Discussion
Not yet the president, Josip Broz Tito was already a singular figure in Yugoslav life in the aftermath of World War Two, a fact made official in his military rank, Marshal of Yugoslavia. But what did his cult of personality look like in the period termed
obnova, or regeneration? This paper will analyse narratives about Tito in two discrete sets of sources connected to the first major Yugoslav youth labour mobilisation, the 'youth's railway' built in Northern Bosnia, between Brčko and Banovići in 1946: internal party reports on behaviour, and media accounts – in particular youth accounts of Tito's only visit during the railway's construction. Beginning with a discussion of leadership cults in Stalinist Europe, this paper will explore youth perspectives of encounters with Tito, giving insights into the character and proliferation of his leadership cult.
Accounts of direct encounters with Tito ranged from the spellbound to the pragmatic. Some youth sacralised Tito, while others internalised his expectations of them in a move toward labouring discipline. In Tito’s absence, he was regularly invoked by youth in moments of both harmony and conflict. As Videkanic (2010) has argued, even in Tito’s absence, ‘Yugoslavian youth was always in his presence, always supposed to behave as if he was watching them, always at their best.’
How youth and propagandists engaged with Tito’s absence and presence in this case offer new insight into the development of his cult of personality, which was characterised by the idea of his possessing paternal ordinariness and great spiritual meaning. While most of the youth working at the railway were hardly fluent in Marxist ideology, they understood Tito’s unquestioned role and status very well, and in a sense, he already represented ‘an omnipotent, omniscient power’, a totalitarian status (Lefort, 1986). Ultimately, this paper will show the contradictory relation between the mass empowerment that youth labour mobilisations partially constituted, and the fact that these same projects reinforced and strengthened the sacralisation and power of the marshal, the ‘ultimate figure of power’ in Claude Lefort’s formulation.
