Dražesni KGB - javi se!

(http://www.kupindo.com/kupovina/Knjige/Strucna-literatura/Politika-i-publicistika/Drazesni-KGB-javi-se-Dragoslav-Simic-Milan-Petrovi/9311014)

(click here for the Romanian version)

A teenager on a street downtown Belgrade, with a red star on the back of her jacket, together with three letters: KGB! For people let's say over fifty it's incredible, how could that be? Well, the girl is working at the KGB cafe on that street: for youngsters her age KGB is just a funny name, nothing more. It was Marx who wrote some place that departure from past always comes with a big laugh. He didn't probably know that the same would apply to his followers. When a cafe frequented by youngsters downtown Belgrade is named KGB it means that past is definitively past, it's gone, for ever. It's not to forget it, it's not to follow its coordinates and taboos either.

Well, the book having this cover, Dražesni KGB - javi se! (Pick Up, Charming KGB!) is about past, mainly about the last years of the 1940's and the first half of the fifties. The book has two authors, both of them journalists. Dragoslav Simić lives in Belgrade and his focus is on what happened in Yugoslavia after WWII, especially on those events having controversial interpretations (trial of Draža Mihailović, Goli Otok prison, etc). Milan Petrović is the Bucharest correspondent for the Serbian newspaper Politika (the oldest daily in the Balkans, it seems).

the Romanian edition of the book
(http://www.librarie.net/categorie/50/carti/biografii-memorialistica/pg3)

And here is the place for a personal story of mine: I know very well one of these authors. We met in Bucharest, in 1948. I was 3 years old and Milan was 23. One day he noted a little kid running after a cat. The friendship was sudden and for several years he kept coming to our home to visit me. Then, as it happens, life went on and each one followed his own ways.

Milan Petrović in 1948
(http://www.uns.org.rs/sr-Latn-CS/content/uns-feljton/3395/dra%C5%BEesni-kbg-javi-se.xhtml)

It was in Montreal, sometime in 2004, that a friend talked to me about Milan, by pure chance. I took the phone number to call him. We met the following year, when I came to Bucharest for a short vacation. And now in 2011 we met again: 63 years have passed since our first encounter. Only the smile in my eyes could remember him the little boy from 1948. He gave me this book, Dražesni KGB - javi se!

Milan Petrović in 2010
(http://www.audioifotoarhiv.com/gosti%20sajta/MilanPetrovic3.html)

Speaking about controversies, Milan offers a lot. He defected from Yugoslavia in 1948, as he was against the political orientation taken by Tito. For several years Milan was in the board of Free Yugoslavia, a radio station broadcasting from Bucharest and making anti-Tito propaganda. The station was active till 1954, when its activity was stopped: the relations between Tito and the Communist block were no more hostile. Since then the memory of this radio station was officially erased: all Communist regimes had no more interest to be reminded about their recent past, about anti-Tito propaganda and stuff like that. So it was like radio Free Yugoslavia had never existed. Even the existence of the Yugoslavian emigration groups in Romania and in the other countries from the Communist block was officially forgotten.

The book of the two Serbian journalists is opening this forgotten chapter, the activity at Free Yugoslavia station. It is not to defend it, as it is not to condemn. Remember the girl downtown Belgrade with the KGB sign on her jacket: past is no more. It is just that: a chapter in the history, and it has to be recuperated by history.

This is, I think, the main merit of the book: the past is nothing more than past; it is not to be condemned, it is not to be absolved. Elif Shafak has a superb phrase about past, it's the memory of our beauties and of our atrocities. The duty of history is to recuperate the facts, to recuperate the memory. And my friend Milan is here in the book neither defending his youth, nor blaming it. He is just authentic, remarkably authentic. There were extremely complicated times, and Milan gives their account in full honesty: thrown in a game where almost everybody was playing dirty, he passed through a controversial epoch following his beliefs (or maybe his guts), avoiding extremes as much as it was possible and keeping his verticality. And the fact that he was able to remain vertical speaks a lot about a great character.

I read the book without leaving it from my hands, eager to follow the story of Milan's life (he goes much further than the 1950's, up to the Romanian Revolution of 1989), conquered by the post-modernist structure of the book (here, I think, it's the merit of the other author, Dragoslav Simić, who organized the whole material). It's like the book is being written while you are reading it: the information is put there just as it came to the author, there is no care at all for any chronological flow, facts unrelated with the history of Free Yugoslavia have their place in the book, just because the information came by eMail to Dragoslav, or just because Milan felt the need to tell much more than strictly the years spent at the radio station. The book is in the same time its building site, you read a book in the making.

And this lack of arrangement gives us the proof of honesty: the historian has to resist any temptation to speculate, any temptation to find the most convenient way to present facts. So the facts remain in their nudity and a chapter of the past is recuperated. For all good or bad, Free Yugoslavia did exist, resistance against Tito did exist and it is now part of their history, part of their memory.

And the girl from the cover comes again in mind: this is a book about past, told to that girl. It's national memory recuperated for her. As I said at the beginning, it's not to forget it, it's not to follow its coordinates and taboos either.

(video by afaDragan)

(A Life in Books)