In the 1980s, when Yugoslavia was slowly breaking apart, the media landscape was vibrant and pluralistic. It featured more criticism of socialism than today’s media offers of capitalism. In her article, Larisa Ranković recounts that period through her personal relationship with the media.
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I grew up in a media-savvy family and was accordingly surrounded by media from an early age. I was exposed to both high culture and popular culture. I experienced all of this during a significant historical transition period in Yugoslavia, when socialism gave way to nationalism.
After the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, our evenings were filled with U.S. TV shows like “Dynasty” and “Dallas,” and we eagerly bought the German version of Bravo magazine, even though we couldn’t understand it. By the time Yugoslavia won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1989, the cracks in the country’s unity had already begun to widen. Looking back at the media from that time makes it clear that the unraveling began after Tito’s death.
A decisive decade
The 1980s are considered by many to be a pivotal time for politics and media in socialist Yugoslavia. The two were deeply intertwined. While much has been written about the media during Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the 1990s, comprehensive insight covering the broader timeline is still lacking, especially from media insiders. How did journalistic roles evolve during this time? What challenges emerged at the intersection of politics, the economy, culture, and the media? How did these factors shape a distinct Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cultural identity?
In this reflection, I aim to explore three interwoven themes: 1) How the decade began and ended, 2) the impact of Start, a groundbreaking magazine, and 3) the influence of Bravo, a foreign window into global popular culture. These are just three pieces of the media puzzle in the former Yugoslavia as seen from my perspective.
Media in limbo
During my teenage years in the mid-1980s, Yugoslav media occupied a unique space. It was vibrant and creative yet not fully free. State funding didn’t always lead to censorship; sometimes, it enabled quality journalism. However, no media could prevent a society from fragmenting politically. It was a time of contradictions. The country was slowly breaking apart. Media freedoms were expanding. Nationalist discourse was gaining traction. Foreign media brought pop culture into our homes.
In hindsight, I understood some of this, but those were my formative years, especially in relation to the press. Many journalists refer to this era as a ‘golden age’ of Yugoslav journalism, characterized by serious criticism, a large readership, and deep trust. A 2012 Croatian radio series (later published by Lupiga) noted that, at that time, newspapers featured more criticism of socialism than today’s media offers of capitalism.
Journalists were specialists who were deeply informed about their beats and operated with a level of professionalism that seems rare today. Self-censorship existed, but so did the pursuit of independent thought and creative freedom.
A study by the Social Communication Research Center at the University of Ljubljana, based on interviews with retirees from 2019 to 2021, highlights that many people’s earliest memories of media diversity are tied to the rise of conservatism and nationalism in the 1980s. As the article notes, that was the time when “Slovenian and Serbian views on the situation in Yugoslavia began to diverge radically.”
According to a Balkan Insight story, Yugopapir is a website that republishes articles from magazines printed in socialist Yugoslavia. The website aims to remind younger generations of life in the now half-forgotten country. The story notes that some magazine articles from the 1980s reported on economic troubles, including rising national debt and the influence of nationalist movements abroad on Yugoslav migrant workers.
A Balkan Insight story about Yugopapir – a website that republishes articles from magazines printed in socialist Yugoslavia to remind younger generations about life in the now half-forgotten country – notes that some magazine articles from the 1980s did report on economic troubles, including rising national debt and the influence of nationalist movements abroad on Yugoslav migrant workers.
Beginnings and endings
One way to remember the 1980s is to ask: Where were you when Tito died? I was in elementary school. It was a Sunday evening. I remember the atmosphere – our whole family was home, and the news came on TV. The following weeks were somber. At school, we made albums in his memory. The album my class made had a red cover with gold letters. I made my own album at home and kept it until the late 1990s.
The decade ended with Milošević at the height of his power. School activities now involved attending rallies. I remember traveling with my family to Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 1989 and noticing when the Milošević posters stopped. That meant we had crossed the Serbian border. Yet, Yugoslavia was still officially one country. From primary school through high school, I experienced many phases of media engagement: consuming it, learning from it, and being shaped by it.
Pushing boundaries in print
Start magazine was one of the most influential publications for me. It boldly combined erotic photography with high-quality journalism, including interviews, features, cartoons, and political analysis. Buying it as a teenager was challenging, but my parents never forbade it. In many ways, Start pushed the boundaries of what journalism could be in socialist Yugoslavia. Start addressed controversial issues, including feminism, long before they were widely discussed. At its peak, it sold over 200,000 copies in a country of 22 million.
A 2016 analytical text Dragan Golubović describes Start as “the most important magazine” in the former Yugoslavia. For that analysis, the author reviewed issues published between 1983 and 1990. The author writes that the first thing that stands out is that Start was a modern magazine aimed at a broad readership. Each issue featured at least one in-depth article by the editorial staff covering global events, such as the Falklands conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom, the Iran-Iraq War, the situation in Afghanistan, and a report from Bolivia on cocaine production. Start’s journalists interviewed many key figures from Yugoslavia as well as other notable individuals, including Susan Sontag and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Golubović further highlights Start’s impact on public opinion, emphasizing its editorial courage in addressing topics that remain controversial today. For instance, in December 1983, Slavenka Drakulić conducted an interview with journalist Gloria Steinem that explored the role of women in society and the rise of the feminist movement.
In the late 1980s, I found everything that reflected the emergence of a new era inspiring. Two powerful trends unfolded simultaneously for a brief time: one centered on openness, modernization, and a cosmopolitan outlook, and the other focused on the revival of myths, nationalism, and a return to the past. I believed in the former, but the latter prevailed. The rest is history. We’re still feeling its impact today. As Yugoslavia began to fall apart, Start couldn’t survive. It ceased publication in 1991 following a failed redesign that erased its identity.
A teenage window into the West
Bravo entered my life around 1985 or 1986. It was written in German, a language I didn’t understand. Nevertheless, I devoured it, cutting out pictures and covering my room with posters. I also created my own scrapbooks. I admired stars like Duran Duran, Kim Wilde, and Boris Becker, but I also pasted images of artists I didn’t recognize, drawn in by their style and allure. Though we had local teen magazines, none of them could match Bravo’s glossy paper, vibrant design, or window into a more glamorous world. Bravo hinted at a lifestyle we dreamed of – until we became the war stories ourselves. Not only did we fail to get what we had hoped for, but we also lost what we already had.
By the early 1990s, war had begun and I had started my journalism career in a world that looked completely different from the one I had grown up in. A recent New York Times article noted that many people who entered the media industry in the 1990s now work in different fields. The media landscape has since either shrunk or transformed beyond recognition, and those shifts have been even more extreme in the Balkans. Everything has changed repeatedly, from content and context to issues of freedom, censorship, platforms, and the very structure of the industry – and much of it remains in a state of flux. This includes the struggle for freedom.