For many young people today, it is unthinkable for them to not spend the summer going to sea. Once upon a time, young people, instead of going to the beach and swimming, went to work actions.
This is an article about the work action on the Sava embankment in Zagreb from 1976.
In June 1976, several thousand young people spent the summer on work actions. They built roads, railways, embankments … Journalists visited the Zagreb construction site and heard how work was being done on the Sava ’76.
And again the brigadiers say: the most beautiful holiday is action! Great friendship is built here, lasting friendships are made and brotherhood and unity are nurtured, the greatest achievement of our revolution. There are blisters, but every young person is very proud of them.
Thirty-nine brigades with 3.000 young people from all over Yugoslavia will invest in this construction, as well as in the arrangement of the Odra drainage canal near Velika Gorica, about 320.000 norm-hours, an immeasurable amount of will, work enthusiasm and motivation, which only young people know. The seventeenth action is taking place on the banks of the Sava, the action with the longest uninterrupted duration in Yugoslavia. For seventeen years, more than fifty thousand young people have built themselves into the embankments along the Sava, and it is to their credit that the destructive force of the river will never roar again through the capital of the Socialist Republic of Croatia.
However, let us return to our brigadiers and their striking day. A long and loud “ho-ruk” draws journalists to the work site of one of the brigades.
The panting commander Surla was asked how it is that the brigade has two flags: stuck in the ground at the edge of the construction site, tied in a knot.
”We are twinned with the “Mosa Pijade” brigade from Zagreb’s Tresnjevka. Our municipalities are cooperating, and a great friendship has developed spontaneously between us here in the settlement. The other brigades are also bonding.
The settlement that afternoon, and the others, looked like a real hive. Athletes, young technicians, those who are preparing for driving exams, everyone was in a hurry somewhere, everyone was doing something, they were interested in what preoccupied them the most. And the settlement communists, 270 of them, as well as another hundred who want to become one, got political knowledge while listening to a lecture on the Draft Law on Associated Labor.
The evening was approaching, the blush in the west indicated that it would be a hard and hot day tomorrow as well. Although the palms ached and the legs and arms ached stretched with tough stumps, the brigadiers did not fall asleep and for a long time a merry brigadier song was heard from the settlement. Why should they give up in their sleep: they are young, they are together, they are friends, it is nice for them, and the action is only once a year anyway, Avaz writes.
E.Dz.
