understand the Balkans better. As a teenager in the mid 1990s, I remember having a very hard time trying to keep track of who were the Bosnians and who were the Serbs. Who was fighting whom? Were the Kosovars Muslim? It’s definitely a weak knowledge area for me.
The book is a time capsule from a period of relative peace and stability for the Yugoslav people. What created these conditions? Doder helpfully explains how Tito's mild authoritarian (it wasn't always mild: it evolved over his decades in power) communist government agilely existed in the gap between the two great cold war powers. Tito boldly rebuffed Stalin in 1948 which gave him the flexibility to trade/interact with the west much more freely than Yugoslavia's eastern european neighbors. He also opened the borders which allowed his citizens to pursue work in the west (especially in West Germany) which helped propel the Yugoslav economy and raise living standards. That also created a cultural exchange between Yugoslavia and the west that its neighbors didn’t benefit from.
The book has many examples of the Yugoslav people navigating the rapid change from klannish traditional ways to modern consumerism. It all seems fairly sunny although Doder does observe the challenges of modernity, especially in the countryside.
This system kept a very diverse (faith, ethnicity, language, alphabet, etc) group of people together as Yugoslavia. The horrors of World War II (especially Nazi occupation and Serb-Croat sectarian violence during and after the war) are acknowledged in the book but feel decidedly in the rear view mirror of 1970s Yugoslavia. Of course those chickens would come home to roost in the early 1990s. Tito would die two years after this book was published and Doder acknowledges the challenge Yugoslavia would face absent the binding agent of Titoism. It didn't help that Tito suppressed many of his competent peers in order to eliminate credible competition. There was no succession plan.
Overall, this book was an educational and compelling look at a peaceful period (the 1970s) bookended by decades of bloodshed and horror (the 1940s and the 1990s). I am grateful that Dusko Doder wrote so carefully about his family's experience in the nation of his birth.
free library in my neighborhood. Doder is a Yugoslav-born american who spent 3 years living in Yugoslavia in the 1970s as a Washington Post journalist. I thoroughly enjoyed the book because I’ve been on a long quest to understand the Balkans better. As a teenager in the mid 1990s, I remember having a very hard time trying to keep track of who were the Bosnians and who were the Serbs. Who was fighting whom? Were the Kosovars Muslim? It’s definitely a weak knowledge area for me.
The book is a time capsule from a period of relative peace and stability for the Yugoslav people. What created these conditions? Doder helpfully explains how Tito's mild authoritarian (it wasn't always mild: it evolved over his decades in power) communist government agilely existed in the gap between the two great cold war powers. Tito boldly rebuffed Stalin in 1948 which gave him the flexibility to trade/interact with the west much more freely than Yugoslavia's eastern european neighbors. He also opened the borders which allowed his citizens to pursue work in the west (especially in West Germany) which helped propel the Yugoslav economy and raise living standards. That also created a cultural exchange between Yugoslavia and the west that its neighbors didn’t benefit from.
The book has many examples of the Yugoslav people navigating the rapid change from klannish traditional ways to modern consumerism. It all seems fairly sunny although Doder does observe the challenges of modernity, especially in the countryside.
This system kept a very diverse (faith, ethnicity, language, alphabet, etc) group of people together as Yugoslavia. The horrors of World War II (especially Nazi occupation and Serb-Croat sectarian violence during and after the war) are acknowledged in the book but feel decidedly in the rear view mirror of 1970s Yugoslavia. Of course those chickens would come home to roost in the early 1990s. Tito would die two years after this book was published and Doder acknowledges the challenge Yugoslavia would face absent the binding agent of Titoism. It didn't help that Tito suppressed many of his competent peers in order to eliminate credible competition. There was no succession plan.
Overall, this book was an educational and compelling look at a peaceful period (the 1970s) bookended by decades of bloodshed and horror (the 1940s and the 1990s). I am grateful that Dusko Doder wrote so carefully about his family's experience in the nation of his birth.
July 29, 2022
The best look into Yugoslavia before its collapse. Written by an ex-pat US citizen turned reporter it was - unintentionally - miles ahead of the post cold war reportage by the media's instant experts of the '90s. Albanian-Yugoslav Dusko Doder returned to his homeland under the Washington Post umbrella to analyze his former homeland upside down, inside-out, front and back in the mid-70s. In doing so he provided the most incisive account of his fragile homeland and its brittle balancing act between east and west and its own fault line.
The book concludes in a hopeful but indecisive mood in its 1980s limbo, just ten years before the country folded in on itself. Yet the tensions that erupted into bloodshed were all present, only requiring the right international context as in WW II. The legion of reporters and traveloguers descending on the country would have done well to read Doder's slim but packed volume, as opposed to poring over Rebecca West's encyclopedic but badly-dated tome, to understand what they saw.
If this country's modern fate interests you, read this one to understand the how and why of its ending.
The book concludes in a hopeful but indecisive mood in its 1980s limbo, just ten years before the country folded in on itself. Yet the tensions that erupted into bloodshed were all present, only requiring the right international context as in WW II. The legion of reporters and traveloguers descending on the country would have done well to read Doder's slim but packed volume, as opposed to poring over Rebecca West's encyclopedic but badly-dated tome, to understand what they saw.
If this country's modern fate interests you, read this one to understand the how and why of its ending.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews