cover image The Improbable Survivor: Yugoslavia and Its Problems, 1918-1988

The Improbable Survivor: Yugoslavia and Its Problems, 1918-1988

Stevan K. Pavlowitch. Ohio State University Press, $0 (167pp) ISBN 978-0-8142-0486-3

In this excellent short history, the author traces the growth of ``the Yugoslav idea,'' i.e., unification, with special attention to the trauma of World War II, the Tito era (1945-1980) and prospects for the survival of Yugoslavia as a united country. Pavlowitch, a British academic, describes how the Axis conquerers not only destroyed the state but turned its ethnic components against each other in a way that was unprecedented (Croatian Fascists carried out a massacre of Serbs which, according to the author, was surpassed in savagery only by the mass extermination of Polish Jewry). He describes how Tito united these components after the war and then, following a period of subservience to the U.S.S.R. and hostility to the West, broke with Moscow in '48, sought economic aid from the U.S. and introduced Western-style consumerism accompanied by ``an ersatz version of liberty.'' The reader is also brought up to date on the current discontent in Yugoslavia with the post-Tito leadership, rising inflationary conditions, the proliferation of workers' strikes, and the explosion of Albanian nationalism in the ``federated unit'' of Kosovo. (Mar.)