Fake Dissidents

"We had no unpublished manuscripts, no written books, no free-lance publications, and not due to the terror of the government but due to the laziness of intelligence. Unfortunately, here the majority of intellectual energy was wasted in bars."

Vreme: Your book "Belgrade between the East and the West: 1948-1965" appeared recently and has already been valued by the critics as an "outstanding, excellently documented and reliably written study". Obviously, many participants in the described events will be incomparably less exhilarated: you are the first to discuss the fake dissidents...

Markovic: This fake martyrdom of the civil intelligence bothers me. Take for example Copic: he was extraordinary brave and a much greater thorn in the Party’s side than those civil quasi-dissidents that thump their chest and talk about their martyrdom.

How did you obtain the dossier on Copic?

It is a genuine police dossier shoved into the general archive due to the carelessness of UDBA. However, they say that an enormous archive of UDBA exists somewhere as huge as a soccer court, but no one knows where it is and what it includes. This dossier is another proof that we have developed an informers’ culture. Copic was directly confronting the Party, which could not be said for the many civil intellectual, "dissidents" that nobody heard of until communism ceased. Where were they? In Russia, dissidents had books ready in their drawers and finished manuscripts. People wrote books by hand and waited for the day to publish them. We had no free-lance publications, and not due to the terror of the government, but due to the laziness of intelligence. When the "liberation" happened, those books from the drawers were nowhere to be found, nothing was done in secrecy... in fact, it is obvious that nothing was really done. In contrast to Russia or Poland where we can find the entire parallel world of the intellectual resistance... the regime was obviously very flexible: it would rather pay than destroy.

You are demystifying also Simina 9a; that circle both the leading and opposition view consider "dissident"...

Deep in their souls, they might have been dissidents, but they were shielded by the authority of Dobrica Cosic. They were among the first to obtain scholarships to study in the West. If one is a cetnic youth and obtains a scholarship of the communist government, the image of the regime becomes strange, not black and white at all, as we are sometimes inclined to conclude. One of the first well known intellectuals to obtain a scholarship for the Western school was Mica Popovic, and soon after him, Borisav Mihajlovic Mihiz also got a scholarship for Paris... Communism is the Paradise for intellectuals: there is no real competition, you get job on permanent basis, with two published collections of poems you become member of the Association of Writers, than you have privileges, you have a pension and social security, the communists used to assign apartments...

You are destroying another myth: the belief that Belgrade was anti-Communist in the first post-war years was widespread, that this urban environment stood in the silent civil resistance?

That belongs to the mythology of this city. It is evident from the results of the first post-war elections: Belgrade voted much less using the boxes without ballots (which offered a possibility to vote against the one and only official candidate) compared to other environments, even compared to its rural hinterland.

You are discussing "the special syndrome of the Yugoslav communists". How is this demonstrated?

The Party would provide funds to establish a magazine, then it would soon banish it; the school of Korcula started pompously, only to be attacked two-three years later, some film authors were banished and than given enormous funds for the films of the "black wave". You get 2 million deutche marks from the state and than you say you are "persecuted" and "a dissident". What sort of dissidence and terror is that!? It could be said that the regime consciously experiments with the liberal trends.

You also write that a good part of dissidents was protected by Rankovic. But are there really proofs or is the story of Leka the Protector also part of the urban mythology?

Well, there is not much documentation on that; communists do not like to confide into paper, they are conspirators and they stick to that practice from the illegal times. The power was exploited on the basis of one’s own free will, which could lead to unexpected paradox; by the irony of history, a good part of dissident culture from the early ‘60s (literature, film) was "covered" due to the grace of Rankovic himself.