„Јединство радника, сељака и народне интелигенције“ – прославе Међународног празника рада у Београду (1945–1959)
“Unity of workers, peasants and popular inteligentsia” – celebrations of International Labor Day in Belgrade (1945–1959)

Summary/Abstract: International Labor Day, known also as May Day, was one of the four legally defined public holidays in Socialist Yugoslavia. By celebrating it, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Union of Communists of Yugoslavia since 1952) tried to show to both the domestic and international public, the commitment of the citizens of Yugoslavia to the idea of building socialism: how to rebuild the war-ravaged homeland, build the economy in a planned way, and carry out the “socialist transformation of the agriculture”; it wanted to show how socialism defends itself from the “forces od reaction” both external and internal, to prove, then, the untruth of the accusations made in the Informburo Resolution and to say that each country should be able to develop its own way of building socialism, without dictates from one revolutionary center. The celebration of the Internatuional Labor Day was, in an organisational sense, a complex multi-day undertaking made up of a series of ritual actions, such as sports competitions, exhibitions, concerts, theater performances and, as the central event on May 1st – a ceremonial parade of thousands of citizens, representatives of various professions, trade unions and professional associations on the streets of Belgrade, decorated with symbols of revolutionary war and socialist construction and slogans that succinctly define the tasks of the builders of socialism. Those May Day slogans had changed over time and, through them, all internal and foreign political changes of Yugoslavia could be read in the considered chronological framework of 1945–1959.

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