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xiv, 256, [2] pages. Bibliography. Index. Small stains to fore-edge. DJ somewhat soiled with some edge wear and small tears. Dusko Doder, a former Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, is the author of The Yugoslavs, Dusko Doder is an award-winning journalist and author. He worked for the Washington Post as a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor. As Moscow correspondent, he had a world beat on the death of Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov, much to the chagrin of the CIA which emphatically denied the story. He was the only western journalist to interview Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. Doder won two Overseas Press Club Citations for Excellence and the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting. The Washington Post nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow. The author returned to his native Yugoslavia from 1973 to 1976 as chief of the Washington Post's East European bureau. He has written a number of nonfiction books including the best-selling biography of Mikhail Gorbachev: The Heretic in the Kremlin and Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics Inside the Kremlin From Brezhnev to Gorbachev. Derived from a Kirkus review: Not banners but billboards--ads for Pan Am, Avis, appliances, banks--greeted Washington Post correspondent Doder when he returned to his native Yugoslavs in 1973. But the Western-style consumerism, the relatively light--by Soviet standards--governmental hand, is not the whole story. Doder's affectionate aunt doesn't invite him to stay for dinner; a wartime outrage is avenged on a Belgrade street; a village of new, modern houses comes alive once a year--when the men return from German factories at Christmas. The 1965 economic reforms, Doder discovers, introducing a free market and top-to-bottom "self-management", have brought prosperity and a measure of personal freedom. Added to Tito's unifying challenge to Russia, they eased ethnic tensions between Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and stimulated cultural expression in a country which, apart from folk arts and crafts, had no national culture. But the very swiftness of Yugoslavia's advance from violent peasant backwater to modern world-state has created problems of identity and stability, and confronted the Communist Party with the necessity of responding "to the people's aspirations without losing power in the process." In the course of a long review of Tito's career, Doder cites the twists and turns of policy that have discredited ideology in Yugoslavia and elevated expediency to a fine art; he interviews leading dissidents--not only including Djilas--to establish the limits of permissible expression. And, peering into the future, he sees the Yugoslavs unafraid of the Russians, relinquishing their ethnic loyalties, clinging to their limited freedom--though what will replace Tito's "brilliant balancing act" he does not venture to predict. A rounded, informed, personalized overview that gives a human dimension to the Yugoslav experiment.
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