The REAL life in socialist Yugoslavia
As expected, in 1946, as war ends and the system needs to recover there is food shortages.
Well-known picture of the 40s, 50s and the 80s. The gap between the 50s and 80s is not that they were the golden ages of SFR Yugoslavia. There were only more loans in that period.
The SFR Yugoslavia went bankrupt in 1982, but no one was allwed to admit it. Imports of foreign products ceased, the dinar was worth nothing, only products for which SFR Y companies had acquired licenses such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi were sold.
There was no milk and sugar; no coffee, oil and detergent were hardly available.
The long waiting-lines were regular occurrence. When you see some, you just stop and wait. My parents gave me a whole block of “ration stamps”. Of the nice ones — yellow with a picture above and a little money.
The instructions were as follows:
- When I went to a market to buy me some snack and by chance there is a coffee, oil or detergent to buy it immediately;
- At the route to home I must pass through all the stores in my neighborhood. In case I see a queue to stop and buy whatever it has.
I used this situation to buy gum for myself — my pockets were full of them.
Even my student comrades had their own “ration-stamps”. [it seems like everyone was rationing, all the time, for 45 years].
The fuel crisis began in 1979, & everyday we had shortages of oil. My classmate and I went to school one day on foot and his father drove us the next day. Due to the lack of fuel, the rule for pair-odd plates of the cars was applied, so we walked pair-odd too.
In addition to the shortages of fuel we also had a shortage of electricity.
So, electricity restriction was a normal occurrence. We didn’t go to school in the days when there was no electricity in that part of the city where the school was. The restriction lasted from 8 to 12 hours. I didn’t notice them often because there was a priority consumer in my neighborhood who couldn’t stay without electricity. [I guess some politician from the “comrades”]
And the red light bulb? So there were no other bulbs for sale, just red. It never became clear to me how in that time of poverty it was easier to make a colored bulb than a plain, transparent one.
“Divka” was a substitute for coffee. A product that my parents couldn’t stand.
A shop selling Western goods seized in customs. Here I bought my first digital watch and my first 501 jeans.
Even the almighty JNA [the Yugoslavian national army] had fuel “ration-stamps”.
Usually, in Trieste you go for buying shoes, jeans, handbags, shirts, lingerie, socks, detergent, coffee, chocolate … Roma provided lingerie for the whole of SFRY, copies of clothing from famous brands were brought from Turkey.
If you are accused of counter-revolutionary acts, you are left without a job and as a bonus you go to jail and the police beat all the politically ineligible elements. I had a friend who for 15 years was characterized as a “nationalist”, and the police and the state security opened a dossier for him. There was only one party, the Savez komunista Jugoslavije and its “worker” satellites - any other organization/association was banned.
We had only two television channels and each republic had one television center. The first program started at 07:00, the children’s show at 10:00, the second program at 14:00 and the program ended at 22:00. Later we got a third channel that aired MTV and Sky, followed by a night channel that lasted from 22:00 to 00:30 and on Friday and Saturday until 01:00. Other televisions arrived in 1988, the Politika news station and Studio B radio received their own television stations.
And it still is common to be said that we lived happily ever after. Yeah, sure …
