Censorship in Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1952

This research is based on the fundaments of somewhat nonsystematic historical and culturological investigation of censorship as an important factor in the shaping of cultural identity of people of former Yugoslavia. It starts from the past studies conducted in the fields of book history, archivistics and journalism. It takes Croatia and Serbia for referent countries as base fields for explaining censorship methodologies in the period of Yugoslav WWII aftermath, through the year of IB resolution in 1948 until 1952 and slowly coming out from so called Agitprop cultural period of Yugoslavia.

The gap which is to be filled is one with objective approach to both sides, the winning and the losing side in the WWII, especially because the winning side had lack of will and expertise to have a better insight in methodology of cultural inheritance which it finds, it destroys or forbids its artifacts, from artwork to everyday specimens of low culture. Also, in this work there is a closer insight to the way of how winner’s propaganda and winner’s authorities deal with propaganda of the enemy, including absolute censorship, destruction, sometimes literal and complete, as damnatio memoriae of everything what previous period was and had as its cultural attributes. In that way there can be shaped a new, artificial cultural identity, identified as a Stalinist and totalitarian model of that time which in this work was tried to be recognized and analyzed.