The Change of Cultural Policy Orientation after the Inform Bureau Conflict

Abstract

Since 1945 the Yugoslav leadership imitated the model of Soviet socialism also in the field of cultural policy. The consequences of such direction were particularly bad for Slovenia, a culturally developed country, which had been traditionally open to the western influences in the past. The cultural orientation started changing a year after the outbreak of conflict between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. At that time Yugoslavia began to open itself again to the western world. The symbolic turnabout came in 1952, when the Yugoslav Association of Writers formally renounced the trends of socialist realism. Also in that year, the Communist Party abolished the 'Agitprop', an extensive censorship apparatus, which had been used for exercising intellectual control over artistic and scientific production. At first, the changes were mostly the result of political actions of the government, but since the early fifties other tendencies were also emerging which were opposing the Communist monopoly in culture. However, the conflict with Milovan Đilas in 1954 showed that the authorities would not allow a total freedom of cultural activity.