Author: Ivaylo Znepolski
Published by the Institute for Studies of the Recent Past, Open Society Institute and Ciela Publishers
Sofia 2008
This book is result of the extensive research of Ivaylo Znepolski conducted as part of the Communism Research Project.
CONTENTS
PREFACE: About the Character and Purposes of This Book
PART ONE: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE COMMUNIST REGIME IN BULGARIA. “PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY” AND TOTALITARIAN RULE
- Power Trajectory of the Communist Regime in Bulgaria
- The Beginning: Coup d’Etat, Popular Uprising, Occupation or Revolution
- The Communist Resistance: Today’s War of Figures and Their Interpretations
- Rhetorics of Heroization and Strategies of Victimization
- Contexts of the Bulgarian and Yugoslav Resistance Movements
- September the Ninth: A Collapse Foretold
- On the Meaning of Key Concepts
III. The Course Towards Mobilization of the Masses
- A Party of a New Type: The Main Tool of Communist Hegemony
- The Course Towards Massification of the Communist Party and Nationalization of the Masses
- Social Deconstructivism and a Deep Crisis of Identity
- Seducing and Enthusing the Masses
- Political Use of Egalitarian Attitudes
- The Inevitable Toll of Idealism
- Social Mimicry: A Tool for Survival
- Intellectuals and the Communist Regim
- The Two Antifascisms and Today’s Attempts at Resemanticizing “Victory Day
- Revolutionary Violence and Totalitarian Arbitrariness
- Wild Justice and Its Targets
- Cultural Prerequisites for Violence
- What Is the Real Number of Victims?
- The People’s Court: A Continuation of Wild Justice by Other Means
- The People’s Court and the Nuremberg Trial
- Fascist: A Generalizing Metaphor
- Expropriation: A Symbolic Form of Class Genocide
- Dimitrov and Stalin. The Totalitarian Personality and “People’s Democracy”
- Georgi Dimitrov’s Diary
- Georgi Dimitrov: A Creation of Stalin
- Two Homelands, Two Duties
- On the Nature of People’s Democracy
- Stalin’s Last Lesson
- The Semantic Ambiguity of the Concept of “People”
- Agrarianism, Communism, Agrarian Communism
- The Bulgarian Agrarian National Union and the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (Communists). Excerpts from the History of Their Relations: Similarities, Differences, Rivalries
- Alexander Stamboliiski and the Ideology of Agrarianism
- The Struggle for the Peasant Masses. Attempts at Reviving Agrarianism Within the Fatherland Front
- Division and Defeat of the Agrarian Movement
- The New Role of United Agrarians with Communist Strategy
- Agrarian Communism: A Bulgarian Variant of Communism
VII. The Sovietization of Bulgaria: A Key Resource of Communist Power
- Objective and Subjective Prerequisites for the Country’s Rapid Sovietization
VIII. Weaving the Totalitarian Web
- Destruction of the Social Structure and Alienation of Society
- People’s Democracy and Totalitarianism
- Small Countries and Totalitarianism
- The Imitative Nature of the Regime as a Factor for Its Softening
PART TWO: REAL SOCIALISM, OR THE END OF THE COMMUNIST DREAM
I. Forced Industrialization and Social Engineering
- Forced Accumulation of Financial Resources
- A Key Resource: The Nationalization of the Masses
- The Human Cost of Communist Growth
- The Processes of Migration and Acculturation in the Prism of Art
- Communism: A Trick of History?
- “We’ve Built Two Bulgarias”: Behind the Scenes of Propaganda Rhetoric
II. Consensus on the Norms of the Regime in the Sixties:
- Corrupting Society
- Social Policy “in Service of the People”
- Group and Individual Strategies for Inclusion in the Consensus
- Social Policy “in Service of the People”
- Corrupting the Masses
- Buying Political Loyalty
- A Society of Total Corruption
- The Nature of the Regime and the Character of Its Social Policy
- Social Gains from Communist Times in the Trials of the Transition
III. The Concept of “Real Socialism”and Its Message
- Archaeology of the Concept
- “Top-Down” and “Bottom-Up” Readings of the Concept of “Real Socialism”
- Contextual Meanings of the Concept of “Real Socialism”
- The End of the Communist Dream
IV. The Social Structure of “Real Socialism”
- Workers and Peasants: Two “Friendly Classes”
- The Nomenklatura: A New Class?
- Communist Property: Nobody’s Property
- Social Strata or Social Roles
- Communist Society: An Amorphous Aggregate of Individuals
V. Massification and Bureaucratization of the Communist Party, and the Social Consequences Thereof
- The Galileo Syndrome
- The Split of Party Elites. The Growing Divide Between the Ruling Apparatus and the Party Base
- Apparatchiks and Technocrats. Cadre Reshuffles and Their Social Consequences
VI. The Limits of Communist Political Modernization
- Divergence of the Processes of Industrialization and Modernization
- Imitative Modernization
- The Missing Agent of Reforms
EPILOGUE: AN END FORETOLD: COMMUNISM FACED WITH AN INSOLUBLE DILEMMA
SUMMARY
Drawing on the concepts proposed by Max Weber, each of the East or Central European communist regimes can be viewed in two ways: as an exponent of an ideal type, and as a historical individual, a concrete variant of the species with its own specific features. In the first case, its evaluation would depend entirely upon the characteristics and history of the phenomenon as such, therefore each of the national communist regimes is in principle responsible for all the crimes committed in the name of its ideology from the victory of the Bolshevik revolution to the disappearance of communism from the contemporary historical scene. The second approach presupposes that the study of each particular communist regime must complement the analysis based on the latter’s ideological platform by inquiring into the specific national context and taking into account the specific historical, social, cultural and even ethnopsychological premises. This approach, being more concrete, enriches our knowledge of the general phenomenon even though it seems to restrict the research field. Similarly to fascism, communism is presented as a constellation of movements and regimes organized around the paradigmatic communism form: Bolshevism. It is surrounded by numerous minor communisms conceived as anticipations, imitations or illegitimate derivatives (which we may call proto-communism, communistoid movements and regimes). The panorama outlined by the regimes in the countries of East and Central Europe, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Congo, Mozambique, Chile, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, is an illustration of this.
The first approach has been dominant in literature to date. Volumes and volumes have been published in the West about communist totalitarianism but, almost without exception, they focus on the referent model, i.e. on the Bolshevik party and the history of the Soviet regime, and especially on the latter’s most radical period, Stalinism. With few exceptions, the same approach has also been applied in the study of the so-called European “people’s democracies”. Despite the conclusion drawn in this book that Bulgarian communism was an imported, imitative phenomenon to which the international promotion of the figure of a prominent communist leader (Georgi Dimitrov) tried to lend some authenticity, its history demonstrates specific features and moments of development which can help us come closer to answering some essential questions that still remain open: How exactly was the communist regime established in Bulgaria? Why did many actively support it while others cowardly resigned themselves to it? Why did the experiment last so long although it soon became clear that it was a failure? And so on. This book aims to offer answers to these questions, starting from the conviction that otherwise the past will remain veiled in silence, continuing to irradiate with illusions and demagoguery the inevitably difficult post-communist everyday life and threatening to distort the unravelling process of reforming society.
Bulgarian communism and the communist regime in Bulgaria, albeit closely interconnected, are treated as different subjects of study. This book is not intended as a history of Bulgarian communism (or of the Bulgarian Communist Party as its organizational form) in its entire historical trajectory from the moment of its emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century to its collapse in 1989. Communism in Bulgaria has a longer history than that of the regime established in its name (it preceded the rise and has continued to exist after the fall of the communist regime in the country). Although the impulses that gave birth to communism seem to have been exhausted, they have not died down completely. Apart from programmatic intentions and visions about society, communism also includes in itself ideals, motives, hopes, delusions, disillusionments, hesitations – all of which are things associated with concrete individuals and groups. The facticity of facts, as Gadamer notes, can never compare in importance to the facticity which each one of us recognizes as one’s own facticity, as well as which all members of a given group recognize as their own facticity. Thus, the complete image of Bulgarian communism may be reconstructed by uniting, in one study, the two extremes – of the real flow of events and of its receptions which depend on the individual motives for integration or dissociation from the social utopia. Although this is an important research goal, raising the big methodological question about the ways to articulate macro- and micro-history, the purpose of this book is different. It aims at studying Bulgarian communism from the moment it merged with the political regime it had established, i.e. the communist idea as it takes form in concrete political, administrative, social, economic, cultural and other practices.
Despite our efforts to keep sight of the events and available archival resources relevant for this study, someone might object that we have failed to take one thing or another into consideration. Such objections would be unjustified because, although the subject of this book is the communist regime in Bulgaria which partly overlaps with and partly differs from the communist idea, it is not a history of the communist regime in Bulgaria, because it does not examine the phenomenon chronologically and does not exhaust the facts. Accumulation of new, hitherto unknown facts and data does not, in itself, guarantee the success of a historiographical study. Even now we have a certain amount of data that are still to be processed or explored. While new facts may corroborate or contest already constructed narratives, they cannot substitute the lack of instruments suitable for their interpretation. No narrative of events, no matter how exhaustive it claims to be, is capable of conveying what really happened. Yet we are confronted not with one but with constantly multiplying narratives. One narrative puts to question another, which makes the question of choice of narrative increasingly relevant. That is why I have been guided in my work by the conviction that there is an urgent need to diversify the research perspectives, to connect the achievements of the hitherto dominant positivist historiography to a methodology that conceptualizes facts. Thus, drawing on the growing flow of studies on various aspects of the communist regime in Bulgaria, this book is a superstructural attempt at a theoretical reconstruction of some of the major themes that form the skeleton of the history of communism that remains unwritten. It is our firm belief that unless there is a methodological renewal of Bulgarian historical science that will connect the latter with the social sciences, it will be difficult to find our bearings in the web of empirical facts, and there is a great risk that we will remain confined within the realm of the history of events, which is invariably reducible only to that upon which the writer decides to focus his or her attention.
This book offers a series of problem fields derived from the specific social and historical context and examined in the light of a series of concepts essential for the subject of study. The first and main one among them, totalitarianism, is associated with the typology of political regimes in contemporary political science. Totalitarianism is placed at the centre of a grid of other concepts which precede or follow from it, and through which the regime thinks of itself or is thought of. The two parts of the book coincide roughly with the two major, albeit not strictly distinct and divided, periods constituting the development of the communist regime: the period of classical Stalinism and the period of post-Stalinism, each of which evolved through several different stages and had its own dynamics. This dynamics is reflected in the concepts which will help me achieve a historical reconstruction of the main moments and themes of the communist age in Bulgaria. In the first period, the focus is on the ideas of resistance, fascism, uprising, revolution, occupation, Fatherland Front, wild justice, People’s Court, nationalization, political parties, concentration camps… In the second period the focus is on the notion of forced industrialization, migration, social classes, social gains, real socialism, reform, corruption, economic crisis…
The first period is characterized by the dynamics of the establishment of the communist regime. It covers the time between 1944 and 1956, but had late relapses at least until 1962, i.e. until the final closure of concentration camps and the end of the practice of administrative arrests, and is full of highly dramatic events. Soviet military occupation, an armed coup, seizure of towns and villages in the country by partisan units, acts of mass violence and of radical destruction of the existing social order, massification of the Communist Party, suppression of the resistance of opposition forces, nationalization, change of the form of ownership and rearrangement of social strata, disruption of the lives of hundreds of thousands, formation of a new political elite in charge with gradually conducting Bulgaria’s Sovietization and guaranteeing its loyalty to the Kremlin, creation of concentration camps… Parallel with all the violence and arbitrary acts in this period, we must also note an immediate result of the radical change which ensured a social base for the regime and made possible the dynamics described above. The change activated the wide rural and urban poor strata of the still traditional Bulgarian society and involved them directly in social and political life. For some time, this sense of “inclusion” would impart legitimacy to events and justify their brutality. But in less than a decade this sense of “inclusion” would fade away, becoming ritualized and formalized. Awakened to activity by the “revolution”, the proletarianized strata would gradually turn into a vast, inert and passive, obedient mass. The period ended with the imposition of total control over society and the establishment of a classical totalitarian system. All this was visible, publicly well displayed, a result of physically tangible conflicts, and is arranged in distinct historical narratives.
In the second period of the development of the communist regime in Bulgaria, which may provisionally be defined as “peaceful”, violence and pressure on individuals did not disappear, nor did the principle of total mobilization of society become weaker – however, they were modified, becoming more perfidious and establishing themselves as a constant background of life, maintained by memories of the recent reign of terror and transformed into a psychological reality. Their external dramatic force declined: the camps were closed down, there were no longer any show trials, there still were political prisoners but they were not many and were no longer forced on the attention of society but, rather, remained hidden. But even this “bloodless violence” was sufficiently effective and it marked the internal dramatic conflict of people, who were forced to don the mask of loyalty. There was even an apparent transition from a mobilized to an administered society. Something like social consensus (called in the official documents of the regime “unity between [communist] party and people”), albeit a forced one, was established around the principles and goals of the regime. This consensus was related to a sense of predetermination in a society with obviously not particularly strong capacities for resistance. After de-Stalinization, and with the gradual emergence from the Cold War period and deepening of the process called “peaceful coexistence” of the two systems, the last hopes for a possible change imposed from outside faded. Unlike the 1950s, no one believed any longer that “the Americans will come”. The brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and of the 1968 Prague Spring conclusively affirmed the conviction that the regime was viable, invincible and eternal, insofar as it constituted a communicating vessel with the “mighty Soviet Union”. All this crystallized in the widely promoted slogan “Friendship for Centuries Past and to Come!” And people, who were clearly aware that they would live their lives under this regime, began to look for different strategies for integrating into the framework imposed by it. This was almost an imperative for the younger generations, whose conscious lives were formed entirely in the conditions of communist reality. They had no other experience or criteria for judgment – the closed society and censorship had taken care of that. Over the years, the number of subjects of the purely present form of the regime grew progressively.
In this period the regime looked internally static. Distinctly structured and confident, the society established in Bulgaria was a society without events, at least in the sociological sense of the term event, i.e. something unexpected, unpredictable, departing from the normal course of things, changing the perspective of positions and of interests. Both sides – the power-holders and a large part of the subjects – were truly afraid of anything that might qualify as an event (treated as a synonym of scandal), doing everything possible to prevent or cover up its occurrence. The main political actors of the regime survived for a long time; despite the constant routine reshuffling, they rotated but seldom dropped out of the game. The list of the nomenklatura was firmly established, and any change in it was carefully weighed. All processes developed in the shadow of Todor Zhivkov, who controlled the Communist Party and the State for thirty-five years and became an emblem of the regime. Internal party life and politics were formalized and ritualized (congresses, official celebrations, festive parades…). The Communist Party itself was openly transformed from an ideological community into a party of power. Meanwhile, communist everyday life fell in line with the party’s prescriptions, becoming monotonous and repetitive and acquiring a certain life routine. Society became increasingly closed, activity and advance in one’s professional career or the administration (i.e. a change of one’s status) being dependent exclusively on a career in the Communist Party. People not only adjusted to the established conditions of existence but also learned how to outwit the system and defend their own intentions and interests without risking open confrontation. This occurred under the sign of ever more widespread corruption. The only real event in this period was the physical movement of large flows of people caused by the undertaken course of forced industrialization. This process was distinctly painful, its dramatic character stemming also from the mass acculturation that accompanied the ambitions of building an industrial-type society. The migration processes slowed down in the mid-1970s, although they left a lasting imprint on the character of Bulgarian society until its very end and, as a matter of fact, after that too.
That is why the research task in the second part of the book is different. The key question here is the following: What is the character of a society that was equidistant both from the society which preceded it and which it destroyed (Bulgarian undeveloped capitalism), and from the society in the communist ideal found not only in the works of Marx but also in the propaganda clichés from the years of forced establishment of power and officially labeled as “real socialism”? The stabilized communist regime can be understood less through the narrative of events than through observation and analysis of everyday life and the motives guiding people in this everyday life. But also, and above all, through the way in which the regime itself thematized and theorized its rule and its practices: socialist industrialization, social rights, an egalitarian society of the working classes (workers and peasants), economic reforms, etc. In the style of the exposition, the narrative of events gives way to a theorizing discourse which offers an opportunity for dispelling the ideological fog. The result of this theoretical reconstruction constitutes an attempt to build a theoretical model of the historical trajectory of the communist regime in Bulgaria.
The last two chapters of the book trace how after Gorbachev’s perestroika, and especially around 1987–1988, the outlines of the crisis of the regime gradually became clearer. This was an economic crisis but also a structural one, an institutional crisis and a crisis of legitimacy, to the extent that the potential of General Secretary Todor Zhivkov’s personal power was exhausted and it was now very difficult to separate the questioning of his rule not only from the questioning of the status quo but also from the questioning of the regime itself. This crisis, which was increasingly difficult to hide, rehabilitated events once again and involved an activation of the civic sector and the emergence of informal movements, but also a split at the top of the Communist Party and the formation of an internal party opposition. This also raises a number of questions which this book seeks to answer: What happened in the last decade of communism in Bulgaria? What had changed and what needed to be changed? What were the prospects before the regime and before society? The study offered here follows the thus described logic in the development of the communist regime in Bulgaria, seeking the necessary synchrony between the changing character of the subject of study and the necessary methods for its study.
But even though it aims to provide a structural reconstruction of the trajectory of the communist regime, this book is not a purely theoretical study either. My purpose was to keep close to the facts, to draw my theses from and support them with archive documents, eyewitness accounts, statistical data and other texts. But I also relied upon the accumulated experience, upon what Koselleck calls “listening and speaking”. The examples used here, the specific cases, do not claim to be exhaustive but to be representative. They cannot substitute – nor do they aim to – the ongoing work in archives or the maximum coverage of existing accounts, as this is not only impossible to achieve in a single book but would also have deviated me from the profile of the undertaken study. I am interested in the communist regime in Bulgaria as a political phenomenon but also as a civilizational phenomenon, the fruit of a particular social context and political culture. Thus, the genre of this book should be sought in the connection between political history and political theory, supported by approaches borrowed from anthropology, sociology, social psychology, hermeneutics, language practices…
This undertaking also contains a risk of which I was clearly aware in the course of my work: every conceptualization transcends the specificity of the past which it seeks to understand, as it superimposes interpretations upon it. “The factual character of events established ex post facto is never identical with the totality of past phenomena thought of as real. Every established and historically presented event lives on the fiction of its factuality.” That is why, Koselleck goes on to say, the researcher is faced with a choice between two types of fiction. “Negatively, the historian is tied to that which testifies to a past reality. Positively – when, while interpreting, he extracts an event from the sources, he becomes more like a literary narrator who will not hesitate to resort to fiction if he can thereby make his story more convincing.” On the one hand is the fiction of factuality – reduction of the historical truth to the facts which have been selected or which have simply been constructed. On the other hand is the sui generis theoretical fiction through which the facts are selected and arranged. The history of the Bulgarian Communist Party and of the communist regime in the 1944–1989 period was canonized by the official interpretations which initially constructed facts suitable for the purpose and then superimposed theoretical fictions upon them. This book is an attempt to do the opposite: to shake free events and facts from the interpretations attached to them and, at the same time, to propose suitable theoretical instruments for their reinterpretation. Difficult as it may be, I have tired to avoid falling into the traps of the fiction of factuality and to control the theoretical reconstruction by multiplying the points of view and diversifying the interpretative approaches, which would prevent the interpretation itself from becoming a fiction.