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This photograph was taken during a mass rally in Titograd in the autumn of 1988, at the height of the so-called Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution. In an atmosphere of collective euphoria, crowds filled the city streets carrying flags and banners, while spontaneous celebration, music, and dance merged with political slogans and speeches.
Montenegro is a small country where people often know one another, and personal destinies easily intertwine with political history. My cousin Dragoslav Bato Lakićević, a respected military physician from Herceg Novi, once told me how a close friend—also an army officer—asked him to help find a job for his son, a recent graduate of the Faculty of Economics. Lakićević recommended the young man to the director of a large and successful company, only to receive a phone call later that same day. The director apologized, saying he could not hire the young economist because he was, in his words, “too soft.”
It turned out to be a serious misjudgment. That “soft” young man was Momir Bulatović, who later became President of the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Montenegro (1990–1993), President of Montenegro (1993–1998), and finally Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1998–2000).
At the rally in Titograd, Bulatović addressed the crowd, declaring: “All our demands have been fulfilled—the people have won,” and called for the celebration of a “great victory.” And if anyone knows how to celebrate, it is certainly the people of Montenegro—something clearly visible in this photograph, through movement, dance, and the raw energy of the crowd.
Several months later, at the Tenth (extraordinary) Congress of the League of Communists of Montenegro, a new party leadership was elected, headed by Momir Bulatović, with Milo Đukanović as party secretary, formally sealing the political shift that had begun in the streets.