For some, Yugoslavia represented an alternative form of socialist modernity. Others, especially those within conservative religious discourse, believed that socialism inevitably leads to moral collapse, and saw Yugoslavia as an example of this idea. In this article, Aleksandra Djurić Milovanović reflects on an unusual archival encounter between competing visions of the future and explains why it matters today.
*
Archives don’t just hold documents. They preserve atmospheres, political anxieties, and ways of talking about fear that outlive the worlds that created them.
During the Cold War, people projected all kinds of things onto socialist Yugoslavia: liberation, repression, modernity, and collapse. These weren’t just conversations in Europe. They traveled through newspapers, missionary networks, religious communities, and diplomatic cables all over the globe. An article from 1961, published in colonial Southern Africa, reveals that the Cold War depended not only on ideology and geopolitics, but also on stories that transformed distant political systems into an intimate moral experience.
Belgrade, spring 1961. A translation lands on someone’s desk at Tanjug, Yugoslavia’s state news agency. It’s from the Umtali Post, an English-language newspaper in colonial Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today). An evangelical preacher named Marion Haines had visited socialist Yugoslavia and come back with a piece titled “Communist Yugoslavia Is a Land of Fear.” That title does a lot of work, packs a whole political imagination into a single emotion.
Haines’s Yugoslavia is all suspicion, exhaustion, and silence. “Fear and distrust are written on every face,” she writes. People are “afraid of one another.” Priests risk prison. Christians worship under watch. Children get “taught to report parents who are loyal to Christianity.” But then the article gets quite specific. IIt catalogs everyday textures in great detail. Empty store shelves, then sudden deliveries, then crowds “pushing and scrambling” for basics. Potatoes are what people eat. Meat, butter, milk hard to get. Women walking around “without stockings.” Shoddy buildings because workers stopped caring. “There is no joy in work.” Hotel rooms become evidence: “the beds were alive with bugs.”
Yugoslavia as a moral landscape
It’s not just anti-communist commentary at that point. Yugoslavia becomes a whole moral landscape – spiritually drained, materially stripped, and emotionally frozen.
At first glance, it resembles many other Cold War testimonies about life under socialism. What makes it strange, though, is not just what it says, but also where it ended up. It didn’t just sit in a newspaper archive in Southern Rhodesia. Rather, it was pulled into the Yugoslav socialist archive itself. Tanjug translated it, circulated it internally, filed it away with other reports on religion and foreign coverage. So the archive ends up holding this interesting collision of two fear systems. On one side, evangelical anti-communism painting socialism as spiritual suffocation. On the other, a socialist state deeply anxious about its image abroad, especially in international religious circles that could shape public opinion. Authorities in Yugoslavia tracked this narrative carefully and anything that interfered with the country’s image as modern, relatively open, and distinct from the Soviet bloc.
The story also challenges the familiar geography of the Cold War. Yugoslavia wasn’t only imagined in Washington, Moscow, London, and Belgrade. These narratives also circulated among missionaries and evangelicals across the Global South. A preacher in colonial Southern Africa turns socialist Yugoslavia into a moral warning for readers who have never set foot there. That’s a whole infrastructure worth pausing on.
A wider religious infrastructure
By the mid-twentieth century, evangelical missionary networks had created a distinctive system comprising publishing houses, radio stations, Bible schools, and itinerant preachers who traveled between continents. They produced narratives. First-person testimony was the genre that mattered most, and countries like Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and Kenya became nodes in a global storytelling machine that linked local anxieties about decolonization and racial order to larger Cold War spiritual geopolitics. Communism, in this world, wasn’t a political competitor. It was a spiritual emergency, a territorial threat to the Great Commission itself.
Little is known today about Marion Haines herself except scattered traces in evangelical networks active in southern Africa during the 1950s and 60s. Yet this practical archival invisibility is itself revealing. Haines mattered not as a singular intellectual figure, but as part of a wider religious infrastructure through which Cold War narratives traveled internationally. Her authority derived from testimony rather than expertise.
The gendered dimension becomes important here too. Haines didn’t use diplomatic language or geopolitical analysis. She persuaded through intimate observation, emotional detail: frightened faces, bad food, exhausted workers, crammed stores, silent churches. Politics seeped into homes, bodies, daily routines. Socialism wasn’t just a political system but it was something reshaping human relations from the inside. That move from the structural to the intimate is a signature of this kind of evangelical storytelling.
The article keeps turning material lack into moral verdict. Potatoes, empty shelves, overcrowding, worn clothes, modest housing – none of that is just description. It all becomes evidence of civilizational decline. Haines builds socialism as a society where ordinary dignity has eroded. Workers without pride. Public life flattened. People drifting through cities. „The people walk aimlessly after work.“ Fear, in this telling, isn’t just repression. It’s atmosphere.
Erasing contradictions
That’s probably why the article still resonates. Today, political discourse heavily relies on emotionally charged geographies. Whole societies are reduced to symbols of danger, authoritarianism, moral decay, and collapse. Complexity is flattened into emotional stories built for speed. Fear remains one of the most effective political tools. The evangelical missionary networks of the mid-20th century helped perfect this approach, which now feels completely mainstream.
Of course, what actually emerges is less Yugoslavia itself than a particular imagination of it. The country becomes a surface for projecting fears about communism, morality, and civilizational decline. Political ambiguity vanishes. Atmosphere swallows complexity. Haines’s article is part of a long tradition of portraying Eastern Europe and the Balkans through emotional and ideological oversimplification. Like many representations before it, her version transforms a politically complex region into a moral spectacle. Yugoslavia becomes understandable not through its contradictions, but through fear.
This is particularly striking because Yugoslavia occupied such an unstable position during the Cold War. Non-aligned, partly open to the world, socialist but independent from Moscow, the country resisted simple ideological classification. Yugoslav citizens traveled more freely than others in Eastern Europe. Western culture circulated visibly. The country maintained diplomatic relations across both blocs while leading the Non-Aligned Movement. That very ambiguity made it vulnerable to competing projections. For some, Yugoslavia represented an alternative form of socialist modernity. For others, especially in conservative religious discourse, Yugoslavia proved that socialism inevitably leads to moral collapse. Haines firmly subscribes to the latter view. In her view, Yugoslavia couldn’t merely be imperfect; it had to be unlivable.
Nut just a description, but a warning
And this is where it gets interesting for contemporary Yugofuturist conversations. In recent years, Yugoslavia has reappeared in art, architecture, theory, and public debate, not just as a failed state or a nostalgic memory, but as an unfinished political imaginary. Scholars, cultural workers, and activists are revisiting Yugoslavia as a source of unrealized possibilities, such as social housing, worker participation, public infrastructure, anti-colonial internationalism, and collective solidarity. These are all visions of the future that are increasingly absent today. In this sense, Yugofuturism does not ask whether Yugoslavia succeeded. Rather, it asks what kinds of political futures disappeared with Yugoslavia and why those futures still haunt the present.
If we read Haines’s article in that way, it looks like an earlier struggle over futurity itself. Her narrative tried to shut down political possibility by attaching fear to socialism as such. Yugoslavia became a cautionary image teaching readers what futures to reject before they could even imagine them. The Cold War leaned hard on exactly that kind of emotional pedagogy, and evangelical missionary networks were among its most effective carriers. Fear wasn’t just a response to geopolitical conflict, it was a primary narrative technology. Haines didn’t persuade through statistics or policy. She persuaded through intimacy: frightened believers, exhausted workers, suspicious faces, empty shelves, and joyless labor. Ideology entered ordinary life through emotion, morality, bodily experience and it traveled along the same channels that carried Bibles and missionary newsletters.
But the state of Yugoslavia also feared narratives. Tanjug’s decision to translate and file the article shows how carefully authorities tracked foreign representations, especially from religious networks abroad. International perception mattered. Socialist Yugoslavia invested heavily in being seen as modern, open, internationally respected, non-aligned. Hostile portrayals threatened all that. So the archive becomes a historical mirror. Evangelical anti-communism feared socialism as moral and spiritual catastrophe. The socialist state feared the circulation of exactly those interpretations. Both sides understood narrative as politically real.
Competing futures
What we were left with is an odd archival encounter between competing futures. Marion Haines imagined Yugoslavia as a future to fear. Contemporary Yugofuturist reflections tend to move the other way reopening political and social questions that Cold War narratives once tried to seal shut. Against the exhaustion of the present, Yugoslavia sometimes reappears as a reminder that history once held alternative visions of collective life that don’t even seem politically imaginable anymore.
Between those competing visions sits the archive. It preserves more than a forgotten 1961 article. It preserves a struggle over imagination over what futures people were taught to fear, and what futures might still be available to imagine.