Tito squares and streets as Remembrance and reminders

By Nataša Čepar, Delo*

Even though places named after Tito were all renamed at the end of the last millennium, a number of squares, roads, and streets have retained the names of the former Yugoslav leader, and not only in the region of the former Yugoslavia, but also in Italy, Germany, Cyprus, Russia, and elsewhere around the world. In our country [Slovenia] we found five squares and nine roads or streets named after Tito. Is it, from today’s perspective, nostalgia, shame, or a part of history we can’t simply erase?

The issue of renaming the Tito Road recently resonated with the mayor of Radenci, Roman Leljak. He tried twice, and the municipal council confirmed his proposal in both instances. However, the Constitutional Court repealed the ordinance on procedural grounds, due to its premature publication in an official gazette, which prevented the possibility of a referendum. The court’s decision from last June was final. Leljak said he has given up.

“There are a lot of streets, squares, bridges, schools, even kindergardens in Slovenia that are still, despite 34 years of democracy, named after communist criminals and crimes,” said Ivo Žajdela, historian and publicist tackling this topic, with outrage. He emphasized that this was an identity card for politicians, mainly of the left, at both the state and local levels.

According to Žajdela, the situation demonstrates a complete lack of ethical and common sense, because so many publications in recent decades have publicized communist crimes it is difficult to even monitor them all.

Žajdela said that people like Josip Broz Tito, Edvard Kardelj, and Boris Kidrič were the main planners of massacres of tens of thousands of Slovenes, and, in the post-war period, creators of a police-state dictatorship.

In one of his articles in the magazine Družina (Family), he presented the example of Roška Cesta (Rog/Horn Road) in Ljubljana, which is named after Kočevski Rog where several thousands of Slovene Home Guard members were killed after the war. “Communists symbolically chained Slovenia with images of violence, crimes, robberies, and lies,” Žajdela said.

After democratization, few places from the Communist era were renamed, and even those that were renamed are not, in his opinion, worth mentioning at all.

“Of course, I’m a realist,” he said. “It’s clear to me that the politicians who are responsible for this infinitely shameful state, have no shame at all. The memory landscape imposes on Slovenes a false and corrupted mythology.”

Constitutionality, Not Cultural Revolution

In 2011, when the municipality of Ljubljana under the mayor Zoran Janković wanted to name a new street after Tito, the Constitutional Court ruled that, such names no longer had their place today because they were contrary to the constitutional principle of respect for human dignity. The name of Josip Broz Tito symbolizes the former totalitarian regime, and so naming a street after him could possibly be understood as an acceptance of that regime, the Constitutional Court wrote in its ruling.

At the same time, the Court did not address the existing Tito squares, roads and streets.

“Tito was a historical figure, both good and bad,” said Ernest Petrič, who was at the time of decision about Ljubljana’s Tito Road the head of the Constitutional Court. “He is a symbol of a period that different people view differently. From the standpoint of fundamental constitutional values ​​that derive from human dignity, however, the Constitutional Court ruled that we cannot grant new public recognition to him because his values ​​and actions were criminal in the post-war period and thus not something to celebrate and reward today.”

Petrič continued, “It was not about evaluating Tito’s personality—that must be left to historians. However, the system, which was responsible for postwar massacres, which was based on limiting individual freedom and creativity and on discrimination, and which Tito symbolized cannot be celebrated with official state recognition.

“But if something already exists and nobody has no objections to it, it was the opinion of the Constitutional Court it can continue to exist. Or if anyone wants have something private in their garden, let them have it. Cultural revolution wasn’t our intention.”

Petrič also emphasized the decision was a consensus among the justices and that it remains his point of view to date. “Personally, I think that heritage landmarks, monuments, and the like need to also be understood as reminders of what was bad, so that it won’t happen again.”

Naming Consistent with Societal Values ​

Bojan Godeša, scientific advisor at the Institute for Contemporary History, said that, “Perhaps one should first ask why there are so many places named after Tito and landscape inscriptions bearing his name, particularly in the Primorska (Littoral) region. One of the main reasons is that, after the Second World War a large part of Littoral was incorporated into Yugoslavia while after the First World War it had been added to Italy.”

The revision of national borders in the framework of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, the 1954 memorandum of agreement, and the Treaty of Osimo, can be credited to Tito’s Partisan movement. It added key coastal areas to the country, a goal expressed in the program of the Liberation Front to unify all Slovenes, then within the framework of Yugoslavia. According to Godeša, this has had a lasting value.

“Another example is Velenje, which is one of the most successful examples of postwar modernization of Slovenian industry, transforming from a small market into a modern economically and socially developed city,” Godeša explained. Velenje still has a Tito Square and a monument to Tito.

Decision-making about the names of squares and streets aligns with modern values of the Slovenian society, and, according to Godeša, it cannot be based on unequivocal arguments. Tito has remained in public spaces especially in areas where his (symbolic) role in the past was so unambiguous that even the proponents of radical deconstruction of “communist” heritage fail to alter his enduring historical significance.

The historian said that, while he did not want to get into the interpretive arguments, he was critical of the aforementioned decision of the Constitutional Court in the Ljubljana case for reasons of principle. Such a body, he believed, was not an appropriate institution for assessing the role of individual historical figures from the past, because it had neither a real authority nor the necessary scientific competency.

“Tito as a leader of a Partisan uprising belongs to the circle of those historical figures who managed to get established politically both in the domestic (Yugoslav) context and in internationally due to their contribution to the victory over Nazism,” he said.

During the war, the Allies recognized in Tito a leader who would have sufficient political authority to restore the country after the war. That is why the Big Three (Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt) unanimously decided to grant the mandate for the postwar restoration of the state and its administration to him.

“Not because Tito was a communist,” Godeša said. “From the Western point of view that was actually a hindrance.”

The view of the past that was established after 1990, according to Godeša, rather than based on critical assessment rooted in historical facts, reflected the ambition in one segment of Slovenian society to rehabilitate interwar collaborationist forces or to, simply put, replace the former Communist truth with that of the Home Guard.

“Who was on right side in the Second World War seems to be a big problem for the Slovenian society,” Godeša said.

Not Renaming, but Creating Reminders

“Squares and streets are named after many controversial historical figures, not just Tito,” said Mitja Velikonja, culturologist at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana. “In the U.S., there are places named after slave owners. If we start deleting whatever someone feels is problematic or whatever bothers anyone, we would simply have to number the streets like they do in New York.

“There is no historical figure who would not be compromised in one way or another. This doesn’t mean they are all the same, but if we are to discuss 20th century totalitarianisms, we have to include (neo)colonialism and different religious totalitarianisms. It’s easy to rename something, to erase it, to destroy it, but you don’t necessarily need to read Freud to know that if you suppress something, it will become stronger. Because of this, victims are often stronger symbolic characters than heroes, who are eventually forgotten and their aura fades—but that of victims never does.”

Velikonja asserted it is much better to turn monuments and memorials to problematic figures and regimes into reminders that can be discussed and debated publicly.

Several years ago Velikonja published the book Titostalgia, which was also translated into Ukrainian and in which he established the pillars of nostalgia for Yugoslavia and Tito. The first is anti-fascism, which has undeniable value. The second is accelerated modernization; conservative Austria-Hungary, Fascist Italy in Primorska, or authoritarian Kingdom of Yugoslavia never succeeded in modernizing previously agrarian and patriarchal societies that quickly. Third, Velikonja said, there was the emancipation of groups that had no rights, including women, peasants, and youth.

Fourth, a working multiculturalism, including the protection of minorities: the motto of brotherhood and unity was not only an abstract ideological tirade of the authorities at the time, but above all a bottom-up practice. And fifth, Yugoslav political alternatives, including the concept of social ownership and self-managing socialism, which differed from the real existing in the Eastern Bloc (in theory it was a horizontal and direct democracy, in practice it was different in many different ways), as well as non-alignment, the third path during the Cold War.

“The system also generated many errors and injustices, as any political system does, and an authoritarian one maybe even more so, but its efforts and successes in the engagement, modernization, and emancipation of the masses were indisputable,” Velikonja said.

As many opinion polls have shown, the positive attitude towards Tito persists to different degrees in various parts of the former Yugoslavia, which also manifests in music and popular culture. Nostalgia for Tito, which is also present among young people, communicates more of a “No” to the present than a “Yes” to the past, according to Velikonja; the past is intentionally used as a critique of the present.

“The sociological study of Tito by the sociologist of memory, Todor Kuljić, for which I wrote a preface, speaks of a so-called emancipatory, liberating, and critical memory,” Velikonja said. “This is a memory that first and foremost criticizes the misdeeds of our group against the evil works of others. The politics of memory must therefore begin with self-criticism. That’s the only way memory serves future generations on both sides. Discrimination, oppression, or crimes cannot be fixed, much less hidden in retrospect by actively admitting mistakes but the attitude towards them is the first step to reconciliation and future coexistence.”

To Marie-Janine Calic, who is in the post-Yugoslav space an admired German historian and the author of Tito: The Eternal Partisan (a Slovenian translation was published recently), it is not surprising that that Tito’s name is still present in public spaces.

“Despite the changes that occurred after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz is still one of the most admired and respected figures in the post-Yugoslav space. That says a lot about the present and very little about him as a historical figure,” Calic said.

According to her, Tito is a metaphor for an idealized past, a kind of utopia and antithesis in times of uncertainty and an uncertain future.

“Titostalgia does not arise necessarily from political beliefs. Memories of Yugoslavia refer to questions of identity, values, self-respect, and wishes for a better life,” she said, adding that Tito is a figure who evokes contradictory feelings that depend on political viewpoints—either we consider him to be a hero or a criminal.

“The cult of personality and extensive propaganda that existed in socialist Yugoslavia are somehow still present, and Tito’s merits as the leader of the resistance and the founder of the country are glorified. But many find something touching and admirable in him, something they could identify with. Tito does not correspond to any black and white categories. It is true that he established a Stalinist regime after the Second World War. However, he transformed it from within into a moderate autocratic rule, which allowed a certain degree of pluralism, freedom of travel, and so on. As a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement Tito enjoyed the highest international reputation both in the East and in the West,” Calic said.

The question of how he is remembered must be, in her opinion, resolved within the society.

“Historical memory is about questions of identity that are not and should not be directed from above, they must be considered in an open public debate,” she said. At the same time she acknowledged the high degree of polarization this topic evokes expresses the current political and social conflicts.

About Nataša Čepar

Nataša Čepar is a reporter with Delo (Ljubljana, Slovenia).

* This article first appeared in the Delo newspaper in Slovenian, “Titovi trgi in ulice v spomin in opomin” (Tito Squares and Streets as Remembrance and Reminders); it was later renamed in the online version to, “Titovi trgi in ulice: nostalgija, sramota – ali del zgodovine?” (Tito Squares and Streets: Nostalgia, Shame—Or Part of Heritage?). The article was translated by and it is reprinted at Yugoblok with kind permission of the author and the publication, Delo.