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Remembering 1950, But Why?

In Croatia ~ at least in towns along the coast ~ one can see graffiti referring to the year 1950. What happened in 1950? The country, along with neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, and Macedonia, were all one country, called Yugoslavia. It, like most of Eastern Europe, was under the control of the Soviet Union, and Marshal (Josip Broz) Tito (1892-1980) was the man in charge (see below). So was it a protest? an uprising? Not quite. From what I can gather, it was the year a soccer fan club called the Torcida Split was founded, and you know what a big deal something like that can be in some parts of the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torcida_Split
   The other possibility is that the graffiti refer to the year Yugoslavia hosted the 9th Chess Olympiad (against the wishes of the Soviet Union) and won it: http://www.olimpbase.org/1950/1950in.html
   With any change, there are those for it and those against. Such is the case with the citizens of this area when they look back on Tito's reign and the Communist era. Mostly, it seems, it's the older people who view it kindly and with nostalgia. "The government
took care of everyone," asserted the 60-something hotelier in Sarajevo. "If you worked for a company for five years, you got an apartment. Now, nothing. You couldn't get rich then, but there were no poor people, either." A 30-ish guy at a museum there wasn't surprised by her comments. "A lot of the older people feel that way," he said. (And I remember reading, years ago, that the prevailing attitude in Russia was much the same.) In response to my comment that the Soviet-era apartments we saw seemed very bare-bones (and, believe me, that was the polite was of putting it), he explained that Bosnians don't require much to be happy. Mostly, for them, it's all about the community ~ hanging with one's peeps, if you will. And indeed, just about every other store front is a coffee/tea/beer/wine-and-chocolate/dessert place with gaggles of tables and chairs spilling out onto the wide sidewalks.
   While we in the West viewed Tito as a dictator ~ a tyrant, even ~ many, including some of those to whom we spoke, contend that he united the disparate populations and held the country together. Not all agree with this assessment: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51216/aleksa-djilas/tito-s-last-secret-how-did-he-keep-the-yugoslavs-together

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