NONFICTION - July 28, 1991

THE CONTESTED COUNTRY: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1919-1953 by Aleksa Djilas (Harvard: $34.95; 248 pp.) . With myriad “autonomous regions,” few clear historical villains or heroes and no obvious ethnic differences between its two main factions, the Croats and Serbs, Yugoslavia certainly tries the patience of those attempting to understand the roots of its current civil unrest. Writing with a scholar’s fine pen rather than a journalist’s broad brush, Aleksa Djilas does not make the going any easier. But those who press on will learn the fascinating but hard lesson of nation-building: Even generally enlightened social planning--Yugoslavia’s communist leaders scrapped collectivized agriculture in 1953, for example, well before the Soviet Union noticed its failure--cannot overcome historical enmities, such as Serbian resentment about the Utasha movement, a little-known genocide that killed up to 750,000 Serbs during World War II.