On This Day in History: November 29

Yugoslavia is born

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Until fairly recently, a black leather couch adorned our living room that was made in a country that no longer exists. It probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place. The country, not the couch. The Republic of Yugoslavia was forced into being after World War II as a communist state to side with the Soviets in the Cold War. But then the guy holding it together died and the Cold War ended and everything exploded in a wave of ethnic violence.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 29, 1945--

The lands of Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When World War I ended that shit was over, so the three were crammed together into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918, although it took a decade before they started calling it that. Then World War II happened, and that shit got blown apart by fucking Nazi occupation. After that big-ass killfest the powers that be said yeah it seemed to be working let’s make those fuckers into one nation again. Except no king. Make it commie. And so, on November 29, 1945, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was born, and the clock was fucking ticking.

Yugoslavia was a federation of six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. There were also two autonomous provinces within Serbia. The divisions along cultural and religious lines were significant, but the place worked as a nation for a time due to strong federal control keeping everyone in line. The guy running the place was named Josip Tito. He’d been a powerful leader in the resistance to the fucking Nazis during the war, and was the dictator in charge of Yugoslavia after the war. Continues below …

The couch we replaced it with looks nice but isn’t as comfortable. I want a Lazy Boy. those things are expensive though, so please click the green button.

Interestingly, by 1948 Tito broke Yugoslavia away from the Soviet Union and said hey we’re neutral, we’re not taking sides on this Cold War shit anymore. In so doing, they went more communism light, where they actually allowed for a market-based economy. But then Tito, who’d been running the show for 35 years, had to up and die in 1980.

And with his death, federal control waned, and power began to decentralize and shift toward the various republics. The economy went to shit, and by the end of the decade communism was collapsing all over Eastern Europe. Hell, even Germany was getting back together. This lack of an external threat by the Soviet Union removed a primary motivation for Yugoslavian unity. By October 1990 the CIA saw war coming, saying in a report, “Yugoslavia will cease to function as a state within a year, and will probably dissolve within two … The violence will be intractable and bitter.” Nailed it.

The report also said there is fuck all the U.S. or European nations could do about it. By 1991 an orgy of violence followed, with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass rape. It is estimated that well over 100,000 people died in the breaking up of Yugoslavia.

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