Hello everybody and welcome back to RevLeft Radio. I have a very special episode for you today,

one that I'm very excited for, one that's long overdue. I have on my friend Alexandra to talk about

Yugoslavia, socialist Yugoslavia, Joseph Brotito, the split with Stalin, all of the history

surrounding it, leading up to the collapse. It's an absolutely fascinating history of an element of

international socialism that I don't think always gets the attention that it deserves. It's very

interesting, I mean it's very primed for certain sorts of sectarianism as well, right? This is a

complicated history, the split between Tito and Stalin in particular led to a lot of, you know,

bad blood on both sides after the fact and it still trickles down into various left-wing

Marxist sectarianisms today, but this is a fascinating history that's really crucial for the

socialist left to study and to understand and I could not have had a better guest for this

episode. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Alexandra on socialist Yugoslavia,

Joseph Brotito, the Stalin split and so, so much more. Enjoy.

My name is Alexandra Kolakovic, I'm a first generation Canadian. My parents immigrated from Yugoslavia,

my mom came a little earlier than my dad, he joined her here in the mid 80s. So my mom is actually

from the same county as Tito in Croatia. It's a really rural kind of like the shire area of

Croatia and former Yugoslavia. The joke is that the bear is still over the male, so my dad's side

are Serbs from Bosnia and for anyone who's confused about what that means hopefully I can clarify

in the episode. My dad's side of the family, they joined the partisans during World War II and

I'm not so caught up on my mom's side, but I'm also not a scholar or an academic by any means. I'm

just a working class woman. I come from a manual labor and manufacturing background and I'm excited

to do this episode because I think of Yugoslavia as a kind of family ghost, like a benevolent family

ghost. Almost like a like a grandparent who passed away before you got to know them, but whose

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