Goli Otok as the Cradle of Socialist Self-management

Abstract

The takeover of power in Yugoslavia was carried out by the Communist Party in full accordance with the textbooks of the Bolshevik Party schools for establishing proletarian dictatorship. In this spirit, a state was formed after the Second World War whose declared aim was to change the regime and introduce a new social order. The number one priority of the socialist revolutionary leaders was to eliminate the occupying forces and their domestic collaborators. To consolidate power, the revolutionaries removed not only those who actively assisted the occupying forces but also those who were not in favor of the regime and did not actively fight on the side of the partisans. However, the firmer the Communist Party’s grip on power, the stronger was its internal opposition. A real danger appeared after the split between Moscow and Belgrade in 1948, which is why the regime dealt with them mercilessly. A new series of mass arrests, convictions and deportations followed. Initially, Tito’s regime responded to criticism from Moscow by radicalizing the Stalinist line and eliminating the last vestiges of “capitalism” in Yugoslavia. Eventually, however, Yugoslav ideologists developed a new type of socialism that came to be known as Titoism. The showcase item, born out of creative opposition to Stalin and the Soviet system and fit for new ideologization, was worker self-management. Paradoxically, the regime tested in practice the functioning of this new system on the island of Goli Otok and other “labor sites” scattered around the state to which the “Stalinists” were deported in order to be re-educated.