Youth Work Actions

A deep dig into volunteering in the former Yugoslavia, from youth work actions of yesteryear to volunteer camps of today.

With Michael Alpert, Goran Gabrić, and Amra Kazić.

Listen: “Youth Work Actions” (Episode #104)

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Ad-free version of “Youth Work Actions” (Episode #104).

Transcript: “Youth Work Actions” (Episode #104)

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[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok. Yugoblok is a global social network community and hub for all things Yugoslavia. Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join.

[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your commander Peter Korchnak.

Yugoslavia emerged from the Second World War utterly devastated. The largely underdeveloped agrarian country saw over 10 percent of its population wiped out in the conflict; 1.7 million people died in the war, another 3.5 million were left homeless as many villages had been destroyed and cities gravely damaged. 70 percent of prewar livestock was dead as well. Also destroyed: 35 percent of prewar industry, 50 percent of rail lines, and 8 0 percent of agricultural equipment. 

Yugoslavia also emerged from the war as a socialist country organized on the Soviet model, under the rule, control, and management of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, whose army won said war. A variety of mass organizations, for workers, women, trade unions, veterans, and youth, carried out the party’s policies in their respective realms. 

After securing power, the new communist government’s first task was to rebuild the country. Failure to lift the country out of poverty could damage the Communists’ legitimacy and negate their wartime victories. The Soviet Union had its own devastation to deal with so it wasn’t quite in the position to assist. Aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration was significant but overall a drop in the bucket. 

After initially stabilizing the economy, the issue of economic development hit Yugoslavia again after the Tito-Stalin split, as it now stood more alone than ever and had to reorient its entire economy away from the nascent Eastern Bloc. Receipts of foreign aid from the West helped to prop the country up but did not cover all of Yugoslavia’s needs. Plus a lot of the assistance was military in nature, as the threat of a Soviet invasion loomed.

Now the war victory was almost entirely a homegrown and voluntary effort. After the war, the Communists harnessed the people’s victorious spirit and revolutionary enthusiasm in reconstruction and industrialization. 

First, they introduced socialist competitions into workplaces where shock workers who exceeded quotas or cut costs would receive various, typically non-monetary privileges like titles, badges, clothing, vacations, or public recognition. Similarly rewarded would be innovators and inventors. 

They also mobilized the surviving Yugoslavs for unpaid, voluntary manual labor, to build or rebuild schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, factories, and so on. Salaried office workers were required to devote part of their work and spare time to local projects. Towns organized shock weeks with their citizens. Peasants helped rebuild their villages. Free labor was also provided by housewives, demobilized soldiers, unemployed workers, prisoners of war—and most significantly, youth. 

The interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia  in the 1920s and 30s had experienced a post-World War I population boom. Even despite wartime casualties, Yugoslavia’s post-World War II population was relatively young, with median age under 25 (it was nearing 35 at the time of the breakup and 45 these days). Which is to say, there were a lot of young idle and energized hands, and plenty to do. 

The Communists put the youth to work on a range of projects, most notably building railways and roads. In addition to building the country, volunteer youth actions built skills and solidarity. Youth volunteer labor provided a continued boost to the economy throughout Yugoslavia’s existence, built infrastructure we use and enjoy to this day, and supplied life education and memories to countless citizens. It also echoes in contemporary volunteering projects throughout the region.

In today’s episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, we’re going to look at youth volunteerism in the former country.

[SOUNDBITE – “Da Nam Živi, Živi Rad” by Zabavni Orkestar i Zbor] 

PETER KORCHNAK: Youth volunteer work actions began already during the war. 

The effort drew on an ingrained sense of solidarity among people. Centuries of life in poverty drove families, friends, and neighbors to mutual assistance to ensure their communities’ survival. People would often get together and build or repair roads, bridges, or watering holes for livestock, rebuild neighbors’ homes lost in a fire or flood, look for lost cattle, or hunt for wolves killing their cattle.

Young people helped the war effort on the front and in the rear. The first major work action took place in October 1941 when a 150-strong brigade from liberated Užice harvested corn in Dobrun. 

From 1942 on, young volunteers helped build or rebuild roads and railways, clear rubble, cut firewood as well as collect clothes, shoes, weapons, and ammo.

The biggest youth volunteer action during the war took place in Summer 1942 when 7,000 young men and women participated in the Sanica Valley Harvest, working under the slogan “Not a single grain to the occupier.” 

Mobilizing citizens for postwar economic reconstruction and development was a key objective for the Communist Party. The task of the youth organization, the People’s Youth of Yugoslavia, was to carry out almost all political, educational, and cultural work among youth, including volunteering.

In his 1946 new year’s speech, Tito called on youth to be on the front lines of restoring the country, just as they were the first to defend the country from the fascist occupier during the war. “May your youthful soaring and ardor find expression above all in constructive work,” he said.

Accordingly, People’s Youth of Yugoslavia declared that its main task for the year was to secure youth participation in renovation and construction. Youth was to be Yugoslavia’s shock group.

Volunteering aimed to inject in youth a collective spirit and infuse them with the vision of brotherhood and unity. Youth brigades also meant to reduce disparities among people with diverse social, cultural, and geographic backgrounds. On the practical level, this was to be achieved with on-the-job training and education. Indeed, Tito described the volunteer work actions as “the best school for our youth.”

In 1946 People’s Youth of Yugoslavia organized two large-scale federal brigades. The first major federal Omladinska Radna Akcija (Youth Work Action) in Yugoslavia built the railway between the Bosnian towns of Brčko and Banovići.

Some 62,000 Yugoslav and 2,200 foreign youth organized into 220 brigades working in three shifts of two months each moved some 1.5 million cubic meters of soil and rock to build the 92-kilometer railway featuring three tunnels and supporting infrastructure. Foreign volunteers came mostly from central-eastern European countries but also from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, and Spain.

Lifting their spirits, among others, was the marching song, “Omladinska pjesma obnove s pruge Brčko-Banovići” (Youth Song of Reconstruction from the Brčko-Banovići Railway), whose lyrics were later also adopted in later projects: “Brčko-Banovići, to je naša meta, izgraditi prugu još ovoga ljeta” (Brčko-Banovići, that is our goal, to build a railway this summer) and “Jedan, dva, jedan, dva, omladina Titova kreće na rad, zove obnova” (One, two, one two, Tito’s youth goes to work, reconstruction beckons).

[SOUNDBITE]

Construction of the Brčko–Banovići line began on May 1st, 1946 and the first train transported coal from the mines around Banovići, near Tuzla, to the transportation hub of Brčko on November 7th. Tito himself opened the line. The writer Miroslav Krleža said, “This is certainly not the first railway in the world, but it is the first built by children who gifted it to Tito, the first man in our politics, so that he can bust tunnels through the darkest periods of our past.”

The other major project for 1946 was the first portion of the Brotherhood and Unity Highway, between Zagreb and Belgrade, which was completed in 1950. As you heard in Episode 59, “Island, Bared,” a brigade of prisoners from the Goli Otok internment camp also built a portion of this road. Yugoslav People’s Army soldiers participated in large numbers as well. The concept behind the highway wasn’t just logistical, to connect Yugoslavia’s main cities, but also to reinforce relations between Croats and Serbs as part of postwar reconciliation. 

[SOUNDBITE]

The main youth action for the following year, the first of Yugoslavia’s first Five-Year Plan, was the construction of the Šamac-Sarajevo Youth Railway, which aimed to not only supplant the existing narrow-gauge railway to transport commodities like coal and timber, but also to spur the development of industries along the Bosna River. The project was launched on April 1st, which later became the Day of Youth Work Actions.

The government provided the supplies, People’s Youth of Yugoslavia supplied the labor.

While some work was done with drills, dynamite, and other mining equipment, and dump trucks, bulldozers, cement mixers, compressors, and other machinery were brought in from all over the country, the bulk of it went on with picks, spades, shovels, and wheelbarrows. 

At 242 kilometers long, with 9 tunnels and 17 bridges, the Railway required three times as many adults, with corresponding mobilization efforts. In all, 211,371 youth volunteers aged 16 to 25 participated in the action over seven and a half months, of whom about 35 thousand were school-aged, 55 thousand were workers, and 112 thousand were peasants. Also helping out were peasants from the surrounding areas as well as teachers and professors of the participating youths.

The volunteers were again organized into brigades, 887 of them, some of which were location based, from cities and towns, there were peasant brigades, school or university brigades, foreign brigades, and so on. A brigade averaged about 300 volunteers. Work stays lasted one or two months. School-aged kids took the middle shift during the summer. 

[SOUNDBITE]

Over 5,800 volunteers were foreigners, from 42 countries, including Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the UK. There were additional small working groups from another handful of countries. Germany and the Soviet Union were not represented, and the State Department banned Americans from joining. Each foreign brigade also had to take a tour of Yugoslavia after their work stay.

One of these foreign volunteers was E.P. Thompson, a 22-year old communist from England. Thompson, who later became a prominent lefty social historian focusing on “history from below,” edited a book collecting accounts of his and his fellow brigadiers’ experiences at the railway. The Railway: An Adventure in Construction was published in 1948 by the London-based British-Yugoslav Association.

The foreigners’ participation helped build not just the railway, quote “a sinew of the new Yugoslavia,” Thompson concludes, but also “strong bonds of international understanding, a legend which will astound and inspire the future, and a new forthright and comradely generation of men.” 

About a fifth of the brigadiers were women. “The sexes lived in complete equality,” Thompson writes. “We found a truer comradeship than we had known between the sexes because it had been based upon common work in which was gained a greater knowledge of each other and a new respect.”

Additional six thousands plus technical, engineering, and other experts, including mining professionals, mechanics, quarrymen, foremen, and so on worked on the project as well.

Each brigade had its own camp, comprised of co-ed barrack-like wooden huts, with an office and common room, and decorated with names and slogans and various illustrations. There was a flag pole outside. Meals were eaten in an open shelter. Volunteers were issued boots and a work uniform. 

Throughout his account, Thompson emphasizes the voluntary nature of joining, participation, and work. Recruitment campaigns run by national organizations and their branches still ensured people joined on their own, kind of like enlisting troops. 

Thompson does acknowledge that “the compulsion was the moral pressure of a society whose total effort was directed to construction.” Indeed, when asked, Thompson writes, the youths would say “no one was compelled to come but of course we consider that it’s everyone’s duty to take a part in reconstruction.”

And, Thompson writes, “those who were left out would feel shame-faced and isolated.” 

Nonetheless, on the job, “the discipline was ninety-nine and nine-tenths self-imposed by the volunteers themselves.”

“The work was driven forward not by threats or by personal incentives but by songs and an amazing spirit of co-operative will. The youth of Yugoslavia were engaged, voluntarily and enthusiastically, in building a railway and they were singing while they built it.”

[SOUNDBITE] 

And, Thompson adds, “They would go home assured that they never had a holiday so good before.” 

[SOUNDBITE] 

Thompson found it all—the spirit, the singing, the shouting of slogans—quite inspiring. “All of us who worked on the railway were so quickly infected by this spirit that we found the heavy work refreshing.” The spirit, he continues, “drove forward the work until the work itself seemed to become possessed by the spirit, reinforcing the determination of the builders and converting a generation to a new way of life.”

Following 6 to 8 hour shifts was a “comprehensive educational and cultural programme”, where youths would learn quote “qualities of leadership, democratic self-government, and responsibility, and the positive values of community life.” The volunteers shouted slogans, played and sang music around bonfires, danced the kolo. They watched movies, held sporting competitions, political rallies, and book reading groups, attended lectures by visiting professors on various topics, from the Five-Year Plan to literature, and enjoyed guest performances by orchestras, choirs, and theater companies, complementing the volunteers’ own music and art societies. 

The work also served to train the cadres in both the professional and vocational sense. “Not only linesmen, drivers, mechanics, miners, engineers, etc. but also telepgrahists, clerks and typists, postal workers, doctors and architects were being trained,” writes Thompson. Youths also learned trades in courses and practice of welding, surveying, masonry, and machinery operation. There were some military drills as well, and, importantly, some 87 percent of those who arrived illiterate left being able to read and write.

The education piece was best expressed in the slogan, “Mi gradimo prugu – pruga gradi nas” (We build the railway, the railway builds us), which originated at Šamac-Sarajevo.

The railway had its own propaganda department, with photographers and filmmakers producing material for distribution around the country, and its own paper and radio station broadcasting the news about the railway to the worksite and beyond. Towns saw off or welcomed brigades back with pomp. Parents and siblings boasted about their loved ones’ feats. Brigades were followed in their home towns like football teams. Newsreels, radio, and the press ran stories about it, documenting records, successes, milestones, statistics, and so on. 

In the background you’ve been listening to a 1947 documentary by Slobodan Jovičić and Sida Marjanović marking the opening of the railway.

[SOUNDBITE] 

The Šamac-Sarajevo Railway was opened on November 16th, 1947, again with Tito himself in attendance.

Whether they were federal-level or locally based, work actions did not just serve economic purposes. Volunteering harnessed the young people’s wartime energy and gave them something productive to do in the face of lack of other employment. The time spent working also served for political, ideological, professional, and cultural education of youth. 

Ideological indoctrination was particularly important during Yugoslavia’s Stalinist period, but political programming persisted beyond that as well, albeit to different degrees and content. 

In the 70s the so-called political school portion of the work actions entailed lectures, round table discussions, reading of ideological newsletters and wall newspapers and listening to radio broadcasts. Topics might include the history and organization of the communist party and youth organization, history of the people’s liberation struggle and the socialist revolution, self-management, current events, and so on. After 1980, Tito’s biography was a major topic. 

Ideologization manifested in other ways as well. Each brigade bore a name, most commonly of a prominent Communist or Partisan. Brigadiers decorated their barracks with slogans and ideological designs. Political call-and-response slogans shouted on repeat not only set the rhythm for the work but also drilled in their messages. 

“The Railway was building a new generation,” writes Thompson, observing in real life the fulfillment of the Communists’ goals. “It taught the youth about each other, and about the various nationalities which make up Yugoslavia—and as they grew to understand each other better so they grew united. It taught the responsibilities of the individual in a society in which only the co-operation of every member resulted in the success of the whole.”

Indeed, throughout their history the Party used the work actions to create a youth that would live the principle of  Brotherhood and Unity. 

In 1978, another track was built at the railway with the aid of youth work actions. Again a documentary was produced to document the event. In the documentary Hiljade Ruku Jedna Snaga (Thousands of Hands, a Single Force) by Ranko Stanišić, notice the variation of the old railway building song, with this railway’s name added and Tito’s name dropped in the chorus (he was completely dead two years later).

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Now Thompson was a Communist. 

More sober later analyses showed quite a few issues with volunteer labor. 

First, participation may not have been as voluntary as it seemed. 

Youth knew that participation would reflect positively on their record, and help them get jobs, promotions, or spots at university. Conversely, not participating was considered an aggravating circumstance that could potentially hamper a person’s progress in life. 

In short, participating in youth work actions was good for your career. The best volunteers would be invited to join the Party as members (as in other socialist countries, Party membership was a privilege; less than 10 percent of adults were Party members). More often than not, people in leadership positions at any level or organization did at least one tour of volunteer labor duty in their early years. 

Though the official line held that volunteer labor should be strictly voluntary, local organizations had to meet numerical quotas of youth laborers. Given the Party’s and system’s authoritarian structure and economic outcomes being set in law, including the Five-Year Plan, quotas in essence became directives. 

In the drive to secure sufficient numbers of workers and meet quotas and deadlines, recruiters sometimes resorted to more forceful tactics. 

For many youngsters, work actions were an opportunity to get away from their parents. Correspondingly, parents were often among those most opposed to their kids’ participation, with some even suggesting their children were being kidnapped. Some parents who refused to send their children to work actions were threatened with the loss of their jobs or ration cards, and one call for participation read, “Whoever does not respond and does not come to the brigade will be held legally responsible.”

Coercive recruitment ultimately helped diminish public support for volunteer labor. Party leaders, including Tito himself, spoke publicly against the use of force in recruitment campaigns. 

Contemporary accounts by participating youth corroborate Thompson’s observations as to a high level of morale. Participation in federal brigades was an honor. But there were also reports of poor working and living conditions; epidemics of typhus and dysentery broke out at Šamac-Sarajevo, resulting in ten deaths. Local actions received much less government funding and consequently provided lesser cultural-educational work and offered inferior living and working conditions. 

And quite a few youngsters simply deserted. Between 1946 and 1973 an average of 15 percent of brigadiers left their actions early. In 1962, 13 percent of brigadiers at the Brotherhood and Unity highway project left the work. Between 1968 and 1971 nearly 17 percent of youth abandoned their posts at the New Belgrade site.

Volunteer labor also distracted youth from education. Though grades suffered across the board in the first years after the war, youth activists, shock workers, and volunteer work action participants ranked the worst.

There was also a negative economic impact. Volunteer labor increased the demand for food, clothing, and other stuff, which threatened supplies for the army. Work actions also tied up other resources, such as buildings, medical staff, or cultural workers. People who were supposed to be producing food, that is peasants, were instead sent to forests, construction sites, and mines to supplement industrial labor, so that didn’t help either. 

In the long run, the not always top quality of projects hastily completed by amateurs meant the railways and roads and so on would have to be repaired not long after launch. 

In his speech at the opening of the Šamac-Sarajevo line, Tito thanked the youth for their heroic heroic efforts but also said that the party must no longer ask them to do the impossible. 

From now on, their main task was to study and gain the knowledge necessary to serve their country. The new focus was long-term: improving professional and ideological qualifications through education in the school system.

What also helped to de-emphasize youth labor brigades was that the economic situation had stabilized, the Party’s confidence in economic affairs improved, and the implementation of the Five-Year Plan began.

This changed again after the Tito-Stalin split. Yugoslavia’s isolation brought about economic problems again and renewed emphasis on citizens’ self-sacrifice and volunteerism ensued. By fall 1948, shock work was hailed again and mass youth volunteer actions revived. 

Other major railway projects built by youth volunteers included Nikšić–Titograd in 1948, and Doboj–Banja Luka in 1951, where more than 87,000 young people built a 90-kilometer long railway.

The construction of the Brotherhood and Unity Highway continued. And between April 1948 and November 1950, nearly 200,000 youth organized in 900 brigades helped in the construction of apartment and government buildings in New Belgrade.

In this period, in addition to railways, the Brotherhood and Unity Highway, and New Belgrade, youth also helped build factories, including the steelworks in Zenica and Nikšić, dams and hydroelectric power plants, including Mavrovo, and entire towns, like Nova Gorica and Novi Travnik. 

[SOUNDBITE – “Da nam živi rad”] 

PETER KORCHNAK: “Long live our labor” was another popular song brigadiers sang. 

Large federal actions were scaled back in the middle part of the 1950s in favor of smaller scale actions at the local level. By one estimate, between 1953 and 1958 there were around 20,000 such local projects, such as the repair and construction of schools, playgrounds, housing, streets, waterworks, sewers, bridges, sports fields, cultural or cooperative centers, parks, and reading rooms, or to agricultural works like sowing or harvest. Schools would also organize countless one-day work actions for students. 

But soon large-scale actions returned. In 1958, youth helped built the Zagreb-Ljubljana segment of the Brotherhood and Unity Highway, and then by 1963 the remaining section, connecting Belgrade with Macedonia-Greece border. In all, half a million youth volunteers, along with Yugoslav People’s Army soldiers and others, built the 1,100+ kilometer road.

From the mid-1960s on, volunteer labor became a near-exclusive domain of youth and work actions the domain of republican and municipal youth organizations (the last large-scale federal action was the Adriatic Highway in 1964). 

Economic reforms, industrialization, and self-management were bearing fruit and Yugoslavia’s economy grew rapidly and advanced technologically; the unemployed began to trickle abroad; wealthier, urbanizing, more educated Yugoslavs were increasingly turning from production and construction to consumption; and, as education and connections gained in importance, voluntary labor no longer provided career advantages to participants. 

Youth were less and less motivated to join and as a result work actions became increasingly recreational in nature; they were advertised and brigadiers took them as an opportunity to travel around the country, make and socialize with new friends, and have a fun time away from home in a camp-like atmosphere, which was particularly appealing for high-school students, who were the most numerous among the brigadiers now. Travel, friendships, and fun imparted on the work actions an air of summer adventure.

On the logistical level, most youth work actions would now entail only month-long shifts and span only over the summer vacation months; brigades shrank to 40 to 50 people, with an increasing proportion of women. 

And if early work actions built railways, motorways, and factories without heavy machinery, now the projects were lighter, like planting trees, constructing youth recreational centers, assisting in archaeological excavations, and regulating river banks with extensive use of heavy construction equipment. Lighter work made for fewer desertions; in 1980 a mere 1.3 percent of brigadiers absconded.

1960 saw the launch of ORA Sava, the Youth Work Action on the Sava river, where young people built embankments in and around Zagreb. 

Youth helped with the reconstruction of Skopje after the 1963 earthquake. 

That year People’s Youth of Yugoslavia changed its name to the League of Youth of Yugoslavia.

After the 1968 student protests, the Communists seemed to have re-emphasized youth volunteerism as a way to get the new generations more engaged in the building of socialism. The Belgrade–Bar railway, Morava and Sava river channels, the Djerdjap dam and power plant, the second phase of the construction of New Belgrade were among some of the major projects launched between 1969 and 1971. 

Another one was the construction of the Sutjeska memorial and recreation complex at Tjentište, site of a major World War II battle. The building of recreation centers at monuments to major World War II battles that were to be the destination for school excursions was one of the quintessential youth brigade projects in this period. One of a handful of foreign youth volunteers at Sutjeska was Michael Alpert. 

Michael Alpert

MICHAEL ALPERT: Instead of going to Kibbutz, I went to Yugoslavia and I went to the radna akcija. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Michael Alpert is, to quote Wikipedia, “a klezmer musician and Yiddish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, scholar, and educator who has been called a key figure in the klezmer revitalization, beginning in the 1970s.” His also quote “a pioneering teacher and researcher of Yiddish traditional dance and has been central to restoring Yiddish dance…alongside klezmer music as a key component of East European Jewish expressive culture.”

But before he did any of that, as a teenager he protested the Vietnam War and listened to shortwave radio broadcasts from Eastern Bloc countries and Radio Free Europe in Slovenian. Alpert’s parents came from present day Lithuania and western Ukraine, respectively. 

As soon as he could get a passport, in 1970 at age 16, Alpert set out to explore the world. First stop: Yugoslavia to visit his penpal Ivica from Slavonska Požega, in today’s Croatia, who had been a high school exchange student in the US. Alpert made his way to Zagreb, where Ivica was now attending university. He wanted to spend time in the countryside working the fields and learning the language and culture. When that didn’t work out, Ivica had a different idea.

MICHAEL ALPERT:  He said, Look, my friends and I were thinking that there’s this thing called Omladinska Radna Akcija, that is like a brigade for kids like your age, our age, you know, end of high school, very beginning of university. Lots of kids do it the summer, between high school and university, or whatever they’re going on to. And we thought that might be a good idea for you to do. And I said, Okay, that sounds good. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Alpert joined Ivica and some new friends at the recruitment office and signed up.

MICHAEL ALPERT: The brigade was about to leave from Zagreb. It was Omladinska Radna Brigada Brača Špalj iz Zagreba.

PETER KORCHNAK: —named after three brothers who were Partisans and killed during the war.

MICHAEL ALPERT: The offices were in Trešnjevka, in that part of Zagreb, and the brigade was based there. And I went down and signed up, and they said, you know, okay, great, we’ll take you, you know, the trains leaving at such and such time in, you know, 2, 3, 4, days from from the station in Zagreb, be there.

PETER KORCHNAK: The night train took the brigade to Sarajevo, then a steam engine train to Foča. Along the way Alpert fraternized with his peers, practicing his new Serbocroatian with fellow 16 to 18-year-old students. 

MICHAEL ALPERT: This was all very romantic to me as well. I mean, it was thrilling. I mean, first, it was like spectacularly beautiful land and mountains and river gorges and stuff.

We got to Foča, and we got on busses that went on a twisty road further up into the mountains to Tjentište and to the site on Sutjeska, to the side of the of the akcija.

PETER KORCHNAK: The site and the work differed little from earlier actions.

MICHAEL ALPERT: I’ve often described it as a cross between summer camp and the army, or work camp and the army.

We slept in barracks. 

Our schedule was that if we had the early shift, we were awakened at 3:45 in the morning by our commandant, whose name was Švrčo. He would come in and say, you know, “Ajmo momci, ajmo, pet minuta zbor.” In five minutes, there’s, we had to be outside gathered with the zbor to raise the Yugoslav flag and sing the national anthem. 

And so, you know, we leapt out of bed and threw on our clothes and staggered out into the dawn and then gathered around the flagpole and sang, “Hej Slaveni….” [SINGS] etc, etc. I could sing the whole thing to this day. And this was stirring to me. And then we had breakfast and coffee, I guess, and went off to the workplace.

If we did the early shift, I think we worked from we started work at 5am and we worked until maybe one, something like that. And then had lunch, and then we had the second part of the day off.

If we had the later shift of the day, we were woken up at 5am and then got up and we had the first part of the day free to just hang out, write letters, hike around, etc, etc. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The task was pretty simple.

MICHAEL ALPERT: We were digging out a side of a hill to be turned into an artificial lake, pond that was part of the grounds of the monument and the hotel. It wasn’t the monument itself, the monument itself wasn’t there yet. Neither was the hotel. It was just the akcija and the, you know, the general construction site.

The work was pick and shovel and wheelbarrow work. It was heavy earth moving work, but not with bulldozers, by hand. So we would, you know, use picks to break up the earth the side of this hill, shovel it into wheelbarrows, you know, run it off with the wheelbarrows. 

It may have been 1970 but a lot of significant roads, especially in the southern half of Yugoslavia, were still dirt. 

Of course, you know, they could have used bulldozers and so forth. But maybe we didn’t need to do it, but it was part of the experience of the brigades and the brigade culture.

PETER KORCHNAK: The volunteers would keep up their spirits with chants and songs.

MICHAEL ALPERT: It was just heavy work. And you know, of course, once the sun was up, it was hot, and you know, we were, we were sweating and working hard. And one of the shouts was like, you know, someone would call out, “Jebeno je!”  You know, it’s fucked, right? And that’s great, right? And then we would all answer, “Jebeno je!” It wasn’t that the cause was fucked, it just, you know, the work was hard. 

But other things we had, we had these brigade chants, like someone would would yell, Himalaya, and we would all answer, “Tres!” “Himalaya.” “Tres.” “Himalaya. “Tres! Tres! Tres! Trešnjevka, Z-A-G-R-E-B! Zagreb! Zagreb! Zagreb!” That was our our brigade chant.

We also was like, also a song to a familiar melody from the Jugovina. [SINGS] 

PETER KORCHNAK: They did get breaks, too.

MICHAEL ALPERT: One of the things that was really, I thought was really beautiful, it was really impressive to me, was when we’d take breaks. I mean, they, you know, come out with bottles of like, you know, Yupi, or, you know, mandarinka, or some kind of, you know, orange juice or or something like that, and some kind of cake or cookies, you know, a sandwich. We’d get down to that last bottle of Yupi, you know, of orange drink and all 15 of us or 25 of us, would like share the last swallow, each one taking, you know, less and less and less, or the last crumbs of stuff. It was socialism in action. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Outside of work was leisure time.

MICHAEL ALPERT: Free time was, hanging out, writing letters, in my case, playing some music.  I didn’t have a guitar with me, but I had a harmonica which I brought to play on, I think, you know, at various points, people lent me guitars. You know, I would sit around and sing. We would sing, I’d sing stuff, you know. 

I was exotic there, of course. I was one of nine non-Yugoslavs there. And it’s not like we were all put together. There was no one else in my brigade who was not from Yugoslavia. I mean, everyone was pretty much from Zagreb.

Of the nine of us, the only people that could really talk to people in the former Serbocroatian, or be understood was me and the woman from Czechoslovakia.

So, you know, what else would we do? Yeah, you know, sometimes I’m, you know, hike up the hill some and look out. 

I mean, sometimes it was kind of lonely for me. I wasn’t with other people all the time. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Alpert and another American participant decided to leave the work action a week early, after 3 weeks, to travel around Yugoslavia.

MICHAEL ALPERT: It was a hard choice because we knew that Tito was coming to address us and to meet us at the end of the of our work term. And you know, everybody was saying, you know, he’ll really dig you, it’s like, you know, it’s like, come from America, you speak our language, I mean, you know, he’s gonna really see what you’re about. 

And so it was a choice between getting to meet Tito or going off and seeing the rest of the country. So we made the choice not to stay for Tito. I don’t have huge regret about having having not done it. I’m really glad we went and did what we did and got to see more of Yugoslavia.

PETER KORCHNAK: Alpert’s reflection on the experience, more than half a century later, are positive.

MICHAEL ALPERT: Just to make clear, this was not forced labor, it was voluntary. And we were volunteers, and we were proud to be volunteers. 

No one had recruited me by giving me any kind of political talk. A friend or two has used that term, “How did they get you? They recruited you into that…” 

And at the time, well not only at the time, I was proud, and am proud to have served, done this work under the flag of Yugoslavia. And the red star on the flag was, you know, what did it remind me of especially was the Viet Cong flag. 

I hadn’t shown up there because I wanted to be a volunteer for socialism. This was different than going to the brigades in Cuba, but I was happy to be doing that.

It was a major experience in my life. I love the fact that I did this. I’m, as I said, I’m very proud to have done it, and it was a remarkable experience, I mean, to have gone off by myself when I was 16.

PETER KORCHNAK: Alpert returned to Yugoslavia two years later and lived in Zagreb for a couple of years, with the goal of collecting folk music.

MICHAEL ALPERT: I basically became a hippie in Zagreb.

PETER KORCHNAK: The country had changed post-Croatian Spring and post the Bugojno Group insurrection, but that’s another story. 

On his travels around the country in 1972, Alpert stopped at Tjentište and spent the night at the hotel that had been built at the resort. The monument had been completed in 1971.

MICHAEL ALPERT: Yeah, there wasn’t that much to check out. I wasn’t that impressed with it, frankly, you know. I got the fact that it was an important location. And, you know, the monument was important, you know, it was still important for those reasons. But I was more jaded at that point about states and governments in general. 

That’s not to say that I was completely disenchanted with it or anything like that. But I began to see that the arrogance towards and mistreatment of the environment, of the physical environment, the natural world, was just as bad in what was called socialism as what’s called capitalism.

I didn’t think it was like, Oh, it’s so beautiful, you know, what we built here, okay, there’s a little artificial lake and the monument and the hotel, and I preferred it when the countryside, when the mountains, there were less kind of disturbed by this kind of stuff.

PETER KORCHNAK: Alpert performs the music he collected on his travels in the immigrant communities around the U.S. 

He went back to the former Yugoslavia last year again after 50 years; he did not make it to Tjentište on this trip.

MICHAEL ALPERT: Like many people, I miss Yugoslavia. I understand why some people don’t. And I’m glad and feel proud to have been part of it in some small ways, and it lives on within us.

[SOUNDBITE – “Hej haj brigade” by Arsen Dedić and Ivica Bobinac]

PETER KORCHNAK: In 1974, the Union of Youth of Yugoslavia added “socialist” to its name. And the song “Hej haj brigade” by Arsen Dedić and Ivica Bobinac became the anthem of youth work actions.

The 1970s saw a number of large-scale ORAs, Youth Work Actions: Jasenovac, Kopaonik, Kozara, Kumrovec, Niš, Šabac. 

In 1975, 15 federal youth work actions had over 15,000 people participating; in 1979, 32 federal youth work actions had over 46 thousand people, with thousands more in 13 republican and 3 provincial-level actions. In 1980, the year Tito died, there were 34 federal and 23 republican and provincial actions. 

ORA Sava continued throughout this period. One of the participants there was Amra Kazić. She is a genetic engineering and molecular biology researcher in Sarajevo where she has lived most of her life since 1963. She participated in four work actions in the 1970s.

AMRA KAZIĆ: The first one was quite unusual. In [the] second half of 70s, somebody made that it would be good that five Pioneers from each former republics of ex-Yugoslavia, and Vojvodina and Kosovo in that time, will basically have five pupils from the primary school in that Pioneer brigade. And in that time I was 13 or 14, something like that. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Yugoslav kids aged 7 to 15 were members of the Union of Pioneers of Yugoslavia, which was in turn a sub-organization of the League of Socialist Youth. 

Special Pioneer Brigades participated in some work actions, comprised of select members. 

As the usual limit for the youth actions was 16 and Kazić was only in seventh grade, and as the stay was almost a month by then, her parents were none too happy to permit her to go. But after reassurances from the school principal about safety and benefits of participating, Kazić’s parents relented and she spent part of the summer 1976 at ORA Sava. 

Working under the supervision of engineers and builders, the youth formed dirt brought in by dump trucks into berms. 

Kazić was one of the younger participants.

AMRA KAZIĆ: In the early afternoon and morning, you will work and usually, because we were quite small, we will get some not very difficult tasks to do, usually raking or bringing the water.

It is hot and the people are thirsty, you will bring water. And it’s not easy job also bringing water, because all the time, somebody will just say, okay, “Water!” “Water!” And you have to run with small canister and with the pot and all these things. 

I remember we were finding some, from the Second World War, empty shells of the bullets and all these kind of things. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The ORA Sava work summer camp lasted from 1960 to 1985. In 14 years thru 1974, so about halfway through, more than 40,000 Yugoslav and 2,000 foreign youth volunteers participated in the ORA Sava work action. 

The work was indeed hard, especially for a kid.

AMRA KAZIĆ: It was a little bit hard, especially for children, to get up around six o’clock or even earlier. And you have to be on time, the same as in military. 

You grow up because you are on your own, there are not parents. You fit in that team, to survive without your parents in not always very easy conditions, especially in the morning and working. 

Of course, it is hot, you are tired, but you will feel ashamed that you will just be sitting and that other other people will [be] working. 

When I return[ed], I was so tired that my parents, I remember, were so frightened when I didn’t wake up for 24 hours. 

PETER KORCHNAK: As in other actions, work itself was only one part of the experience.

AMRA KAZIĆ: After we will return in our radna akcija campus, basically, we will have different kind of social activities or even courses if you wanted to attend. I remember in ‘78 or something like that, I finished a course for photography. 

And it was really wonderful to get together with people from different area, because I think ORA Sava is quite [a] big, radna akcija.

In the evening, we usually will come some very popular bands or some another social activity, and we basically could interact, and that really joined people so much. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: The same year, 1976, members of the rock band Bijelo Dugme collectively participated in the Kozara work action.

AMRA KAZIĆ: Just really working for one month, not singing. They could sing in the evening, you know, for fun, but working the same as any other participants, and nobody forced them. They decided that they want to do that as a band, as something what is good, and to show also other youths that, basically they think that is good thing that everybody will need to try. 

Maybe it’s look from today’s perspective as the marketing, but they have enough popular that they didn’t need that. But that is, you know, how people differently felt about that kind of voluntary work in ex-Yugoslavia.

PETER KORCHNAK: For her second radna akcija, Kazić, now in high school, picked to go to ORA Sava again. The following year, she decided to go to the Belgrade action and the fourth one she spent in Ljubljana. 

The only material rewards she ever received were two thank-you certificates and a special pin (you can find these individually or in sets on ebay for less than 15 dollars). 

Kazić, too, emphasizes the voluntary nature of participating in work actions.

AMRA KAZIĆ: Definitely, it was voluntary, because even sometimes you really, really have to find information, where to apply on time that you can go in some radna akcija. 

You would go and say, Okay, I would like to participate in radna akcija. And usually before you would go, you will have some meetings with people who would also participate. And you will have also medical examination, and you will receive some vaccine and all the that kind of things, meaning that was really completely voluntary, that was really up to us if we wanted. 

Sometimes would be too many people, or just they will need to cut on a certain number of the people. Some people, for example, just couldn’t come, at least not with that brigade or in some action which they would like to go. Meaning that was really, really voluntary, completely, even you have to find a way how to go there.

PETER KORCHNAK: And Kazić has positive memories of her time volunteering as well. 

AMRA KAZIĆ: I felt a pride that I can participate that I somehow can participate in building my country, and feel as the part of that somehow that I can contribute. It was very different mentality. Definitely I would say that that experience as a whole is something that is worth it.

PETER KORCHNAK: Indeed, one of the facets of youth work action Kazić and other participants remember most fondly is the friendships they formed in the camps. Peruse any of the Facebook groups organized around different work actions or read through comments on YouTube videos about work actions, and you’ll get a sense of camaraderie that developed and that people carry with them to this day.

AMRA KAZIĆ: Probably that hard time basically put people more together, and that when we later afternoon and in the evening socialized and between different brigades and with different people chatting, laughing, and all these kind of things, probably get much more together. And basically you are more mature, you can easy later to get through some different kind of situation.

You know that connection between people and friendship, which you develop, was really something what is difficult to explain. I remembered that with some of the participants in my brigade, I spent years later on visiting each other in different towns and all these things, writing postcards and letters. It was some friendships for years.

Somehow people connect in different kind of ways. You beside the work has also that very much socializing, which was really very happy, and I do remember that was my motivation to go in other action, because that friendship which you develop, which really stay for a long time, and something really strong.

Such a connection with the people you feel as they’re family.

[SOUNDBITE – “Brigadirska uspavanka ORA Sava 1980” by Marin Škrgatić]

PETER KORCHNAK: Aside from building the country, Youth Volunteer Actions were present in popular culture as well. 

April 1st, the Day of Youth Work Actions, was commemorated every year. 

In addition to a number of singles, LP albums collected tunes. Earlier you heard a title track from the 1974 album Hej, Haj, Brigade, which also contained contemporary or instrumental versions of several Partisan songs. 

1976 saw the release of Da nam živi živi rad (Long live our labor), a compilation of songs about youth volunteer actions released for their 30th anniversary. Most songs were in Serbocroatian but there was one each in Albanian, Macedonian, and Slovenian; titles included “Song of Highway Builders,” “Action Workers Anthem,” and “Youth Song.”

Another compilation album in 1980 collected music from a documentary film about ORA Morava. 

And just now you heard the track “Brigadier Lullaby” by Marin Škrgatić from the EP 20 Years of ORA Sava, released in 1979. 

Youth volunteer actions also found their way to the television and silver screens.

You already heard about the reels of film created at and about youth work actions for propaganda purposes.

[SOUNDBITE]

The 1962 feature film Prekobrojna (The Extra One) by Branko Bauer is a love story between the characters portrayed by Milena Dravić and Ljubiša Samardžić that takes place at the Brotherhood and Unity Highway youth work action. The movie was filmed on site, with extras from actual work brigades.

[SOUNDBITE]

Action in the 1981 film Ljubi, ljubi, al’ glavu ne gubi (Kiss, Kiss but Don’t Lose Your Mind), which was the third installment in the film series, Lude Godine (Foolish Years), takes place at a youth volunteer action.

Similarly, the 1983 film S.P.U.K., short for Sreća Pojedinca – Uspjeh Kolektiva (An Individual’s Happiness Is a Collective’s Success), by Milivoj Puhlovski, took place at the ORA Sava youth labor action. The film was shot during the third shift of the actual ORA, with select participants from prior shifts included as extras.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Youth work actions declined in the 1980s as the country began to fall apart. 

Nationalism took hold of the political sphere and public imagination, and socialism crumbled. With intensifying national affiliation and growing individualism, solidarity and the drive to build a common country that had inspired young people’s participation in the past dissipated. 

Moreover, with the worsening economic crisis unemployment grew, particularly among young people, and so dealing with existential problems hampered the drive to volunteer as well. 

Most brigadiers in this period were of high-school age, that is students not yet seeking employment. As the children of the early brigadiers enjoyed the benefits of their elite parents’ successful careers and higher education, most brigadiers were from the poorer social strata. And at the end of the 1980s, opportunities opened for youth to go volunteer in Western Europe, a much more attractive proposition.

With the collapse of Yugoslavia and socialism, youth work actions disappeared. 

The last youth volunteer work actions took place in 1990.

[SOUNDBITE]

In 1990s, the Sarajevo comedy troup Top Lista Nadrealista delivered a final popcultural blow to the actions (check out Episode 65, “Jokers to the Right” for more on these guys and humor in Yugoslavia). One of their mock news reports was about the first private volunteer work action. In the skit, a businessman is using volunteer labor at his construction site, with the guys occasionally receiving gifts like discounts on products the businessman sells. The skit mocks not just the arrival of capitalism to the Yugoslav lands, but also the people who welcomed it uncritically.

According to one estimate, around two million Yugoslavs participated in youth volunteer work actions throughout their 45-year postwar history.

[SOUNDBITE] 

Like the former country itself, youth work actions also live on in popular memory. Facebook groups gather former participants to share photos, recollections, or connect with past friends. 

Dozens videos on YouTube bring back media and private footage from and about the actions, there are photocollages featuring “Hej Haj Brigade” and other work-action songs; countless comments only underscore the power of memories from work actions, with veterans of multiple actions being among the most forceful proponents of volunteer labor. 

Former volunteers have been publishing memoirs of their time in the brigades. 

Researchers devote a growing number of pages to the discourse about youth work actions, from student theses to journal articles to books, including These Are the Creations of Our Hands: The Heroic and Glorious Epic of Youth Work Actions, 1941–1990 by Slobodan Ristanović published in 2014 by the Association of Youth Work Actions Participants and Volunteers of Serbia; or The Railway of Dreams: Youth Work Action Belgrade–Bar 1971–1975 by Vidoj Golubović, published in 2024.

In 2012, the Archive of Serbia organized the exhibition We Build the Railway, the Railway Builds Us: Youth work actions in Yugoslavia 1946–1951.

An exhibition in Zagreb in 2017 offered a retrospective on the propaganda and media production around volunteer labor. Youth Work Actions: Design of an Ideology showed ways work actions were presented and promoted through visual media. A variety of designed and printed materials like graphic maps, posters, leaflets, brigade newspapers, postcards, booklets, awards, badges, diplomas, commemorative postage stamps, professional publications, and vinyl covers were presented alongside music, educational, documentary, and feature films and their posters, artworks, and photographs. 

“The ultimate goal of the design for youth work campaigns was fundamentally very noble,” writes one of the exhibition authors in the catalog.

“To unite young people around work tasks that would benefit the entire community and enable them to identify with each other in the process of work.”

In 2023, the exhibition The Railway of Dreams filled the House of Youth in Belgrade with photographs and archival materials about the Belgrade–Bar Railway Youth Work Action. Exhibition organizers included the Serbian Railways and the Association of Participants of the Belgrade–Bar Railway Youth Work Action.

Serbian Railways has commemorated some anniversaries of the Belgrade-Bar line construction.

Since 2010, the Serbian reality TV show Radna Akcija (Work Action) remodels homes of families in need.

And the Associations of Youth Work Action Participants and Volunteers of Serbia organizes commemorations on April 1st, the Youth Work Action Day, with, you guessed it, work actions. 

The 2023 action, in collaboration with forestry and other organizations, reforested areas around the village of Pruževina.

The Association also publishes an almanac, most recently in November 2024, featuring analyses, history text, memoirs, and photographs. One of the Association’s partners in this activity is the Museum of Yugoslavia.

Veterans organizations and various local organizations, too, organize work actions and other events.

From 2014 to 2019, the local World War II veterans organization in Kladovo organized the annual Work Action Tito, which restored, beautified, and cleaned up the Tito memorial overlooking the Djerdjap dam and hydroelectric power plant.

And various local and national volunteer and veteran organizations commemorate youth work actions on April 1st at the Monument to Youth Work Actions at Crni Vrh, which itself is a memorial to a wartime, 1945 work action there.

[SOUNDBITE]

The tradition and spirit, even the name of volunteer labor lives on in volunteering in general. This kind of volunteerism is apolitical, ideologically neutral, and generally focused on community development or environmental protection. 

One peculiar example is the Medjunarodna radna akcija volontera (International Volunteer Work Action) in Zenica. First organized in 2010, it purported to help the local community in the regulation of the Bosna river and management of the natural environment. It was sponsored by an American emigre from Bosnia who is a self proclaimed researcher, archaeologist, and anthropologist of disappeared civilizations and who quote unquote discovered 12,000-years-old Illyrian pyramids near Visoko and used the volunteer project to excavate them. 

More reality based was the Youth Work Action Vrnjačka Banja 2011 which saw more than a hundred volunteers from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, and Macedonia work for three weeks improving the Lipovačka River banks, in central Serbia. The action was sponsored by the municipality and the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy; in addition to officials, 65-year old Jožef Parag from Bačka Topola, who participated in 28 Yugoslav work actions, opened the camp.

In 2014, scores of volunteers helped clean up and restore areas affected by catastrophic floods, in Serbia and elsewhere. 

Instances of citizens getting together to improve their villages often get the moniker youth work action. In October 2023, a group of men of all ages in Gornja Velika Vrbnica cleaned up the access roads to their village.

In Novi Pazar, an international volunteer work action has been organized for six years now. Participants of all ages this past year came from all former republics as well as Turkey, restoring and beautifying the Ljudska river embankment and promenade. The action was sponsored by the municipality and the Ministry of Tourism and Youth.

The environmental nonprofit Young Researchers of Serbia offers volunteering opportunities for youth in youth work camps also known as volunteer camps. 

The organization originated in the late 1960s and is financed in large part by the Ministry of Youth and Sport. It organizes dozens of small volunteer work camps around that country modeled on such camps in Western Europe; it also facilitates volunteering opportunities in work camps abroad. 

The primary objective of these camp is summer entertainment and travel. 

Scout organizations organize small youth work actions as well, including tree planting and neighborhood cleanups.

Left-leaning, though of course nominally non-partisan and apolitical organizations or groups of people like to call their volunteer gigs work actions. They may beautify a neighborhood, build a playground, improve infrastructure, and so on. 

Youth Work Actions at Mini Yugoslavia-Yugoland

One such organization is Mini Yugoslavia-Yugoland in Subotica. You may recall I visited Mini Yugoslavia in winter 2019 and reported on my visit in Episode 11. 

According to Mini Yugoslavia-Yugoland’s president, Goran Gabrić, over the past few years the theme park has seen many improvements as well as the addition of a camping site for RVs, trailers, and tents. They also organize events, most recently a recreational vehicle fair and a tandem bike ride for people who are visually impaired or blind.

Volunteers play an outsize role in these activities.

GORAN GABRIĆ: Couple times in a month, we do organize like a community, work actions, and then we invite also some other local people, friends of ours, who were connected with Yugoslavia, our members, and so on. Since we have already some kind of tradition for more than 20 years. So yeah, we do know people who are ready to help us out in certain way, in certain periods, not, of course, all the time as a volunteering should be and yeah, they are open in willingness to help us. 

So we do organize smaller or bigger work actions.

When we create smaller actions, when we include five to 10 people, you know, so that’s more like a personal, personal thing, that where we call each other, and that’s, that’s how it goes.

PETER KORCHNAK: A recent work action that I’ve been following on Instagram is the reconstruction of a Soko Jastreb small military fighter jet that the Yugoslav Air Force used in the training.

GORAN GABRIĆ: Through the help of our members and volunteers, also, we managed to assemble it, to put back the wings, to put back the tail, and also one, big day when we had a lot of volunteers included was the day when we started the painting of the of the airplane.

PETER KORCHNAK: The plane is now part of the permanent exhibition at the park, and a prime example that work actions here don’t always mean just manual labor. The restoration was lead by a volunteer with the requisite technical skills. 

GORAN GABRIĆ: This was really kind of a technical thing, really, and where he helped us to unload the the tire from the airplane, which is not so easy to be done, then to connect those wings to the airplane, which is also not something which we have never done before, you know. And so he brought his, let’s say, kind of a professional, technical knowledge as a gift to this action. 

And also, what we are planning to do with it in, let’s say, in future times is to set up an type of virtual, virtual reality option of riding the airplane. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Gabrić sees work actions at Mini Yugoslavia-Yugoland not only as essential to the functioning of the park but also as having deep roots.

GORAN GABRIĆ: That’s part of the Yugoslavia identity, youth, work, actions. The best things happened there concerning the Yugoslavia and the Yugoslavian youth, I may say, because it combined the youth, the willingness to develop the society, and the connection with real work, which was really meaningful in that way. 

I didn’t have opportunity to participate in the original ones. But my father and mother, they used to go and most many people who I met during the time here at Yugoland, they they all had, like best, best only to say about that. And really, the people who who participated in those actions have different approach to work, or different approach to society, and really, really good people in that way. 

They are more, more eager to work for some kind of a greater and common good, common value and not so much like self-oriented in that way, putting their effort for something which is like greater than themselves, yeah. Then only, what can one man achieve, or what one man can have for himself. So being able to understand that concept, that something is bigger than that, and something should, should we do together to make something which will be good for not only us, but also for the all of the other people who are into our society.

PETER KORCHNAK: So the volunteers work actions of today are a twist on volunteer work actions of yesteryear.

GORAN GABRIĆ: So yeah, what basically we try here at Yugoland is to put them on kind of a modern perspective, yeah, into the days thing and to also to organize youth work actions from short period or a longer period, depending on what is the work actually, what do we want to achieve, who do you want to involve into it, integrate and so on.

PETER KORCHNAK: Additionally, volunteers include internationals, arriving via the platforms Workaway and Worldpackers, who help out in exchange for accommodations, which is now offered on the premises.

GORAN GABRIĆ: When we create these youth work actions, it’s very important to have a good chemistry between the volunteers, among the them, but yeah, and it’s very good also, I think if they are like, if they have like, at least a bit of internationality. Because I think that is what also attracts locals. When we have people from other countries, then they are interested to come and see them and speak with them, you know, speak on foreign language, learn something about them, teach them something from from here, and something like that. I think that is one good, let’s say, magnet for the locals. 

We are very much open for any, let’s say, individuals or groups who would like to spend some time longer in in Subotica or in Yugoland, to host them, to be able to connect them with the with our society, to be part of our community. They always have a place to stay, and always only to visit and everything. And we can agree on some kind of work which they want to do.

PETER KORCHNAK: One such opportunity is humanitarian work at Mini Yugoslavia-Yugoland, centered around the HQ building.

GORAN GABRIĆ: We have also people from Collective Aid, international organization, which is now present here in Serbia and Subotica, especially because they are helping the people who are on the migrant routes. So they’re providing them like help with donating material, stuff like clothes, medicines, food, also camp things in a way tents, blankets, something like that, and they are using part of this building as their warehouse. So, and we have a good connection with them, not only through this building, but also like among the among the peoples, among their volunteers, among our people volunteering, and so on. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Gabrić also assists in work actions outside Yugoland. One such project was the engagement with some 100 youths from the Serbian diaspora who were in Subotica for a week of voluntouring and whom he brought to Mini Yugoslavia.

GORAN GABRIĆ: I was with them together as one of the coordinators, and so we went and renovated, or actually cleaned out, one big monument in or in the Subotica neighborhood, a monument from The Second World War, it’s called Nemirna Ravnica, a really big monument, which was not not being preserved as we believe it should. So one day, we went out there with a group of people from this from this camp of and we cleaned it out to completely on to kid. 

The next day, we went out through Palić lake and then planted some trees and help out some other trees, painted some terraces and some public locations and so on. So, yeah, that was really one, one good, good project, which we were part on, and it was supported by the Ministry of Serbian diaspora.

When we were here at Yugoland, spent one day here, then we organized [for] them one thematical treasure hunt.? Yeah, like a game where you have to answer a couple of questions about history, about geography, to go through the through our park, you know, which now have these, like boards, monuments and so on.

PETER KORCHNAK: This year, Mini Yugoslavia – Yugoland will not only continue in these activities but also organize a special project. 

GORAN GABRIĆ: We will probably have one big working action, June or July, where we want to set up one bicycle path on the old railway, which connects actually very close to our park, and goes to the one newly formed spa center some maybe 15 kilometers away. 

PETER KORCHNAK: And maybe, just maybe, as the volunteers build the bike path, the bike path will build them.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening…and volunteering. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and take part in a growing community of yugodiasporans and others.  

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Additional music used fairly from archival materials.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ho-ruk!

[SOUNDBITE]

Additional Sources and Resources

Gorunović, Gordana. “Usmena istorija SFRJ i virtuelna sećanja na omladinske radne akcije.” Etnoantropološki problemi, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2014): 

Lilly, Carol. Power and Persuasion: Ideology and Rhetoric in Communist Yugoslavia, 1944-1953. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001

Popović, Dragan. “Youth Labor Action (Omladinska radna akcija, ORA) as Ideological Holiday-Making.” In: Hannes Grandits and Karin Taylor, eds. Yugoslavia’s Sunny Side: A History of Tourism in Socialism (1950s–1980s). Budapest, Central European University Press, 2010, pp.

Ristanović, Slobodan. To su naših ruku dela: Herojska i slavna epopeja Omladinskich radnih akcija, 1941-1990. Belgrade: Odbor veterana-graditelja Beograda, Udruženje učesnika Omladinskich radnih akcija i volontera Srbije, 2014

Woodward, Susan L. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995