Biographies of War and Welfare in Tito's Yugoslavia: SUBNOR's Invalid Commission in the Croatian Socialist Republic, 1961–1986

Abstract

Abstract

In Tito's Yugoslavia, antifascist veterans were both hailed as heroes in the public spaces of the state and entitled to generous welfare support. This was true also for the disabled veterans and their families. Sometimes the case for welfare on the part of disabled veterans and their families was clear-cut, but in other cases, where details of wartime service or family circumstances were less straightforward, the case for welfare needed to be adjudicated. Such ‘requests and complaints’ were from 1961 onwards handled by a special commission, a department of the amalgamated veteran association ‘SUBNOR’. Supplicants submitted letters of request to the commission outlining their justification for receiving support, based on wartime record and on physical or financial need in the postwar period. These letters collectively form a kind of biography of the disabled wartime generation and their experiences in the period of mature socialism in Yugoslavia. Appeals were often grounded in patriotic stories of wartime heroism and sacrifice, but they also spoke of the physical and economic difficulties of the postwar years. As time passed, applicants also complained of the fading memory and respect for their wartime generation, as well as the political and social crises that hit the state from the 1980s onwards. The letters to the Croatian commission also speak of the economic transformation of the region, economic migration into depopulated and industrializing borderlands, geographies of opportunity and also those of risk. This article analyses these requests from 1961 to 1988, helping to explain the transformation of welfare expectations on the part of a generation of war veterans and their families.