Against Capitalism from the Stalinist Cellar: The Balkan Spy in the Post-Yugoslav Context

Abstract

The chapter focuses on The Balkan Spy, a film and a play written and directed by Dušan Kovačević, one of the most important Yugoslav/Serbian writers, and analyzes the changes in the symptomatic readings of its main character Ilija Čvorović in the post-Yugoslav and postsocialist context. For a long period interpreted as a typical communist paranoiac who internalized the repression and started to harass his subtenant out of fear, labeled as a traitor and an imperialist spy, the main character of The Balkan Spy is interpreted differently in the post-Yugoslav context, most strongly revalued and embraced by right-wingers, who perceive him as a nationalist, pro-Russian, and militantly anti-Western activist. This chapter argues that Ilija’s regression into seemingly paranoid, yet certainly militant and combative anti-imperialism, with a return to his trauma of the Stalinist past, is a symptom not only of the internalized repression, but of the internalized social contradictions caused by the harsh intrusion of capitalism in Yugoslavia in the beginning of the 1980s, and the betrayal of the ideals of the revolution by Yugoslav communists themselves.

Does that mean that Ilija was a mindless fool, and that I will end up in a wheelchair and watch you re-build capitalism, and make people suffer under its yoke again?!

Ilija Čvorović in The Balkan Spy ¹