55 INTELLECTUALS IN YUGOSLAVIA AND POST-YUGOSLAV STATES Siniša Maleševic ´ From ‘Organic’ Legislators to ‘Organicistic’ Interpreters: Intellectuals in Yugoslavia and Post-Yugoslav States WHEN OBSERVING YUGOSLAV INTELLECTUALS BEFORE AND AFTER communism one can immediately notice a striking paradox — whereas the rest of the communist world had well-known and prominent dissidents, communist Yugoslavia had very few. Whereas with the disintegration of the communist order, dissidents have either disap- peared from countries across Eastern Europe by becoming pro- fessional politicians or by returning to their previous academic or artistic professions, the new post-Yugoslav states have witnessed the proliferation of their first proper dissidents. This fact in itself indicates that Yugoslav society was in many ways unique in the communist world and that its sudden and horrific disintegration had more to do with its own internal social, political and cultural organization and structure and less with the global geopolitical changes resulting from the collapse of the communist order world- wide. However, its uniqueness did not preclude it from sharing common ideological goals with the rest of the communist world. On the contrary, one of the main arguments of this article is that precisely because communist Yugoslavia took its Marxism more seriously than the rest of the communist world, it acquired the preconditions for its dramatic and bloody collapse. Nevertheless, this article will not focus directly on the structural reasons behind the disintegration of communist Yugoslavia but will look only at one small aspect of the Yugoslav tragedy — the profile of its intelligentsia. 1 The aim is to analyse the role and function of intellectuals in the communist and the post-communist period in order to answer the following two 1 My interpretation of the collapse of communist Yugoslavia is extensively elaborated in S. Maleševic ´, ‘Ethnicity and Federalism in Communist Yugoslavia and its Successor States’ in Y. Ghai (ed.), Ethnicity and Autonomy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000 and in S. Maleševic ´, Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State: Yugoslavia, Serbia and Croatia, London, Frank Cass, forthcoming 2002. Sinisa Malesevic.p65 07/01/2002, 11:34 55