From War “Reconstructions” to War Preparations
The very first pohod (march), held in 1947 for Croatian pioneers, represented precisely such a reconstruction of the route traversed by the 13th Proletarian Brigade and 6th Lika Shock Division (Paravina, 1961, pp.
7-8). This format (recreating trails of certain partisan military units during a specific phase of World War II) remained the most basic and most common routing rationale, and the whole system of partisan marches eventually came to be associated with this subtype. Besides reconstructing military itineraries, other kinds of routes were also recreated, as in the march Following the Trails of the AVNOJ Delegates, which remembered the paths crossed by the delegates from different regions of occupied Yugoslavia on their way toward the town of Jajce, where the Antifascist Council proclaimed the federal Yugoslav republic in 1943. Another variant revolved around the mobility of important individuals from the antifascist movement. The most significant of these were the marches connected to Tito’s wartime mobility, but there were also other person-centered partisan marches, mostly dedicated to distinguished individuals who had lost their lives during the war (e.g., Ivo Lola Ribar or Ivan Goran Kovacic). The presence of the communist antifascist movement in many parts of Yugoslavia (although with differing manpower and combat activity), and the fact that partisan soldiers came from all regions, allowed the creation of hundreds of local itineraries retracing paths of local partisan brigades. The temporal frame for marches was most often connected to anniversaries of the reconstructed events or, alternatively to state holidays. The most obvious sign of a particular march’s success was that it would become “traditional” (tradicionalni), in the sense of being held annually. Those marches that recreated the most famous wartime military operations were given a higher status by political authorities, which meant that their organization was undertaken on the federal level. These marcheswere also assigned much greater subsidies by the state and big companies, which allowed the organizing teams to invite participants from all parts of the country, giving these practices a pan-Yugoslav character.Retracing the historically recorded paths of partisans was but one aspect of the “reliving” of World War II by postwar youth. In many marches, the spatial component was complemented by the recreation of the combat-based wartime episodes that occurred in those locations—battles between partisan soldiers and the occupying forces. These partisan-themed “battle reconstructions” (rekonstrukcije bitaka) took place at the original battlefields, usually on the anniversaries of the battles. These events were particularly popular in the early 1950s when the veteran league bragged that at least one such action was held in every Yugoslav county, with some events numbering up to 10,000 participants, such as the reenactment of the 1944 battle for Belgrade.2 Battle reconstructions required the active participation and support of the army, both in technical and military equipment and in personnel. This even allowed battles fought at sea to be reconstructed, albeit less frequently. Such was the reenactment The Adriatic at War that was held as part of the countrywide celebrations in 1961 of the 20th anniversary of the People’s Uprising, with the navy actively helping to “dramatize” important sea battles during the People’s Liberation Struggle.3
Noncombatant events that had been closely connected to the military actions of partisans were also the subject of these reconstructions. In 1963, Yugoslav alpinists reenacted the evacuation of partisan soldiers across the canyon of the Sutjeska River at the very same location where it had happened in 1943.4 Similarly, the action Lika ‘84 brought scouts from all parts of Croatia to the village of Srb, where they reenacted the beginning of the People’s Uprising, as well as recreating the “people’s exodus” into the mountains and accommodating them in refugee camps.
Afterward, representatives of each scout battalion traveled to the nearby Otocac in order to reconstruct the first session of the Croatian Antifascist Council in 1941. Local residents were also invited to this session, along with the surviving participants of the original Council.5 The process of forming partisan units during the war was also recreated. The joint action of scouts and hostelers in 1961 had the participants repeat steps through which smaller groups came together in the woods and formed bigger units in order to have the final gathering (several thousand people strong) in the county seat where the “people’s liberation committee” convened and broadcast radio messages to the general public via Radio Zagreb.6 The 1977 march Following the Trail of the Supreme Headquarters and Comrade Tito in 1941 and 1942 similarly commenced with participants grouping themselves “like real war units,” walking “according to military rules,” and imitating the indoctrination process that occurred within real partisan units by forming internal cells of the Communist Party.7Apart from their commemorative significance, youth-oriented battle reenactments fulfilled another important function for the Yugoslav regime:Retracing the Revolution 113 to improve the country’s defense power. This became a necessity after the split between Tito and Stalin in 1948, when Yugoslavia came into a vulnerable diplomatic position, being simultaneously outside and between the two ideological blocs that had divided the world. Therefore, involving large parts of the population in the system of partisan marches (and battle reconstructions in particular) ensured their simultaneous inclusion into the “military training of civilians.” Thus, Yugoslav veterans interpreted the massive participation in the rekonstrukcije held during 1951 and 1952 as “a manifestation of the people’s willingness to defend the country from East European countries and the USSR.”8 This purpose of reenacting past battles in order to prepare for future ones was also reflected in the view of the Croatian youth league that “getting to know the beauties of our homeland encourages the development of patriotic feelings, and the very lifestyle of marches, with their elements of pre-military training, fosters a strong and reliable attitude of relentless fighting against every kind of enemy that would endanger the legacy of the great People’s Liberation Struggle and the People’s Revolution.”9 Despite the subsequent geopolitical consolidation of Yugoslavia in between the Cold War blocs, the militarization of the population (especially the youth) remained one of the paramount goals of the regime until the end of the federation, with its pinnacle in the creation of the Territorial Defense, which played a big role in the violent dissolution of the country (Basic, 2004).
The fact that partisan reenactments encompassed this pragmatic aspect of preparing the population for the possibility of foreign invasion had significant consequences for the subsequent evolution of these practices.
Accommodating to the needs of the future (and to the resources of the present) often took priority over an insistence on accurate reconstruction of the past. Thus, the relevant committees concluded in 1966 that battle reconstructions, in the form in which they were organized at the time, did not entirely fulfill “contemporary needs of our society and lacked the elements required by the task of preparing the population for defense in all modes of danger, with regards to the technical and general development of production forces and the needs of contemporary warfare.”10 This was part of the veterans’ league’s more overarching reexamination of the previously pursued memory politics, with the ultimate aim of making commemorative practices more approachable to the younger generations by trying to rely on the past in a less direct manner. In one letter from the veterans’ league presidency to the leaders of the League of the Socialist Youth, “[t]urning towards the revolutionary past must always be in service of today and tomorrow.”11 On the other hand, the official report of the commission in charge of memory politics stated:[Our] relationship towards the revolutionary traditions must not be laden with a cult of the past, but must be oriented towards the present instead [...]. The liberation, revolutionary, combatant, moral, andcultural traditions cannot be viewed as values of a heroic but bygone era [...]. Therefore, revolutionary traditions cannot be understood as something given for eternity, as a myth, as a legend, or as some mystic cult. They are not the past etched in stone, because they live in people and with people, serving them as motivation and encouragement for the revolutionary tradition.12
This prompted a gradual departure from the insistence on reconstructing real events, turning instead to an amalgamation of reenacting select partisan tactics with reinforcing the pragmatic needs of modern civilian protection.
The most famous among such hybrid practices was the annual emergency drill Nothing May Surprise Us, founded by Croatian scouts in 1967 (Bjazic, 1982). Drawing continuity with scouts’ annual reenactments, this event transformed them into typical public safety exercises, such as the evacuation drills of civilians in the aftermath of catastrophic floods, devastating air strikes, or nuclear assaults.13 Another trend was the proliferation of actions inspired by the illegal activities of the resistance movement in occupied cities. Such events, which put participants “in the shoes” of communist saboteurs in order to test their stealth abilities, were frequently used in the annual reviews (smotre) that the pioneer and scout leagues organized to showcase their activities to a wider public. In the scouts’ action Rebellion 1941-1961, as many as 16,000 people in Croatia participated. In Zagreb, the “illegals” wrote graffiti on pavements; in Rijeka, they threw leaflets around the town; while in Kostajnica, they had to infiltrate the military compound and measure guarded objects.14 During a similar action called Ilegalac in Ljubljana, the secretly selected resistance members had to disseminate communist leaflets under the veil of night and hang their flags on the local church and post office (Pelko, 1960).Even though these events celebrated the clandestine activities of urban antifascists, their outcome was left to the individual participants’ abilities. Thus, in the 1961 edition of Ilegalac, 22 out of 40 “illegals” were actually caught by “the enemy,” thus failing the task (Anon., 1961). At the yearly review of Croatian pioneers, participants would come together in the school building in Zlatar, which represented “liberated territory.” This perimeter was surrounded by occupied land and guarded by the “enemy” (acted out by local youth league members). Beyond the enemy territory lay the “friendly” partisan unit that had to be reached. The scenario began with secret messages received by parachutes within the free territory.
Scouts had to hide these messages well, pass unnoticed through the enemy territory, find the partisan headquarters, guess the correct contact person, and use the right password in order to relay the message. During their movement, the pioneers were allowed to ask locals for directions because the provided maps covered only a small segment of the terrain. The catch was that many locals were also “enemies” in disguise. In an attempt to elude interrogators, some participants tried to pose as locals by mimicking the local dialect. OtherRetracing the Revolution 115 proved overtly “defiant” and failed the task by openly showing their disdain toward the interrogators.15Partisan marches and other already existing remembrance formats reflected the perpetuation of the legacy of the People’s Liberation Struggle, in line with the general inclination of the chief political ideologues in Yugoslavia to extend the duration of the communist revolution into the indefinite future. The above-mentioned examples imply that partisan reenactments gradually abandoned scripted adherence to known historical facts about the “reconstructed” event and its known outcome. Instead, partisan-themed events took on traits of collective games and competitions due to their open-ended result that depended on the reenactors’ abilities and thus did not have to reflect their nominal historical referent. More generally, starting in the 1960s, the temporal orientation of partisan-themed mobilities shifted from the past to the future, even though the abundance of open references to World War II history still embedded these future-oriented drills, exercises, and competitions within the overarching remembrance policies. On a broader level, this change also points to a possible transnational process, given the emergence of kindred practices in other societies, such as the Soviet Zarnitsa games, which were founded precisely in this period, albeit in a much more centralized manner.
Reframing scripted reenactments as open-ended games and competitions enabled a much freer approach by the organizers to conceptualize these practices according to their pragmatic needs, such as increasing the physical fitness of the population or raising the military preparedness of civilians. Concurrently, this change also lent greater importance to the agency of the participants, who now took active roles in the “scripting process.” Rather than following the already established course of past events, it was their personal abilities and creativity that conditioned the outcome. Arguably, this gave a new quality to their participation, increasing the personal investment of children and youth in the assigned tasks by having them devise their own tactics to fulfill them. This points to the issue of the relationship between historical accuracy (embodied through the reenactment’s script) and the degree of personal immersion and self-identification with the reenacted past (Daugbjerg, 2017). The less Yugoslav youths played “the role” of a concrete partisan unit fighting in a clearly defined spatiotemporal context, the more they could articulate their own creative energies in the staged partisan setting, even if still filtering their acts through officially approved political symbols and cultural references.