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IN HISTORY, THE BEST TOLD STORY WINS

He was aged just 15 when he became the youngest student of the University of Belgrade, a record he still holds to this day. Having become a doctor of historical sciences in his 30s, he has long been the director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the most popular professor at the Singidunum University Faculty of Media and Communications. The author of around a dozen books that interpret and explain, in an interesting way, some chapters of contemporary history, he is often invited as a guest in televised debates, as a reliable witness of the times. He is currently among the vice presidents of the Socialist Party of Serbia

By Radmila Stanković

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Predrag J. Marković (1965) was born and raised in Belgrade, where he grew up as the middle child of three (he has an older sister, Danica, a professor at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Belgrade, and a younger sister, Milena, a playwright who lectures at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and won the NIN award for the novel Children, which the jury declared as being the best novel in Serbia in 2021).

“My family and childhood are among the best known imaginable. That’s because my sister Milena described our childhood in painful detail. She exposed the life of my family so much with that unusual novel that she wrote that I don’t know what I would add.”

He describes his family as having belonged to the new socialist middle class. His father, Jovan, hails from a rural family, while his mother, Milka, was born into ‘the most terrible Lumpenproletariat family’, as he describes himself. His mother had a career as a Russian language teacher, while his father was, and remains, a devoted cinephile, screenwriter and the first private producer in Yugoslavia.

“I grew up in New Belgrade. None of my friends’ parents were from Belgrade. They were mostly lower ranked officers or employees in culture and various federal institutions... New Belgrade was no ghetto, which is also a lie. New Belgrade was a fortress of the socialist middle class. I only met upper echelon urban families for the first time when I married in old Belgrade, and they were really something different. There were several different types of middle class at that time, and I would divide them into at least two: the old middle class, as remnants of the pre-World War II period; and the new middle class raised under socialism.”

This historian cites numerous examples and scientific knowledge to show how much socialism created opportunities for education. He also exposes some misconceptions that still exist today when people talk about ‘old Belgrade families.’

“Only the elites leave tracks behind. What we know about those families we know from the books of Stevan Jakovljević, Svetlana Velmar Janković or Slobodan Selenić, and that is the very cream of the crop of several hundred families of the society of that time. And yet we know nothing about those families that lived in hovels, with an outdoor squat toilet behind their house. Most Belgraders lived in courtyard houses, with a drinking fountain in the yard and a squat toilet in the middle. And alongside it was obligatory to plant geraniums that would neutralise the stench.”

When it comes to the great fortunes made in the interwar period, and generally after every war, Marković says that they are war profiteers and that there hadn’t been many very wealthy people in the Kingdom of Serbia, as can be seen in the buildings erected at that time.

“Belgrade only ‘exploded’ in the 1920s and ‘30s, when a lot of money came into the city and many people got rich. And it seems that the most common investment was in buildings that yielded a return on the investment in five or six years, which was an incredible opportunity to generate wealth. The real boom began in 1918, with people constructing building after building, and Belgrade grew much more in the interwar period than it did after World War II.”

Predrag lectures in several subjects at Singidunum University’s Faculty of Media and Communications, and the ‘History of Family’ subject is one that also implies students talk to their grandmothers about their youth and life. And, according to him, grandmothers mostly lie. They describe what was not. They create an idyll that people want to believe in retroactively. Of course, there are families that raise children with better manners than others.

“You also have that which psychologists call resilience, hardiness. Some children are like kittens – no matter how you throw them, they will land on their feet. Some children can survive any trauma and remain decent people. And some end up broken, like this demon child at Ribnikar” [in reference to the recent mass school shooting at Belgrade’s Vladislav Ribnikar Primary School].

He describes himself as having been an unhappy, frustrated teenager who resorted to

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