Among the countries which emerged as socialist republics in the aftermath of World War II, Yugoslavia was peculiar because its communists succeeded in liberating a bigger part of the country through their own military initiative, with only a marginal contribution from the Soviet Red Army.
This fact served as one of the primary legitimization arguments for the new regime, particularly after the country’s leader Josip Broz Tito abandoned Stalin’s tutelage in 1948. Whereas in foreign policy this paved the way for the subsequent Yugoslav defiance of the Cold War’s diplomatic binaries, in internal politics the narrative of the home-grown antifascist victory (termed the “People’s Liberation Struggle”) formed the basis for the political mythology that celebrated partisans (communist guerrilla fighters) and their revolutionary deeds.
Throughout the following four decades, the communist authorities persisted in devising various mechanisms for promoting the official history of partisans’ wartime military achievements, merging it with the concept of equality of Yugoslav nations expressed through the country’s federal structure and popularly known as “brotherhood and unity of Yugoslav peoples.” In these efforts, the leading ideologues deemed it particularly important to reach out to younger generations that did not have a personal experience of these venerated events.“Partisan marches” (partizanski pohodi), also known as “marches following the Revolution’s trails” (pohodi stazama Revolucije), were among the most widespread collective practices fashioned to fulfill this aim. These collective mobilities, organized by a diverse set of state-sponsored institutions and associations, took participants along the trails of wartime partisan units and had them take part in different types of symbol-laden activities at the sites of important events for the history of the People’s Liberation Struggle (e.g., battle sites, partisan hideouts in the wilderness, concentration camps). Geographically, these marches ranged from short regional trails traversed by locals to itineraries that crossed the territory of several Yugoslav constituent republics and brought together people from all over the federation.
First organized in 1947, this form of symbolic mobility became one of the most notable institutionally organized pastime activities for Yugoslav children and adolescents in the following decades. By the 1960s, the countrywideDOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-8 annual attendance amounted to several million people (Anon., 1962). Apart from providing the opportunity to personally experience spatial landmarks of the ruling ideology, partisan marches also offered a controlled setting for social interaction between residents of geographically distant communities in different Yugoslav republics.
The aim of this contribution is to analyze partisan marches in socialist Yugoslavia as a form of reenacting events from World War II, as well as a way of recreating the wartime experience of partisan soldiers. Additionally, the conceptual framework of pilgrimage as a form of reenactment will be used to study the strong reliance of these practices on the collective bodily traversing of culturally significant routes. After a brief introduction to the institutional mechanism of the social-political organizations (drustveno-politicke organizacije) that stood behind these practices, the concepts of pilgrimage and reenactment will be elaborated. The analysis will then move to selected cases in which concrete military episodes from the history of the partisans’ movement were reenacted within the scope of civilian military training. Subsequently, attention will be given to the intra-institutional negotiations underlying the process of labeling partisan reenactments as authentic. The discussion will also include general efforts on the part of Yugoslav political institutions to have younger generations “relive” specific aspects of participating in a wartime guerrilla movement. The underlying argument is that, in the early socialist period, the practice of partisan marches was conceptualized around the insistence on reenacting concrete historical events, but the marches were embedded within the agenda of training civilians for the case of foreign invasion in light of Yugoslavia’s insecure geopolitical position at the time.
In the following decades, the heavily militarized format of battle reconstructions gave way to more ludic and regionally specific framings of reenacting the past, which aimed for a more active engagement of young participants with history by relating their needs and interests to select facets of the wartime guerrilla lifestyle. Rather than fostering physical preparedness in the case of a foreign invasion by reconstructing World War II episodes, these later reenactments were aimed at moral transformation of the participating individuals through symbolic self-identification with the idealized role-model figure of a partisan soldier.This research is based on the documents produced by institutional collectives that directly organized partisan marches on different administrative levels and concurrently formed the crux of the participant pool. These sources include logistical documentation, plans, maps, programs, session notes, and organizational manuals, as well as internal and public reports and evaluations of completed actions. The specialized printed media produced for (and very often by) members of these collectives—bulletins, newspapers, leaflets, monographs—serve as an additional source base, providing an intersection of external and internal perspectives. While such sources provide insight into the diversity of partisan-themed practices and the complexity of their organizational apparatus, it should be acknowledged that itRetracing the Revolution 107 mostly represents the institutional top-down perspective of the organizers. Even though the emic position is partially revealed through the institutions’ (often explicitly emphasized) insistence on recording and critically reflecting on participants’ impressions and reactions, it is very difficult to gain insights from such sources into individuals’ feelings and cognitive processes during and after the marches. Therefore, the focus will be on practices performed by specific actors as recorded and represented in the public setting and in the semi-public sphere of intra-institutional discussions.