While I don't really like the designs, the 50 dinara note shows a sculpture by Ivan Meštrović, a well renowned Yugoslavian (Croatian) artist - "possibly the greatest sculptor of religious subject matter since the Renaissance, the first living person to have a one man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Meštrović (And yes, I have the Irish coin depicted on that page. ) Christian
In reality Jugoslavia was one of the countries that kind of went it's own way politically and financially. Notice the signatures on the notes of the governor and vice governor, you won't find those on any other Socialist country notes. Also the designs were somewhat more western in appearance, but they were also limited by the obvious need to have several languages on them.
That looks like Dubrovnik on the reverse of that note. My wife and I visited Croatia on holiday a few years back but we were in the North (Istria), we both quite fancied a trip to Dubrovnik or Split but it was a bit more exclusive/expensive. I seem to recall Yugoslavia being open for tourism even in the communist era and remember the (rubbish) cars they used to sell into the West, they seemed to have more of a market economy than most Eastern bloc countries. You may have heard of the Stalin quote, something along the lines of "I shall wave my little finger and there will be no more Tito" but there was quite a good one from Tito to Stalin rebuking him for his failed assassination attempts: "Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (...) If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second."
We once had a family holiday in Dubrovnik in the 1980s. The old walled city was beautiful but still under repair after an earthquake in 1979 and they still hadn't completed restoration from the most devastating one in 1667! As for market economy? Not when we were there. The only local supermarket was almost bare with a few packs of butter and a few stale loaves of bread (the locals apparently bought theirs fresh from the bakers in the early hours of the morning before that day's supply dried up). Oh, but there were plenty of shoe shops - if you liked them made out of cardboard. There was a shopping center (for tourists and, no doubt, for local government officials only) but I seem to remember they would only accept British pounds or US dollars. Then after the fall of communism they fell prey to civil war and hyperinflation. This note from 1993 would probably have been enough to buy you one of those stale loaves.
The curious thing about Jugoslavia was that in the 1950's during the hottest part of the cold war, Jugoslavia was so isolated from the USSR that they bought most of their military aircraft from the USA - which is why they were flying C-54s, Bristol Britannias, and F-86 fighter jets.
Oh, that was work of Josip Broz Tito, who basically was the glue behind Yugoslavia in the post-war era until his death in 1980. As the French might say, "Aprés Tito, le déluge".
Don't know about military equipment, but from what I have learned, it was pretty common in (West) Germany to have "guest workers" from Yugoslavia. The German government made, in the 1960s, agreements with various Mediterranean countries that would allow people from these countries to come/work/live here for an indefinite period of time. Yugoslavia was the only "socialist" country with such an agreement; it was not a Warsaw Pact member, and not really a Comecon member either. Christian
One of my favorite images on a bank note is the back of the 10-billion dinara note from the 1993 issue.
When I was in Croatia they had reverted to the Kuna, Wiki has some interesting factoids: "The kuna is the currency of Croatia since 1994 (ISO 4217 code: HRK). It is subdivided into 100 lipa. The kuna is issued by the Croatian National Bank and the coins are minted by the Croatian Monetary Institute. The word "kuna" means "marten" in Croatian since it is based on the use of marten pelts as units of value in medieval trading. It has no relation to the various currencies named "koruna" (translated as kruna in Croatian). The word lipa means "linden (lime) tree"." Oddly I don't seem to have any examples lying around though. During the holiday we hired a car and took a trip up to Slovenia, where they are now part of the Eurozone. We were able to pay the road tolls in kuna and the owner of the rowing boat we rented at Lake Bled accepted kuna at a very reasonable exchange rate!
