This article concerns two national museums in Croatia during the socialist period, the Museum of the Revolution of the Peoples of Croatia and the Historical Museum of Croatia. Both state-developed institutions were intimately tied to the process of nationalization as they helped articulate the place of the Croatian nation within the ideology of supranational Yugoslavism founded on the ideas of socialist patriotism, brotherhood and unity, self-management, national assertion, and South Slavic culture and community. This paper therefore traces the development and collapse of Yugoslavism in Croatia's national narrative by analyzing how these museums adapted the mythology of socialist Yugoslavism for a particularly Croatian context. Specifically, this paper investigates the ways in which these museums operated in an often ambiguous national-supranational discourse in order to reinforce the historical precedents of Croatia as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. I argue that these museums were envisioned by party elites and museum curators alike as essential to the project of building socialist Yugoslavism by adapting and altering Croatia's previous national pantheon of heroes, places, objects, and events to fit into a larger and distinctly supranational Yugoslav framework.
The communist period for Yugoslav Croatia brought about dramatic changes in museum practice and theory between the early 1950s and late 1970s. Driven by questions concerning how to properly develop socialist museums, Croatian museum professionals sought to transform the bourgeois history museum into a truly popular institution that would make Croatia’s cultural legacy accessible to the masses and allow visitors to understand their place in the socialist Yugoslav imaginary. To this end, museum professionals developed two new museum models, the Revolutionary Museum and the Native Place Museum. Revolutionary Museums were charged with memorializing the founding myths of socialist Yugoslavia, chief among them the anti-fascist, communist revolution during World War Two, and the postwar building of socialism. Native Place Museums similarly reinforced the Yugoslav state by exhibiting local history and culture within the larger trajectory of socialist Yugoslavism. Furthermore, these two models were front and center for new museological experimentation intended to create a distinctly socialist museum space that would engage the everyday working-class visitor. Analyzing contemporary museological journals and museum planning documents, I argue that these museum models were successful in implementing much of the new museological theory, but in doing so moved away from one of the fundamental principles of museum practice: the exhibition and explanation of authentic material culture to the museum visitor.
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