Independent research institution located in Bulgaria
Category: Projects
Through the years of its existence the Institute for Studies of the Recent Past has initiated and implemented numerous projects and activities. With different scope and dimension they all try to provoke the institutional, educational social and individual capacity to know and understand the communist past.
По отношение на близкото българско минало в масовото съзнание съществуват два мита – митът за престъпния комунизъм и митът за добрия комунизъм, като до голяма степен двата мита съществуват паралелно, без първият мит да обезсмисля втория. Престъпленията от първите години на режима се признават, но се и опрощават в името на социалната му природа през последните две-три десетилетия. Този идеен разнобой на различни нива в обществото се явява сериозна пречка пред установяването на една трайна и стабилна демокрация, подронвайки психологическата и социалната база на личната политическа активност и индивидуалната стопанска инициатива.
2020-2021 г.
По отношение на близкото българско минало в масовото съзнание съществуват два мита – митът за престъпния комунизъм и митът за добрия комунизъм, като до голяма степен двата мита съществуват паралелно, без първият мит да обезсмисля втория. Престъпленията от първите години на режима се признават, но се и опрощават в името на социалната му природа през последните две-три десетилетия. Този идеен разнобой на различни нива в обществото се явява сериозна пречка пред установяването на една трайна и стабилна демокрация, подронвайки психологическата и социалната база на личната политическа активност и индивидуалната стопанска инициатива.
Описаното по-горе прави необходимо задълбоченото и всестранно изследване на социалните практики и принципи на комунистическата държава, което разколебава неосмисленото схващане за успешния и добър комунизъм в съответните сфери. Проектът цели да допринесе за промяната на точно на този контекст.
Основните дейности, които осъществяваме с този проект са:
Колективен авторски сбовник върху социалната история на комунизма в България;
Четвърти том от поредицата “Това е моето минало”;
Авторска монография върху “тоталитарната държава” и българските практики;
Публичен дебат “Интелектуалците: комунизмът и демокрацията”.
Проектът се подкрепя от Фондация “Америка за България”.
Фондация “Америка за България” е независима, непартийна и неполитическа американска благотворителна организация. Основана през 2008 г., Фондацията е наследник на Българо-американския инвестиционен фонд, създаден по Закона за подпомагане на източноевропейската демокрация от 1989 г. чрез Американската агенция за международно развитие.
Фондация Фондация “Америка за България” подпомага укрепването на динамична пазарна икономика и на институциите на демократичното общество в България и подкрепя страната в постигане на пълния ѝ потенциал на успешна и модерна европейска нация. Даренията, предоставени от Фондация “Америка за България”, развиват дългогодишните традиции на доброжелателство и приятелство между народите на САЩ и България. За повече информация: https://www.us4bg.org
Project “EUnderground” wants to bring the history closer to young citizens with a very unique topic which has received less attention so far. The project reveals a hidden and less accessible cultural heritage of former socialist countries: the field of underground cultural movements in Eastern- and Central-Europe between 1948-89. The project’s scientific, cultural and non-formal educational activities about counterculture helps significantly the acquaintance of the era, which creates a better understanding the importance of free speech and civil dialogue in a democracy. We show different forms of cultural protesting against the repression of the freedom of thought and conscience through censorship, and accent the contrast between the dictatorship of the party state and the democratic system of the EU nowadays.
PROJECT ACTIVITIES
Intercultural Student-Journal Workshops
We would like to organize creative workshops for European students (under 20) about the cultural censorship in the communist past. A guest speaker (historian) from a partner country will visit a school in another partner country and will deliver lectures about the life of artists under communism of his/her own country. With the help of the foreigner teachers the students will learn how the totalitarian propaganda was worked, and what happened if somebody had “different thinking” in the field of literature, painting, music or any other type of arts. At the end of the workshops the young participants from all countries have to make together a “samizdat” newspaper with old photos about a specific event from the past like rock concerts, underground cultural gatherings or alternative artworks. With this censorship-circumventing journal, they have to explain the truth against the totalitarian propaganda. We will translate the student articles to every partner’s language and publish it.
European Traveling Exhibition
It will be a traveling exhibition about the underground cultural movements in the Eastern Block countries. We would like to display the tragic fates of artists who were exiled from the “official” communist culture because of their political views, artistic styles or their subjects. We try to show a wide variety of culture and art forms. We will use the case-studies from the Knowledge-Center and we will introduce around 3 artists/groups per countries (18 together). We want to tell their stories mainly with innovative visual and iconographical elements. The location of the exhibitions will be held in unconventional places, like main walking streets, squares, shopping malls, or busy public places. With this method we can reach much more quantity of visitors and more diverse target groups. The national opening ceremonies will include performances and talks with the artists too.
Censorship Festival
It will be a one day long cross-national cultural festival to remembering the victims of the totalitarian censorship. With this festival we would like to commemorate to the oppressed artists and the cultural opposition movements from the Soviet Block. Our main aim with the festival is to get the attention of the young generations and with cultural examples from the past, explain the democratic EU values nowadays. The programme of the festival: art performances from underground and dissent artists from the former socialist countries, concerts, opening ceremony of the traveling exhibition, displaying the student samizdat-journals from the workshops, public readings, interactive debates with the witnesses, exhibitions, film projections, etc. Location: Budapest, Hungary.
Transnational Knowledge Center
We would like to develop a crowd-sourcing online community surface. Here will be loaded up all of the project related educational and scientific materials. At the beginning it will contain 30 case-studies with multimedia elements (interactive maps, images, films) about the life of oppressed artists or illicit groups. After the end of the project we would like to expand continually the center with new contents from other European countries.
Organizer: Laterna Magica (Hungary) European partners: SAN- Social Sciences University (Poland) University of Bucharest (Romania) Art Kontakt (Albania) Educentrum (Czech Republic) Institute for Studies of the Recent Past (Bulgaria) Period: 2018-2019
Full data on implemented activities can viewed in the attached document.
The immediate aim of the project is by using the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the accompanying public interest to process and present as a traveling exhibition under the auspices of the Bulgarian President an unique collection of original and first-hand testimonies about the communist totalitarianism and its victims to different social mediators and communities, especially to engage and provoke younger people who does not have direct experience of the communist past.
Period: 2014
The vivid and realistic imagery of the drawings made by Petar Baychev during his detention on the Belene Island from 1950 to 1954 has a huge potential to revitalize discussions and remembrance about the communist regime and its impact on Bulgarian society.
Through the project ISRP also intends to catalogue, classify, digitize, describe and analytically communicate in series of publications these findings, as well as translate the whole corpus in English and prepare its dissemination beyond the national scope.
Тhe main challenge before our Institute now is to change the research perspective and direct our attention deeper into the everyday functioning of the regime, to elucidate the social system it created and to observe and understand the specific professional and social groups that communism has “designed” and nourished.
Period: 2013 – 2016
The aim of this project is to go beyond these dividing lines and to explore the period from an independent and methodologically informed academic perspective that guarantees the accumulation and communication of academic knowledge to the wider public.
Most of the nowadays political, economic and social downsides in Bulgarian democratic development are deeply rooted in the decades of communist totalitarian rule. The thorough analysis and profound understanding of the regime-society relations and practices during these times can help decision makers, stake holders and society as a whole to proper identify and deal with these pressing challenges.
a) In-depth interviews with the “inhabitants” of the communist regime and
b) Call for life narratives and authentic diaries from the communist times.
Period: 2010 – 2012
Our general goal is by introducing to the interested audience the private, intimate experience of the people under communism to enrich and broaden the critical historical knowledge and social capacity for moral evaluation of our common recent past.
The project team tries to achieve these through the development of a rich database of people’s testimonies from the times of the communist regime in Bulgaria. As it is noted in the proposed project title it will consist of two types of resources: (1) interviews and (2) written life narratives gathered through an open call for recollections and authentic diaries from 1944–1989. These two forms of witnesses have things in common but also presuppose a different level of self-awareness and varying proportion of spontaneity and auto-censorship. Viewed from this perspective they are complementary and provide an additional validation for each other. It is hard to foresee who and how many will answer the call for written life stories. However, in respect to the anthropological survey and according to the financial and human resources the project team can conduct from 150 to 200 in-depth interviews.
“Knowledge and Memory Policies: Public (Mis)Use of the Recent Bulgarian Past” is three year research project. Its basic premise is the lack of critical and profound mass of knowledge about the communist period which hinders the independent evaluation of the past.
Period: 2007 – 2010
Implementing partners: National Art Gallery, Paideia Foundation, Political Science Center.
At different stages of the project implementation the Institute will closely cooperate with Faculty of Philosophy, Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication at Sofia University, other universities, Bulgarian Media Coalition, The Victims of Communism Union.
The Institute for Studies of the Recent Past started a common research project with Open Society Institute in Sofia on the communist years in Bulgaria. Researchers are writing on 16 actual topics from the recent past. Outcomes to be announced and published in the following years.
The “Revival Process” (Cultural assimilation of the Muslims in Bulgaria), Alexey Kalionski
Bulgarian Communist Party and its Policy toward Bulgarian Emigration, Boyko Kiryakov
Bulgarian Rural Areas, Mihail Gruev
The Political Regime and the Bulgarian Muslims, Mihail Gruev
State Security, Momchil Metodiev
Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Momchil Metodiev
The Party Nomenclature, Alexander Vezenkov
Governmental and Social Organizations, Alexander Vezenkov
The Foreign Debt of Bulgaria 1944 – 1989, Daniel Vachkov and Martin Ivanov
The Socialistic Reform “during the 80-ies”, Martin Ivanov
Currency Policy without Currency, Roumen Avramov
“The Real Socialism”. Political and Cultural Analyses, Ivaylo Znepolski
The Cultural Policy during Communism, Ivan Elenkov
The Production of Historical Knowledge during Communism, Ivan Elenkov
Policies for Construction of Cultural Memory, Evelina Kelbecheva
The project aim is to involve people from the countryside (village, small town, medium-sized town), ordinary people in reflecting on their past (life under communism 1944-1989) and put their own stories in the public debate, looking for reasons of silence, non-participation, alienation and melancholy.
Period: 2005 – 2008
The voices from below are voices of people from the periphery of the system, performers of prescribed roles who were trampled or privileged by the system, people who have failed to conceptualise their life experience and are therefore still helpless in the changing times.
The project has three components which are not only mutually complementary but also follow a logic of deeper investigation of the problems in question: oral history, reflective seminars, open competition THIS IS MY PAST.
