Socialist Bulgaria Research Articles

Book Review: The Road to Socialism. Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945–1989) by Lyubomir Pozharliev

Book Review: <i>The Road to Socialism. Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945–1989)</i> by Lyubomir Pozharliev

The Road to Socialism: Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945–1989) by Lyubomir Pozharliev (review)

The Road to Socialism: Transport Infrastructure in Socialist Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (1945–1989) by Lyubomir Pozharliev (review)

A Symbiosis of Religious Affections and State Socialism: Bulgaria’s Foreign Cultural Policy of the late 1970s85-100

State Socialism aimed to create a utopian atheist society, where religion was supposed to become superfluous and therefore disappear. Despite the strong anti-religious campaign in 1950s’ and 1960s’ socialist Bulgaria, religion did not vanish but remained in the periphery of public and private life. That applied not only to traditional orthodox Christianity but also to different Theosophy-based groups and ideas, which became influential in the policy of the cultural minister of the 1970s Lyudmila Zhivkova. Her large scaled international cultural projects and the lively bilateral relations with India, Nepal and Sri Lanka not only aimed at increasing the country’s diplomatic prestige but also at popularising Zhivkova’s esoteric conception of national and personal development for which I introduce the term “esoteric nationalism”. Further discussing Bulgaria’s active participation at the general assembly of the United Nations in 1979, this paper will argue that non-hegemonic religious ideas were not always considered hostile by the Eastern European totalitarian authorities. Moreover, the Bulgarian case exemplifies the potential which an esoteric-socialist symbiosis had nationally and internationally.

Symbolic Time(s) of Violence in Late Socialist Bulgaria

By introducing Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, the author explores the state uses of the cinematic industry—notably through the making of grandiose national epics—in the endeavor to model and, ultimately, to assimilate Muslim minorities during the so-called “Revival Process” (1984–1989) in socialist Bulgaria. Drawing attention to often-neglected aspects of film production, such as the selection of symbolically charged “national landscapes,” shooting locations, and the use of Muslim film extras, she examines the production of a state-sponsored historical master narrative, its widespread dissemination at home and abroad, and the attempt at channeling film reception by national minorities and the majority population. The visual recreation of the alleged Ottoman “forced islamization” of Christians and the blurring of the distinction between fiction and fact, as well as past and present were intended to boost the national pride of the majority, achieve support for anti-minority measures, and win the obedience of minorities.

Retirement Is a Foreign Country: Work beyond Retirement and Elder Care in Socialist Bulgaria

In this article, I investigate state policies in socialist rule in Bulgaria, encouraging pensioners to work beyond retirement and their impact on eldercare. First, I argue that in the 1970s, Bulgarian pensioners began occupying economic niches similar to those of labor migrants in Western Europe. The policies actively promoting work after retirement were introduced in parallel with legislation encouraging older people to distribute their property among potential heirs as a donation instead of their last will. I argue that this combination of work beyond retirement and inheritance patterns had a negative impact on eldercare and should be taken into consideration when designing new policies addressed at working pensioners. The research is based on letters of complaint or denunciation from the 1970s, available in the Bulgarian State Archives.

Youth labor in socialist Bulgaria - from ideology to labor practices

The research is aimed at an important part of the state policy in socialist Bulgaria - the forced engagement of young people, future intellectuals as an unpaid or low-paid labor force in various sectors of economy. Through this compulsory employment of high school and university students in summer free months the ruling elites aim to discipline the young intelligentsia and to educate them in work habits. The main form of forced labor is the participation in youth brigades, but other alternative forms of youth labor are gradually being adopted and imposed. The text presents an ethnological study of youth seasonal labor in the sector of international tourism in the 1970s and 1980s, looking at the perspective of young intellectuals working during their summer vacations in the Youth Travel Bureau ?Orbita? as part-time tour guides of foreign groups. This form of temporary employment of young people is accepted as an alternative to the participation in youth brigades and is related to intellectual work. The aim is to analyze the main features of the labor culture of part-time guides working at the International Youth Center ?Georgi Dimitrov? near Primorsko. The officially imposed principles and norms for the work of the young collaborators are presented and their application in the working life of the guides is studied. The subjects of research are the attitudes for working with tourists, the relations in the work environment, the labor practices, the difficulties in everyday working life and the ways of overcoming them, the informal aspects of the activities. The study is based on biographical interviews with former guides between the ages of 50 and 65, conducted in 2019 and 2020. As a participant for six summer seasons in this type of work, the author also relies on the method of the reflexive anthropology. The results of the study show how the discrepancy between the expectations and intentions of the ideologues of the provided tourist services, on the one hand, and the behavior and labor practices of young people actually occurs. The examples are indicative of the changes ?from below?, through everyday strategies of young people, of the initially conceived system of the international youth tourism in socialist Bulgaria.

The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene by Theodora Dragostinova

Reviewed by: The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene by Theodora Dragostinova Elizabeth Banks (bio) Theodora Dragostinova, The Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021). 307 pp., ill. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-5329-9. Theodora Dragostinova enriches understandings of the cultural Cold War by examining cultural exchange in and from Bulgaria in the long 1970s and by demonstrating the centrality of culture to socialist and nationalist nation branding in Bulgaria. Emphasizing Bulgaria's status as a "small state," Dragostinova additionally invites scholars to rethink the concept of periphery in cold war history and global history more generally. The body of the book consists of a preface, an introduction, which establishes the importance of the global cultural scene amid the challenges of the 1970s, six chapters, and an epilogue. Chapters 1 and 2 present the efforts within Bulgaria to use complex cultural events to reinvigorate state and society during this crucial decade. The most important of these events was the 1300th anniversary of Bulgaria, which took place in 1981 but was celebrated through anticipation and preparation for much of the late 1970s. This celebration, like the embrace of culture writ large, was the initiative of Liudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the longtime state leader Todor Zhivkov. She is the book's central character, and was the cultural secretary from 1975 until her death in July 1981. The remaining four chapters explore overseas uses of Bulgarian culture in the same years. They demonstrate the enmeshing of international cultural performance with domestic, the variety of socialist world making in the seventies and eighties, and the pursuit of foreign audiences as central to Bulgarian self-expression. Dragostinova refreshingly avoids any sense of surprise that a small state would actively pursue global ambitions, focusing instead on documenting its details. The international cultural tour begins closest to home, with chapter 3 examining exchange with Bulgaria's nearest neighbors. Chapter 4 heads farther afield to the FRG and United States to document the creation of a multivalent Bulgarian diaspora through cultural exchange. The chapter reveals elaborate state plans for recruiting émigrés of various backgrounds and political persuasions for socialist Bulgaria, while highlighting varied responses and forms of national affinity among Bulgarians abroad and their descendants. The final two chapters travel farther still to cover cultural exchange with India, Mexico, and [End Page 321] Nigeria. They show how connections with the developing world, where audiences had little or no prior knowledge of Bulgaria, offered officials more space to craft their cultural national self-image. These chapters usefully show how Bulgarian cultural officials presented one message for audiences miles apart, underlining the international cultural project as primarily domestic, while noting local variations in expression and reception. Dragostinova's vibrant account of Bulgarian cultural initiatives in the long 1970s is driven by a method-as-argument she calls a "pericentric approach." It disturbs traditional historical narratives by centering on states and people usually considered small or peripheral. Cultural exchange generated a whole range of local meanings that can only be seen and understood in the specific sense; paying attention to these details makes clear the polyphony of socialist world making even in a single national case. This is an important contribution, especially as histories of the Cold War may suffer more than other subfields from an obsession around causality or a hangover assumption that Eastern Europe was overshadowed by the USSR. Following a long line of scholars who have delved into the specific to demonstrate the falsehood of this claim, the book displays honest fidelity to the Bulgarian point of view, even as two-thirds of the book is about Bulgarian culture abroad in various forms. Dragostinova is always very careful about the limitations of her sources, which are Bulgarian, and makes observations about Bulgaria rather than an ephemeral "socialist world" even as she rightly insists her method would be fruitfully applied in other settings. At times this reader found herself wishing for more contextualization that would help make sense of the metrics of smallness and bigness that underlay the argument. Between 1977 and 1981, for...

Chairman Cotton: Socialist Bulgaria’s cotton trade with African countries during the early Cold War (1946–70)

AbstractThis article follows Bulgarian officials engaged in cotton and textile exchange with African states in the early Cold War. These officials founded enterprises for carrying out transactions, collected information on prices at international cotton exchanges and attended meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to coordinate trade activities in capitalist markets. Exploring how Bulgarian foreign trade organizations positioned themselves on the scene of international trade, this article argues that cotton traders, instead of upholding the supposed bloc bipolarity of the Cold War, followed the logic of the markets they worked in. A focus on trade infrastructures in particular shows that early Cold War East–South trade was not as strictly bilateral as official agreements and statistics suggest and reveals the systematic embeddedness of the socialist traders’ practices in global capitalist structures. In the field of cotton, the globalizing economy of the early Cold War was not cut in half, as globalization studies have implied.

Life Cycle and Career Cycle in Socialist Bulgaria

The author examines changes in the interaction between life cycle patterns and career patterns during the period of socialist development in Bulgaria. She explores the implications for the interconnected problems of young people and middle-aged people regarding their roles – productive and reproductive – in the society. The author has made eight research trips to Bulgaria, over an eighteen year period. As background to the analysis, the author reviews the changes in Bulgarian society up to summer, 1989, particularly developments during the socialist period from 1944.

Political Privileges in Late Feudal Society in France by the End of the 17th and the Beginning of the 18th Century and the Lessons for the Modern Times

This article examines the essence and nature of political privileges in the late feudal society (late 17th-18th centuries in France), which is the main purpose of the analysis. A definition of political privileges has been formulated, on the basis of which their main manifestations during feudalism have been analyzed. The privileges are classified according to several basic criteria - historical origin, social sphere, legitimacy and political hierarchy of power. The genesis and development of the privileges in the French feudal society since the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century were subjected to a synthesized analysis by revealing the key types of privileges then - the signoral and noble ones. Emphasis is placed on the numerous political privileges of the French royal family, the nobility and the religious clergy, who were the largest users of the system of privileges during this period. There are a number of illustrative examples of the enormous political, financial and corruption damage suffered by the French state from the illegitimate introduction of the system of privileges in absolutist France. A comparison with some privileges in politics that found a place in totalitarian societies in the twentieth century has been made. On this basis, the nature of the privileges in the former countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular of their basic forms in socialist Bulgaria (1944-1989), is revealed in a comparative plan. Specific conclusions (and recommendations) about the nature, meaning and necessity of political privileges in modern societies have also been made.

Socialism with an Occult Face: Aesthetics, Spirituality, and Utopia in Late Socialist Bulgaria

This article explores the unlikely infusion of state-sponsored spiritualism into the materialist ideology of Bulgarian late communism. In the 1970s, Minister of Culture and daughter of party leader Lyudmila Zhivkova initiated grandiose state programs to inject the “occult” into Bulgaria’s national culture, art, science, and even political philosophy. Inspired by her Eastern religious beliefs, she sought to “breed” a nation of “all-round and harmoniously developed individuals,” devoted to spiritual self-perfection, who would ultimately “work, live and create according to the laws of beauty.” How are we to explain such a paradoxical lapse into state-sponsored spiritualism in a milieu dominated by materialism as a philosophy and way of life? How did Zhivkova’s occultism inform and transform Bulgarian late socialism? In pursuit of these questions, the article opens with Zhivkova’s intellectual and political trajectories, especially her spiritual formation, as I see her religiosity as the cornerstone of her cultural theory and praxis. The second part reconstructs Zhivkova’s theoretical apparatus, while the third demonstrates how it was translated into a large-scale aesthetic-spiritual utopia, which posited art, culture, aesthetics, and spirituality as a way to revamp the entire communist project. I contend that as quixotic as Zhivkova’s vision was, her policies contributed to the liberalization of art and culture in a period that has long been associated exclusively with stagnation and decay. In so doing, I demonstrate that impulses to attach “a human face” to the communist project endured even after the Prague Spring of 1968.

Drinking to the Future: Wine in Communist Bulgaria

This article explores wine production, consumption and trade in the context of late socialist Bulgaria and the wider Eastern Bloc. In particular, it connects wine to the process of building legitimacy in Bulgaria, as part of post-Stalinist culture of consumer abundance and even connoisseurship that was steeped in nationalist narratives and meanings, as well as utopian visions of the future. To complicate such narratives, it also delves into the contradictory ways in which late-socialist anti-alcohol narratives and campaigns similarly looked to local, if not national, precursors to ground their counter model of a sober socialist present and communist future.

Bringing “A Different Femininity”: Immigrant Women from Bulgaria and Local Co-workers on a Factory Floor in Turkey

This article draws on life-course interviews with a group of Turkish immigrant women from socialist Bulgaria and locals who shared the same factory floor for approximately two decades starting from the late 1970s in the city of Bursa, Turkey. It examines the relational processes that simultaneously shaped both the immigrant and local gendered understandings of employment. The contrasting norms that immigrant women and local co-workers attributed to work evolved into everyday contestations on the factory floor. Through these interactions, the work-oriented image of women embodied by immigrants placed pressure on understandings held by co-workers, specifically regarding women’s paid labor as secondary to men’s. However, the immigrants could not entirely change institutionalized gender expectations, and therefore simultaneously reworked their public conceptions of work to better accommodate their new situations. The findings contribute to the literature on gender and immigration by showing that immigrants selectively adopt gender norms present in their new destinations and, distinctively, that immigrants may simultaneously shape receiving gender contexts.

Rights to Weapons: Rights as a Resource in Workplace Conflicts in Late Socialist Bulgaria

Social rights are essentially rights to the betterment of life. And because of this, they lack any internal principle of limitation. Socialist governments recognized social rights as the core of human rights and therefore as legal rights, the implementation of which was a matter of obligation rather than policy. However, since the governments commanded limited resources, they had to limit the implementation of social rights. The article describes the ad hoc limitations on the implementation of social rights, developed by the Bulgarian Communist Party, which brought forth their transformation into instruments of government, and their appropriation by different forms of counter-conduct.

KEY FACTORS INFLUENCING THE AIR TRANSPORT IN BULGARIA

Bulgaria has a significant background in the sector of air transport. It is one of the first countries in Europe to develop air transport. The latter eventually goes through three political systems: the Third Bulgarian Tsardom, socialist Bulgaria and the so-called democratic Bulgaria after 1989. An extensive period of time with its ups and downs, hardship and struggle to prove its place and remain on the market. The years of Bulgaria's political and economic transition from a socialist planned economy to a market economy have brought our country to a number of challenges and have created a number of problems related to property shifts, infrastructure problems and facilities in the transport sector, and in particular in air transport. During this period, the ownership of our international airports and airlines was restructured through a number of privatization deals, with new "players" emerging on the economic scene, while others went bankrupt and went out of circulation, as the state-owned airline BGA "Balkan" whose name and logo were recognizable the whole world. Many of the existing and built air transport sites were closed due to poor organization and financial resources. In addition to these events, air transport was hit by a serious political crisis where airspace of neighboring countries was very often violated due to military action in Syria, and the efforts of our specialized bodies focused on flight safety and safety. In addition, our country was economically covered by the global financial crisis.In order to promote the development and competitiveness of the sector, the factors that affect it must be taken into consideration.The main purpose of this paper is to outline the crucial for the development of air transport factors.The tasks we have undertaken to reveal the purpose of this research relate to such issues as the human factor, regulations, international airports and domestic licensed passenger and cargo airlines. Our main proposition is that to create and promote a competitive air transport, all the main factors like quality staff, synchronized regulations, licensed airports and airlines, must be compatible. If this can be achieved, more and more people in the country will opt for air transport rather than other means of transport.

Bordering the Past. The Elusive Presences of the Holocaust in Socialist Macedonia and Socialist Bulgaria

Bordering the Past. The Elusive Presences of the Holocaust in Socialist Macedonia and Socialist Bulgaria

Race and Women of Color in Socialist/Postsocialist Transnational Feminisms in Central and Southeastern Europe

Abstract Recent scholarship on Black American women and feminists in the radical Left documents how these women's travel to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in the twentieth century influenced their understanding of racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and capitalism in the United States and abroad. This study draws from a related but ignored archive of documents to examine how the travel and knowledges of these Black women have affected women and feminisms in the socialist/postsocialist countries they were visiting. The study explores these affects in the encounter, in 1972, between a young Muslim girl in socialist Bulgaria and African American feminist Angela Davis. This encounter is linked to postsocialist Romani feminisms explicitly rooted in African American women's epistemologies of intersectionality to confront racism and anti-Gypsyism in the European Union and former socialist states in central and southeastern Europe. Women members of dominant majorities in Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania seek links to women of color in the Global North and South but their bridgework rests upon claims to racial innocence and shared victimization. The study relates these modes of socialist/postsocialist transnational feminisms to global and historical racial formations wherein Western racial sciences, colonial technologies, Marxist-Leninist imaginations, and socialist state policies intertwined to produce socialist women belonging to privileged ethnic majorities attached to racial Whiteness and European civilization, as well as Romani and Muslim women whose Otherness marked them for state-led socialist emancipation or eradication. These women engage with women and feminisms of color from the United States and around the world, and the consequences of these engagements illuminate possibilities for new and extended feminist collectives and political alliances that include women in the so-called “Second World.”

Time on hold: science fiction worlds in socialist Bulgaria and Romania

L’article propose une réflexion sur les temporalités socialistes en Bulgarie et en Roumanie à travers le prisme de la science-fiction, un genre habité de visions et de prodiges, qui fut aussi un support privilégié d’interrogation sur les présents socialistes. Étudiée à travers ses producteurs, ses circulations, ses lecteurs et ses clubs d’amateurs, la science-fiction permet en effet de retracer les croisements entre productions politiques, thématisations littéraires et expériences sociales du temps. Ce faisant, l’article suggère la faible pertinence de découpages Est‑Ouest pour appréhender l’histoire des sensibilités, de la science ou les interrogations sur le devenir de la planète. Il montre toutefois aussi que les traversées Est‑Ouest des textes et des savoirs empruntèrent d’un pays à l’autre des sentiers différents, tributaires des histoires ante communistes et de visions nationales contrastées de la direction spatio‑temporelle de la modernité. Au‑delà de ces divergences, les univers SF suggèrent des chronologies proches du (dés)enchantement socialiste : à une projection plutôt confiante dans les années 1960 succéda au cours des années 1980 un éclatement générationnel, social et territorial des visions du présent et de l’avenir. Le repli vers un lointain passé nationalisé ou un futur inaccessible n’empêcha cependant pas les clubs SF de fournir, particulièrement en Bulgarie, un espace de débats sur un futur socialiste réformé.

Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari

Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, edited by Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari. New York, Berghahn Books, 2013. ix, 284 pp. $105.00 US (cloth). This collection is a very welcome addition to the recent spate of publications on leisure in communist eastern Europe. The volume's ten chapters provide broad chronological, geographic, and topical coverage. Some contributions are absolutely excellent, and others are very good. Following Alexander Vari's detailed introduction, the chapters are grouped into five, not always useful, sub-categories: Concert Halls and Estate Museums, Cabins in the Woods, Beach Parties, Roadside Adventures and Bright City Lights, and Sports and Stadia. Cathleen M. Giustino's conclusion helpfully ties the chapters together. Among the themes the authors address are productive leisure, the socialist escapes of the title, and a variety of transgressions, including nudism and political jokes. Cathleen Giustino's, Patrice Dabrowski's, and Mary Neuberger's contributions are among the most conceptually anchored and best argued of the chapters. They address the socialist states' attempts to build support for their respective regimes by providing their citizens a variety of leisure pursuits: The Czechoslovak state sought to build support for the regime through controlling public perception of newly nationalized castles and chateaux in the late- and post-Stalinist era--the popular depiction of the Bieszczady Mountains in southeastern Poland as the Wild West, and the malleable parameters of socialist leisure in socialist Bulgaria began in the late 1950s. Giustino analyzes aristocratic residences the state had seized and transformed into state-owned museums to demonstrate how Czechoslovaks were able to produce meaning in their lives independent of party intentions. She argues that the state's inability to influence visitors owed to its inconsistent employment of socialist codes and narratives. Dabrowski asserts that tourism took a back seat to regional economic development under Polish socialism, and was less an aim than an afterthought. She demonstrates that the newly opened Bieszczady Mountain region was attractive to groups and individuals, if for varied, and unexpected, reasons. The Polish public was not interested in mass tourism with a socialist content, but rather in more leisurely, decidedly unproductive Moreover, the problems--including shortages--that tourists in the Bieszczady experienced were simply another small side of the increasing gulf between real lived socialism and the expectations of the Polish population. Neuberger analyzes the links among smoking and drinking and tourism in Bulgaria between 1956 and 1976 (the country was the eighth largest tobacco producer in the world and by 1966 the greatest exporter of cigarettes) when smoking among Bulgarians of every stripe was expanding more rapidly than drinking. The so-called debauched practices that accompanied Bulgarian tourism eventually came under official scrutiny, which favored healthy, active tourism. …

How the Concept of Totalitarianism Appeared in Late Socialist Bulgaria: The Birth and Life of Zheliu Zhelev’s Book Fascism

Few would dispute the claim that the most significant political text--and political event--in the history of late socialism in Bulgaria was Zheliu Zhelev's Fascism. Completed around 1967 and published in 1981, the book was censored immediately after its publication for making implicit analogies between the fascist regimes and the political organization of the socialist states. Yet despite the state's attempts to limit its circulation, the book captured the political imagination of the generation of the 1980s, reordering political coordinates, eroding the legitimacy of state power, and triggering a political crisis of enormous proportions. Its author, Zheliu Zhelev, trained as a philosopher of Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s but during his graduate studies developed a liberal political perspective and became a harsh critic of the regime. Known as one of the most prominent dissident voices in the country, Zhelev took a trajectory similar to that of Vaclav Havel, becoming the first democratically elected president of Bulgaria after 1989. This article traces the trajectory and political life of Zhelev's book, the only explicitly liberal political critique of state power written and published under Bulgarian socialism. The book presents Europe's fascist states as totalitarian regimes, reproducing Western Cold War right-wing and liberal frameworks that dominated the analysis of fascist and communist societies and their political institutions for most of the second half of the 20th century. In the socialist context, however, these arguments played out in a unique way, tactically inverting some of the most central tenets of Marxism-Leninism. First, by seeing the state as a determining element of social relations, Zhelev undermined the primary status of economic and material relations with respect to the political superstructure and thus attacked the Marxist-Leninist base--superstructure model. Second, by pitting liberal democracy against fascism--and by analogy, against socialism--he radically destabilized the political coordinates of the Marxist-Leninist system, for which fascism constituted the most dangerous enemy, the most stable line of opposition. The publication of the book triggered a complex political response. On the one hand, it inflamed the repressive apparatus to such an extent that people began speaking of the next wave of re-Stalinization--in a certain way, it called into being or reignited what it aimed to expose. On the other hand, the reactions following its publication reveal a three-dimensional political spectrum that complicates any attempt to paint a picture of domination, subordination, and mass complicity in a top-down hierarchy--the very picture Zhelev puts forward in his analysis of the totalitarian state. The complexity of debates around the book calls into question widely accepted arguments about the tangential and inconsequential role of ideology in political life during socialism, as well as arguments about the apolitical or depoliticized nature of the official public sphere, as opposed to the private one, in which politics are often presumed to have been lived and experienced. (1) After 1989, however, Bulgarian dissident intellectuals were blind to such nuances: they eagerly embraced totalitarianism as their favorite analytical framework, stubbornly resisting any approaches that might provide an alternative to the picture of total ideologization, top-down, ubiquitous control, and mass repression. (2) Ironically, just as Western scholars of Soviet and socialist history worked to undo the persistent legacy of the totalitarian framework and the way its theoretical and political assumptions influenced our understanding of the modern socialist era, Zhelev's book introduced totalitarianism into late socialist Bulgaria's political and scholarly debates and shaped the liberal imaginary of critically minded communities. (3) In the last decade, much has been written on the genealogy and use of totalitarianism as an analytical framework in Soviet studies and the way it has structured our notions of socialist subjectivity, struggle, and political agency. …