“My first and biggest wish would be to wake up and realize that it is the year 1990 and say: ‘Uh, that was one bad dream!’”(198). The “dream” from which Milan Mladenović, lead singer of the Belgrade rock band, EKV, and many of his generation wished to awaken was the disintegration of Yugoslavia, an imperfect country that was, for many of its citizens, still a viable project. Ljubica Spaskovska's engrossing monograph, The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism, demonstrates how this “last Yugoslav generation” used official institutions to create a vibrant youth culture and political practices that sought to revitalize, rather than dismantle, the Yugoslav idea.

The Last Yugoslav Generation focuses on the cohort that was in their 20s and 30s during Yugoslavia's final decade (1981–91) and their activities within the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia (the SSOJ). Drawing on archival material, media, and oral histories from across the former Yugoslav republics, Spaskovska examines the “new generation of political activists, journalists, musicians and artists” who carved out “pockets of freedom” within the SSOJ as they pushed the organization to “reinven[t]” itself (38, 52). The SSOJ grew into a major sponsor of Yugoslavia's cutting-edge youth culture and became a space where young people could develop new ways of talking and thinking about political activism, with much of these energies directed towards critiquing, though not destroying, the Yugoslav system. The organization also absorbed new social movements, including environmentalism, feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and anti-militarism. New ways of thinking about “‘rights’ and ‘identity,’” often emerging from the SSOJ, revealed this generation's “layered Yugoslavism,” frequently a balance of supranational Yugoslav identity, ethnonational identity, and “Europeanness” (90, 92, 125). By the late 80s, however, the SSOJ struggled to establish a consensus on its role in Yugoslav society, or its vision for Yugoslav socialism. As the country's political crisis deepened, the organization was fragmented, its branches at odds with each other, and many of its activities under attack by authorities. The body of youth culture and activism that might have produced a sustainable, pan-Yugoslav alternative proved unable to serve as a bulwark against the older generation's march to war.

The Last Yugoslav Generation is a rich and vivid portrait of the Yugoslav 1980s and a welcome contribution to the literature on late Yugoslavia and on state-society relations under socialism. While Spaskovska is not the first scholar to observe that Yugoslavia's collapse was hardly a foregone conclusion, the book's “generational lens” provides a useful tool for further dismantling notions of a country predestined for violent collapse (2). This was a cohort for whom ethnonational identity was often important, but still compatible with a fundamental faith in the Yugoslav project. The generational lens proves useful also in uncovering deeper continuities in Yugoslav history. For example, in pointing out parallels between the student/youth activities of the 80s and those of the 60s–70s generation, Spaskovska opens up intriguing questions about the persistence of numerous themes within political/cultural activism and the state's response to them.

In foregrounding the often blurry line between rebellious youth and the state, Spaskovska nuances our understanding of the intricate negotiations between the Yugoslav state and its citizens, while continuing to undermine the narrative of a doomed Yugoslavia. We see a far more flexible and tolerant state apparatus—and a more loyal citizenry—than might be expected for a state supposedly on the verge of disintegration. The study produces such a fascinating portrait of the interplay between state and society that one wishes a few larger conclusions might have been drawn from it. Clearly, Yugoslavia was in many ways an exceptional case, but I would have been interested to know Spaskovska's thoughts on how adding Yugoslavia to the scholarship that has explored similar dynamics in other socialist contexts more broadly advances our understanding of how socialist societies functioned—or ended.

The Last Yugoslav Generation is so compelling in its recreation of late Yugoslavia that readers may, like this one, find themselves pulling up old EKV or Laibach videos on YouTube as they read. This portrait of punks, rockers, activists, and student journalists provides an important alternative to the image of the Yugoslav 80s as little more than a prelude to catastrophe. Indeed, the country's disintegration in the book's last pages comes as a kind of shock, much as it did to the historical actors. Mladenović’s generation may not have been able to awaken from the terrible dream in which they found themselves, but they made some great music.