The Authenticity of “Going Partisan”

The above-mentioned shift from reenacting concrete historical episodes to a “play” system inspired by partisan symbolism was coupled with a con­comitant change in the criteria for validating individual marches as authen­tic.

Indispensable in the process of routing partisan marches was the coopera­tion with institutions and researchers dealing with the history of the People’s Liberation Struggle. In many cases, it was actually the decision of a local branch of a social-political organization to commemorate events from their region’s wartime history through a partisan march that would prompt histo­rians and archivists to study the chosen route. However, the most prominent actors who could provide the required historical background knowledge on the reenacted movement of military units and the events that occurred during that movement were the original participants. Hence, the veterans’ league took the leading role in helping youth leagues to route trails and assigned their local members to share their experiences with marchers pass­ing through their region. After the reenactment itself, they would hold a lec­ture for the reenactors and answer their questions about both the original event and the reenactment.

It was not only the former partisans’ memories by which the reconstruc­tion of the past was labeled as authentic by the authorities but also the space itself. Moreover, within the veterans’ league, there were frequent discus­sions on the (in)dispensability of authentic space for the mission of young people reliving the events they commemorated. The proponents of the more “historicist” approach insisted that the historical accuracy of the location was paramount in correctly performing the commemorative acts. In the instructions for local clubs, the leadership of the Hosteling League consid­ered that regular gatherings of youth should be held at historical locations whenever possible.¹⁶ A delegate at the meeting of the veterans’ Commission for the Cherishing of Revolutionary Traditions in 1969 commented:

[...] one of the discussants mentioned it would be good if the big cele­brations were held at other spots, not only where those historical eventsRetracing the Revolution 117 took place. I am against it. Celebrations should be held where those events happened, because if we extract the event from the place where it occurred, in ten years’ time we will not know what we are celebrating anymore, because we will not be celebrating there where it happened.¹⁷

At the federal conference of social-political organizations dedicated to the further development of remembering the socialist revolution, the leagues’ delegates agreed it was essential for the perpetuation of the current memory practices that young people “genuinely live” the Struggle rather than passively learn about it.

Yet other functionaries argued that successful events could be organ­ized at “other” sites as well, in the sense that the contents of the program were more important to achieving the appropriate atmosphere within the group.¹⁸ Basically, as long the direct participants of the People’s Liberation Struggle were involved in creating the program for the march, the lack of direct correlation with a specific historical event was not detrimental to its didactic potential. The institutional flexibility in this regard was also a prac­tical matter since not all localities could fulfill the criterion of having been the site of important wartime events and thus could not be part of the web of partisan marches. For this reason, many local leagues started organizing marches where the historical relevance of the geographical setting took a back seat compared to the activities contained in the program. Such events can be said to have been emplotted in a “thematic” way, meaning that the places that constituted the route had not been part of any concrete histori­cal route but simply represented locations in one geographical or historical region that were connected to the “theme” of the respective march.

This type of route was suitable for the leagues’ local levels to symboli­cally represent their own region’s historical, geographical, or cultural spe­cificities. Such routes were also a means for local communities to establish trans-local links and socialization channels that did not need to rely on his­torical facts or corroborated research. Although such thematic trails were first organized as early as 1949, they became particularly popular beginning in the late 1950s. In that same period, the federal hosteling league recom­mended that gatherings of local branches should be thematic (tematski), with topics pertaining to “the economic development of our country,” “natural beauties of Yugoslavia,” or “learning about our peoples’ history” (Cerovic, 1958).

Drawing historical parallels between the marchers’ diversity and the diversity within the partisan units was but a symptom of a broader redefi­nition of the very adjective “partisan” (partizanski). At first, this label was attached as the marker of the action’s authenticity by referring to the official sources of knowledge, such as historical literature or veterans’ testimonies. Such attention to detail was visible in the internal bulletin of the Petrova Gora action in 1960, where the commanders stated as their aim:

to rekindle partisan traditions and enable young people who know the People’s Liberation Struggle only from books and stories to live themselves the partisan spirit of those times [...] not only by recreat­ing concrete events, but also the complete organization, brigade struc­ture, learning songs from the times of the Struggle, wearing partisan emblems, forming people’s liberation committees, and cherishing the partisan spirit within the units.²²

The notion of “partisan spirit” eventually became omnipresent in the leagues’ discourse as the ultimate criterion for the authenticity of theRetracing the Revolution 119 marchers’ experience vis-a-vis that of their historical role models, even though it was very difficult to pin down. The “partisan” label was also even­tually attached in the official discourse to locations, objects, and practices that did not have any direct connection to actual history but were merely linked to general outdoor activities or camping practices.

It is very difficult to trace the participants’ own perspectives and per­ceptions of these practices and how they correlated to the agendas of the organizers and authorities. Although the sources present them as mostly reproducing the official tenets, more mundane motivations occasionally come through. For instance, in one survey of scouts who came to the fed­eral review in 1983, the most frequently cited motivation for attendance per­tained to meeting old and new friends, with only one interviewee explicitly mentioning brotherhood and unity and another quoting “pretty girls” as the motive (Anon., 1983b). Yet explicit mentions of incidents that could be described as politically subversive were almost never mentioned even in the leagues’ internal documents, which often pointed out the negative sides of executed actions. Even during the more turbulent periods, such as when Serbian and Croatian party cadres underwent a purge in 1971-1972, most organizers explicitly confirmed that their gatherings saw no incidents of a nationalistic nature.²³ Negative remarks mostly pertained to lack of atten­tion or seriousness during history lessons and commemorations, or young­sters using ammunition against the supervisors’ instructions, or stealing other units’ flags as a way to mimic the partisans’ saboteur actions (Bosnjak, 1982). This can be explained by the marchers’ young age, as well as by the increasingly ludic programmatic structure of many partisan-themed events. Even more importantly, the membership in social-political organizations, as well as the participation in partisan marches, remained voluntary (despite various informal forms of pressure or social expectations). This meant that the individuals who were in profound disagreement with the official ideolog­ical tenets would most likely not even be part of these practices, whereas the ones who chose to participate mostly abided by the thereby espoused values.

In their essence, the institutional discussions on the state level about the ability of partisan marches to authentically represent the past revolved around the indispensability of authentic locations for the correct reenact­ment of past events and what effects this would bear on the practical aim of popularizing this practice across the country. The prioritization of space as the key criterion for authenticity, albeit prevalent in the early years, effec­tively restricted the possibilities for including places in the federation-wide network of partisan marches that had not figured prominently in the hegem­onic historical narrative. While the top-level ideologues pondered the ques­tion of whether history can be reenacted away from its original location, thelocal-level actors reacted by reinventing the format of the marches, emplot- ting them in ways that sought not to reconstruct the past but rather to be inspired by it while fulfilling various localist agendas. This retreat from the direct reliance on the past, coupled with the previously analyzed shift from scripted reenactments of historical battles to general military training through collective games, testified to the changing orientation of Yugoslav memory politics in the later phase of socialism. In an effort to make the participation in partisan-themed mobilities more appealing to young audi­ences all over the country, as well as to make the memory politics more in line with the needs of the present, the institutions allowed much more free­dom to local actors in conceptualizing their own vision of the youth “reliv­ing” the wartime history. Increasingly, these actions renounced ambition to authenticity (spatial or other) in the sense of directly reconstructing the past, instead picking select symbols connected to the partisan narrative in order to endow their activities with a loosely understood aura of history, as well as to opportunistically increase their own financial and social capital.