Remembering and forgetting the SFR Yugoslavia. Historiography and history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia

Historiography

For historical research, the ‘Review of the Institute for National History’ (Glasnik na Institutot za nacionalna istorija) is among the most prominent and oldest historiographic journals in Macedonia, together with ‘History’ (Istorija) and the ‘Review of the Faculty of Philosophy’ (Godišen zbornik na Filozofskiot fakultet). From 1990 until today the ‘Review of the Institute’ has published 540 bibliographical items including articles, documents, reviews, and polemics. Of those only twenty-three articles and thirty-three reviews, or 10% of the total material, have dealt with the contemporary, i. e. Yugoslav, history of Macedonia. A modest share in which socialist Yugoslavia is very often either missing altogether as a historical entity or at best mentioned only as a ‘necessary’ technical reference, rather than as a geographic, political, economic, social, or cultural space. A similar thing applies to the ‘Review of the Faculty of Philosophy’ which publishes articles proposed by all twelve departments of the faculty. Historians from the Department of History have published a total of 107 articles, of which again only 10% relate at all to socialist Yugoslavia.

On the other hand, in the period under consideration, of all publications by the Institute of National History sixty-one of 191 — or nearly a third — deal with the Yugoslav history of Macedonia. That output incidentally includes everything from monographs to collections of articles, documents, and memoirs.^[6] The difference in output of a one in three as against one in ten suggests that historians preferred to publish their research in books, which would be available to the wider public, rather than in academic journals.

The thematic focus of the research interests of professional historians working on contemporary history appears to have been quite limited, amounting to five key topics, or what might be called thematic tendencies. Those are first, World War II and the partisan struggle in federal socialist Macedonia, including Aegean/Greek and Pirin/Bulgarian Macedonia. Then comes the matt er of Macedonian statehood, mostly in terms of its founding socialist agency, the Antifascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM). That was the supreme legislative and executive people’s representative body of the federal socialist Macedonian republic within Yugoslavia, its first plenary session held on 2 August 1944 at the Monastery St. Prohor of Pčinja. The third commonly seen theme concerns controversial personalities and events in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and then fourthly we often meet considerations of the status of Macedonians in Aegean as well as Pirin Macedonia. ‘Aegean Macedonia’ refers to what is now northern Greece, and the theme we often see here is the participation of the people there in the Greek Civil War. Pirin Macedonia, now western Bulgaria, is taken up in terms of the status of Macedonians living there. The fifth of our common themes is the processes of collectivisation and denationalisation in socialist Yugoslavia.

All those topics focus on the period from 1941 until 1953, but in the foreword of his book Macedonia 1945-1991, Novica Veljanovski, one of the (few) historians who deal with contemporary history, offers a number of explanations for that. Because of the chronological closeness and even ‘incompleteness’ of these topics, Veljanovski argues, events after 1953 have remained insufficiently attractive for the use of historians. Moreover, dealing with Yugoslav history could easily be interpreted as Yugo-nostalgia. After 1991, the Yugoslav period was anathematized and very often defined as a ‘communist single-mindedness’. Consequently, its collapse affected the historians’ work, in the sense that they tried to avoid dealing with it.^[7]

Historians’ work on Yugoslavia has been ‘replaced’ with numerous academic and non-academic texts published by everyone from sociologists, political scientists, former communist officials writing memoirs, and journalists; and that neatly explains the small number of publications on socialist Yugoslavia. There have been a few on political history, only one about the demise of Yugoslavia (authored by a veteran of World War II), and a few more on the cultural and educational history of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia.^[8] It is worth mentioning here too that the fifth volume of the authoritative ‘History of the Macedonian people’ ends with the Second World War.^[9] Furthermore, the short English version of the History of the Macedonian People, published in 2008, contains only twelve pages about socialist Yugoslavia, a rather abbreviated review of political events especially when compared with the sections on ancient and medieval Macedonia, which make up approximately a third of the volume.^[10] So it seems, then, that socialist Yugoslavia has largely been written out of the master narrative of Macedonian history.

Textbooks

As in many other countries, history in Macedonia is taught as a separate subject in both primary and secondary schools. The Bureau of Education Development is responsible for curricula on national history, and authors of history textbooks are obliged to comply with them. According to the criteria established by the Ministry of Education after the armed conflict of 2001, at least one of the authors should be an ethnic Albanian or a member of Macedonia’s Turkish community. Then, when the Ministry requests it, a textbook committee, comprised of historians and ministry officers, selects the textbooks for each level from the array of books submitted. Finally, the Minister of Education confirms and approves the use of the textbooks selected by the committee.

A short overview of the history textbooks that were used in socialist Macedonia during the 1970s and 1980s shows that on average about 35% of their content was dedicated to the history of socialist Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav peoples, 18% to the history of Macedonia, and 47% to the history of the rest of the world.^[11] Since the history of Macedonia was integrated into the narrative of Yugoslavia one might even say that 53% of the content was dedicated to the joint Yugoslav dimension. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s the Yugoslav aspect enjoyed the lion’s share of textbook content, even if Macedonia itself was excluded from the picture.

The first textbook revision in independent Macedonia in 1991/1992 replaced the binary structure of Yugoslavia and the rest of the world, with a new, tripartite one. There was now world history, Balkan history, and Macedonian history. The second section replaced the previous part dealing with Yugosla via and the Yugoslav peoples as the focus now shifted to Yugoslavia’s Balkan neighbours Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and Serbia. Also, the ‘us’ shrank; the other Yugoslav republics were now excluded, becoming ‘them’ instead of ‘us’. Yet if one examines the content of the lessons covering the Balkan dimension it appears that most of them still discussed the history of Yugoslavia and its peoples, and pupils still learned about a variety of topics related to the previous state. This, by the way, was spread over a full twenty-five pages, still without reckoning with socialist Macedonia. Although Macedonia did receive special attention in another section, even there the narration kept up some of the positive links to Yugoslavia, for example the important role of the Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) for the recognition of the Macedonian language and state, to mention just one.^[12] So in the matter of the representation of socialist Yugoslavia, the first textbook revision of the now independent Macedonia in 1991/1992 changed the façade handsomely enough, but not so much the content.

A new revision of the textbooks in 1995 reduced the number of pages in each book by a quarter, which did lead to a reduction in the content about Yugoslavia, for while the structure followed the same pattern, a dozen topics were deleted. Students were now given only nine pages on Yugoslavia. In the 1995 textbook only one of the assemblies of the AVNOJ was mentioned, as opposed to three in the 1992 one, and AVNOJ’s history was covered on only a quarter of a single page as opposed to the previous three whole pages. However, the didactic part of the textbook still contained many questions about socialist Yugoslavia, with three implicitly and four explicitly relating Macedonia to Yugoslavia.^[13] So the links to the former communist state remained, if in reduced format. The relationship to Yugoslavia and its communists was still regarded in very positive terms, as the following extract shows:

‘During the fascist occupation of Macedonia, the Macedonian people found an ally for the realisation of its aspirations for national, social, and political liberation. In the newly created circumstances, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia proved to be the only political force that could lead the Macedonian people on the victorious road of the people’s uprising and the People’s Liberation War.’^[14]

Maintaining the same tone in their next paragraphs, the 1995 authors still considered the communists to be ‘progressive’ people, a discourse that would remain in use throughout the 1990s. Not really surprising since all the textbooks dealing with 20^th century history were written by more or less the same group of academic historians.^[15]

Then, the reforms in the years 2000 to 2003 essentially erased socialist Yugoslavia from the history textbooks, limiting it to a few appearances in sporadic references. The scarce material that did remain, no more than three to four pages, was so mixed up with paragraphs on other Balkan countries that socialist Yugoslavia was lost as a stand-alone concept.^[16] In comparison, the new ‘European Union dimension’ received six very positive pages. Finally, the next textbook reform in 2005 followed this up on the same pattern, but actually upgraded socialist Yugoslavia once more by dedicating a whole lesson of three pages to it in a section called ‘The World, Europe and the Balkans in World War II’. The 2005 book even restored some positive aspects of the relationship between Macedonia and Yugoslavia,^[17] but still to this day, at least statistically (by number of pages and lessons), socialist Yugoslavia continues to be almost absent from current history textbooks in the Republic of Macedonia.

World War II, the Antifascist Movement and the ASNOM

One of the topics which ‘survived’ the narrative changes is the partisan struggle (1941-1944) and especially the ASNOM (1944/5), and both topics have remained a strong focal point in historical memory. Changes have occurred in how the events have been narrated, which has become increasingly ethnocentric. During the socialist period, the Kruševo Republic, i.e. the anti-Ottoman Ilinden uprising of 1903, and the Antifascist and National Liberation War shared an equal place in Macedonian national history. After 1991, the perceived significance of the Kruševo Republic grew considerably and historians tried to find ‘deeper’ connections between the Ilinden uprising and the antifascist war and laid as much emphasis on them as they could. An interesting explanation is given by the historian Vera Vesković-Vangeli who argues that

‘the successful “transfer” of the Ilinden revolutionary and humanist values into the ideological and political platform of the People’s Liberation and Antifascist War of Macedonia was a “corrective artery”, the basic condition for the harmonisation of the national and the class component. Their complete unity was a causative agency which provided the continuity between the Ilinden uprising and the mass participation in the People’s Liberation and Antifascist War of Macedonia.’^[18]

Emphasis has therefore been placed on the struggle for national liberation of the Macedonians, and certain important figures have been designated ‘communist patriots’ of a sort. All the same the Yugoslav partisan movement and the shared Yugoslav antifascist traditions have not been forgott en. As part of the efforts to achieve international recognition for the Republic of Macedonia in 1991, the ASNOM events, that is to say the beginnings of Macedonian statehood and legal traditions, were placed particularly clearly into historiographical focus.^[19]

Despite attempts by some historians and ‘pseudo-historians’ to revise the official narratives of the Slavic origin of the Macedonians or to portray socialist Yugoslavia as a ‘prison for Macedonians’, President Kiro Gligorov publicly underlined that the Macedonians are a South Slav people and that the Kruševo Republic as well as the antifascist liberation war are historical episodes important for the constitution of the contemporary Macedonian state. Tito has been remembered as the first statesman who officially recognised the Macedonian nation. Numerous socialist monuments were still in use in the public space, things like street names, names of institutions, and the national coat of arms with its red star.^[20]

On the other hand, as tended to be the case in other postsocialist countries, during the process of nationalisation of the past and of ‘de-ideologisation’, the Marxist paradigm was rejected.^[21] The ideology of social justice, as one of the mobilizing components of the Yugoslav resistance movement, including the Macedonian one, was marginalized, and what remained was the ideal of the cause of national liberation. At the same time, emphasis was laid on the role of the communist (and non-communist) partisans, who were seen as Macedonian patriots, particularly when it came to the political rivalries and ideological controversies immediately after the war. Their attitude was thus contrasted to that of the partisans and communists viewed as ‘pro-Yugoslav’. These ‘pro-Macedonian’ personalities then, such as Metodija Andonov-Čento, the first president of the ASNOM, Petre Piruze-Majski, Pavel Šatev, and Metodija Šatorov-Šarlo, became subjects for various scholarly publications and academic conferences. The conferences helped shed light on some previously intentionally forgotten historical events, in an attempt to elucidate the ‘dark side’ of postwar Yugoslavia.^[22]

It has been maintained too that for most of the Macedonian people and for most of the ASNOM participants ‘the formation of Democratic and Federal Macedonia was only a phase in a process which would lead to the complete unification of the Macedonian People’.^[23] Furthermore, as Novica Veljanovski claims, ‘the main issue of the Macedonian people, immediately after the war, was the issue of the unification of the people’.^[24] There is then a view that Yugoslav Macedonia was a ‘necessary step’ towards the ultimate goal of unification of all Macedonians, from Aegean, Pirin and Vardar Macedonia, into a single state. On the other hand, others have seen the decisions of the AVNOJ and ASNOM as resolving the Macedonian question geographically within the framework of socialist Yugoslavia.^[25] Still other interpretations, although relating the Ilinden tradition of 1903 to the partisan movement of 1941-1944, emphasize the efforts of the Macedonian communists as founders of the contemporary Macedonian state.^[26] Finally, yet others claim that the Macedonian statehood is in fact a result of the AVNOJ and ASNOM, that it ‘can be discussed only in the frame of the Yugoslav federation’.^[27]

The topics of the antifascist liberation movement and the ASNOM too have remained an enduring point in history textbooks. Since 1991, while different aspects of the Yugoslav past have been either deleted or re-interpreted, the antifascist struggle and the ASNOM in particular were still valued positively and remained the sole historical bridge between the Macedonian and Yugoslav dimensions of the recent past. The one historiographical dilemma refl ected in the textbooks is how far the Macedonian liberation movement depended on the wider Yugoslav movement of the ASNOM from the AVNOJ, as discussed above. It is noticeable in the latest textbook reform of 2005/2006 that although remaining within the Yugoslav frame of reference, a subtle change in vocabulary has reflected an effort to link the Macedonian partisan movement with the local nationalist tradition. The authors of the textbooks emphasised that the Macedonian national liberation movement had been organised ‘as a continuity of the liberation struggle of the Macedonian people’, seen as ‘a struggle for the centuries-old ideals of the Macedonian people’.^[28] The depiction of the relationship between AVNOJ and ASNOM presented attention to AVNOJ as gradually diminishing through the years, so that from a major historical event it was turned into secondary and marginal information. In the reformed 2003 textbook it was located outside the main text, in a small box headed ‘For the curious students!’; there was no reference to its role in the creation of the Macedonian state. The same is true for Josip Broz Tito who, whether seen as hero or villain remains a most significant figure in the history of Macedonia in its Yugoslav context. He too was described in just a few lines in a small box similarly headed ‘For the curious students!’.^[29] However, in another shift, since 2005 the AVNOJ, with two of its assemblies, has been re-introduced in the main text section, showing that its relevance to Macedonian statehood has again been given emphasis.^[30]

Controversial Personalities and Eventsin the Immediate Aftermath of the Second World War

The historian Vlado Ivanoski, director of the Institute of National History between 1987 and 1995, in his speech of welcome to the 1992 conference dedicated to the life of Pavel Šatev, said this:

‘The new democratic environment, for the first time, enables us to explicitly addressand discuss Šatev’s life and time, along with many other problems of Macedonian history. Two or three years ago it was simply impossible to do this. If someone tried to mention these issues and personalities, even at closed sessions, it was considered a “sin” and was sanctioned.’^[31]

During the period between 1945 and 1950 the communists and partisans (Čento, Šatev, Šarlo, Piruze etc.) had been imprisoned, and some had been ‘silenced’, while other were sent to work in the federal institutions in Belgrade. They were accused by the new communist elite of being ‘separatists’, ‘autonomists’, something which today is primarily seen as a ‘certificate of pro-Macedonism’.^[32] Their elimination from the historical scene, together with communist propaganda saying that the ‘Macedonian question’ had been solved by the AVNOJ, were advanced as the reason for ‘the redirection of the Macedonian national consciousness towards “Yugoslavism”’ — so that Macedonians renounce their idea of unification.^[33]

The presentation of such controversial individuals varied from one generation of textbooks to another. In the 1990s such debate on the historiography did not enter the textbooks, and it was only after the reforms of 2000 and 2003 that students found some basic information on these topics, which followed the general historiographical lines although there were differences in vocabulary and representation. For example, a 2003 textbook implied that Čento, Šatev, and the rest were stigmatized and then prosecuted because of their democratic views, which were so diametrically opposed to the one-party system.^[34] Another textbook from the same wave of reforms was more explicit, claiming that such men were striving for the unification of the three parts of Macedonia and did not see socialist Yugoslavia as any sort of solution to the ‘Macedonian question’.^[35] Interestingly enough, in the latest generation of textbooks this topic has again been absent.^[36]

The Few Images of the Shared Socialist Past

The synchronic and diachronic frames of the Yugoslav narrative were elaborated by a specific vocabulary which lasted until the very end of socialist Yugoslavia. The notions of ‘our peoples’ and ‘our lands’ constructed the ‘us’ transmitted via the textbooks. Macedonia and the Macedonians were an integral part of this Yugoslav ‘us’, and pupils were taught to identify with it, but not to neglect their ethnic identity. However, in independent Macedonia there is a noticeable tendency to ‘forget’ the connections among the Yugoslav peoples in the historiography and history textbooks, so the context of the recent history of Macedonia is lost. As we shall see, the task has been not easy because Yugoslavia was more than just a living memory, and not only during the 1990s, but beyond.

New history textbooks began to appear in the first half of 1992. Perhaps wishing to lay claim to legitimacy and progress many of their authors referred in the forewords of their books to the new history curriculum with its new recommendations. That such ‘de-ideologisation’ was wholly intentional is quite clearly expressed for example in the foreword of the new 8^th grade history textbook for fourteen year-olds (covering 20^th century history), authorized on 31 March 1992:

‘Through the realisation of the demands of the history curriculum, the main text of this textbook offers for the first time a different approach, which replaces the historical interpretation of the history of the south Slav peoples employed so far, and especially the history of the neighbouring peoples to the Republic of Macedonia.’^[37]

However, the change in the 1990s textbooks remained incomplete in the matter of how the history of the Yugoslav peoples is intertwined. However, readers would still learn about the most recent shared Yugoslav past, which in fact was dropped entirely only with the new 2000/2003 revision. Socialist Yugoslavia was now dealt with — in a strongly negative discourse — mostly via discussion of the crisis of socialism in the Balkans with respect to the Eastern bloc. Pupils could now read about the one party system, Soviet control, economic and political problems, incapacity, unemployment, and finally the dissolution of Yugoslavia.^[38] The positive aspects were ignored along with the emancipatory role of socialist Yugoslavia. Even the name ‘Yugoslavia’ was now excluded not only from the overall structure of 20^th century history (the world, the Balkans, Macedonia), but also from the titles of numerous lessons. While in the 1990s Yugoslavia had remained alive as a subsection of the ‘Balkans’ chapter, now it was almost entirely erased from the textual content too. For example, Yugoslavia received just a few paragraphs in the lessons on ‘The Balkan Peoples in World War Two, 1939-1943’, ‘The Balkan Peoples in World War Two, 1943-1945’, ‘The Development and Crisis of Socialism in the Balkan Countries’, and ‘The Socioeconomic Development of Macedonia 1945-1991’.^[39] The general attitude to any traces of the socialist Yugoslav past was at best neutral and often rather negative, and at the same time the elements of the shared history were entirely lost, a trend that has been continued in the most recent textbooks. In the 2005/2006 textbooks, still in print, references to socialist Yugoslavia have remained as scattered and negative as in previous books. In fact, apart from the generally negative vocabulary what is most indicative in this post-2000 tendency is the reduction of socialist Yugoslavia to the political events of 1945-1953. The rest of its history is abandoned, both diachronically and synchronically, until it is time to mention the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991.

Similarly, historiographical articles since 1991 dealing with socialist Macedonia and its place in socialist Yugoslavia have generally focused on the first, so-called ‘Soviet’ or repressive phase of socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1953). The following examples illustrate both the presence and absence of socialist Yugoslavia in research. Whether we read about postwar collectivisation and agrarian reform, or about education, culture, the status of women, it is very noticeable that at the centre of the narration lies Macedonia, by default deprived of the attribute ‘socialist’. For example, the impression is conveyed that the complex agrarian reforms carried out in socialist Yugoslavia, with all their results both good and bad, were actually intended to destroy the Macedonian village. However, that impression comes about because what was in fact a Yugoslav and wider international process was interpreted in an ethnocentric way. Thus, Violeta Ačkoska has claimed that

‘in the period after the Second World War in Macedonia there was one of the most turbulent rural exoduses in the world. In a relatively short period of time (about thirty years) the overall number of active agricultural population decreased rapidly.’^[40]

Ačkoska’s article offers no comparative perspective at the Yugoslav level. Nor is there any mention of the processes of modernisation, albeit in its socialist variant, as the main goal of the Yugoslav authorities or as the main context of the agrarian reform. Furthermore, the author claims that some of the consequences of that policy are still alive today, ultimately manifested in the decreased birth rate and the aging population.^[41]

The emancipatory practices of socialist Macedonia, such as the enormously increased literacy of the population (illiteracy had stood at approximately 75% at the end of the war) and the opening of the first educational and cultural institutions, it is again viewed from the wider Yugoslav context. Those achievements are attributed exclusively to the educational and cultural policies of the Macedonian authorities, following the decisions of the ASNOM,^[42] so that it appears that the process of modernisation in Macedonia took place independently from general Yugoslav policies.

On the other hand, the Yugoslav context does appear, albeit fl eetingly, in the field of women’s rights, in particular those of Muslim women in socialist Macedonia. However, research offers no comparative example of shared experience of either Muslim or non-Muslim women’s rights in socialist Yugoslavia. In that sense the campaign led by the state and party authorities for the removal of the veil, which led to the drafting in 1951 of the ‘Law for removal of the veil’, in fact worked in favour of equal opportunities.^[43] In addition, the shared Yugoslav past can be seen in the topics related to Yugoslav ‘liberalism’ as the 1960s became the 1970s.^[44]

In general, in both historiography and textbooks the approach to socialist Yugoslavia and its heritage favours the individual development of Macedonia and the Macedonians to the detriment of the Yugoslav context. Consequently the impression is created that although Macedonia was a federation member its development was autonomous, almost independent. So the interpretations and re-interpretations create chronological and synchronic confusion, but after all, events and processes that took place in the Republic of Macedonia in the 20^th century are inseparable from those that took place in Yugoslavia.