May 25 Yugo-nostalgia, not

A former Yugoslav friend writes:

May 25th was celebrated as Tito’s birthday, and was known as Youth Day. They used to take us out of school to wave flags at the runners carrying “best birthday wishes from students, peasants and workers of Yugoslavia” hidden in a baton. Students, peasants and workers started running a relay around the country around May Day, passing the baton hand to hand every couple of hundred meters — it was a huge honor to be a carrier.  Factories would stop for a shift and schools would close while workers and students lined the streets to greet the passing baton. Every evening at 7:30, the daily news, which was mandatory viewing for all, would first show that day’s leg of the relay and all the happy workers and peasants celebrating.

Weeks of celebrations culminated on May 25th, at the Stadium of the Yugoslav People’s Army in Belgrade, where the baton would be handed to Tito, by a breathless Stakhanovite or his student equivalent. This one is Tito’s last birthday, in 1979. The lyrics of the song are: “Tito, Tito is our Sun. Tito, Tito is our heart. There is no end to our joy and one love binds us all. Tito-Party-Youth-Action.” Action refers to “work action” – unpaid physical labour that we performed for the motherland, digging ditches, picking corn, laying railroad tracks.

The determined young Albanian woman recites our collective wish: “that you continue to navigate the ship of our state for many more years with a steady hand and  a clear eye.”  The commentator gushes about the air being “charged with love, respect and gratitude.”  The birthday boy manages to string a few semi-coherent short sentences.

I was in the audience.  I was over the moon.  Within a year, Tito dies. Life changes.

This helps explain how those same people lined up behind new leaders a decade later, and killed and died on command.

All the more glory to those who refused, and who still refuse today, to be led in the wrong directions.