Authors

Malcolm Lowe¹;  ¹ University of East Anglia, UK

Discussion

In 1945, the new Yugoslav state set about modernising in the countryside in the wake of distinctly rural partisan warfare. Today, popular regional political movements focus on protecting rural environments from lithium mining and hydroelectric dams. But how did their predecessors relate to new industrial projects that would disrupt rural lives and landscapes?

The youth’s railway (Omladinska Pruga) was a 1946 mass railway construction in socialist Yugoslavia, connecting calorific coalfields in Banovići, mountainous Central Bosnia, with Brčko, a town in the flat Posavina region with transport links to Belgrade and Vojvodina. It aimed to speed up the transportation of fuel for crash industrialisation, and transform the lives and worldviews of the 60,000 Yugoslav youth who built it. Yet the construction of a railway also marked a transformation in the villages, mountains and gorges it passed through. 

Journalistic writings from a state perspective explore disruption to village life but tend to gloss over disruption caused to traditional landscapes, presenting a conventional problem-resolution storytelling format. Villagers told representatives of the state that Eagle’s Gorge (Orlova Klisura) could not be traversed by humans, so in official narratives the railway passing through was portrayed as a triumph of socialist modernity over nature and old ways of life. These stories of a world historical mission do not account for losses of traditional ways of life. However, journalistic and literary texts written often contained celebratory depictions of the very nature and people whose lives were disrupted by the railway project. This emphasis hints at contradictions between a modernising government claiming to be celebrating rural life, and the reality of destruction of landscapes and homes.

Sources about the benefits of railway construction for villagers may be read as ‘symptomatic’ of the losses they ignore, the loss of traditional life present as ‘an absence’ (Althusser, 1965) in the explicit claims of such texts. Following a similar logic to work on the Czechoslovakian town of Most (Spurný 2023), these ‘officially approved’ sources are reflective of the ‘symbolic world’ of rural Bosnia and socialist Yugoslavia in 1946. 

This paper will retell the stories of villagers who encountered the railway project and shift focus toward a fundamental disruption of nature and rural life. These sources offer a case study in the frantic culture of early socialist Yugoslavia, and a broader meditation on losses that accompany processes of modernisation. Ultimately, this paper will argue that contradictory discourses about villages reflect a collective ambivalence about changing rural environments that went unspoken in ‘the new Yugoslavia’, but can be discussed now, amidst a broader reassessment of modernisation.