The adults’ half of Pockets of Freedom: a Belgrade archive, a student election, and the rooms we owe the young
Paul Tan · Good Protocols, SPC · October 2026
Pockets of Freedom, written for readers between eighteen and thirty, will join this page here. It tells how the last Yugoslav generation found the usable edges of rooms they had not chosen, and it asks its readers to hold such rooms open for whoever comes after them. This page is its other half, written for the people who hold the keys now: parents and teachers, pastors and coaches, program directors, board members, and funders. Both pages draw on Ljubica Spaskovska’s study of that generation, built from forty interviews, the youth press of the 1980s, and archives in several republics, and the hardest finding in it is about people our age. A third page, Rooms or Files, takes up what the same archive says about the transition our own country is going through.
Sunday night in Belgrade
On the night of October 25, Aleksandar Vučić, who had led Serbia for more than a decade as prime minister and then as president, told his supporters, “It is clear that we have lost these elections.” He had resigned the presidency in September to run for prime minister in a snap parliamentary vote. On a sample count, a list put together by university students was projected to win between 135 and 140 of the parliament’s 250 seats, against about 105 for his party, on the highest turnout in more than thirty years. The official count was still being completed when this page was written. No one in Belgrade knows yet what the next four years will bring, which is the condition every person in history has acted in, and it is the condition this page tries to write from.
The movement began in grief. On November 1, 2024, a concrete canopy fell at the railway station in Novi Sad and killed sixteen people. Students blocked their own faculties and ran the blockades through open assemblies, where everyone had an equal voice and an equal vote. Their teachers stood behind them, and some of those teachers paid for it. In March 2025 a government decree recalculated academic pay, and professors received as little as one-eighth of their February salary. Vučić said the state “will not reward non-workers,” and some 470 deans, professors, and staff at the University of Belgrade took the decree to the Constitutional Court. The government’s reason was that faculties under blockade were not teaching. The university’s reason, in its rector’s words to a parliamentary committee, was that it “supports students’ democratic demands.” Vučić called the demonstrators blockaders bent on destabilizing the country, and the students’ platform promised to fight corruption and take party politics out of public institutions. Their list of 250 candidates was made up mostly of professors and professionals, and its campaign was led by Ilija Srdanović, a professor of medicine in Novi Sad.
This page has no stake in Serbia’s parliament and offers no verdict on its politics. It begins in Belgrade because the shape of what happened there, young people running a room and older people paying to keep the room open, is the shape of the archive Pockets of Freedom drew on. It also begins there because that archive’s hardest sentence is addressed to people our age. Zoran Thaler, a Slovene youth activist in the 1980s who later served as his country’s foreign minister, told Spaskovska who had destroyed the country he grew up in: “Yugoslavia was destroyed by the generation which was 50 at the time, or rather, between 40 and 60.” Then he said what his own generation could not do about it: “None of us was in a position of power so that one could seriously do or prevent something.” That is one witness’s judgment, and Spaskovska sets it beside scholars who reached a similar conclusion by other roads. The sentence lands either way. The people between forty and sixty decide whether the young have rooms, and we are that generation now.
Say plainly who this falls to. Thaler named the generation between forty and sixty as the one that decided, and the archive’s payers were the people with standing, whatever their age: a name on the masthead, a budget someone had to be talked into, a paycheck that could be docked, a position high enough that a reprimand dented it without ending it. Those of us past forty hold the same things now: the job title, the board seat, the mortgage paid down, the reputation that can take a mark and keep its shape. The fine is ours to absorb because we are the ones it can land on without ending anything. A twenty-two-year-old who takes a write-up may lose the only foothold she has; a fifty-five-year-old who takes it loses an afternoon. We are strong enough for this, and the young are watching to see whether we know it.
A vent pipe or a factory
The setting needs a sentence or two, since few American readers carry it. Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of six republics that lasted from 1945 until the wars of the 1990s broke it apart. One party ruled it. Belgrade was its capital, as it is Serbia’s today, and the country stood outside the Soviet bloc, with open borders and an official youth organization that financed a youth culture it only loosely controlled. The 1980s, after Tito’s death in 1980, were its last decade and its loosest.
In Belgrade there is a building that housed the secret police from 1945 until 1968. After the student protests of 1968 the state handed it to the students of Belgrade University, and through the 1980s it was the Student Cultural Centre, where the city’s new wave bands rehearsed in the basement and played upstairs. Srđan Gojković-Gile, who sang for one of those bands, gave Spaskovska two descriptions of the place, and both are true. The first: “It was allowed to be some sort of a vent pipe for some silly young people - they could entertain themselves in there so that they don’t protest on the streets.” The second: “It was like a big factory. We used to practise in the basement and we would then just climb upstairs and play a gig.” He also called it an educational institution “for us and also for the new generation which was educated through our work.”
The money came from the League of Socialist Youth, the official youth organization of a one-party state, and the people who spent it remember how it arrived. Petar Janjatović, then a young rock critic, described putting together a two-day festival of new punk bands in 1982. You submitted a project proposal, he said, and the answer was “yes, here’s the money.” Then he said the thing anyone who funds young people now should hear twice: “At the time they didn’t ask us to do anything in return, no speeches, no flags.” Nowhere was there a “big sign or a logo.” The organization that paid for the music never put its name on the stage.
Spaskovska is careful about the givers’ motives, and this page should be too. She reads the League’s opening to the new culture partly as “a reluctant, pragmatic, if not populist move to neutralise growing criticism.” Some of its officials were careerists who treated the youth posts as a salaried stepping stone. Others were not, and one witness who worked inside the organization remembered most of its people as “progressively oriented and very successful at what they were doing, as was proven later.” Mixed motives built real rooms, and what the young made in them outlasted the evening. The youth organization’s press in Belgrade published the first book of a young philosopher named Zoran Đinđić. A youth branch in Zagreb’s Trešnjevka neighborhood gave space to the volunteers who opened the country’s first telephone line for women and children who were victims of violence. At the 1986 federal youth congress the delegates demanded an end to all work on nuclear plants while one of them handed out anti-nuclear badges to the party leadership in the front row, and in 1989 the federal assembly banned the building of new ones. The student radio in Zagreb left its parent institution in 1990 and became a company of its own, Radio 101.
A room like that can be a vent pipe or a factory, and the building does not decide which. Hartmut Rosa has a word for what the factory gives a person, Spielraum, room to play: the margin in which someone acts on a situation instead of executing a plan written elsewhere. Two things the adults control decide whether a room supplies it. The first is whether the young hold real keys, with a budget and a decision attached. The second is whether anyone older will stand in front of the room when the institution comes to collect.
The fifth minute and the eighth
Boro Kontić edited the youth program at Radio Sarajevo in the 1980s. Born in 1955, he was not much older than the comedians and young journalists who worked for him, but he stood higher on the ladder, and so it was Kontić who answered when a program strayed from the Party line. He told Spaskovska how a review went. When the montage was finished he knew exactly where the trouble lay: “the fifth, the eighth minute, after this and that line.” He would play the tape for the editor above him, and the two men would sit and listen without speaking. As the dangerous stretch came up, Kontić would ask the man whether he wanted a cigarette. Later he would start coughing and ask him to open the window. The tape would end, and the editor would say, “Well you’ve got one boring program there.” Kontić would answer, “The next one will be better.” He swore that no one had taught him the trick: “it was pure instinct.”
The cigarette was the craft, and the fines were the cost. Kontić was fined several times over two of his programs, one of them the comedy show that later moved to television as Top Lista Nadrealista, and the fines “were usually in the amount of 10% of the [monthly] salary. It was awful.” Once the station pulled an entire show without telling him. In 1987 he was fined several times more “because of the Slovenes,” and joked that playing Laibach had earned him a Slovenian passport. The young people who worked for him remember the arrangement from the other side. Senad Pećanin, born in 1965 and later the editor-in-chief of Dani in Sarajevo, said of Kontić, “he protected us, he took upon him everything, we didn’t feel anything.” Elsewhere in his interview he named the cost exactly: Kontić “took upon himself all those pressure, fines, salary cuts, while protecting us.”
The same arrangement ran through the whole archive. Velimir Ćurgus Kazimir, who ran the Serbian youth organization’s research and publishing center through most of the decade, put his budget behind the young critics who wanted to document the new wave, and one of them remembered what that cost him: “Kazimir also had to answer in front of someone, he had to convince someone to assign a budget for that.” In Ljubljana, Miha Kovač, who edited the student radio and then the youth weekly Mladina, described his bargaining with the Party as “making two steps back and one step forward, as Lenin would say.” Pockets of Freedom gives Kovač’s sentence a reading worth keeping. The older hand negotiates the retreats, and the step forward belongs to the younger people in the room.
Nothing in our world calls for coughing at a program officer, and the comparison has limits that matter. Our funders and regulators are not censors, and our young people do not risk prison for a radio sketch. The transposition is about where the cost lands. In our sector the cost of a young person’s mistake usually lands on the young person: a stipend cut off, a slot given away, a note in the file that follows them to the next program. Our forms have words for it, non-compliant and disengaged among them, and each word records the young person’s behavior as a trait while the institution’s part goes unwritten. Kontić ran it the other way. The institution’s reflex to punish landed on him, and the young people kept the one risk that was properly theirs, the risk of making something that might fail in public. He never took their step for them. The house’s covenant for families has language for this posture. An adult who stands between a young person and the young person’s own work becomes a wedge. An adult who stands beside them, and in front of them when the blow comes, is the one Pećanin remembered.
Four countries, four endings
Serbia’s students belong to a wave, and the wave has already produced several endings. In Nepal, protests that began on September 8, 2025, against a ban on social media became two days of violence in which at least seventy-six people died, sixty-three of them protesters. The government fell, a retired chief justice named Sushila Karki led the transition, and in March 2026 a new party’s landslide made Balendra Shah, a thirty-five-year-old former rapper who had been mayor of Kathmandu, prime minister; the day after he took office, police arrested the former prime minister over the crackdown. In Bangladesh, the student uprising of 2024 led to an election in February 2026 that returned an established party with a two-thirds majority. The students’ own party contested thirty seats and won six, while a reform charter named for the uprising’s month passed in a referendum with just over sixty percent. In Madagascar, young protesters calling themselves Gen Z Madagascar rose over water and power cuts, an army unit sided with them, and its commander, Colonel Michael Randrianirina, was sworn in as president in October 2025, while the African Union suspended the country. One protest leader, who gave only the name Safika, put it simply: “It was launched by the youth. And the military supported us.”
It would be easy to make these endings into a lesson. The honest course is to hold any lesson loosely, because each country has its own constitution and its own history, and the people living these stories can no more see how they turn than the young editors of 1986 could see 1991. The archive offers a question rather than a prediction: who carried the weight of the movement, and what did carrying it buy them? In Madagascar an army unit carried it, and its colonel now holds the presidency. In Nepal the first cost fell on the young themselves, and the government that followed is led by one of the few young men who already ran a room of his own, a city hall. In Serbia, for most of two years, professors carried part of the weight, and the students reached the ballot with professors on their list. These are readings, offered as readings. A young person’s courage is real, and by itself it supplies neither the room nor the shield; the adults around a movement decide, by what they agree to carry, a great deal of what it becomes.
The letterhead
In 1990, with the federation coming apart, the League of Socialist Youth voted itself out of existence at its last congress in Ljubljana. On September 4 of that year, a coordinating committee in Belgrade sent out a letter on the League’s old letterhead, its logo still at the top. It invited the successor organizations from every republic to comment on a draft code for a new body, the Yugoslav New Forum, and to attend a round table titled “The Yugoslav Community (working title).” The draft called for “a state founded upon the sovereignty of the citizen.” Nothing came of it. Pockets of Freedom keeps the detail for a reason, and its sentence bears repeating: the people who keep writing after the room has closed are the ones who build the next one.
The letterhead has cousins in this year’s news. Bangladesh’s students won six seats, and the charter their uprising left behind still passed. Serbia’s students have also stood where they stand now. In 2000 a student movement called Otpor helped force Slobodan Milošević from power, and Zoran Đinđić, whose first book the youth press had published in the 1980s, became prime minister. In March 2003 he was shot dead outside the government building in Belgrade. A movement’s victory night begins a long work, sometimes a costly one, and the older people who carried weight before the vote are needed more after it, when the young must learn to govern the rooms they won and the old rules of loyalty wait for them inside the offices.
The other use of a high position
Every system grows a comfortable class, and the comfortable can afford beliefs whose costs land on other people. Rob Henderson calls them luxury beliefs: ideas that win their holders standing at little cost to themselves while the bill goes to people with less. Rooms or Files follows that pattern from the villas of the old Yugoslav elite to the meeting rooms of our own sector. The same high position has another use, and the archive is full of it. Kontić paid the fines out of his own salary. Kazimir talked someone into a budget. In Ljubljana, as Kovač remembered it, the soft line in the Slovene party defended a student radio that the hard-liners wanted closed. Dunja Blažević, who ran the gallery at the Student Cultural Centre and later a television arts program, said she was “given carte blanche” for that program, and she used it to bring the avant-garde to a mass audience. Last year Serbian professors lost most of a month’s pay for standing with their students.
A luxury belief costs its holder nothing and charges someone poorer. Taking the fine reverses that arrangement: the holder pays, so that a younger person can imagine something and make it. Every adult with standing, a title, a budget, a board seat, or a name that opens doors, holds that choice. The young idealist needs room to be wrong in public for a while, and the room is cheapest when someone who can afford it stands in front of it.
What the adults can do this month
Most of us will never run a radio station inside a one-party state. The archive still asks something of every adult who holds a key, and none of it waits for an election.
Hand over a key with a budget line attached. A youth council that advises and never decides is a vent pipe with minutes. Somewhere in your reach there is a room, a line in a budget, or a decision that a twenty-two-year-old could own, run, and be voted out of. Dejan Jović lost an election in his city’s youth organization, called it “a fair battle,” and said the organization taught him “the ability of persuasion and lobbying.” Nothing teaches self-government the way a real vote does.
Learn where the line is, and say it plainly. Dragan Kremer, a young Belgrade music critic in those years, described the freedom of the youth media as “a line which could not be crossed, but also a space beyond that line where one could do whatever one wanted.” The young cannot use a space whose edges no one will name for them. Tell them where the real limits sit, the legal ones and the safety ones, and defend everything on their side of the line. Then give them work with their hands beside people unlike them. Kremer learned at a summer work action “what it means to dig a two-meter trench with a shovel,” and years later, under political pressure, he knew he could earn a living another way: “I’d rather do that than to compromise myself, my attitudes and views.” A young person who knows the shovel is not beneath them can afford to refuse a bad bargain.
Put your name on the letter. When the institution’s reflex to punish arrives, let it land on the adult who signed for the room before it reaches the young person who made something. That is the whole of Kontić’s craft, and none of it requires a cigarette.
Keep the logo off it. Janjatović’s funders asked for no speeches and no flags, and the scene they paid for outlived them. A program that needs its name on every stage is building its own record. A room that recedes builds the young person’s.
Coffee on the twenty-second floor
Rasim Kadić was twenty-seven in September 1987 and working in the federal youth leadership in Belgrade when the Serbian party’s central committee met in the session that sealed Slobodan Milošević’s hold on it. Kadić watched the broadcast instead of the national team’s football match against Italy. When it was over, he gathered his colleagues on the twenty-second floor, bought everyone coffee, and told them, “Guys, this is my farewell coffee, I’m going back to Bosnia because this is no longer my country.” He walked away from a second term, a good salary, privileges, and friends. Nearly twenty-five years later he told Spaskovska what he had kept: “For me Yugoslavia was the friends, the people with whom I communicated and with whom I still communicate. So, in that sense, Yugoslavia did not disappear at all.”
Slavenka Drakulić, who died this June, put the rule in the title of the first chapter of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed: you can’t drink your coffee alone. Kadić’s farewell coffee was the last round bought in a room that was about to close, and the friendships made in that room outlived the country. They were made, though, in a room someone had opened and someone else had paid for. The young will make their own friendships and their own movements, and that part was never ours to give. What is ours to give, between forty and sixty, is the room, and what is ours to take is the fine. Somewhere in your reach this month there is a room with a usable edge. Open it, hand the key to someone twenty years younger, and stand in front of it.
Notes and Sources
The archive: Ljubica Spaskovska, The Last Yugoslav Generation: Youth Cultures and Politics in Late Socialism, PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2014, published in revised form as The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester University Press, 2017). Page references are to the thesis: Thaler, pp. 214 to 215; the Student Cultural Centre and Gojković-Gile, pp. 79 to 80; Janjatović and the League’s funding, p. 75; Jović, p. 76; the League’s motives and Kontić’s fines, p. 90; Đinđić’s first book and Kazimir, pp. 88 to 89; Pećanin on Kontić, pp. 89 and 96; Kontić’s review, Kovač, and the soft line, p. 98; Radio 101, p. 82; the Trešnjevka telephone line, pp. 158 to 159; the anti-nuclear congress and the 1989 law, pp. 165 to 166; Blažević, p. 80; Kremer, pp. 96 and 124; the dissolution and the New Forum letter, p. 213; Kadić, pp. 194 to 195.
Serbia: Al Jazeera on the concession and the projected seats; Euronews on the sample count; Al Jazeera on the September resignation and the student list; Kosovo 2.0 on the assemblies; Vreme on the pay decree and the Constitutional Court initiative and on Vučić’s remarks; FEPS on the rector’s statement. The official count was not final when this page was written; the seat figures are the projection from a sample count.
The wider wave: Euronews on Nepal’s protests, transition, and arrests and Ada Derana on the death toll; Al Jazeera on Bangladesh’s election and referendum; Al Jazeera on Madagascar.
Drakulić’s chapter title opens How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (W. W. Norton, 1992). Rob Henderson’s account of luxury beliefs is in Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class (Gallery Books, 2024) and his essays. Spielraum, room to play, is Hartmut Rosa’s word in Resonance (Polity, 2019).
Companion pages: Rooms or Files, the one question to ask of anything offered to a neighborhood; Where to Stand, on beside, in front, and at the table; The Membership, the association this stance is built into; Beside, Not Between; The Unguarded Table; and Who Stays. Pockets of Freedom, the half written for eighteen to thirty, will join them here.
The works in these notes open their cards on the Lineage Shelf, with doors to borrow them or buy them.