I have a ton of questions! Hoping someone could give some clarifications on The death of Yugoslavia Episode 1. So my first question is.. why was Ivan Stambolic suddenly seen as a a dictator after the Kosovo incident and I wasn't exactly clear what it is they where voting for. Wasn't Milosevic the one who went against communist party guidelines? Also why did Milosevic's nationalist ideology gain so much traction within a communist country? Also there was a segment about these (I may be wrong ) magazine publishers . I wasn't clear exactly what the point of the segment was ? And my final question is when its talking about serbia, Kosova, croatia, slovania, bosnia, and montenegro are these all part of one country ? It seems they all have there own governments ?
I can get a bit into the last question.
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as the official name suggests, was set up as a federation. The constituent republics within the federation were Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Serbia was further subdivided between Serbia proper and two autonomous provinces: Vojvodina and Kosovo.
Much of the glue holding this system together was Tito himself, who was both president and leader (under several different titles) of the ruling party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. After his death in 1980, both the government and party became a bit more decentralized - the League itself was comprised of member parties in each of the republics, and the government was led by a collective presidency, made up of the heads of each of the republics and autonomous provinces (who then took turns as "President of the Presidency").
This federal collective presidency is in part what precipitated the greater political crisis in Yugoslavia that led to its collapse, and the subsequent wars. Milosevic was President of Serbia, as well as President of the League of Communists of Serbia. Through a number of incidents, Milosevic ended up installing allies as Presidents of Vojvodina, Montenegro and Kosovo, meaning that effectively he controlled half of the collective presidency (which was not appealing to the other members, especially Slovenia and Croatia). Furthermore, the ruling party itself rapidly ceased to operate on a federal level. When Yugoslavia formally allowed multiparty politics in 1990, the League more or less broke up into its member parties in each of the republics. Notably at the 14 Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Serbian and Slovene party delegations clashed about the nature of future party and presidential decisionmaking (the former wanted more centralization, the latter more decentralization), and eventually the Slovene, Croat, Bosnian and Macedonian party delegations walked out.