htc.Workshop February 6, 2008, 2-5pm

Vladimir Kulic, Florida Atlantic University

Strategies of Resistance: Architecture and the Stalinization of Yugoslavia, 1945-50

In its first issue in August 1947, Arhitektura, Yugoslavia’s chief architectural journal at the time, promised to initiate, record, and organize “a new architectural epoch, epoch of socialist realism.”  But the material that the journal would publish in the following two years stood in intriguing contrast to its own proclaimed goals, as only a fraction of projects presented in it can be classified as what we today know as the stereotypical image of socialist realism.  Indeed, Yugoslavia’s short-lived stint as the most faithful ally of the Soviet Union produced few buildings that could be clearly labeled socialist realist, despite the fact that all other arts fully succumbed to political dictate.  

This paper explores how this contradiction was possible amidst incessant political pressures to emulate the Soviet Union in all wakes of life.  A debate about the definition of socialist realism that ran on the pages of Arhitektura between its founding in 1947 and the early demise of Stalinism in Yugoslavia some three years later is particularly illuminating of the situation.  Rather than directly confronting the pressures, participants in the debate explored various oblique strategies, both in practice and in theory, to escape Soviet-style historicism without directly opposing the regime. This was not a result of some rampant anti-communism among architects but, on the contrary, of the fact that many modernists among them, thanks to their left-leaning and anti-fascist reputations, enjoyed sufficient amounts of political clout to avoid blindly following Soviet examples.