National museums, national myths: constructing socialist Yugoslavism for Croatia and Croats

Abstract

This article concerns two national museums in Croatia during the socialist period, the Museum of the Revolution of the Peoples of Croatia and the Historical Museum of Croatia. Both state-developed institutions were intimately tied to the process of nationalization as they helped articulate the place of the Croatian nation within the ideology of supranational Yugoslavism founded on the ideas of socialist patriotism, brotherhood and unity, self-management, national assertion, and South Slavic culture and community. This paper therefore traces the development and collapse of Yugoslavism in Croatia’s national narrative by analyzing how these museums adapted the mythology of socialist Yugoslavism for a particularly Croatian context. Specifically, this paper investigates the ways in which these museums operated in an often ambiguous national-supranational discourse in order to reinforce the historical precedents of Croatia as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I argue that these museums were envisioned by party elites and museum curators alike as essential to the project of building socialist Yugoslavism by adapting and altering Croatia’s previous national pantheon of heroes, places, objects, and events to fit into a larger and distinctly supranational Yugoslav framework.

Keywords:

• Croatia
• Yugoslavia
• museums
• Communism
• nationalism

Notes

1. It bears mentioning that throughout the ebb and flow of Yugoslav politics, there were occasions when this official culture was challenged or subverted through official cultural organs. Yugoslav rock music, for instance, was an outgrowth of state-supported folk music that by the late 1970s had produced groups such as Bijelo Dugme and Zabranjeno Pušenje, who on multiple occasions rebelled against official Communist culture with songs like “Spit and Sign, My Yugoslavia,” and “How Beautiful It Is to be Stupid” (Ramet 2002). As I will show throughout this paper, however, these two museums remained remarkably loyal to the official party line, even at the height of events such as the Croatian Spring. This alone tells us a great deal about the nature of these institutions and how deeply embedded they were in the larger nexus of official state culture.

2. I borrow the term from Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci’s work on Romanian museums in the post-socialist period. Traditional national museums have often functioned as so-called “Temples of Truth” for the civic religion of nationalism that provide a space for worship and reverence of the sacred nation. “The visitor enters like a Temple, to receive a single Truth, Reality, uniqueness, and accumulation of information for the better identification with an ideal.” Therefore, in a Temple of Truth, there exists only a singular narrative that the museum space guides the visitor toward; nowhere is there a space for critical engagement with the objects, for any sort of plurality of voices, any questions posed, or any alternative narratives (Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci 2008, 277).

3. Integrating Croatia’s popular heroism into the Yugoslav Partisan narrative bears particular significance. According to Stevo Đurašković, in the late 1950s, some military historians of primarily Serb and Montenegrin descent argued that the National Liberation Struggle (NOB) consisted primarily of ethnic Serb and Montenegrin forces. Likewise, these historians claimed that most of the ethnic Slovenes and Croats joined only toward the end of the war and in much smaller numbers, while the Croats in particular were “resistant to the very idea of Yugoslavia as a polity” (Ðurašković 2014, 62). By the 1960s, however, some Croatian historians, including Franjo Tuđman, began to challenge this narrative by “Croatizing” the NOB while rejecting the absolute guilt of Croats for the Ustaša and Jasenovac. Ultimately, Tuđman’s more extreme nationalist interpretation was rejected and he was expelled from the party in 1967. Yet, under the guidance of Vladimir Bakarić and his cultural policy of legitimizing the Croatian Communist movement, the narrative of Croatia’s wartime experience began to include more ethnic Croats in the revolutionary events of 1941–1945 (64).