Biography and social change: industrialists and the Communist revolution in Yugoslavia

This paper focuses on the possibilities contained in the marriage of a social-constructionist notion of identity and historiographical biographical research. The author shows that the non-essentialist understanding of identity can easily be effectively applied to archival materials produced during a period of radical social change specifically the period immediately following the Second World War, when the Yugoslav Communist Party emerged victorious and began implementing its programme, an important (or rather crucial) part of which was the expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie. It is on the biographies of these Slovenian industrialists that this paper focuses, showing the effects that the revolutionary political and economic programme had on their (social) identities. Two of the most important phenomena were the radical change in the terms of respectability and the economic value of the industrialists, and the 'institutionalization of identity reversal'. Finally, the article attempts to understand the place and role of individual agency during the time of the Communist revolution, concluding that industrialists were left very little space for action by the state.