Serbia’s Idle Factories

The tractor production firm Zmaj once employed 5,000 people (Photo: S Dojcinovic)

I experience a strange, disconcerting feeling each time I walk past an abandoned factory building or disused industrial site that was shut down after being privatised – as most former communist companies have now been.

Thirty years ago, these buildings and factories were part of the economy of what was then a powerful country – the former Yugoslavia.  These factories were a hive of activity, full of people - from cleaners to workers to directors - and they represented the power of socialism and workers’ rights.

Today, after the planned socialist economies of the past switched to free, market-driven economies, many of these firms were privatised and most of these buildings and factories have been abandoned or are now used for different purposes.

Recently, I spontaneously visited one such company.

I was in taxi cab travelling from Belgrade to Surčin, near the airport. About halfway there, I saw signboards signalling where to exit the highway in order to visit the Roda hypermarket. I already knew that this hypermarket had been built on land once occupied by Zmaj – the company that produced the largest number of harvest machines and tractors in the former Yugoslavia.

Finding enough time on my hands for an impromptu visit, I asked the taxi driver to turn off the highway so I could visit this industrial complex, which was privatised in late 2006.

According to archive media reports, the plant - at its height - produced around 1,200 harvesting machines each year and employed 5,000 workers.

Dragan, the taxi driver, says his father worked here for the whole his life and that, in the vast courtyard of the factory, there was also a hospital and a school.

“This industrial complex was a kind of community,” he tells me.

When I visited, little remained of its once glorious past.  

The factory was in ruins and abandoned, along with the headquarters building too. Warehouses and the former hospital and school buildings were dilapidated and covered with weeds, making it almost impossible to enter any of them.

When I finally scrambled through, I found the buildings to be completely empty, the floors littered only with broken glass and bricks.

By contrast, the site also contains the Roda and DIS hypermarkets. Both look modern and glow in the summer sun. Both are full of people, shopping for products that have been, in the main, imported from abroad.

It seems it is far more profitable to work with supermarket chains than to produce tractors and combines. It is the law of free economics in action, as opposed to the former socialist logic that social programmes were more important than the business-driven economic model.

According to privatisation agency website, the number of workers officially employed at Zmaj dropped from 5,000 in its heyday to just 643 in 2005.

Today, just 73 workers are officially registered as employed at this site – whether at Zmaj or the hypermarkets is not clear from the website.

I couldn’t stay for long in this industrial complex, but that strange feeling, that words can hardly describe, kept with me for a good part of the road. It was a mixture of emptiness and a weird nostalgia for something I never saw or lived myself. I recalled many times what I saw there and tried to imagine how the company once looked.

In any case, this visit to Zmaj was a good introduction for what I want to explore during my fellowship – the results of privatisation in Serbia.

Has it been done properly and with clear goals? What are the problems and mistakes that happened during this process? Did some of this once major state companies ended in hands in people with questionable biographies?

I am very curious to see what my research will show me.

Stevan Dojčinović is a Belgrade-based journalist who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

He will be writing regular updates on his investigation into the privatisation of industry since the collapse of communism in Serbia, Montenegro and Poland.