Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past: Public Narratives and Personal Recollections (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies) 3031046579, 9783031046575

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Navigating the Memory Archipelago
What Do we Talk about when we Talk about Memory?
How to Look into Memory: Narrative as Lens
Grand Narratives and Life Stories
References
Part I: Politics of Memory and Memory Cultures
Chapter 2: The New ‘Grand Narrative’: Coping with the Past
Politics of Memory: “Holocaustization” of Communism?
Mnemo-Political Regionalization: Two European Cultures of Memory
References
Chapter 3: Politics of Justice: Transitional Justice
Legislative Condemnation and Criminalization of the Communist Regime
Justice for the Victims
Rehabilitation
Restitution of Property
Perpetrators’ Accountability—from the Judicial to the Moral Sphere
Criminal Prosecution
Lustration
References
Chapter 4: Politics of Recognition
Establishing the Facts: The Archival Revolution
Politics of Truth and Institutions of Memory
Constructing a New Historical Narrative: Historians’ Commissions
Institutes of Memory
The Emergence of Memory Cultures: Memorialization and Musealization
The Memory of the Victims in Public Spaces
Museum Narratives of Communism
References
Part II: Memory Narratives and Mnemonic Communities
Chapter 5: ‘Thorns in the Spirit’: Traumatic Narratives
Trauma and Memory
Collective Trauma? Is It Possible?
Communist Repressions as Cultural Trauma
Belene as Topos in the Traumatic Narrative
Public Memory: Sites, Topoi, Plots
Local Memory in Belene: Topoi, Tropes, Plot Lines
The Community Narrative: “Here We Are Split in Two”
The Past: Floods, Mud, Polenta
Socialist Reforms: Housing, Asphalt, Sidewalks
The Island: “Sheer Heaven, Golden in Our Eyes”
The Camp in Local Memory: Traumatic Repression or Limited Rationality
Edification of Memory?
Bare Life and damnatio memoriae
The Politics of Pity and Local Public Life
References
Memories and Memoirs
Chapter 6: ‘Sorrow, Almost Hope’: Nostalgic Narratives
The Concept—From Medicine to Cultural Critique
Nostalgia and Neostalgia in the Post-socialist Context
Retrospective Mirages: Nostalgia as a Biographical Phenomenon
Everyday Socialism
Serenity and Security
Solidarity in the Micro-community: One’s Own, Not the Regime
Lost Values
Homo Nostalgicus without a Stigma
On the Normality of Post-communist Nostalgia
Facing the Challenges of Transition
Nostalgic Generation?
On the Abnormality of Post-communist Nostalgia
References
Chapter 7: Conclusion: Is There Hope for Memory?
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past Public Narratives and Personal Recollections Daniela Koleva

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK John Sutton Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14682

Daniela Koleva

Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past Public Narratives and Personal Recollections

Daniela Koleva History and Theory of Culture Sofia University Sofia, Bulgaria

ISSN 2634-6257     ISSN 2634-6265 (electronic) Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-031-04657-5    ISBN 978-3-031-04658-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit : Sellwell Hotels / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book became possible thanks to the extensive initiative of the Institute for the Study of the Recent Past (ISRP) in Sofia to set up an archive of oral and written testimonies “Bulgaria 1944–1989”. In the course of a few years until 2015, hundreds of biographical interviews were conducted with women and men from different localities and different occupations, whose active life coincided with the period in question. A wealth of written testimonies was collected as well. I am far from the ambition to cover this huge body of materials, even less – to exhaust it. I have approached it with my own questions, which are not the only ones possible. Luckily, it is available to future researchers as well. I am grateful to the ISPR team and to its head, professor Ivaylo Znepolski, for their full support over the years of work on this project. My interest in oral history and memory studies has developed for over two decades of work at the Department for History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University, a place with a blessed atmosphere of academic freedom, creativity and teamwork. My colleagues and students have inspired me all the way with their intellectual curiosity. The oral-history teams have worked enthusiastically and professionally. Vanya Elenkova has been a faithful workmate in field research. Alexander Kiossev’s project “Patterns of Anxiety”, where I took part, was of key importance for the conceptual framework of this book. Fieldwork during the last couple of years was part of the project “New Cultures of Festivity: Communities, Identities and Politics in twenty-first century”, led by Rayna Gavrilova. Both projects were supported by the Bulgarian Research Fund. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The broadening of the context and the comparative perspective on the coping with the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe became possible in the frames of a couple of international projects, including the COST action NEP4DISSENT. Borislav Skotchev was an indispensable conversation partner on the Belene case, and Georgi Dimitrov helped with a sociological perspective on nostalgia and moral support at the last stage of writing. Special thanks to Lilia Topouzova for her encouragement and invaluable advice on this publication, and to the two anonymous Palgrave Macmillan readers for their supportive reviews and constructive suggestions. I particularly appreciate the responsiveness, the trust and the patience of our interlocutors over the years. I am aware that going back to the past is not always easy, that reliving some moments of it can bring not only satisfaction but also pain. The generosity of communication and sharing is a special gift that I accept with deepest heartfelt gratitude.

Contents

1 Introduction: Navigating the Memory Archipelago  1 Part I Politics of Memory and Memory Cultures  27 2 The New ‘Grand Narrative’: Coping with the Past 29 3 Politics of Justice: Transitional Justice 51 4 Politics of Recognition 87 Part II Memory Narratives and Mnemonic Communities 135 5 ‘Thorns in the Spirit’: Traumatic Narratives137 6 ‘Sorrow, Almost Hope’: Nostalgic Narratives213 7 Conclusion: Is There Hope for Memory?277 Index287

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About the Author

Daniela Koleva  lived in communist Bulgaria till her early adulthood and has been coping with this past of hers ever since. She is professor of Oral history and Memory studies at the Department for History and Theory of Culture, Sofia University. Her research interests are in the fields of oral history and anthropology of socialism and post-socialism, biographical and cultural memory, politics of memory and heritage, gender, social constructivism. She has published a monograph on the ‘normal life course’ in communist Bulgaria and a number of book chapters and articles in peer-­ reviewed journals. Her interest in everyday life and life course under communism has resulted in a series of edited volumes, including Negotiating Normality: Everyday Lives in Socialist Institutions. She is co-editor of 20 Years after the Collapse of Communism: Expectations, Achievements and Disillusions of 1989; Ageing, Ritual and Social Change: Comparing the Secular and Religious in Eastern and Western Europe; From Literature to Cultural Literacy.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 5.1

Mnemonic map of post-communist Europe. Own elaboration based on Troebst (2005, 2014). Map source: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blank_map_Europe_with_ borders.png46 Memorial to the victims of communism, Prague. (Source: Author’s archive) 108 Names carved into the plinth of the building housing the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius (former Museum of Genocide Victims). (Source: Author’s archive) 110 A cupola of faces in Bunk’art, historical and art center in an anti-nuclear bunker in Tirana, Albania. (Source: Author’s archive)111 An improvized memorial to Christians and Muslims interned to the forced-labor camp on the Danubian island of Persin near Belene (see Chap. 5). (Source: Author’s archive, 2008) 113 Memorial service at the Memorial to the victims of communism in Sofia, 1 February 2020. (Source: Author’s archive) 115 The blank monument at the site of the forced-labor camp, Belene. (Source: Author’s archive) 118 House of Terror, Budapest. (Source: Author’s archive) 120 DDR museum, Berlin. Some of the ‘apartments’ in the ‘prefab buildings’ are drawers with items to be explored by the visitors. (Photo courtesy of Svetla Kazalarska) 122 The pontoon bridge leading to the island is present in all visual narratives. (Author’s archive) 153

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List of Figures

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Map of the Belene archipelago with the campsites on the main island. (Drawing by Krum Horozov, former internee. Reprinted with permission from ISRP, 2009) The camp in 1954. (Drawing by Krum Horozov, former internee. Reprinted with permission from ISRP, 2009) Commemoration at the campsite on the island, May 2018. (Author’s archive) A corner in one of the derelict buildings at the campsite has been turned into a chapel of sorts to imply that “the work of memory is not political but … spiritual”. (Author’s archive) The lobby of this spa-hotel, former vacation residence for high-level party nomenklatura, features in 2010 the portraits of Politburo members, award flags and plaques. (Author’s archive) Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin. Thematic merchandize. (Photo courtesy of Svetla Kazalarska)

167 169 200 203 222 226

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Navigating the Memory Archipelago

May 9th 2018, Sofia’s Red Army Memorial, minutes before the start of the Victory Day festivities. Soviet military hymns blasting from the loudspeakers. Two women sell red carnations. Another one is selling small paper flags—Bulgarian and Russian. Further down, a young man offers passers-by St. George’s ribbons, at no cost. Older folks are gathering in small groups, in anticipation of the Immortal Regiment.1 Some exchange greetings. I ascertain that they attend every single year. A gray-haired woman in a gray trenchcoat declares that she’ll keep coming as long as she lives, because her uncle, a partisan, was killed in 1944. A man supported by a cane elaborates: “It is how we were raised. Knowing how many thousands, how many millions sacrificed themselves for this day, you can’t possibly stay at home.” I am sure that he is sincere, although his words eco Russian ambassador’s speech of last year. Another explains that every year they do a ‘head count’: if anyone is missing, they no doubt have a compelling reason—either illness, or worse… Nearby, an elderly man sporting a cap delivers a fiery lecture: “We befriended those who pillaged, 1  An initiative to commemorate Victory Day, which began spontaneously in Russia in 2012, was then quickly appropriated by the authorities. It comprises a procession where the participants carry portraits of their forefathers, who fought in World War II. It has proliferated through the Russian diaspora, including in Bulgaria. Over the past few years, Bulgarians too have taken part in the processions, carrying portraits as well, though not always of war veterans, and not necessarily any familial relation to them. For detail see Koleva, 2021.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_1

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and continue to pillage from the Bulgarian people. Of all that we built, what’s left?! Where are the thousands of factories?!” His energetic gestures are a stark contrast to his raspy voice. Several people approvingly listen on. “Well yeah, back then there was willpower,” one of them pipes up. I sense a generational solidarity, which I don’t partake in. February 1st 2019, the Victims of Communism Memorial in Sofia. People stand uneasily on the pathway and on the wet grass surrounding it, nuzzled beneath their collars under the anemic winter sun. This location was not contrived to host crowded ceremonies. Public officials are lined up outside the chapel, the addresses having just concluded. The mass for the dead is about to begin. An older man is currently speaking—a survivor from the Belene forced-labor camp. Hunched over, weak, and with a frail voice, he can barely be heard. Some strain themselves respectfully to make out his words, while others fix their sight on the wall of names. They find their loved ones, lay down flowers and light a candle beneath the name. An older woman wearing a threadbare coat clutches her bag—not exactly a shopping tote, though not quite a purse either. The bag appears to be empty. It is wrinkled: evidently she doesn’t carry it often. Her other hand is wrapped around the stem of a white chrysanthemum, holding it like a pointer, sliding it along the rows, searching for a name. “It was right here” she mumbles, mystified. She stands up, helplessly tosses her arms open, brings them back together, and continues to stare once more. She props the chrysanthemum indecisively against the wall. Her hand has turned red from the cold. She takes several steps back, then returns, takes the chrysanthemum and lays it down by the stone cross in front of the wall. I become uneasy. It occurs to me that I should ask her for the name, and help her find it. I turn around, trying to locate her, but she is already gone. Two memorial sites, hopelessly far-removed from one another. Two islands, with an entire ocean between them. No bridge in sight. Tony Judt was spot-on when he diagnosed Eastern Europe with suffering from “too much memory,” and too many versions of the past, used as weapons against someone else’s past: “For Eastern Europeans the past is not just another country but a positive archipelago of vulnerable historical territories, to be preserved from attacks and distortions perpetrated by the occupants of a neighboring island of memory…” (Judt, 1996: 51). The 1989 ‘velvet’ revolutions of Eastern Europe were perhaps the only ones that did not deliver a respective utopia, or rather, whose utopia was retrospective. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the past, and the memory of it, is so important. But not just that. Memory, particularly the

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collective one, equips us with a distinctive mental map, providing us with a sense of who we are, how we got be this way, and what this all means— questions, to whose answers we apply the shorthand ‘identity’. Identity and memory are perpetually interdependent, and this correlation becomes particularly significant in periods of dynamic transformation, especially following the collapse of the all-encompassing communist doctrine.2 A factor of an entirely different nature is the post-optimism of the past decade or so, fraught with economic and geopolitical crises, the crisis of European values and the ‘Idea’ of Europe, the unfulfilled expectations of EU membership. Against this backdrop, discourses predicated on memory can be interpreted as an abandonment of the politics of change, a loss of direction, and a fencing off inside one’s own (ethnic, national, religious or political) community in search of authenticity and a bedrock. Invoking the past in such situations arms some participants in political debates with a kind of moral certainty otherwise difficult to attain in the climate of a democratic, pluralistic society. Thus, a turn towards the past becomes a manner of sidestepping political debate, or even “de-moralizing” it (Müller, 2010: 33). The situation in Bulgaria today may well look like a healthy democratization of memory, particularly in contrast to the rage-fueled confrontations of the 1990s. However, as I illustrated at the beginning with two vignettes from my fieldwork, it resembles, rather, a discursive archipelago wherein the islands are isolated from one another, with incomparable ethics and irreconcilable versions of the past, each of them engrossed in the “collective production of historical innocence” (Kansteiner, 2010: 3) by projecting upon others political and historical responsibility. When compared to the democratization of memory, where the dividing lines are acknowledged by those debating, with its fragmentation they become front lines, on either side of which “mnemonic warriors” are positioned, advancing disparate perspectives as to the significance and the aftermath of the communist experiment (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014). The subject of this book is the memory of the communist past: the ‘official’ memory, constructed by institutions; the public memory, molded by media, rituals, books and films, the urban environment, etc., as well as the everyday or ‘vernacular’ memory. The latter, tapped into by way of oral history, marks the beginning point of this investigation. I adopt the 2  It is no coincidence that Svetlana Alexievich (2017: 113) compared it to a religion, deeming it “Soviet paganism”.

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term ‘vernacular’ from historian and memorian Carol Gluck (2007) to mean informal memory, cultivated in the ‘shadowy publicity’: the memories of individuals, families and generational communities (Chap. 6) as well as local memory, present in  localized public life, usually in smaller population centers (Chap. 5). This memory is vernacular both in the sense of being everyday, spoken/communicative, and in the sense of being local, geographically or socially constrained. It encompasses both individual and collective day-to-day memory, thus directing the attention towards the interaction and interdependencies between the two, rather than towards their delineation. The question I seek to answer is how the communist past is remembered, and what are the circumstances upon which this memory is conditioned. How is communism/socialism construed as public recollection? Do these processes differ in the distinct post-communist countries? Do they influence one-another? Who is reminiscing, and what effect does this remembering have on the links between individuals and groups? What is the relationship between official and vernacular memory? Which cultural models and forms are involved in the formation and perpetuation of reflections about the past? How are individual memories influenced by the public vocabularies, imagery and tropes? Does a transformation of public memory impact biographical recollection? How do the communication strategies of any given group lead to the formation and articulation of shared memories? These questions approach memory as a cultural practice, and are aimed at deciphering the social aspects of the individual act of remembering and at understanding the correlation between personal/biographical and public/cultural memory. To put it in other words: understanding the relationship between discreet, episodic reminiscences, and memory as a shared, coherent narrative about the past. This is the reason why, in the chapters to follow, I shall deliberate first upon the public memory of communism, conditioned upon transitional justice and made manifest in memorials, celebrations, etc., and then upon the personal recollections of Bulgarian women and men whose lives overlapped, for the most part, with the period of communist regime. Despite belonging to a different generation, I likewise have my own memories from this period and from its denouement, which I piece together in the story of myself, and of the times. The irregularities of these conglomerations are part of the motivation prompting my involvement with memory.

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What Do we Talk about when we Talk about Memory? In this section, I shall provide an overview of the conceptual tools with which I will work. It will be necessary to repeat some well-known theses that are key to my approach. I see memory as a process of meaning making, whereby the past is reconstructed, interpreted and presented from specific viewpoints related to the present. It is this relation, from which the past extracts its significance. As Maurice Halbwachs has insisted, the past is not “stored” in memory but rather, it is reconstructed from the point of view of the present. This is a process in which “society obliges people” (Halbwachs, 1952: 86) to participate, in order to maintain social continuity. Halbwachs introduces the concept of collective memory to support the thesis that human memory only works in the context of a group (“affective community”). It is the shared images and meanings that generate the common perspective in efforts to remember the past: when we recollect events from our past, we reflect on them, that is to say, “link in the same system of ideas our opinions and those of our entourage” (Halbwachs, 1952: 107). Furthermore, the reconstruction of past events is made possible thanks to shared data and concepts (Halbwachs, 1950: 12–13). Thus, the “social frames” of memory do not only hold individual recollections together, they also set forth the very terms in which to think of one’s own past: personal memory works with “instruments such as the words and the ideas, which the individual has not invented but has borrowed from his milieu” (Halbwachs, 1950: 36). The concept of collective memory is a central one in this book, in spite of its limited use below. Its importance is defined by the purpose of singling out the ‘collective’ aspect of biographical memory, on the one hand, and the incorporation of personal stories in the modeling of ‘collective’ and public memory, on the other. I also adopt Halbwachs’ constructivist perspective because I find it promising with regard to the questions posed above. Indeed, human beings are not mnemonic castaways. Those around us are witnesses whose recollections affirm or correct what we remember. Furthermore, remembering is not merely a spontaneous act—it is meditated through the broader social, cultural and political settings; regulated by institutions and rules, which determine what is worthy of being remembered, and what better be forgotten. Although it is the individual that is doing the remembering, personal narratives are conditioned upon the membership in specific “affective” or mnemonic communities (Zerubavel,

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1997: 17): familial, communal, local, ethnic, national, religious. Insofar as memory is carried by various social groups, it is always plural. This plurality is key to the understanding of the memory of communism, where varied social actors face off, interested in strengthening and growing their political, cultural, symbolic, or other capital. Furthermore, the memory of any such community is formed on the basis of what has been formalized by the institutions of memory (archives, museums, commemorative calendars), substantiated by monuments and memorials, inscribed into the urban space or in the landscape, codified in social and legal norms. To further complicate the picture, the “social frames” of memory are not immutable. It can be expected that mnemonic practices, such as commemorations, will lead to changes in the way individuals and groups remember and to the formation of dynamic mnemonic communities that remember otherwise. The historicity of remembering prompts attention to Pierre Nora’s approach to the past not as a chronologically ordered narrative but as clusters of symbols and concepts, which articulate national identity (Nora, 1984, 1986, 1992). In spite of substantial criticism,3 the key concept of lieu de mémoire has proven to be a “success-concept” (Berger & Seiffert, 2014), as evidenced by the range of comparable projects from the 1990s onward.4 Nora’s central concept and his non-linear approach are fully relevant for this study as well. The use of the concept of a memory site in this book will be relatively loose and fall closer to the literal meaning, which can be found in the first volumes of Les lieux de mémoire. Under this definition, one can talk about GULag as a transnational memory site and about the Belene concentration camp or the 9 September 1944 as Bulgarian memory sites. It is important here to differentiate between a common site of memory and a site of common memory. Thus, 9 September is a common site of memory in Bulgaria, but with drastically disparate meaning for various mnemonic communities. In this sense, it is a ‘no man’s land’—an arena of symbolic battles. Beyond the literality of the “sites”, Nora’s theory directs the attention towards the objectivation of memory and the cultural mediators of its articulation: 3  See Schmidt, 2004: 25–27 for a brief overview. In their three-volume work on German memory sites François and Schulze (2001) discuss the specificities of the German context in a critical reappraisal of Nora’s project. 4  For a brief overview see Erll, 2011: 28–29; for more details on some national projects see Hebel, 2008 and Isnenghi, 2008. On the transnational dynamics see Le Rider, 2008, and Memory Studies. Special Issue: Cultural Memory Studies after the Transnational Turn, 11(3). For an ambitious attempt at cataloguing the European memory sites see den Boer et al., 2012.

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symbols, rituals, codes, artefacts; narratives, rhetorics and topographies— as well as towards their dynamics and changing flow over the course of time. Some of these mediators—primarily the narratives—are in the focus of this book. The question of the cultural mediation of memory directs to the paradigm of cultural memory, as developed by Jan and Aleida Assmann.5 It builds on the differentiation between the two modi of collective memory— communicative and cultural (Assmann, 2011). Communicative memory comprises the recollections of the recent past shared among peers and contemporaries. Cultural memory refers to historical, even mythical, time. It operates with sign systems (rituals, myths, symbols) and it is “more a matter of construction than of natural growth” (Assmann, 2011: 37). Both forms of memory are part of the “connective structure” linking the individuals to the semantic world of their culture through narratives and norms. The theory of cultural memory resolves the tension in Halbwachs’ concept that troubles many of his followers: between the immediate social conditions of personal memory and, more broadly, continuity and the longue durée. Moreover, personal memory interacts not only with the memories of others but with objectified, externalised and relatively stable ‘things’ that bind the individual to the past. Shared memories are, to a large extent, the result of mediation, textualization and communication, rather than immediate experience. This model raises some questions pertinent to the study of the memory of communism. How does communicative memory morph into cultural, i.e. mediated memory? What is the dynamics of cultural memory itself: how do some of its elements advance from the periphery to the center, from a latent to a manifest state? Building on the interplay of remembering and forgetting, Aleida Assmann differentiates between “canon”, i.e. operational, active cultural memory and “archive”, i.e. storing, passive memory (Assmann, 2006: 54–58; 2009). The latter is comprised of traces of the past, which have no active carrier-groups, are not integrated into the present, and are in this sense “forgotten”, but they can be re-actualised as, for example, the memories of communist repressions silenced before the end of the regime were (see Chap. 5). In this context, Assmann is interested in the mediation of memory: “symbolic media”, i.e. mediators, carriers, topoi of cultural memory, which enable its (re)actualisation. She offers forth an explanatory model for the transformation of immediate 5

 On the mediation of memory see also Erll & Nünning, 2004, 2008; Erll & Rigney, 2009.

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experiences into representations by means of symbolic coding, affixation into material signs, their circulation and storage, as well as the reverse process—of their interpretation and decoding, i.e. transforming the archive into canon (Assmann, 2006: 205–212). This theoretical model is applicable to the transformations of memory observed after the fall of the communist regimes, when certain memories are reclaimed from the “archive” and incorporated into the mnemonic “canon”. In a broader sense, the theory of cultural memory is important for this study with the dynamic inflection that it induces—casting the spotlight on the social turnover of meanings, which are not fixed once and for all but always happen anew. Because my study is based, in substantial part, on oral history—that is, it taps into communicative memory—the interplay of the two modi of memory looks promising not only as theoretical basis but also with some of the challenges and unresolved issues it leaves, especially in regard to communicative memory. Social psychologist Harald Welzer, discussing the mediation of the social and biographical aspects of communicative memory, has insisted on the dependence of biographical memory on the context, its orientation towards the audience and situation, and on its bricolage nature (Welzer, 2008: 213–220). It does not ‘exist’ in permanent unity, but is synthesized within each communicative situation. Welzer advances a compelling hypothesis about the ‘material’ from which life stories have been woven, and the sources (media and popular culture) from which it has been acquired. He uncovers striking parallels between snippets of his respondents’ stories, and scenes from popular historical movies (Welzer, 2008: 182–183; 189–206).6 Going back to Assmanns’ theorisations, upon which Welzer builds, it can be concluded that cultural memory stabilizes one of many fluid versions of communicative memory. Its choice, or its construction, is a matter of politics of memory, understood as a kind of struggle for recognition, whereby yet another possibility for the progression of communicative memory to the public sphere emerges.7 The proclamation of certain individuals’ or groups’ narratives of the past as legitimate confers a different status to their recollections—these are no longer personal reminiscences but testimonies, largely independent of the transience of the witnesses themselves. In democratic societies, the criteria of legitimacy are defined 6  For additional observations on the literary sources on which Russian WWII veterans draw, see Merridale, 2010. 7  See Closa, 2010; on the ‘paradigm’ of mnemopoliticts see Verovšek, 2016.

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by values such as human rights, rule of law, justice and responsibility. In accordance with these, it is mainly the politics of recognition of the victims which are morally legitimate, as a gesture of granting them justice, and reaffirming democratic values. (In this respect, as I shall try to demonstrate in Chap. 2, European institutions have increasingly morphed into an arena for soliciting recognition for the past suffering of entire nations.) On the other hand, control over memory is, beyond doubt, a form of power. Therefore, politics of memory often boil down to uses of memory and forgetting for political purposes, such as national/ist mobilization. In such cases, history is twisted into a kind of hypermemory whose mobilizing power relies on the aggravation of emotions—an important issue, which falls outside the scope of this study. Mnemopolitics are bound together with memory cultures which contribute to their genesis and development. The term ‘memory cultures’ (Erinnerungskulturen) signals the plurality of relations to the past. It is no wonder that interest in memory cultures has grown since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unfulfilled expectations of a consolidated European memory. Expounding on the situation in Germany, Aleida Assmann explicitly links the notion of memory cultures with the “ethical turn” in the relating to the past, and with the critical reappraisal of sensitive episodes in it (Assmann, 2016: 32–33). She refers not only to the memory policies ‘from above’, but to mnemonic initiatives ‘from below’: “the middle and the lower levels of the pyramid—a multitude of unofficial, informal civil-society activities and initiatives, which are practised locally and bottom up in German cities and regions … autonomously, voluntarily and without much media publicity” (Assmann, 2016: 108). It may be inferred that the concept of memory cultures captures the phenomenology of memory, while that of the politics of memory addresses construction and agency. ‘Memory cultures’ connotes multiplicity, while ‘memory politics’—artificiality and deliberateness. From another perspective, the former refers to representations and the latter—to rhetorics. These differentiations are, of course, solely analytical and bounded by the objectives of the pursuant argument. As I hope to demonstrate in Chap. 2, European memory cultures are, to a large extent, the result of (or reaction to) a certain type of mnemopolitics—“the politics of regret” (Olick 2007), which adhere to the German model of coping with the Nazi past and the Holocaust. After the accession of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries to the EU, however, the European mnemopolitical register has included the so-called “politics of truth”:

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unearthing the hitherto unknown crimes of the communist regimes and seeking recognition for their victims. To summarize: in the postcommunist settings, a substantive mnemonic tapestry of politics, practices and institutions is observed. Its ubiquity, however, does not indicate that memory is homogenous. On the contrary: we find an ever-growing fragmentation, and an elevated significance for communal memory as a legitimizing and stabilizing factor. These circumstances become a condition for the politicization of memory. By politicization, I mean the increased importance of memory to identity politics, and social empowerment via a restitution of the past (i.e. achieving a sense of a moral continuity of sorts). Thus, the duty to remember appears no-less-­ important than remembrance itself; the ethical aspect of memory might even take priority over the cognitive one. The juxtaposition of official and vernacular memory of communism has the aim of understanding how claims about truth and meaning are formulated and justified, not to assess their veracity. The question is not if, and to what extent, memory can be trusted as a record of the past, how accurate or inaccurate this record is, how damaged or well-maintained. It is more a matter of the construction of the past, and the narrative surrounding it.

How to Look into Memory: Narrative as Lens My own coming to memory studies has taken place via oral history, which is actually more about memory than about history. This is perhaps where the awareness of the centrality of narrative arises. But there are a number of other, more substantial arguments linking narrative with memory and with the human condition in general. Hannah Arendt, for example, has explained the key role of narrative with the need to “solidify” actions into words and things, and with the importance of others, as witnesses who can affirm the reality of our experience. More than that: “That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story without beginning and end” (Arendt, 1998: 184). From the point of view of oral history and biographical research, the knot between memory and narrative is obvious, immediate and literal. Here I will argue, in the first place, for a broader understanding of narrative as cultural practice for the production of shared meanings. The link between this cultural practice and memory as a shared attitude to the past is implied as a matter of course, but seldom thematised.

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The question of narrative came to the fore with the so-called narrative turn in the humanities, starting perhaps with the awareness of the rhetorical aspects of historiography. Hayden White (1973, 1978, 1987) discussed historiographical texts as “literary artefacts,” converting the chronicle into a narrative, something that has an explanatory power in and of itself. The “emplotment” of the historical narrative, the way facts are arranged, can import different meanings and enable different interpretations.8 While for White, the narrative form was imported into an otherwise chaotic and formless flow of history, Paul Ricœur (1984, 1985, 1988) revealed the inherent connection between temporality and narrative in history and literature. His thesis, relevant to this study, is that narrative transforms temporal order into logical and conceptual unity. This is why narrative is the only apposite framework for understanding human experience. Between the telling of a story, and the temporality of experience, “there exists a corellation that is not merely accidental but that presents a transcultural form of necessity. To put it another way, time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode” (Ricœur, 1984: 52, emphasis in the original). Thus, narrative turns out to be a mediator between individual lives and the ‘big history’, between individual and society. In a later work problematizing memory, Ricœur argues for the narrativization of the explanatory modes of knowledge of the past: narrative is a way of understanding that does not compete with causality, nor does it “simply turn naïvely toward things that happened”; it “does not add something coming from the outside to the documentary and explanatory phases, but rather accompanies and supports them” (Ricœur, 2004: 237–238). In a dialogue with Ricœur’s ideas, David Carr (1986) discusses narrativity in the context of daily experience. Seen in this perspective, narrative implies not just a sequence of events, but also a narrator and an audience. This adds yet another dimension to the narrative structure of human experience—that it is intersubjective. For Carr, the existence of any human community is dependent on the existence of a shared experience and of a narrative about it, formulated by (some of) its members (Carr, 1986: 163). This narrative can be shared but there can also be competing versions of it, leading to deep cleavages within the community. Thus Carr sees in the narrative structure both a unity of experience and narration, 8  This theory was confronted with the challenges of its own epistemological and ethical ramifications in the well-known debate on the limits of the representation of the Holocaust (Friedlander, 1992).

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and a unity of the individual and the social/historical—a thesis which is particularly pertinent for my project in that it offers a ‘bridge’ between personal and collective/cultural memory. In a similar vein, Alasdair Macintyre sees narrative in the synthetic unity of its existential and hermeneutic aspects: “It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others.” (MacIntyre, 2007: 212). As homo narrans, “story-telling animal[s]”, we learn our social roles by way of the plots of the stories heard and told: “It is through hearing stories about wicked step-mothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance … that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they were born and what the ways of the world are.” (MacIntyre, 2007: 216). That is, it is via “the stock of stories” of a society (including our own) that we gain an understanding of it. This cursory review hopefully illustrates the point of convergence for the different theoretical positions, and the common direction of different arguments: with the ‘narrative turn’ in the social sciences and the humanities, the narrative is seen not just as a form through which to present some kind of content, but as a fundamental mode of constructing and ordering human reality. We organize our biographical experience through narratives, linking some occurrences with others, and placing them in a meaningful context. But the very articulation of a narrative creates and sustains a social world. A collective narrative re-creates the story of an individual by rationalising the experience of the social category to which the individual belongs, e.g. “repressed persons”, “dissidents”, “nomenclatura”. The narrative of/about the social category makes it possible for those assigned to it to identify with it and, retrospectively, to relate their lives to standard sociocultural scenarios. Thus, emotionally uniting persons with similar experiences, the collective narrative can transcend their isolation and generate a “consciousness of kind” (Richardson, 1990: 128–129), a shared consciousness, which characterises a community rather than a mere category of people. This is what obviously happened in the 1990s to the survivors of the communist forced-labor camps, as I attempt to demonstrate below. A narrative with its own semantic universe (genre, plot, chronotopos, protagonists) offers a lens permitting the audience to ‘see’ something else, e.g. memory, identity, etc. Drawing on both Halbwachs and Mikhail

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Bakhtin, James Wertsch (2002, 2008) reveals yet another link between memory and narrative: he sees collective remembering as a process wherein social actors apply the “cultural tools” on hand—the most important of these being narrative. Each individual story conveys biographical experience, mediating it not only through language but also through a repertoire of plots, which is a component of cultural memory, or of a specific culture of memory. This repertoire is constantly updated and refashioned, which explains why sometimes people who have lived through a situation have a relatively poor story to tell about it—they do not yet have the cultural tools needed to mnemonically process it.9 That is to say, experiences and emotions gain substance (are solidified, according to Arendt) by means of words and narratives. But words are not directly defined by what has been lived and felt, and in this sense they are not innocent. In addition to specific silenced stories (about the mass murder in Katyn, for example) Wertsch uncovers “schematic narrative templates”, which mold collective memory and ensure a certain continuity even in times of radical change.10 These are the deeper structures around which specific stories are generated. Personal reminiscences are such stories; those among them that do not fit into the meaning structure of a narrative template are distorted or ignored. Apart from relating to reality (referential function), narratives also relate to each other (dialogic function). This functional dualism corresponds to the functional dualism of memory: its referentiality, that is, on the one hand, the ‘truth’ of the reminiscences, and on the other—their confrontation, competition, and the negotiation of a usable past (Wertsch, 9  During WWI André Gide noticed that journalists who had never been on the front lines coined the clichés, which were subsequently used by the soldiers to describe their own experiences and feelings. 10  For instance, the main schematic narrative template in Russia is about the “triumph-­ above-­foreign-powers” and its structure is: peaceful existence of the Russian people –> unprovoked assault by a foreign power –> crisis and suffering –> victory over the foreign power. While this scheme is typical for other countires too, and it has its origin in history, its function as a narrative template is due to the fact that it has marginalised other possible narratives, such as the one about the empire, which is no less applicable, also for the Soviet period (Wertsch, 2002: 93–97; see also Wertsch, 2008: 142–143). While in Soviet textbooks the former template was applied to the civil war, which was thus severed from the 1917-­revolution, post-Soviet textbooks offer a tragic counter-narrative seeing the civil war as a direct consequence of the revolution (Wertsch, 2002: 101–105). WWII and the Great Patriotic War are severed in much the same way. The narrative template of the “triumph-­ above-­foreign-powers” is of course applicable only to the latter (Wertsch, 2002: 106–114).

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2002: 62). What is unusual in post-communist settings is the visibility of contestation and dialogue. While in other circumstances dialogicality is hidden (Bakhtin) and the narrative comes across as a chronicle where the events become manifest by themselves, without the presence of a narrator, now the narrator’s position is visible, and can be relativised and contested. Indeed, the narratives are often incommensurable with each other—something that is clearly visible in post-communist public arenas. Even when they are based on the same set of facts, they can differ drastically in the interpretation of these facts. The other unusual circumstance is the expectation of the predominance of referentiality: that the hitherto suppressed truth will be revealed; while in reality the dialogical function, i.e. the mutual contestation of divergent versions of the past, is no less important. Wertsch’s ideas of narrative as a cultural tool for the mnemonic processing of the past, as well as of the dualism of memory and the competition between different versions, are directly applicable to the situation of which I am trying to make sense. In his work however, these ideas are developed in relation to public/collective narratives (the ‘grand’ narratives of memory), while I am also interested in the role of narrative in autobiographical memory (the ‘little’ narratives11 of life stories). Aleida Assmann has noted that individual memory is fragmentary and what “flashes” as a reminiscence usually are separate unrelated moments without a ‘before’ or ‘after’. They acquire a form and a structure, which unites and stabilises them, only through narratives (Assmann, 2006: 25). Jens Brockmeier seems to concur with this hypothesis when he contends that we use narratives whenever we try to make sense of our experience (Brockmeier, 2015: 107). The narrated experience is an interpreted experience. Each subsequent interpretation can add new meaning and thus transform the narrative. Based on these considerations, Brockmeier formulates his “strong narrative thesis”: that “the intricacies of autobiographical meaning-making are not just represented or expressed by narrative, they only come into being through and in narrative” (Brockmeier, 2015: 120). We do not need to stick to the strong narrative thesis in order to realize that the templates and the vocabularies of autobiographical narratives—even when the topics are very personal and the stories are idiosyncratic—comply with cultural standards of 11  I am aware of Lyotard’s use of the notion of little (or regional) narrative and its potential applicability to the situation of fragmented memory cultures I am dealing with. My use of the term is limited to the context of oral history and biographical research on which a substantial part of this book is based.

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credibility and authenticity, and fit into cultural schemes that make our experience understandable to others. It is however possible to go down this path in the opposite direction as well: from the autobiographical texts (written and oral) to the social fabric and the life worlds in which they were created. This is the direction of oral history. Insofar as memory is not—and could hardly be—a space for explanation, proof and argumentation, the struggles on its terrain are waged through the persuasiveness of the narratives: how convincing they are in themselves (i.e. coherent and plausible), and for whom they are convincing (i.e. consensual). Thus persuasiveness, which is a matter of rhetoric, supports the referentiality of the narrative, its correspondence to a past reality. In Ricœur’s words, memory offers “narrative understanding” (Ricœur, 1984: 93), instead of historical explanation. Here, as in literature, the principle of plausibility and narrative ‘necessity’ seems to apply, even though the authority of a witness rests on their claim to the truth. The ‘I-was-there-and-I-saw-it-happen’ stance implies particularity: the witness can witness an event or part of it, at a specific point in time and space, from a limited perspective. But this particularity acquires testimonial status, and is inscribed in memory due to the fact that it references a more general narrative where the facets of the specific witnessing are ‘naturally’ placed; and those which are not explicitly given are implied, hinted at, suggested by the generic/exemplary narrative. The Memory Archipelago consists of ‘islands’ of narrative necessity whose inhabitants cannot—or do not wish to—see a version different from their own. The self-evidence of each version is achieved through narrative banalization: the repetition of a story (not necessarily in completely identical versions) to the point that it becomes a social convention routinely reproduced. In another respect, the narratives underlying distinct memory cultures can be understood analogously to the paradigms in Thomas Kuhn’s definition: they are shared within certain communities, which accept them as true. Different communities have different narrratives and versions of the past. Although they are not equally convincing per se, the importance of the consensus upon which mnemonic communities are formed around their respective ‘paradigms’ cannot be underestimated. In present-day Bulgaria, for example, for one such community what happened on 9 September 1944 was an uprising aided by the Soviet Army, as part of the anti-fascist struggle in Europe during World War II. It led to the establishment of a socialist system that made the rapid modernisation of the country possible. For another mnemonic community however, according

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to its no-less convincing narrative, 9 September 1944 was the day of a coup d’etat instigated by an occupying foreign army. The regime established after this coup deprived Bulgaria of its intellectual, artistic and political elites and diverted it away from the normal development path which it had taken. Seeing memory in terms of mnemonic paradigms, or memory cultures, formed around alternative narratives about the past makes it possible to inquire about the actors. Granted that narratives are not free-floating in the public space, it would be appropriate to ask ‘who’ is telling them and ‘whence’. A narrative not only sets a certain semantic perspective; it is also linked with social positions (class, ethnic, generational), with present-day interests and even with political programmes. Following the intersubjective approach in sociology of memory (Misztal, 2003), which concerns itself with the social organization and the mediation of memory, it is important to understand who remembers what version of the past and why. To summarize: although memory has a multidimensional relation to the past comprising emotional, moral and practical aspects, it is conceptualized mainly in cognitive terms, as knowledge about the past. Hence the question about ‘the truth of memory’. Each and every narrative of the past legitimizes itself based on the referentiality principle, that is to say, on the extent to which it corresponds to the past reality. However, as was evidenced, although they insist on their referentiality, narratives persuade in a different way—through genuineness, intelligibility, plausibility, acceptability, sharing. Therefore, the ‘truth of memory’ is more rhetorical than referential. It is based on coherence (the internal logic of the narrative and its meaning) and consensus (the acceptance of a certain version by a mnemonic community). Therefore, in the following chapters, I will not evaluate the narratives of the communist past from the perspective of their referentiality, but will focus on their meaning-making potential and the mnemonic communities formed around them. In other words, I will not ask which of the existing narratives is (more) true—an otherwise completely legitimate question—but how these narratives are constructed and maintained, what makes them convincing, and for whom.

Grand Narratives and Life Stories Assuming that personal memories and memory cultures form a dynamic relationship, this study aims to reveal how the transitions and reciprocal influences between them take place. The working hypothesis is that the

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linkages between biographical memory and the various forms of collective memory are made possible through narratives: at the communicative level (sharing, negotiating and maintaining a common version within a family, local, generational or other community); at the symbolic level (through memory sites and other forms of cultural memory); at the politics level (recognition, assertion of identity and interests that shape different memory cultures). All of this is only possible because life experiences are shared and made sense of through narrative forms and genres forged in a certain cultural context. In support of this thesis, sociologist Gabriele Rosenthal (1991: 36) states that whatever has already been gestalted, i.e. spatially and/or meaningfully arranged, is much better remembered, and becomes tellable. On the other hand, the same author concludes that the collective thematisation of historical events is dependent not only on their tellability, but also on both the biographical relevance and the social function of these narratives. Sometimes, personal stories, such as Primo Levi’s memories of Auschwitz, become exemplary and form the basis of widely accepted representations of the past. Memory captures both personally experienced and socially constructed aspects of one’s attitude toward the past. It cannot be claimed that the former are ‘authentic’ in contrast to the latter, but rather that points of commonality can be discovered between the ‘grand’ narratives, which are foundational for certain memory cultures, and the ‘little’ narratives of biographical and communicative memory. This perspective was informed by my own pursuits in oral history from mid-1990s onwards. Oral history is a permutation of the so-called ‘history from below’ not merely because of its subject matter, but also due to its mission of searching for alternative viewpoints, fully conscious that every account is contingent upon its social purpose (Thompson & Bornat, 2017: 1–3). It is precisely because of the openness of its social purpose that oral history makes it possible to address broader audiences. Not only researchers, but society as well recognizes that the history of the recent past is still (but not for much longer) living history, that this past continues to exist within the memories of our contemporaries, the better part of whose lives transpired during the period of communist rule. Their testimonies are irreplaceable not only because they expose ‘what it was,’ but also because they provide a sense of ‘what it means to have lived through it’: what it entails, for example, to have been interned in a forced-labor camp, or to have been a shock-worker in a communist-labor unit. Placing the focus on the accounts of ‘common people’ represents a reshuffle of the central and the marginal in the pursuit of local and individual, rather than

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official/institutional interpretations. This subversion of the hierarchy is a gesture of solidarity, a political (in a broader sense) position. This stance makes oral history particularly appealing for the study of the recent past in post-communist countries. In the first few years following the collapse of the regimes, the accounts of eyewitnesses were frequently seen as one of the sources for the rewriting and rethinking of the history of communism. On the other hand, oral history’s stake in the everyday—although criticized as potentially normalizing—can constructively limit political reductionism: day-to-day practices (work, consumption, familial relations) are not political actions, but they are crucial to the way in which people construe and debate notions of the past (Confino, 1997: 1395). Now, some 30  years following the initial ‘rescue excavations’ into the memory of communism—with the hope (or illusion) that this could have been an explicitly political act, resurrecting the muffled voices from the past—the necessity sets in to evaluate and interpret what has been gathered. The projects of the Institute for the Study of the Recent Past and the Department of History and Theory of Culture at Sofia University, upon which this book is founded, relied on the biographical approach, because it provided the best opportunities for the active participation of the conversation partners—men and women from several populated places, born in the 1920s and the 1930s, with differing professional and life trajectories. They were asked to relay their lives with the full freedom to structure their account as they saw fit, and to place the accents where they thought they belonged. After that they were invited to elaborate on the broader social and political context. The compilation of interviews in the same population center provided the opportunity to uncover microcommunities, to pinpoint topics of debate or accord, to track how the individual stories interweave, how they uphold or contradict one another, as well as how these multifarious representations of the past become shaped by the changing local conditions (Chap. 5). In their entirety, the recorded interviews depict not just a series of individual memories, but to an extent they express the shared tendencies within the respective local communities, as well as the dissonant voices within them. Because of the narrow age range and the shared experiences between the participants, their memories provide considerable insight, as well, into the generational memory of the ‘builders of socialism’ (Chap. 6), the people whose adolescence and youth overlapped with the initial period of the regime, hence why I have labeled them the ‘first socialist generation,’ in response, to some extent, to the title of the renowned book on “the last Soviet generation” (Yurchak,

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2006). The case studies in Part Two—of a local and a generational community—will illuminate the questions posed above about the formation and preservation of vernacular memory. At the same time, it will hopefully become clear how and to what extent the politics of memory, outlined in Part One, have had an effect on it. One final note about the research methodology, which to an extent imparts a certain opaqueness of the ‘evidence’. In essence, the interview is an active text, in which meanings are created (and not merely shared). Moreover, upon their creation they are improvised and performed. As Norman Denzin (2001: 26) asserted, we inhabit a dramaturgical culture, in which the boundaries between the everyday and theatrical performances are sometimes blurred. Viewed from this perspective, an interview is the selection and reordering of significant fragments, which creates a microcosm via its situated meaningfulness. In stories/conversations, a past event gains a meaning, which may not have been present in the context of its occurrence. For this reason, every retrospective account is to a lesser or greater extent revisionist. The dialogical function of memory, visible in the aims of the communicative act—convincing peers, expressing and defending one’s own stance, disputing the positions of others—often has a priority over its referential function, i.e. the commitment to recreating with absolute precision an episode from the past. The ‘awakening’ of memory is something more than collecting information about the past, confined within the memories of the interlocutors. This book’s approach to them is culturalist, inasmuch as it inquires after the forms of mediation of memory, and social-anthropological, as far as the interest in memory’s potential to create communities and its social impact is concerned. The latter predisposes the focus on the traumatic and nostalgic narrative of communism in Part Two. They form the core of the two distinct memory cultures evoked in the field vignettes at the beginning. In the following chapters I shall first inquire into the centrally formulated policies of memory (including their normative articulation) and then I shall zoom out on broader public discussions revealing the emergence of memory cultures. In Part One, a look ‘from above’ is taken—I trace the institutional and political dimensions of coping with the communist past. First, I outline the European context: the politics of memory and the transnational networks, associations and discourses connected to them; the efforts towards constructing a shared memory and the mnemonopolitical regionalization of contemporary Europe. Next, I shift the scale and discuss the coping with the communist past on a national level, starting

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with transitional justice, continuing through the archival revolution and concluding with the memorialization and formation of cultures of memory. The approach in this instance is comparative and transnational: the Bulgarian case is in focus, but it is interpreted against the background of parallel processes in the remaining CEE countries. Thus, I map out the politics of memory in the broadest sense: from transitional justice to the institutions of memory (archives, museums, historical commissions and institutes of memory). In Part Two, I will transition from memory, i.e. accounts of the communist past as political and cultural products, towards memories, that is, accounts of individual lives during this period. I reverse the perspective and look ‘from below’. This mnemonic space seems to be organized along two axes, constituted by alternative ‘grand narratives’ and forming distinct memory cultures. One of them is mostly apologetic and often nostalgic, while the other is based on the counter-memory, which could gain publicity only after the end of the regime; it is often traumatic.12 I concentrate on personal reminiscences and vernacular memory to examine traumatic and nostalgic accounts as ideological metanarratives, towards which our interlocutors steer their own lives in their retrospective accounts. My hypothesis is that the two metanarratives operate as templates, symbolic instruments, which integrate in their elementary schematics biographical content, and bolster the coherence of the life stories. I shall attempt to demonstrate how a biographical account is intersubjectively spawned not only in the declared sense of communication over the course of a biographical interview, but also in the broader sense of social interactions (Gardner, 2001: 196–197), generating around it a mnemonic community: in one instance local (Chap. 5) and in the other—generational (Chap. 6). Thus, one’s life story not only testifies to what happened and to the experiences of the narrators, but at the same time positions and integrates them into a culture of memory. * * * Before moving forward, I must clear up an evident terminological conundrum, namely the use of the two terms—communism and socialism— throughout the book. Their use to refer to the same reality, that in the 12  For the past few years, a third memory culture seems to emerge, based on an ironic emplottment of thе communist past. I will touch upon it in Chap. 6, insofar as it can be interpreted as a generational inversion/parodying of the nostalgic narrative.

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‘Eastern bloc’, is not uncommon.13 Each term is rooted in a certain context. ‘Communism’ relates to the so-called totalitarian paradigm outlined by Hannah Arendt and developed during the Cold War. From the 1970s onwards, the concept of totalitarianism was gradually abandoned by Western historians and social scientists. At the same time however, East-­ European dissidents started using it to refer to the regimes in their own countries (Brier, 2011), and more specifically to the leading role of the communist party, discrimination based on religious and political belief, etc. Moreover, after 1968 their characterization of communist regimes as totalitarian served as an implicit criticism of the reformist illusions that democratization processes could originate from within the communist parties. This seems to have been more of an activist approach, lending legitimacy to dissent, rather than a theoretical argument. In the 1990s, the concept of totalitarianism gained popularity in post-communist countries, both in research and institutional contexts, as well as among the general public.14 The latter is obviously indicative of a value orientation and a political choice. It should be noted that the term ‘totalitarianism’ is used in official documents of European institutions, where it refers to all totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century in Europe (see Chap. 2). The term ‘socialism’ relates to the so-called revisionist paradigm established by the second generation of sovietologists who entered the field in the early 1970s. Unlike their predecessors, who were mainly political scientists, many of them were trained in social history and tended to apply microhistorical and anthropological approaches, while shifting their focus from political to social phenomena. Their research interests included the fluidity of the cultural production of knowledge, the contextual nature of social conventions, the implicit power relations and the agency of the subjects in both the reproduction and the contestation of these relations— that is, not the regime itself but the consequences of its policies.15 These scholars have tended to use the ‘native’ term coined by the regime in the Soviet Union, and adopted in the other ‘socialist countries’, often with a modifier—“state socialism”, “actually existing socialism”, etc. 13  The terminological disparity in the collective volume edited by Todorova and Gille (2010) is a case in point. Unfortunately the editors have not found it necessary to address this inconsistency. 14  See e.g. Znepolski, 2010; for Russia see Fitzpatrick, 2007. 15  For a brief but informative overview of Western historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union see Fitzpatrick, 2000.

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Each of the two paradigms has been criticised: for ‘totalization’ or for ‘normalization’; for privileging certain aspects at the expense of others; for glossing over the regimes’ historical dynamics or, on the contrary—for glossing over their nature while focusing on historical change, etc. The disciplinary conditionality of terminological choices is evident: while ‘communism’ and the ‘totalitarian paradigm’ are more influential in political philosophy and political science, social historians and anthropologists tend to prefer ‘socialism’ regardless of whether they work in the ‘revisionist paradigm’ or they try to modify it in the direction of the so-called post-­ revisionism. An all too frequent argument for this preference is the cultural-anthropological rule of using ‘native’ concepts. This is not a viable solution however, because the ‘native’ concept of ‘socialism’ was also coined in the Cold-War context, and was imposed by the regimes, rather than invented by the ‘native people’. Finally, as Thomas Lindenberger (2014: 35) points out, the two paradigms (and the respective concepts) are pertinent to different research questions: while the former provides a starting point for inquiry into the nature and the intentions of the communist regimes, the latter helps to capture the dynamics and transformations that have ensured their decades-long continuity. Additionally, each of the two terms is, to some extent, contingent upon national academic traditions and cultures of memory. ‘Communism’ seems to have established itself as the preferred term in Czechia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, as well as in French-language research (e.g. Ragaru & Capelle-Pogăcean, 2010). In the ex-Yugoslav countries, and in the majority of anglophone literature, ‘socialism’ is the favored term. In the Baltic states, the accepted term is ‘Soviet’. In Bulgaria, both terms are in use, and the choice of one or the other is a statement in and of itself, especially in academic contexts. Far from underestimating the debates around the concepts and their importance for the study of the recent past, I will sacrifice conceptual purity in order to adhere to the terminology used in my source materials. For the most part—especially with regard to European policies of memory, transitional justice and commemorative initiatives—I will use ‘communism’, but in the last chapter, I will discuss post-socialist nostalgia, or ‘sots-nostalgia’ sticking with the vocabulary of popular culture and the life stories.

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References Alexievich, S. (2017). Chernobilska molitva. Paradox. Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition (2nd ed.). The University of Chicago Press. Assmann, A. (2006). Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit: Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik. C.H. Beck. Assmann, A. (2009). Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (4th ed.). C.H. Beck. Assmann, A. (2016). Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur. Eine Intervention (2nd ed.). C. H. Beck. Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural memory and early civilization: Writing. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1992). Berger, S. & J.  Seiffert (Hg.). (2014). Erinnerungsorte: Chancen, Grenzen und Perspektiven eines Erfolgskonzeptes in den Kulturwissenschaften. Klartext Verlag. Bernhard, M., & Kubik, J. (Eds.). (2014). Twenty years after communism: The politics of memory and commemoration. Oxford University Press. Brier, R. (2011). Adam Michnik’s understanding of totalitarianism and the west European left: A historical and transnational approach to dissident political thought. East European Politics and Societies, 25(2), 197–218. https://doi. org/10.1177/2F0888325410387644 Brockmeier, J. (2015). Beyond the archive: Memory, narrative, and the autobiographical process. Oxford University Press. Carr, D. (1986). Time, narrative, and history. Indiana University Press. Closa, C. (2010). Negotiating the past: Claims for recognition and policies of memory in the EU. Working Paper 2010/08, Instituto de politicas y bienes publicos [IPP]. Retrieved from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ipp/wpaper/1008.html Confino, A. (1997). Collective memory and cultural history: Problems of method. American Historical Review, 102(5), 1386–1403. https://doi.org/10.1086/ ahr/102.5.1386 den Boer, P., H. Duchhardt, G. Kreis & W. Schmale (Hrsg.) (2012). Europäische Erinnerungsorte. 3 Bde. De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Denzin, N. K. (2001). The reflexive interview and a performative social science. Qualitative Research, 1(1), 23–46. https://doi.org/10.117 7/2F146879410100100102 Erll, A. (2011). Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (2nd ed.). J.B.Metzler. Erll, A., & Nünning, A. (Eds.). (2008). Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook. Walter de Gruyter. Erll, A. & A.  Nünning (Hrsg.). (2004). Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnises. Konstruktivität—Historizität—Kulturspezifität. Walter de Gruyter.

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Erll, A., & Rigney, A. (Eds.). (2009). Mediation, remediation, and the dynamics of cultural memory. Walter de Gruyter. Fitzpatrick, S. (2000). Russia’s twentieth century in history and historiography. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 46(3), 378–387. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-­8497.00103 Fitzpatrick, S. (2007). The Soviet Union in the twenty-first century. Journal of European Studies, 37(1), 51–71. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F0047244 107074186 François, E. & H.  Schulze (Hrsg.). (2001). Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 3 Bde. München: Beck. Friedlander, S. (Ed.). (1992). Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the “final solution”. Harvard University Press. Gardner, G. (2001). Unreliable memories and other contingencies: Problems with biographical knowledge. Qualitative Research, 1(2), 185–204. https://doi. org/10.1177/146879410100100205 Gluck, C. (2007). Operations of memory: ‘Comfort women’ and the world. In S. M. Jager & R. Mitter (Eds.), Ruptured histories: War, memory, and the post-­ cold war in Asia (pp. 47–77). Harvard University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1950). La mémoire collective. Presses universitaires de France. Halbwachs, M. (1952). Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Les Presses universitaires de France. Nouvelle édition. Édition électronique dans le cadre de la collection “Les classiques des sciences sociales” http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/ Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/index.html Hebel, U. (2008). Sites of memory in U.S.-American histories and cultures. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook (pp. 47–60). Walter de Gruyter. Isnenghi, M. (2008). Italian luoghi della memoria. In A.  Erll & A.  Nünning (Eds.), Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook (pp. 27–35). Walter de Gruyter. Judt, T. (1996). The past is another country: Myth and memory in postwar Europe. Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 87, 36–69. Kansteiner, W. (2010). Memory, media and menschen: Where is the individual in collective memory studies. Memory Studies, 3(1), 3–4. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750698009348276 Koleva, D. (2021). The Immortal Regiment and its glocalisation: Reformatting Victory Day in Bulgaria. Memory Studies. Advance online publication, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/2F17506980211037280. Le Rider, J. (2008). Mitteleuropa as a lieu de mémoire. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook (pp. 37–46). Walter de Gruyter. Lindenberger, T. (2014). Experts with a cause: A future for GDR history beyond memory governance and Ostalgie in unified Germany. In M.  Todorova,

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A. Dimou, & S. Troebst (Eds.), Remembering communism. Private and public recollections of lived experience in Southeast Europe (pp. 29–42). CEU Press. MacIntyre, A. (2007). After virtue: A study in moral theory (3rd ed.). University of Notre Dame Press. Merridale, C. (2010). Soviet memories: Patriotism and trauma. In S. Radstone & B. Schwarz (Eds.), Memory: Histories, theories, debates (pp. 376–389). Fordham University Press. Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of social remembering. Open University Press. Müller, J.-W. (2010). On ‘European memory’: Some conceptual and normative remarks. In M. Pakier & B. Strath (Eds.), A European memory? Contested histories and politics of remembrance (pp. 25–37). Berghahn Books. Nora, P. (sous la dir. de) (1984, 1986, 1992). Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. I. La République (1984); II. La Nation (1986); III. Les France (1992). Ragaru, N., & Capelle-Pogăcean, A. (2010). Vie quotidienne et pouvoir sous le communisme: Consommer à l’Est. Karthala. Richardson, L. (1990). Narrative and sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 19(1), 116–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F089124190 019001006 Ricœur, P. (1984, 1985, 1988). Time and Narrative, vols. 1, 2, 3. (K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1983–1985). Ricœur, P. (2004). Memory, history, forgetting. The University of Chicago Press. Rosenthal, G. (1991). German war memories: Narratability and the biographical and social functions of remembering. Oral History, 19(2), 34–41. Schmidt, P. (2004). Zwischen Medien und Topoi: Die Lieux de mémoire und die Medialität des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. In A.  Erll & A.  Nünning (Eds.), Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnises. Konstruktivität—Historizität— Kulturspezifität (S. 25–43). Walter de Gruyter. Thompson, P., & Bornat, J. (2017). The voice of the past: Oral history (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. Todorova, M., & Gille, Z. (Eds.). (2010). Post-communist nostalgia. Berghahn Books. Verovšek, P. J. (2016). Collective memory, politics, and the influence of the past: The politics of memory as a research paradigm. Politics, Groups, and Identities, 4(3), 529–543. https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2016.1167094 Welzer, H. (2008). Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (2nd ed.). C. H. Beck. Wertsch, J. (2002). Voices of collective remembering. Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J. (2008). Collective memory and narrative templates. Social Research, 75(1), 133–156. White, H. (1973). Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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White, H. (1978). Tropics of discourse. Essays in cultural criticism. The Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1987). The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Yurchak, A. (2006). Everything was forever until it was no more: The last soviet generation. Princeton University Press. Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social mindscapes. An invitation to cognitive sociology. Harvard University Press. Znepolski, I. (Ed.). (2010). Totalitarizmite na 20 vek v sravnitelna perspektiva. ISRP/Ciela.

PART I

Politics of Memory and Memory Cultures

CHAPTER 2

The New ‘Grand Narrative’: Coping with the Past

In this chapter, I shall trace out the construction of a new ‘grand narrative’ of the recent past, which supplies the normative component of memory: it invokes the questions of ‘what was’ and ‘what comes next,’ setting forth new social and historical categories, a point of reference, relative to which the ‘little’ narratives, collective and biographical, are to position themselves. As I intend to demonstrate in due course, vernacular memory— traumatic, as well as nostalgic—adopts a stance with regard to this grand narrative, whether to affirm it, to contextualize it, or to rebuke it. I shall commence with the so-called official memory, compiled by institutions or political subjects, at the national and the European level. I will follow up on the multiple approaches for coping with the communist past: restoring justice, uncovering the truth, recognition and commemoration. Ultimately, I shall outline the manner in which the politics of memory are exploited by social actors, and embedded into the foundation of memory cultures. Coping with the past, its overcoming, or ‘coming to terms’ with it, is one of the most pervasive questions of the present, or at least from the 1980s onwards. This was the period of the emergence and substantiation of now-unavoidable approaches in the study of memory and its uses. But not just that—it also marked the beginning of immense empirical pressure, initiated with the commemoration of anniversaries, at the national and the European scale, and continued with the dismantling of the ‘Eastern bloc,’ which engendered novel cultural practices and necessitated © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_2

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a retrospective look at the past. In post-communist societies, the past ended up being a guiding light for the future (the “return” to Europe, to normality, etc.), a resource for the legitimization of new political actors, an impulse for civil initiatives, a justification for social regrouping, and a litmus test for belonging. In the aftermath of the Cold War, it was not only Eastern Europe that was on the lookout for its identity. Western Europe also had to portray, in a new manner, its own, as well as the pan-European, twentieth century. The legitimation vacuum, which emerged once the confrontation between the two ‘camps’ had come to an end, was filled, for the most part, by the narrative about the Holocaust as a European event with global significance. This understanding was also driven by the absence of a “myth of origin” for a united Europe (Littoz-Monnet, 2012). Thus the Holocaust has ended up being “a moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and the absence of a master ideological narrative” (Levy & Sznаider, 2002: 93). The memory of it has morphed from “literal” into “exemplary”, from which a lesson is to be extracted and which is therefore called “justice” (Todorov, 1996: 14–15): it is no longer about specific events, but about the conflict between good and evil. As a result, the Holocaust has turned into a “free-floating myth” (Giesen, 2004: 142), a “moral universal” (Alexander, 2004), a metaphor, which dramatizes every single act of injustice, and makes possible the narratives of/about victims of other regimes and crimes (Levy & Sznaider, 2006). German researchers noted the “holocaustization” (Holocaustisierung) of such events, that is, their subsumption under the Holocaust model, in order for their consequences to be observed and evaluated (see Assmann, 2016: 179). This is due to the circumstance that the ethical-political argument for the necessity of memory, applied to the Holocaust, is linked directly with the legal discourse on human rights (Huyssen, 2011), sourcing its terminology from it, and in turn corroborating it. On account of its universalist values, this discourse has a de-ideologizing effect (Assmann, 2016: 58), which is why it turns out to be universally applicable to the tragedies of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the potential for in-depth studies of World War II has significantly grown in the context of the opening up of Eastern European scholarly circles and archives: it is precisely Eastern Europe that was once the home, and ultimately the final resting place of more than 90% of the executed Jewry. Thus, the hypothesis about the radical unrepresentability of the Holocaust has been relativized by the large body of concrete historical research amassed in recent years, including comparative

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and transnational studies, which has contributed to the academic Europeanization of the topic (cf. Laczó, 2018), if not the mnemonic one. So, the situation, in which Eastern Europeans face their own communist past is characterized by the dehistoricization and cosmopolitization of the memory of the Holocaust, its turning into a central topos of the European mnemonic cannon,1 the opening up of new opportunities for historical research, and the establishment of the paradigm of human rights as a universal approach to traumatic historical events. Therefore, despite the observed “revival of the national paradigm in Europe,” and the emergence of a “post-classical national master narrative after 1989” (Berger, 2006: 3), it might be asserted, and with good reason, that modeling the memory of communism is a movement in the direction counter to that of the nationalization of memory—towards the formation of a transnational culture of memory. This memory cannot erase, nor does it compete with the national or ethnic ones, but does, to an extent, transform them. In the sections to follow, I will trace out the realization of this transnational anamnestic project.

Politics of Memory: “Holocaustization” of Communism? Starting with the Nuremberg trial, European societies have found and affirmed strategies for overcoming their totalitarian pasts: Nazism in Germany, fascism in Italy, the dictatorships in Southern Europe, and the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. A survey commissioned by the European Commission (Closa Montero, 2010) brings to light a significant array of approaches, measures and practices, summarily forming a normative model, an acquis communautaire of sorts, for coping with a difficult past, a component not just of cultures of memory, but also of the political culture in the respective European states. From the start of the 1990s, Eastern Europe’s new democracies began applying this model in their endeavors to come to terms with their communist legacy. Following the velvet revolutions, the perception set in that in order for democratization to be successful, it was not just institutional reform that was needed, but also an earnest attempt to cope with the non-democratic past. First and foremost, justice for the victims was to 1   For more detail on the Europeanization of the memory of the Holocaust (see Kucia, 2016).

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be sought: rehabilitation, compensation, and the restoration of seized property. Second on the list, attempts were to be made to impose sanctions upon the perpetrators—from direct courtroom trials against high-­ ranking functionaries of the communist regimes and their respective organs of oppression, to various forms of lustration/screening. Further down the list, measures were taken to find the truth—from the declassification of archives, to the formation of special committees and institutes for investigating the past, with the intent of uncovering the crimes of the former regimes. Last but not least, overcoming the past also involved a commemorative aspect: erecting monuments, establishing museums and commemorative rituals. At the very start of these mnemopolitical endeavors, the outstanding Franco-Bulgarian intellectual Tsvetan Todorov noticed a tendency towards the “conflation of Hitler and Stalin” in Eastern Europe’s politics of memory. He fleshed out four different types of reaction to “the pairing of Auschwitz and Kolyma”: for Hitlerist “hangmen”, any conflation was used as an excuse; this is why, however, the victims of Nazism were opposed to this comparison; Stalinist “hangmen” opposed the pairing because it served as an accusation against them; precisely the reason why the victims of Stalinism favored the pairing of the two regimes. Todorov warned that the groups labeled in this manner were not, as a rule of thumb, the actual victims and perpetrators, but rather “groups that, for reasons of national or ideological membership, identify themselves, whether consciously or not, with one or the other role” (Todorov, 1996: 17). While for Todorov, “victims” and “hangmen” were roles and discourses, memory activists, as well as political figures of the post-­communist countries have consistently defended the parallels drawn with Nazism, in an attempt to impose a view of the equation of the two regimes. Accession to the EU unlocked new opportunities for cooperation in this sphere. Members of the European Parliament from post-communist states have consistently carried out initiatives for recognizing and maintaining the memory of communism. In 2005, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the European Parliament adopted a resolution which stated that “for some nations the end of World War II meant renewed tyranny inflicted by the Stalinist Soviet Union”, acknowledged “the magnitude of the suffering, injustice and long-term social, political and economic degradation endured by the captive nations” and urged

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keeping the memory of the past alive, in the name of reconciliation.2 Thus, the comparison between Nazism and Stalinism was, in a sense, officially spelled out, albeit on a specific occasion. Perhaps the most-significant accomplishment of the representatives from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the EP, as far as politics of memory are concerned, was the adoption of a resolution in 2009 on “European Conscience and Totalitarianism”. The two regimes—communism and Nazism—were both deemed totalitarian, with the understanding that “the uniqueness of the Holocaust” must be acknowledged. The European Parliament condemned “all totalitarian rule from whatever ideological background” and called for the comprehension of the “double legacy” of Nazism and communism in CEE countries, by declaring that “the ultimate goal of disclosure and assessment of the crimes committed by the Communist totalitarian regimes is reconciliation, which can be achieved by admitting responsibility, asking for forgiveness and fostering moral renewal.”3 The Czech and the Slovenian rotational presidencies of the Council of the European Union, which took place in 2008 and 2009 respectively, undoubtedly contributed a great deal to this result, as did the involvement of high-profile figures from the EP, including Vytautas Landsbergis, Tunne Kelam and Sandra Kalniete, all of whom held the moral high ground on account of their dissident bona fides.4 The so-called Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, signed by human rights activists, historians and notable politicians such as Václav Havel and Joachim Gauck, and insisting on a “common approach” towards the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes, served as the blueprint for the EP’s resolution. The debates which surrounded the transformation of the Prague Declaration into an EP resolution illuminate the schism not just between 2  The future of Europe sixty years after the Second World War, https://www.europarl. europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-6-2005-0180_EN.html, last accessed 3 December 2021. 3  https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-6-2009-0213_EN.html, last accessed 3 December 2021. 4  V.  Landsbergis (b. 1932) was the co-founder and leader of the opposition movement Saiudis (1988–1992), president of Lithuania (1990–1992), member of PACE and EP; T. Kelam (b. 1936) organized semi-illegal oppositional groups in the 1970s and 1980s; one of the leaders in the push for the restoration of Estonia’s independence, served in the EP and PACE; S. Kalniete (b. 1952) grew up in Siberia, where her parents had been deported; one of the leaders of the Latvian Popular Front (1989–1991), Minister of Foreign Affairs (2002–2004) and MEP.

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the various parliamentary groups, but within them as well—between the representatives of ‘old’ Europe, and those from the post-communist states. A more thorough examination of this process (Neumayer, 2015) demonstrates the capacity of Eastern European MEPs to wield the tools of European parliamentarism in order to induce a shift in the discourse on communism, in congruence with the so-called totalitarian theory, which highlights its criminal nature, and its resemblance to Nazism. By grounding their theses in the vocabulary of human rights, they managed, for the most part, to de-particularize their own national experiences and to impart them with a European dimension and a humanitarian bearing. Thus, their cause became universal, and in a certain sense depoliticized, framed within the European perspective, rather than in the national/regional or strictly ideological window. More to the point, the initiators of this resolution, coming from post-communist countries, in spite of their relatively brief presence within the EP, succeeded in creating partnerships and unions, and in lobbying representatives from different countries and different parliamentary groups for support (ALDE, the Greens, and even PES).5 The Prague Declaration, and the EP resolution which followed, codify a series of terms used when discussing communist regimes: “totalitarian crimes” or the “crimes of the communist regimes”, “victims of the communist crimes”, “anti-communist/anti-totalitarian resistance,” etc. As we shall see shortly, this vocabulary lies at the foundation of one of the grand narratives of communism—the traumatic one, and provides it with legitimizational scaffolding. The fundamental dimensions of transitional justice in the post-communist context are also outlined: unearthing the truth (from the archives of the communist secret services), recognition for the victims, and comeuppance for the perpetrators. The likening of the two dictatorial regimes is not, however, unambiguous. In the above-cited resolution by the EP, the term “communism,” which was originally suggested, is replaced with “totalitarianism,” which potentially encompasses other non-democratic regimes—those in Southern Europe, for example. This redaction hints at a certain caution against placing an equal sign between communism and Nazism, as well as, perhaps, the presumption that all communist regimes were identical and immutable in nature. In the 2008 EP Declaration, which declared 23 August to be the European Day of Remembrance for the Victims of 5  63% of the PES representatives, predominantly those from post-communist countries, voted in favor of the resolution.

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Stalinism and Nazism,6 the text put forth by its advocates, which included the terms “communism” and “totalitarianism” was likewise revised to read “Stalinism”. While the declaration in question used this term in the context of the event which was referenced in selecting the date—the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—in other instances, the predilection for the term “Stalinism” has been met with a certain reluctance east of the Iron Curtain, owing to the concern that it condemns only one historical version of the regime. The communist system is also labeled “totalitarian” in documents from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE): in Resolution No.1096 (1996), on the “Measures to dismantle the heritage of former communist totalitarian systems”,7 and Resolution No.1481 (2006) concerning the “Need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes”, initiated by the Bulgarian representative Luchezar Toshev.8 This last one also draws parallels with Nazism, noting however, that in contrast with it, the fall of totalitarian communist regimes in Europe was not followed by an international investigation, or trials for the perpetrators of those crimes. The rapporteur, Göran Lindblad (EPP) was even more decisive: he did not share the opinion expressed by his colleagues that it was necessary to delineate between ideology and practice. Listing out the characteristics of the communist regimes, he concluded: “When analyzing the consequences of the implementation of this ideology, one cannot ignore the similarities with the consequences of the implementation of another ideology of the 20th century, namely nazism”.9 His opponents (predominantly from Russia, and countries with strong communist resistance during World War II) highlighted, in response, the 6  https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-6-2008-0439_EN.html last accessed 20 January 2022. 7  The resolution outlines the principles to be used for coping with this legacy: justice, without the thirst for revenge, and within the boundaries of the law; as well as its scope: criminal persecution for the crimes committed, rehabilitation and compensation for those unfairly convicted by the regime, the opening up the records of the secret service, the restoration of seized property, and lustration, if individual guilt can be demonstrated. https:// assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=16507, last accessed 3 December 2021. 8  https://pace.coe.int/en/files/17403, last accessed 3 December 2021. Some analysts consider the expression “totalitarian communist regimes” to be an acceptable trade-off, because it implicitly allows for the potential existence of non-totalitarian communism. 9  Explanatory memorandum by Mr. Lindblad, #45. https://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/ XRef/X2H-Xref-ViewHTML.asp?FileID=11097&lang=EN, last accessed 3 December 2021.

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role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazism, and dismissed the resolution as a conservative ideological endeavor. The debate over whether the specific regimes were criminal, or the ideology itself was such, never concluded, and the resolution takes no stance with respect to ideology. The term “totalitarianism,” as well as the more specific “totalitarian and authoritarian regimes” (at times also referred to as “Stalinism”) is enshrined within the working papers of the European Commission as well (see e.g. Closa Montero, 2010; European Commission, 2010), including programmes in support of research or action projects. In 2007, the EC ventured into the mnemo-political sphere with the launch of the “Europe for Citizens” programme. The first of its funding streams was connected with memory—the traumatic one, at that.10 Still, the recognition has remained mostly at the symbolic level, rather than the institutional one (Littoz-­ Monnet, 2012; Troebst, 2017). These discussions, documents and actions, in spite of their inconsistencies, attest to the gradual shift away from the anti-fascist narrative, forged in the aftermath of World War II as a bedrock for European consensus, and towards a broader anti-totalitarian narrative of Europe’s twentieth-­ century history. Furthermore, they demonstrate that these transformations are occurring in parallel within different European institutions, and bolster one-another, for the most part. While the EP is seen as the forum for debates over European identity, accepting, to a great extent, of the mnemonic narratives of the new member states, the EC offers up institutional answers, with which it simultaneously endeavors to construct, via memory, a transnational European identity, incorporating the new member states. Given a more exhaustive contextualization, which is unfortunately not feasible within this text, these initiatives can be seen as part of a broader early-twenty-first century tendency, which also includes condemning other forms of genocide, such as the Armenian one, Ukraine’s Holodomor, and others. It exhibits not only the “global advent of memory” (Nora, 2004), but also the role of mnemo-politics as a “politics of recognition” (Taylor, 1994). Despite the numerous gestures at the European level in support of the memory of communism, the efforts to transform it into a pan-European memory site do not always garner success. For example, the efforts to 10  However, in 2009 c. 75% of the funding went to projects dealing directly or indirectly with WWII and the Holocaust, 17% to projects on the memory of Stalinist repressions and 8%—to comparative projects (Troebst, 2017: 339).

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broaden the definition of genocide, so as to also include persecution on the basis of social and political criteria, rather than just racial, ethnic, national and religious ones, as it was defined within the 1948 Convention on Genocide, suffered defeat. This debate took place predominantly within the Justice and Home Affairs Council (JHA). The occasion for these discussions was the 2001 recommendation for the creation of a European judicial instrument for combatting racism and xenophobia. Following a prolonged debate, the Council of the European Union achieved political consensus in favor of a “Council framework decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law” (28 November 2008), which deemed the denial or trivialisation of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes directed against groups or their members “defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin”11 punishable by law, citing the crimes committed during World War II.  The recommendation that other factors, such as social status and political conviction be included was rejected. Unlike the debates in the EP, the deliberation format in this scenario was rather different, and the demands of Eastern European members simply fell through the cracks. As a result, in contrast with the EP, here the representatives of the post-communist countries were unable to form a coalition and garner support from the remaining member states.12 In response to the demands of the new member states, the Council tasked the European Commission with looking into the need for an additional instrument to address the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes commited by totalitarian regimes, against groups defined by alternate criteria, such as social status and political belonging. In the course of the study, a public hearing was held, organized by the Slovenian presidency. The participants, the majority of whom came from CEE countries, coalesced around a series of recommendations for pan-­ European action: a common approach towards totalitarian regimes; a permanent governmental body on the coordination of research and evaluation initiatives dealing with totalitarian regimes; the establishment of a European foundation, museum and memorial to the victims of totalitarian regimes; a common legislative framework for access to archives; an unbiased and equal treatment of the victims of all totalitarian regimes (Jambrek, 11  Official Journal of the European Union L 328/55-58, p. 56. https://eur-lex.europa. eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32008F0913, last accessed 3 December 2021. 12  For an in-depth analysis of the two debates (see Littoz-Monnet, 2013).

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2008: 313–314). The majority of these recommendations were not included in the final report (European Commission, 2010). Although the report proclaimed “a strong feeling that the Member States in Western Europe should be more aware of the tragic past of the Member States in Eastern Europe” (p. 6), it did not find that a separate instrument, covering the denial or trivialization of crimes committed against groups of people defined by their social status or political convictions—encompassing the better part of the crimes of communist regimes, in essence—was necessary. Such legislation existed in only a handful of countries: Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and to a certain extent, Latvia, hence the necessary conditions to introduce it on a EU scale were not in place. The burden of coping with the legacy of communism was thus left up to national institutions. Given the impossibility of criminalizing the actions of communist regimes at the European level, memory has ended up being a substitute for judicial persecution. The focus has shifted away from post-communist mnemo-activism on the European stage, and towards uncovering the truth about victims and commemorating them (Neumayer, 2017). The European Network for Remembrance and Solidarity (2005) and the Platform of European Memory and Conscience (2011) were founded, consolidating the so-called institutes of memory (see below). Both networks set their sights on aiding research and educational initiatives, and on setting the priorities, as far as politics of memory are concerned. The parity between these activities varies—while the European Network concerns itself mostly with research, the Platform slants towards political involvement in its day-to-day operations (Büttner & Delius, 2015). Both of them are mostly comprised of organizations from the CEE countries, setting a geographical as well as an ideological limitation, making them, consequently, insufficiently representative to be major players at the European scale. Still, they impart additional legitimacy to the national institutes and initiatives in the respective countries. Many of these initiatives are met with sharp criticism, on account of their depiction of communism as the moral and political analogue to Nazism. Activists on the left side of the political spectrum, as well as representatives of international Jewish organizations voice harsh accusations of trivialization of the Holocaust and abdication of the historical responsibility for it. They perceive GULag, and the memory of it, as a challenge to the Holocaust, robbing it of its uniqueness. The efforts made to recognize the crimes of communist regimes, as well as their victims, are interpreted

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as an attempt to cover up and obfuscate Eastern Europeans’ part in the eradication of Jews in their countries during World War II. These dichotomies are the subject of the subsequent section.

Mnemo-Political Regionalization: Two European Cultures of Memory The enlargement of the EU has conjured into existence a certain stratified power dynamic between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ of Europe. As James Mark points out, the “return to Europe” for post-communist societies has been linked not so much with a pivot towards their own post-war past, but rather towards the World War II period in correspondence with “the norms of global Holocaust memory” (Mark, 2010: 96). The reality of the mass-execution of Jews in the “bloodlands” (Snyder), stretching from the Baltics to Romania, with the collaboration of the local ethnic majorities, was systemically glossed-over in communist historiographies. This narrative had to be re-fashioned so as to carve out a place for the Holocaust—a requirement deemed, in jest, an “accession criterion” in the field of history, or a “soft criterion” for EU membership (Leggewie, 2008). However, many social actors in the CEE countries perceived this type of memory politics to be West-centric, and expressed their discontent at the lack of a reciprocal engagement of ‘Europe’ with their own communist past, and with the non-recognition of its universal significance as a failure of the communist social-engineering project. I will once more emphasize that the template used for the post-­ communist memory work has been the overcoming of the Nazi legacy (and not, for example, the more recent transitions to democracy in Southern Europe and Latin America). Post-communist memory has engaged with this paradigm, by projecting its own essence upon it in a kind of catching-up regime: while the de-heroization of the war and the casting of the spotlight upon the victims commenced in Western Europe in the 1960s, in the Eastern Bloc, discussing the Holocaust was inacceptable, particularly in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Following the collapse of communism, however, the ‘never-again’ moral stance, the rhetoric, the semantics and the symbols, the commemorative practices, and even the trans-nationalization strategies have borne the mark of Holocaust memory. Because of this, some critics have gone as far as to fix the departure point of post-communist politics of memory as “not lived history but

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the universal memory of the Holocaust”, as a result of which, the interpretation of communism which they offer “is well received because of the European modalities of its creation” (Zombory, 2017: 7). This assertion is, of course, exaggerated: Eastern Europeans are weighed down by their own traumatic experience, whose enunciation, sharing and researching has only become possible after the fall of the regime, and for which the paradigm of the Holocaust has become a model. Thus, the focus on one’s own past presupposes, in a certain sense, the europeanization of the memory of communism. Ljiljana Radonić (2018) identifies three tendencies which result in the europeanization of memory: the universalization of the Holocaust, the europeanization of the Holocaust, and the divided memory in Eastern and Western Europe. I am turning now to the last of these. In spite of the use of universalist terminology in the phrasing of Eastern European demands for recognition, they are frequently interpreted as being particularist:13 as a contestation between the memory of GULag and the memory of Shoah, driven by political objectives or more generally as an attempt at interpretative reversal in Foucault’s understanding, that is, an appropriation of the guidelines so as to “invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them” (Mälksoo, 2014: 88). The assumption that memory is a terrain for competition, a zero-sum game, no doubt contributes to this understandig: remembering one event mandates the forgetting of another. Aleida Assmann examines the discontents at this new European culture of memory. She highlights the mnemo-political asymmetry between the Holocaust and the Stalinist state terror (Assmann, 2016: 119, 122, 155). With regard to the latter, she notes the fragmentation and the privatization of the victims’ perspectives, which often remain unacknowledged in public spaces. The fundamental reason for this is once again the ‘competition’ of victims stemming from the unprecedentedness of the Holocaust and waryness of its trivialization (Assmann, 2016: 118–123, 142–153). In this predicament, some CEE countries have constructed a paradigm of the ethnization of suffering and a victimhood identity, which is easily instrumentalized for political objectives. 13  One should not forget that Eastern European attempts to construct a memory of Stalinism/communism based on the model of the Holocaust occur in the wake of the “historians’ debate” (Historikerstreit) in Germany in 1986, and in certain aspects, suspiciously resemble Ernst Nolte’s theses on the analogues between Nazi and Stalinist crimes, decried by many of his opponents as being revisionist. For many social actors from ‘old Europe,’ support for Eastern Europe’s mnemonic demands is, undoubtedly, seen as a revisionist stance.

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Thus, with their incorporation into ‘Europe’ and her mnemo-political discourse, post-communist countries find themselves trapped by two contradictory tendencies in relation to their own past: the “politics of regret” (Olick) as a normative model, adopted from/imposed by the West, and the politics of national victimhood (Kattago, 2009) or nationalization of suffering (Luthar, 2017). In a heroic, martyrological key, which closely adheres to communist narrative models, the latter projects all guilt outside of one’s own community—upon the Nazis, the communists, the Soviets, the security services, etc.—in the spirit of a victimhood nationalism (Lim, 2010), which externalizes both Nazism/fascism and communism. One’s own nation is assembled as a mnemonic community on the basis of its portrayal as a victim. The traumatic narrative about the recent past thus turns out to not only be fully-compatible with the national myth-history, but also successfully nourishes it (Apor, 2010). Similar to post-WWII, where the reconstruction of both democracy and economy was most often contingent upon the externalization of fascism as an alien occurrence, in post-communist Europe, analogous processes seem to have been going on, in order to externalize communism as having been forced down their throats by the Soviet Union as a result of the world’s parceling out in Yalta and in Teheran. This supplies the ‘victim nations’ with a kind of moral alibi (Zhurzhenko, 2007). Such uses of memory are a way of incorporating the ‘new Europe’ and its new elites into the supra-national communities of shared memory. They are, however, also a way to articulate and legitimize nationalist counter-memories, perceived to be autochthonous and subjected to external pressure. Thus, the ‘politics of truth’ in Eastern Europe at times upholds versions of memory which source their normative authority from elsewhere.14 The policy of national martyrdom is, understandably, the subject of criticism, because of its historical revisionism, which culminates in the exculpation of collaborationism during World War II from anti-­communist or nationalist positions (see e.g. Luthar, 2017). From a different perspective, however, it comes across as one of the stages of memory work in post-communist countries, aiming to correct the historical distortions in favor of the communist regimes (Challand, 2009: 399) and, in a more 14  A distinctive example of “mnemonic militancy” (Mälksoo, 2009: 656) is the narrative of the “two occupations” in the Baltic States and Poland, as a justification for the insistence on a pan-European consensus regarding the condemnation of the communist regimes. See also Mälksoo (2018).

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general sense, as an attempt to integrate “subaltern” or “minority” narratives by Eastern Europeans about the past into the mnemonic landscape of contemporary Europe (Mälksoo, 2009).15 The very notion of a “subaltern” points to the asymmetry in the field of memory, where dissonance and confrontation is also to be expected, not just harmony and reconciliation. From this viewpoint, Eastern Europeans’ endeavor to reap recognition for their traumatic experiences under communism, and to have them written into the shared narrative of the European twentieth century is actually their aspiration to be recognized as legitimate Europeans. It “indicates the degree to which the institutionalized European recognition is constitutive of their subjectivity as Europeans” (Mälksoo, 2014: 89), as well as a yearning for the establishment of democratic statehood in the absence of stable democratic traditions (Littoz-Monnet, 2012: 1193).16 From this perspective, the mnemo-political initiatives for condemning communism outlined above can be interpreted, rather, in the context of a politics of recognition, rather than of retribution. The construction of a shared European memory, on which memory activists from post-communist countries insist, is loaded with immense normative potential (Pakier & Strath, 2010, Challand, 2009, Leggewie, 2008, Assmann, 2016). Although the outcomes differ vastly from their ambitions, the very processes of the transnationalization of this memory mark new developmental trajectories in Europe’s mnemonic code. Though the mnemonic hegemony remains unaltered, a new alleyway is opened up for the interpretation of European values as intrinsically counter to all forms of totalitarianism. The validation of these values is possible only through reflection upon the legacy of communism, whose incompatibility with them serves as its moral delegitimization. In precisely this manner, the Eastern European experience seeks out ways in which to expand the Western mnemonic cannon, integral to the EU in its contemporary form. This experience is enunciated in a universalist moral and legal language, which depoliticizes it to a certain degree. On account of this, some analysts are inclined to view the struggle for the international condemnation of communist regimes as an integral facet of the human rights movement, 15  For an analysis of the complexity of the memoryscape and the contestation of the memory regimes in the Baltic States under the influence of the EU and Russia (see Perchoc, 2019). 16  In a handful of cases (the Baltic States, for example) one must also factor into the circumstances the persistent and active mnemo-politics of Putin’s Russia, which invariably advances its own narrative about World War II (see: Kattago, 2009; Perchoc, 2019).

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which rests on the assumption of the universal dignity of the victims, regardless of which regime victimized them (Mälksoo, 2014: 85). At the same time, from an ethical standpoint, the duty to remember takes center stage, so as to rescue the victims from oblivion, and to restore their dignity. While the discourse grounded in the notion of human rights enjoys the support of legal theory and of certain institutions (ECHR, for example), the moral discourse finds its footing in the direct transposition of arguments developed with regard to the Holocaust, within the terrain of the memory of communism. The coping with the communist past thus turns out to be an example of multidirectional (Rothberg, 2009), or traveling (Erll, 2011) memory—adapting new topics to fit mnemonic models and rhetoric developed in a different context. Michael Rothberg, whose theory about multidirectional memory appears to be applicable to the European debate, dismisses outright the notion that publicity is a pre-defined space, within which already-extant groups, with their respective mnemonic and identity programs, compete with one-another. According to him, publicity is rather a dynamic discursive space, where groups do not merely articulate established positions, but they emerge as such, by way of dynamic interaction with others. Thus, alongside direct competition, “complex acts of solidarity in which historical memory serves as a medium for the creation of new communal and political identities” are also engendered (Rothberg, 2009: 11). By analyzing the parallel and entangled articulations of the memory of the Holocaust, racism, colonialism and decolonization (though by his own admission, this intellectual tradition is far from mainstream), Rothberg demonstrates how the globalization of the memory of the Holocaust contributes to the vocalization of other traumatic narratives in a transnational context. This multidirectional memory is entangled and syncretic, rather than competitive and exclusive. The transnational diffusion of the Holocaust is not uni-directional, nor is it merely a product of its abstract universality, but in effect materializes in dialogue with other historical traumas (Rothberg, 2009: 263–265). On the other hand, abandoning the premise of its uniqueness, and allowing room for comparison, opens up numerous possibilities for a non-Eurocentric understanding of the Holocaust. This is the reason why Rothberg calls for an “ethics of comparison” as an inherent component of the democratic politics of memory, alongside the differentiated empirical history and moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices (Rothberg, 2011: 526). It is the ethics of

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comparison—rather than competition—that enables the “coordination” of the asymmetric demands of these victims. The Europeanization of memory does not only occur via the creation of common ‘sites’ or ‘circles’ (Leggewie) for transnational memory. No less important, europeanization also means the acceptance of concepts, standards, politics and regimes of memory, consolidated within Western European discourses, and upheld by European institutions. The West-to-­ East migration of concepts such as memory, trauma, victim, guilt, forgiveness and reconciliation, however, necessitates their rethinking and recontextualization. It might reasonably be assumed that a process of diversification of Europe’s memory regimes is under way, as a result of which the field of European memory becomes fragmented, or rather, it becomes hetero-centric, and within it, discrete mnemonic regions are formed. Many researchers and activists of memory see this fractured European memory as being symptomatic of a crisis; it might be claimed, however, that this development is all-too-natural: even if based on shared universal values, this memory can hardly be monolithic and homogenizing. The European mnemonic landscape might be, rather, “a plurality of memories [that] can simultaneously and respectfully co-exist” (Kattago, 2009: 386). The politics of memory are not materialized in a political vacuum. On the contrary—at the national, as well as at the European level, they are very much entangled with ongoing processes, and mediated by current confrontations on the political arena, and not just by the moral imperative for truth and justice. The discourses of memory develop in connection with broader social and cultural processes, and generate new forms of power dynamics, of inclusion and exclusion. Eastern European memory activists conscript symbolic, networking, political and expert resources in their quest for condemnation of the communist regimes and recognition of their victims. For certain political actors in these countries, the condemnation of communism is an important vindication within the ongoing confrontations in the struggle for power. The outcomes, at least at the European level, are anything but unambiguous: communism is stigmatized, but coping with its legacy is left in the hands of the individual states, and it is removed from the judicial sphere, to be deposited within the much more-generic topic of Europe’s totalitarian legacies. On the other hand, the setting of demands for recognition at the European level is capitalized upon on the national political stage, where the authority of the European institutions is utilized. ‘Europe’ is recruited in initiatives targeted at the domestic public, dealing with the respective

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country’s past. Moreover, the European context takes on a different role in the distinct post-communist states, depending on the local situation: for example, European influence fosters transitional justice in Romania, where the overcoming of the communist past was neglected during the 1990s, while in Czechia, where state-level measures were implemented early and decisively, European resources are redirected towards engagement with international audiences (Gledhill, 2011). Even though they are parts of the same mnemonic ‘region,’ the post-­ communist societies are not homogenous, as far as their cultures of memory are concerned. In comparing the mnemonic terrains in Eastern European countries and the political actors within them, Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik highlight the importance of premeditated, deliberate mnemo-politics (i.e. institutional practices), while simultaneously cautioning about the cultural limitations imposed by the meanings, values and identities, adopted in the respective country (i.e. semiotic practices) in the context of collective/national historical memory (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014: 22–28). In a different context, Stefan Troebst (2005, 2014: 140) offers a typology of the national cultures of memory in CEE, depending on the degree and the nature of consensus in regard to the past, embedded into the respective institutions (Fig. 2.1). The first of these, exemplified by the Baltic States, is characterized by a clearly-expressed anti-communist consensus, grounded in the perception of the communist regime as foreign and occupational, including in the ethnic/national sense of the word. Croatia also falls in this category, where the Yugoslav period is often labeled “Serbo-communism” and, to a certain degree, Slovakia as well, because of the association of communism with the Czech component of the former federation. Belonging to the second type are societies where there is no prevailing consensus with regard to the past, quite the contrary—debate rages on. Those include Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Ukraine—a country where, for years on end, contradictory historiographical paradigms for reflection upon the post-WWII period have been advanced. The third category encompasses countries where a “national(ist) rediscovery” prevails, alongside with an ambivalent regard for the period in question. The ambivalence manifests itself in the coexistence of perceptions of communism as fundamentally foreign to the respective national culture, and those which emphasize its role in convergent modernization. These include Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Slovenia and Albania, to some extent Moldova. (It must be noted, however, that

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Fig. 2.1  Mnemonic map of post-communist Europe. Own elaboration based on Troebst (2005, 2014). Map source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Blank_map_Europe_with_borders.png

changes have taken place over the last few years in some of these countries, as a result of which the situation in Romania, and perhaps in Albania, has shown characteristics of the second type.) Lastly, in expanding his analytical horizon eastward, which most researchers do not do, Troebst also defines a fourth type of memory culture, characteristic to Russia and Belarus, where the consummate continuity between the old and the new elites is on hand, and where the narrative about the past has remained largely unchanged. Developing this typology further, Troebst analyzes the importance of longue-durée factors, such as religion, the institution of the church, the peculiarities of nation-building and others, which fall outside

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the scope of this study. One cannot, however, overlook the significance of the “monopolizing politics of history of the communist era” (Troebst, 2007: 19), whose mark upon the public memoryscape remains visible to this very day. It is no coincidence that in a later work (Troebst, 2014) the author searches for a correlation between the memory of dictatorships, and the quality of democracy in the respective countries.17 This important factor must, of course, be accompanied by other differences in circumstance, even within the same category of countries. For example, the ‘politics of truth’ are left unchallenged in Czechia, likely because the post-1968 communist nomenklatura was rather distanced and impermeable with regard to the intelligentsia, while in Hungary and Bulgaria, it was successful, to an extent, in co-opting the intelligentsia. This is why anti-­ communism is a significant cultural capital in Czechia, and less so in Hungary or in Bulgaria. In the chapters that follow, I will plunge into more detailed comparisons, by analyzing the transitional justice measures applied in Bulgaria from a comparative angle, and in the transnational context. First and foremost, I will direct my attention at the legislative instruments for restoring justice to victims and perpetrators. Subsequently, I will sketch out the broader ‘politics of truth’, that is, the institutional provision of archival and research activities. Finally, I will outline the most all-encompassing context of all—that of the cultures of memory, in particular the memorialization and musealization of the period.

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CHAPTER 3

Politics of Justice: Transitional Justice

At this point, I would like to insert a quick overview of the public frameworks of the memory of communism created by transitional justice—the legal and extra-legal measures in the context of a transition from dictatorship to democracy, which aim to restore justice in the aftermath of large-­ scale human rights violations. Transitional justice encompasses “the ways countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large-­ scale or systematic human rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice system will not be able to provide an adequate response.”1 Although ‘transitional justice’ originated as a descriptive, catch-all term, its components serve as templates and guidelines for the countries emerging from conflict or authoritarian rule, and striving towards democratization. Thus, given their exemplarity, they acquire a normative meaning, which cannot be neglected. At the European, just as at the national level, legal discussions concerning the legacy of communist regimes have turned law into an instrument for the construction of memory, shaping a particular attitude towards the past, and respective ways to discuss it. Its importance stems not just from its material consequences, but also from its symbolic meaning—it establishes standards which make possible (whether directly or not) the appraisal of the former regime. 1  International Center for Transitional Justice: https://www.ictj.org/about/transitional-­ justice last accessed 20.01.2022.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_3

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But transitional justice cannot be realized without the comprehensive involvement of civil society and institutions, and not just those of law enforcement. It refers to a broad range of actions, which concern society as a whole, or significant groups within it. The integral directions of transitional justice are the re-evaluation of the former regime, reparations for the victims, punishment for the perpetrators, unearthing the facts about the regime’s repressive apparatus, reforming the organs of law enforcement in such a way as to disallow a future systemic-scale violation of human rights. One of the transitional justice’s fundamental ideas, particularly important in the post-communist condition, is that the restitution of justice with regard to dictatorial/authoritarian regimes is an important part of overcoming their consequences, and of the democratization process. It is commonly accepted that the memory of a difficult past must be maintained as a condition for justice for the victims, as a guarantee that the past will not repeat itself, and history will not be censored, and as a bedrock for democracy. Owning up to past injustices and taking responsibility for them is a reflexive and self-critical act, which makes a society stronger and truly democratic. This is not merely a theory: this is the manner in which Germany managed to cope with its Nazi past, and France—with collaborationism, South Africa—with apartheid, Guatemala—with the legacy of a civil war. Just court trials and out-of-court measures strengthen the new order, founded on the rule of law, and restore trust in the institutions. Comeuppance for the old elites and compensation for the victims reaffirms the values upon which democracy ought to be grounded. There are, however, counterarguments as well: a divisive memory may well undermine solidarity and calcify political or ethno-cultural boundaries.2 That is to say, not social memory, but social amnesia is what would make new beginnings possible. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in Germany and in France the critical approach towards the WWII past commenced decades after the fact. This was followed, much later, by deliberations about the legacy of mid-twentieth century dictatorships in Southern Europe. Aside from the risk of new divisions, amnesties/amnesias are based on legal arguments as well: potential purges would follow the principle of collective guilt (that is, they would affect people because of their political convictions) and could often be carried out by extrajudicial entities in an extrajudicial manner. Thus, the newly-established democratic 2  For an analysis of the existing theories about the link between memory and democracy (see Misztal, 2005).

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governments would run the risk of reenacting the methods used by their authoritarian predecessors. Certainly, transitional justice measures are not the only condition for overcoming authoritarian legacies, and it is hardly possible that their effect could be set apart from the influence of institutional reforms, economic conditions, the international context, etc. While political science theories qualify transitional justice as contingent upon the manner of exiting the authoritarian regime (revolution, reformation, negotiations) or upon the legacy (so-called path dependency, the cultural and political traditions of the respective country),3 here I shall proceed, first and foremost, from two types of simultaneity. The first is the concurrence of history and memory, i.e. the formulation of politics of memory in the context of radical changes, confrontation between different interests, in search of a balance between the old and the new elites, between central and local actors, in an attempt to appropriate symbolic capital and legitimizing resources. This converts the past into a kind of political litmus test, and makes questions about it relevant long after ‘the page has been turned’—to the befuddlement and irritation of subsequent generations. The second is the concurrence of these processes in CEE countries, and the entanglement of international partners (the EU, UN, IMF, World Bank). Post-communist transitions are not exclusively an internal matter, and the example set by one or more neighboring countries often serves as inspiration or argumentation for the others (e.g. Germany’s lustration in 1990 and Czechoslovakia’s in 1991 set an example for Bulgaria, Romania and Poland). Even when there are no direct replications, the processes in the countries in transition are influenced by the international normative context, by transnational movements and by the circulation of ideas, and they utilize the opportunities generated by these dynamics. This is why I shall try to sketch out the broader picture for each of the referenced aspects of transitional justice, before narrowing down the focus to the Bulgarian case. The European documents cited in Chap. 2 define the general framework corresponding to the moral duty to remember the past and to honor the victims. All practical measures were adopted at the national level. Despite the mismatch in contexts, traditions and conceptualization of the communist past, the trajectories of transitional justice in CEE countries are to a large extent the same: condemnation of the communist regime, 3  For a critical assessment of “transitology” in connection to transitional justice see Grosescu (2015).

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justice for the victims and the perpetrators (whenever the criminal guilt of the latter can be proven), studying the past and preserving its memory by way of museums, memorials and commemorative celebrations. As the report on coping with the totalitarian past in EU member states states, the introduction and realization of such measures has been dependent on parliamentary majorities—at times to such an extent, that already-adopted legislation was actually suspended by the incoming new majority (Closa Montero, 2010: 22). In Bulgaria and in Romania, where the former communists won the first democratic elections in 1990, the processes unfolded more slowly and unsteadily, but still in all of the directions outlined above.

Legislative Condemnation and Criminalization of the Communist Regime Almost all CEE countries have undertaken some form of a legislative and/ or political condemnation of their former regimes. In most instances, they had to cope with the legacy of two totalitarian regimes—the Nazi(-allied) one and the communist one. The problem was particularly acute in the Baltic States and Poland, occupied first by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany, and where factions of the local populations took part in the Holocaust. In other places, such as Bulgaria and to a great extent Romania, there was an effort to separate out the two periods. Regardless of the specific circumstances, efforts to condemn the communist regime bumped into a grave difficulty: they followed the model of stigmatizing Nazism following World War II, but under different conditions. While in the post-war situation there was an unambiguous winner and a categorical condemnation of Nazism—juridical, as well as moral—the allocation of merit for ending the Cold War was anything but clear-cut. That is why some countries’ (e.g. Bulgaria and Romania) reformist communist elites retained, to a great extent, their symbolic capital and their political influence in the years of the post-communist transition. The first acts to specifically condemn the regime were dedicated to concrete events: the Soviet occupation of Estonia and Lithuania (both declarations were adopted in 1989 already, the semi-centennial anniversary of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), the acknowledgement of the 1956 revolt as a struggle for Hungarian freedom (1990), the condemnation of the Katyn Massacre (Poland, 1992). The 1990s also saw the emergence of resolutions which targeted the regime as a whole. The most

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comprehensive one was the 1993 Czech law on the unlawful character of the communist regime: it condemned the regime, envisioned rehabilitation and compensation measures to be taken, and did away with the statutes of limitations for criminal prosecution. In the other CEE countries, those tasks were addressed with separate laws. In 1996, Slovakia adopted a law on the immoral and illegal character of the communist regime. In Romania, the communist regime was denounced in an official speech to Parliament by president Traian Băsescu in December 2006, on the eve of Romania’s accession to the EU, and following the adoption of the report investigating the communist dictatorship in Romania (see below). In several countries—Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania—laws criminalizing the denial or denigration of the crimes of totalitarian regimes were adopted, which included the communist regimes explicitly (European Commission, 2010: 5). In Bulgaria, the National Assembly adopted on April 26, 2000 a law declaring the communist regime to be criminal. It spelled out what the crimes of the regime and the leading figures of the Bulgarian Communist Party4 were, and deemed all acts of resistance to have been righteous and morally justified. This itemization outlined the breadth and character of the acts, which had been classified as criminal, and in doing so established normatively some of the key theses of the debates which took place in the plenary hall and the public sphere over the course of an entire decade. The systematic violation of human rights and of the rule of law took center stage—a wording which situated the law first and foremost within the boundaries of the human rights discourse. These qualifications set forth the possible rationales for bringing the violators to justice, but the law did not foresee their operationalization. In contrast with similar legislation in other post-communist states, which reassessed the statutes of limitation and made possible the pursuit of justice for the repressions of the early 4  State Gazette, 37/05.05.2000. Art. 2.2 enumerates the crimes of the communist regime: depriving the citizenry of “any and all opportunity to express political will”; systemic violations of fundamental human rights, “by also suppressing entire population subgroups, singled out for their political, social, religious or ethnic belonging”; violating the basic principles of democracy and the rule of law, by “thus placing the interests of the communist party and its representatives above the law”; persecution of citizens, including executions, forced labor camps, commitment to psychiatric institutions, depriving them of the right to property; impeding and forbidding access to education and professional development, impeding free movement, revoking citizenship rights; “illegal advantages for those persons who took part in the crimes and the persecution of others”; subordination to the interests of a foreign state.

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post-war years, the Bulgarian law did not contain such provisions. This is why it has got, more than anything, a symbolic meaning, but no actual legal consequences. Leaving aside the dissatisfaction of the memory activists, it is worth noting that this law also fits into the tendency of expanding the very definition of criminalization beyond the sphere of punitive law, that is, the application of the term “crime” towards reprehensible acts, which were not subject to criminal persecution due to various reasons: the impossibility of collecting evidence, a lapsed statute of limitations, or a lack of willpower for such a pursuit. It must also be noted that the Bulgarian law falls, to an extent, within the contentious category of so-called “memory laws” (lois mémorielles), adopted in France and some other European countries in the 1990s and 2000s. Introduced as a measure against Holocaust denial, memory laws have been extrapolated to other cases of mass annihilation, turning into, in Pierre Nora’s words, a “legislative sport,” which curtails the freedom of historical studies and leads to a “sovietization of history” (Nora, 2011) by prescribing a mandatory historical truth. Historians’ criticism was provoked not by the Holocaust denial law (in as far as it addressed France’s own collaborationist past) and not by the law recognizing the Armenian Genocide (2001), but by the 2006 amendment which criminalized genocide denial.5 The fundamental ideas of the law declaring the communist regime criminal were reaffirmed in a declaration by the National Assembly on the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the communist regime in Bulgaria, adopted on 9 September 2004.6 This declaration was provoked by an initiative of the Bulgarian Socialist (ex-communist) party (BSP) and organizations affiliated with it to “commemorate the deed of 9 September 1944”, which the other political entities saw as an attempt at rehabilitating the communist regime. Except for the anticipated party-line division with regard to the valuation of September 9th, another argument was that this date divided people, which was precisely why it shouldn’t be commemorated. As one of the orators stated, dates like this one “should be remembered, but not commemorated.”7

 For a comparison of French and Bulgarian memory laws (see Deyanova, 2009: 119–127).  State Gazette, 81/17.09.2004. 7   Minutes of the plenary session http://www.parliament.bg/bg/plenaryst/ns/1/ ID/1066, last accessed 20 January 2022. 5 6

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The Bulgarian Parliament also articulated its position with regard to a particular policy of the communist regime with its declaration condemning the forced assimilation of Bulgarian Muslims.8 Denouncing the regime’s assimilationist policies, the declaration called upon the competent authorities to conclude the lawsuit against the perpetrators (see below). Interestingly, the draft declaration was submitted in October 2009. Its delay by almost two and a half years is indicative of the attitudes of the MPs with regard to politicized applications of history.9

Justice for the Victims By following the template of transitional justice in the aftermath of World War II, the post-communist transition ought to fulfil the mission of restoring justice with regard to the victims, i.e. identifying, acknowledging and compensating those damaged by the communist regimes. This process was complex, and it had legal, as well as broader moral aspects. Of interest are, first of all, the definitions and the terminology used, because they have upended the ideological discourse, by providing new answers to the questions ‘what it was like’, who the protagonists were, and what should be done next. Some national legislations employed the terminology adopted for Nazism and fascism, and used the term “victims” with respective specifications: “victims of communist crimes” (Croatia), “victims of communist dictatorships” (Hungary), “victims of resistance” and “victims of genocide” (Lithuania), “victims of political/Soviet repressions” (Georgia and Ukraine). In other cases, the key term stressed political repressions without referring to victimhood: “politically repressed [persons]”, “sentenced for political reasons” (Bulgaria), “persons repressed/persecuted on political grounds” (Poland), “politically persecuted [persons]”, “condemned persons” and “persons who were the subject of administrative measures” (Romania), “politically repressed” (Ukraine).10 All legal acts, which orchestrated the response to this subject matter, offered up some selection of judicial definitions of the victims/repressed through the very mechanisms of their material and moral compensation. In certain cases,  State Gazette, 5/17.01.2012.  Aside from the presence of nationalists in parliament, it must be noted that BSP did not participate in the vote on the declaration. 10  The mapping of these concepts was possible thanks to the colleagues from the COST action NEP4DISSENT, as well as to Raluca Grosescu, Ljiljana Radonic, Vykintas Vaitkevičius and Aistė Petrauskienė. 8 9

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specific categories of people were singled out, depending on the respective historical situation. In Hungary, various documents were adopted refering to distinct categories depending on the kind of repression: “persons illegally sentenced between 1945 and 1963”, “persons sentenced in connection to the 1956 revolution and freedom fight”, “persons subjected to deprivation of freedom for longer time”. In the Estonian law for persons repressed by occupational (Nazi and Soviet) forces, 13 such categories were defined, including those who were deported, fled the country, were subjected to forced labor and forcibly dispatched to a nuclear disaster site to eradicate its aftereffects. The approach was similar in Lithuania, where the law (1997) specifically stated that it was referring to the victims of the occupations from 1939 to 1990. In Slovakia in 2005, a reparations scheme was established to compensate persons victimized by the armies of the Warsaw Pact in 1968. What is common for most of this legislation is its approach: no matter which specific category is used, the individuals referred to are regarded in terms of passive suffering, not in terms of agency and opposition. Only in Georgia the term “dissidents”, which was in wide circulation in the whole post-communist world, was entered in the law in 1997. In Lithuania and Slovakia, the category “participants in the anti-communist resistance” was introduced, while in Poland, “activists of the anti-communist opposition” was established as official legal term in 2017. That is, the legal lens seems to have been unfit for capturing dissent and opposition; in most cases, it only granted recognition to suffering. This perspective determined the measures of the restorative justice in their entirety. Rehabilitation In accordance with the prevailing practices, transitional justice in post-­ communist Bulgaria is likewise oriented first and foremost towards those harmed. Changes to the Penal Code between 1990 and 1993 annulled politically-motivated punishments, in order to rehabilitate the victims without seeking criminal persecution for the perpetrators. The number and content of newly-adopted laws and associated acts speaks to the absence of an all-encompassing vision. Instead, the approach—particularly at the very beginning—was piecemeal, following, to a large extent, the events of the first few months after the start of the democratic changes in November 1989. Further proof of this is the constant expansion of the circle of rehabilitated persons, via the addition of new categories.

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Already on 17 November 1989, the National Assembly revoked Art. 273 of the Penal Code,11 aimed at freedom of speech, and announced blanket amnesty for all those convicted under this article. In January 1990, amnesty was also granted to those convicted for opposing the forced name changes of Bulgarian Turks.12 In March 1990, a law on the names of Bulgarian citizens13 was adopted, which provided an opportunity for the restoration of forcefully-altered names via a simplified procedure. All three acts are quite limited in scope, and they do not take into account the numerous cases deemed criminal because of political convictions. The 7th Grand National Assembly (10 July 1990–2 October 1991) took a further stab at transitional justice. At the end of 1990, it adopted an amnesty law for the restoration of seized property,14 based on a broader understanding of resistance against the totalitarian regime in its varied forms. In accordance with this law, amnesty was granted to those convicted because of political motives after 17 March 1945 and up to the end of 1989,15 and they were absolved of their criminal sentences. The amnesty erased the criminal nature of the acts envisioned with the 1945 Decree, and some sections of the Penal Code from 1951 and 1968. According to evidence laid out in the plenary hall during these debates, under this legislature, between 25 and 30 thousand people were convicted in the years from 1948 to 1962. Afterwards, their number sharply plummeted, but at the time the law was passed, there were still some 47 people in prison serving such sentences. This was the first amnesty in the country’s post-war history, which did not merely pardon particular individuals, but wiped away the so-called crimes against the republic, as countless instances of resistance against the regime were classified. This, namely, was its political meaning and its significance from the point of view of transitional justice. The legislative bill singled out, in the first place, members of oppositional parties, who emigrated on account of political persecution. In many 11  Convicted under this article were persons who distributed dissident literature, wrote protest letters, etc. 12   Law on Amnesty and the Reprieve from Sentences Imposed, State Gazette, 6/19.01.1990. 13  State Gazette, 20/09.03.1990. 14  State Gazette, 1/04.01.1991. 15  The 17 March, 1945 was when the Decree on the Protection of Popular Control went into effect, which foresaw strict punishment, including death sentences, for the opponents of the regime, and played a major role in its solidification. After 1948, the decree was revoked, and its provisions were integrated into the 1951 Penal Code.

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regards, however, it also concerned the resistance of Turks and Bulgarian-­ speaking Muslims during the forceful changing of their names. The other novelty was that confiscated property was returned to its owners or their descendants, and in cases where that would not be possible, compensation was envisaged. Precisely this constitutes the key difference with the so-­ called “legislative pardoning” practiced up until that point, under which the confiscated assets of amnestied persons remained property of the state. In the course of the plenary debate, on more than one occasion, support for the bill was declared “in the name of reconciliation” and justice, of unity, and the “moral assuagement”; it was stated that the question of amnesty and the restitution of property was a “question of a principal essence, intimately connected with the restoration of honor and dignity for those harmed by the totalitarian system.”16 The cardinal juridical act concerning justice for the victims was adopted in June 1991—The Law on Political and Civil Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons.17 It is fundamental from the point of view of the inquiry on hand in that it defined the term “politically repressed person”. Rehabilitation was applicable to people who were illegally oppressed on the basis of ethnicity, political convictions or religious beliefs. Furthermore, while the National Assembly’s previous decisions addressed judicial rehabilitation and amnesty, the 1991 law—aside from expanding the breadth of rehabilitation, and thus the understanding of the regime’s repressions—also granted political and civil rehabilitation. Initially, eight categories of repressed persons were defined: those convicted under criminal cases (except by the so-called “People’s Court” of 1945); those illegally arrested; those interned in forced-labor camps and similar institutions; those interned, uprooted and resettled on administrative grounds; those convicted in criminal cases for unfulfilled deliveries of produce to the state; expelled high-school and university students; those repressed in connection with the forceful changing of names; those who disappeared without a trace. During the deliberation in the plenary hall, it was underscored that the objective of the law was to restore justice and to “close the book once and for all on one of the most-shameful chapters in the history of this

16  7th Grand National Assembly, Seventy-first session, December 13, 1990. Minutes, p. 138, 144, 145, 146, 148; Seventy-fourth session, December 20, 1990. Minutes, p. 158. 17  State Gazette, 50/25.06.1991.

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tormented nation”.18 Some of the statements were quite emotional, because the orators had been witnesses to, or victims of the acts described, and their arguments were therefore ex vitae. Some of those who spoke called for revealing the truth, including the truth about the perpetrators. Todor Kavaldzhiev, MP of the oppositional Agrarian party (later vice-­ president of Bulgaria), reading out the names of his murdered comrades, concluded: “…blood doesn’t wash out blood. With bloodied hands, one shouldn’t stroke a child, or hug their beloved wife. With bloodied hands, one cannot go into Europe… We want peace in this land. We want brotherhood. We want understanding. And don’t take that to mean that we’re opposed to seeking justice for the murderers from Lovech, from Belene, from Pleven.”19 Other orators connected justice to truth and memory, not with the punitive pursuit of the perpetrators: “… restoring truth with regard to the many who suffered, we’re actually not giving them anything—they are dead. We’re holding a commemoration for the perished innocent, the murdered innocent, and to the extent to which we are able to, with this gesture, we’re alleviating the pain or the painful memory of their close ones.”20 Later amendments of the law added new categories of repressed persons: forcefully mobilized workforce; underground; forcefully expelled to the USSR; murdered in public places, residences, or while attempting to flee; convicted for planning an escape, an escape attempt or an escape across national borders under circumstances relating to their ethnicity, political convictions and religious beliefs; those who perished in prisons, forced-labor camps and other similar locales, and also under circumstances relating to their ethnicity, political convictions and religious beliefs; Catholic priests convicted in a show-trial in 1952; members of the united Evangelical churches convicted in 1949; the Bulgarian experts from the Katyn and Vinnytsia commissions convicted by the “People’s Court” (the remainder of those convicted by the “People’s Court” could be rehabilitated by way of a court order); people with completed higher education ordered to work in construction sites, sanitary departments, or in agriculture; those whose right to a pension was revoked. The list of 16 total categories spelled out in Art. 1 is the result of amendments approved between 18  Stefan Radoslavov, in a statement. 7th Grand National Assembly, One hundred and forty-third session, June 4, 1991. Minutes, p. 22. 19  Todor Kavaldzhiev, in a statement. Ibid.: 25. 20  Kolyo Georgiev, in a statement. Ibid.: 92.

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2004 and 2010.21 The fact that 15–20 years after the fall of the regime, the legislature loops back around to this question speaks to the non-­ diminishing importance of memory, not just for the victimized groups, seeking recognition, but also for political actors, seeking resources for legitimization in the sphere of memory. Initially, the law envisioned a one-time compensation for the repressed or for their descendants, so as to avoid a repetition of the conundrum of life-long privileges being awarded to anti-fascist and anti-capitalist fighters before 1989. Following the 2004 addendum, however, monthly supplements were after all calculated on top of pensions, depending on the type and duration of the repression. As ethnologist Ana Luleva (2013: 121) asserts, however, rehabilitation was in the first place a symbolic act, and did not tangibly alter the social status of the repressed—they remained, in the majority of cases, marginalized and with scant pensions. The re-evaluation of the “People’s Court” and the convictions it handed down ended up being a challenging undertaking.22 They were not the subject of rehabilitational legislature (with the one exception mentioned above), but subject to revision along regulatory lines. Starting in 1990, the Supreme Court reviewed such cases, initiated by the Chief Prosecutor, or following pleas submitted by the descendants of the convicted. Judicial practices were contradictory. This was why the plenary of the Supreme Court directed a request to the Constitutional Court to find that there was a discrepancy between the Decree on the People’s Court and the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria, the international treaties to which Bulgaria is a party, and the universally-acknowledged norms of international law (Case N 7/1994).23 The demand was turned down with the argument that the Decree on the People’s Court was one-time legislation, whose actionability has come to an end. The inconsistency in judicial practice continued. In some instances, the requests were dropped without review, on the grounds that the “People’s Court” was not a judicial organ—it was exceptional and anti-constitutional, therefore the sentences issued by it cannot be subjected to control/evaluation at varying echelons  State Gazette, 12/13.02.2005; 29/05.04.2005; 26/07.03.2008 and 62/10.08.2010.  Established in accordance with the Decree on trying those responsible for dragging Bulgaria into a World War against the Allies, and the resulting atrocities in a “People’s Court” from 30.09.1944, State Gazette, 219/6.10.1944. 23  Available at: http://www.constcourt.bg/bg/Cases/Details/261 last accessed 20 January 2022. 21 22

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of the judicial hierarchy.24 In other cases, however, the justification was that the “People’s Court” was a “special judicial organ, temporarily incorporated into the state’s judiciary system” and hence its sentences were subject to supervisory checks.25 Decision N 4 of the Constitutional Court from 11 March 1998 is indirectly tied-in with rehabilitation, because it provided a valuation on the constitutionality of the “People’s Court”, though with regard to another specific occasion. The Constitutional Court decreed that the “People’s Court” was “not the court existing and acting at that particular moment as an extension of the nation’s judicial system,” but an “extraordinary court with a time-limited capacity (from 06.10.1944 to 31.03.1945), whose composition included even members without a juridical education, acting for the designated period in parallel with the state’s existing judicial organs. … From the point of view of the Constitution currently in force, the thusly-issued convictions cannot be qualified as judicial acts. Issued by an extraordinary court, and directed at times even against deceased persons, they do not meet the requirements for due trial enshrined in the Constitution (Art. 5, Par.3; Art. 30, Par. 4–5; Art. 117, Par. 2; Art. 119, Par. 3).”26 This decision was the basis for the execution of another component of restorative justice—compensation for seized property. Restitution of Property The decision of the Constitutional Court concerns another meaningful aspect of restoring justice for the victimized, namely the restitution of seized property. In that regard, post-communist countries have adopted laws for the transformation of the property of communist parties into public property, returning to citizens real estate and lands nationalized by the respective regimes. At a European level, an important guiding light is the “Resolution on the return of plundered property to Jewish communities” 24  Decision #388 from 23.07.1996 (Judicial Practice…, 1998: 172–174) and Decision # 226 from 22.05.1997 (Judicial Practice…, 1998: 223–226). 25  Decision #234 from 12.04.1996 (Judicial Practice…, 1998: 193–202). With this decision, the sentences of 126 persons were reassessed—former ministers and MPs (1941–1944), of which 124 convictions were waived because of “clear baselessness of the judicial act on account of objective and subjective incommensurability of the activities listed in the charges, or because the factual positions adopted and established in the court are evidently not supported by the evidence of the case” (ibid.: 201). 26  State Gazette, 30/17.03.1998.

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(1995), which has in its sights primarily the CEE countries post-1989. It also conceded that “under the Communist regimes many other individuals of various origins, communities and religions and many organizations, notably Christian churches, were deprived of their property” and invited “all countries of Central and Eastern Europe which have not already done so [to] adopt appropriate legislation for the return of other property plundered by the Communists or the Nazis and their accomplices to their rightful owners.”27 At the time of this resolution’s publication, almost all post-communist countries had already assessed the question of the restoration of seized property, and some measures to that effect had been adopted (Closa Montero, 2010: 116–125). In Estonia, for example, a law on the reform of property was adopted, which envisioned concurrent privatization and restitution. The law foresaw compensation by way of privatization vouchers, should the property subject to restitution no longer be in existence. In Germany, with regard to the GDR, the law on the settlement of unresolved property issues was passed, which restored nationalized property and possessions seized as a result of political persecution. In Hungary, a law was adopted for the partial compensation for damages unjustly caused by the state in 1939–1949. In Latvia, in November 1990 already, the law on land reform in rural regions was adopted, based on the premise that the collectivization of agricultural lands had been forceful and illegal. The very next year, laws on the restitution of urban properties (primarily residential) were also adopted. On account of the complexity of the subject matter, the laws were amended and expanded time and again. Poland does not have a special law on restitution, though procedures for compensation or restoration of nationalized property have been actualized through the courts. Separate legislation was adopted on the restitution of properties to the Catholic Church and Jewish communities. Restitution in Romania, in comparison with other countries, started later. The first law concerning residences confiscated by the state (1995) protected the rights of the residents, allowing only for the restitution of vacant properties. In the remaining instances, monetary compensation was foreseen, for which a special fund was established in 2005. At the start of the 2000s, several laws were adopted on the return of building assets to religious communities and ethnic minority organizations. In Slovakia, a comprehensive law on the 27  Resolution on the return of plundered property to Jewish communities. 14.12.1995. Official Journal C017, 22/01/1996: 199–200.

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compensation of property and other injustices, and on the responsibility of the organs of the Slovak Republic’s state administration in the competence of out-of-court rehabilitation was adopted as early as 1991. In 1993, an additional law on the restitution of the properties of Christian churches and Jewish communities was also passed. Slovenia adopted the law on denationalization in 1991, which guaranteed the restitution of property nationalized after World War II. In Bulgaria, restitutional legislation was one of the priorities of the 7th Grand National Assembly and the subsequent 36th National Assembly. The question of restitution was closely tied to that of privatization and the restructuring of the economy in accordance with the principles of private property and the free market. This is why, in contrast with the rehabilitation of the repressed, here the considerations had to go beyond the restoration of justice, so as to also take into account economic expediency, and the potential social consequences. Once again, there was no comprehensive law, which could exhaustively address every case. Instead, several distinct laws were adopted, directed at different aspects, or even separate restitutional challenges. The first in a series of restitutional laws, which was granted the greatest level of significance, but was also the most contested, was the Law on the Ownership and Use of Agricultural Land (1991).28 The chairman of the Legislative Committee of the Parliament Aleksander Dzherov deemed it to be “perhaps the most-important bill, … because with it the restoration of the right to property commences, which for so many years had been stripped away completely unjustly.”29 According to another parliamentarian, its significance “isn’t just constitutional, but crucial for the future of the country and our people.”30 This is why I’ll take a more detailed look at its preparation and adoption. Nine versions of the bill on agricultural lands had been introduced, varying drastically in their philosophies and fundamental positions. The convergence of these positions required an enormous amount of effort and time. A series of consultations between the representatives of the political powers within the Grand National Assembly were held on the  State Gazette, 17/01.03.1991.  7th Grand National Assembly, Ninety-seventh session, 19 February 1991. Minutes, pp. 6–7. 30   7th Grand National Assembly, Hundredth session, 22 February 1991. Minutes, pp. 263–264. 28 29

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controversial points, with the participation of the president, the prime minister, and experts as well. In October 1990, the Commission on Agrarian Policy and Agricultural Reforms put forth for discussion the consolidated bill, which underwent numerous changes over the following months. Fifteen plenary sessions were dedicated to it, at which 109 deputies took the stage to speak on the topic. Its broader public deliberation went on in parallel. Prior to the second reading of the bill in February 1991, over 2200 letters containing recommendations were received, and over 200 texts were published in the mainstream press alone.31 When, on 1 February 1991, the law was approved at a first reading with 313 votes (out of 328) in favor, the deputies spontaneously stood up and applauded. Justice was the principle which was consistently highlighted in debates on the law, but its interpretations were different: on the one hand, it was deemed just to return the land to its owners (“historical justice,” i.e. the principle of unconditional restitution), on the other—it was also just for it to be surrendered to the people who cultivated it (“social justice”, the principle of the agrarian reforms in 1921 and 1946). The challenge was to correct a blatant injustice from the past in a socially just manner. The proposed restrictions on the administration of restored properties clashed the purported “ideology” of the law with the mechanism of its enforcement. Aside from all that, the agrarian reform was burdened with the immense expectations that it would put an end to the economic crisis of the early 1990s, and contribute to the development of a modern and competitive agriculture. Within these debates, the positions of large groups of people who felt harmed by the collectivization of land were clearly stated, and their expectations articulated. Many of these people were still alive, which was why the debate could not be maintained at the level of abstract economic logic. The economic rationality arguments and judicial practice collided with the expectation of justice, conceived as the restoration of both ownership over the land, and the prestige of agriculture. MP Krum Horozov from the oppositional Agrarian Party, who had spent 11 years in camps and prisons, placed the highest degree of importance on the fact that “with the adoption of a law on land, we’ll put an end to an injustice, carried out by the Communist Party … against Bulgarian agricultural landowners, who,

 7th Grand National Assembly, Ninety-seventh session, 19 February 1991. Minutes, p. 5.

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through sheer terror and abuse, were forced to forfeit their lands.”32 His colleague Ivan Glushkov emphasized that with this law “we’ll liquidate a historic injustice, we’ll restore the right to ownership over the land to the former proprietors and their descendants…”33 Another injustice from the previous 45 years, according to him, was the exploitation of agriculture as a whole, because of the prioritization of industry. Thus, in addition to being a basis for economic reform, the law on agricultural land was also viewed as a key element of transitional justice. The latter is true in a broader sense, namely because it was to define the principles upon which not only agriculture, but also the sociopolitical system in Bulgaria on the whole was to be constructed—principles, which were embedded into the Constitution being formulated at that same point in time: private property, market economy and the rule of law. This is why the Law is no less important from the point of view of transitional justice than from the point of view of economic efficiency in agriculture—something, which many analyses of its implementation and consequences, gloss over (e.g. Giordano & Kostova, 2004). The other material circumstance, which detractors of this law often overlook, is the scale of the challenge: the creation of legislation in an entirely novel sphere (not just for Bulgaria, but for all of Europe), with a very complex legal substance, in the context of an all-too-fragile tradition of deliberative democracy, and given the conditions of particularly agitated sensitivities and elevated societal expectations. With the law on the ownership and use of agricultural lands, the rights of owners and their descendants over agricultural lands which they possessed prior to the formation of agricultural collectives (TKZS) and state-­ owned agricultural farms (DZS), were restored, unless those tracts had been converted to manufacturing, transportation, energy, and other similar facilities, or incorporated into urban areas. The ownership over agricultural lands which had been confiscated on account of sentences subsequently overturned, was also restored. In 1997, an amendment was passed, which restored ownership of lands seized in accordance with the Decree on the People’s Court and other laws and decisions from the end of the 1940s and the 1950s. Perhaps the most controversial position— important from the perspective of transitional justice, however—was that 32   7th Grand National Assembly, Seventy-fourth session, 20 December 1990. Minutes, p. 119. 33   7th Grand National Assembly, Ninetieth session, 1 February 1991. Minutes, pp. 148–149.

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the restitution of properties was supposed to follow their authentic boundaries, whenever those existed or could possibly be determined. The Law on the ownership and use of agricultural land underwent 66 amendments, the first of which occurred as early as 1991–1992, and the latest—in July 2017. The most substantial changes were those from March 1992, prompted by the failed, up until that point, reform of the agricultural system.34 Those adjustments ameliorated the procedures for proving ownership, broadened the circle of those who could stake a claim, as well as the scope of the conditions which allowed one to qualify for restitution; eliminated a number of limitations (e.g. on the sale and rent of property, as well as on the absolute size of plots owned). The chief notion, which resonated within these debates, alongside the considerations of economic rationality, was the disassembly of the old system35—an objective, which transcended the boundaries of transitional justice in the narrowest sense of the term. In this spirit, the law foresaw the shuttering of existing TKZSs and agricultural co-ops. The idea did not merely provoke ferocious discussions—the “liquidation” ended up being emblematic, marking a break with the communist past, a symbol of which the TKZSs had become. Precisely this particular term, used only once, at that in the Transitional and Conclusive Judgements, was elevated to a symbol of post-communist agricultural reform—the law on agricultural lands was embedded into the mass consciousness of the 1990s as the “liquidation” law. The negative connotation of the very term is indicative of the overwhelmingly negative disposition toward its initial consequences. With regard to urban and industrial property, it was decided that restitution had to precede privatization—precisely with a view to restoring justice. The Law on the Restoration of Ownership over Immovable Property36 expropriated by the state in 1947–1948 was conceived in this spirit. In debates over the legislative bill, fears were expressed over the limited nature of the justice which it guaranteed: only still-existent properties were subject to restitution, while those which were destroyed or repurposed were to be compensated in accordance with a different law. A further critique was that restitution (particularly that of enterprises) was  State Gazette, 28/03.04.1992.  36th National Assembly, Minutes from Plenary Sessions. Thirty-eighth Session. 6 February 1992. Years later, the lawyer Vasil Gotzev, one of the authors of these amendments, highlighted that it was this decision which made the transition irreversible. Interview by the author, 23.01.2018. 36  State Gazette, 15/03.04.1992. 34 35

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bound to be economically unfounded. Ultimately, in this instance too the principle of justice, taken to mean the direct return of what was taken away, overpowered the perspective of legislative mechanics and economic expediency. The law on compensating proprietors of nationalised properties which could not be physically returned was adopted only at the end of 1997.37 The restoration of ownership over the real estate of Bulgarian Turks, who emigrated in May-September 198938 was subject to a separate law. Those leaving were often forced to sell their property for chump change or to leave it behind as a donation for the state, civil organizations, cooperatives, etc. In accordance with the law in question, they were granted the right to regain ownership of the property if they could pay back the sale price. The return of properties belonging to the Catholic Church, confiscated in 1953 with the non-promulgated Decree #88 of the Presidium of the National Assembly39 was, once again, decided with a separate law. Real estate belonging to the former Consistory of Bulgarian Jews (later the Cultural Organization of Bulgaria’s Jewry) were returned to its legal successor, the “Shalom” Organization, in 1992.40 As was mentioned, the prioritization of restitution over privatization in the context of the reforms of the 1990s was bounded consistently and explicitly with the idea of restoring justice. What was left unarticulated, and in fact unacknowledged, was the connection of this process with memory. The institution of ownership supersedes the individual human lifespan, and presupposes a continuity across generations. Precisely this continuity comprises memory’s social substratum. Restitution restores this form of intergenerational linkage, interrupted by the nationalization of property. We are dealing in this case not merely with the institution, but with the restitution of ownership; that is to say, the intergenerational  State Gazette, 107/18.11.1997.  The Law on restoration of ownership over immovable property to Bulgarian citizens of Turkish origin, who applied to emigrate to the Republic of Turkey and elsewhere in the period of May-September, 1989. State Gazette, 66/14.08.1992. 39  State Gazette, 104/24.12.1992. 40  Decision N 225 of the Ministerial Council, State Gazette, 95/24.11.1992. The assets of the Jewish community confiscated under the infamous Law for the Protection of the Nation (1941) were returned to their owners in the spring of 1945. The communist regime did not formally lay a claim to Jewish properties, but after the mass migration of Bulgarian Jews to Israel in 1949–1951, the Jewish quarters of many cities were abandoned, and their properties were forfeited to the state at no charge. Their actual restitution, however, has often been problematic, because of the changes in the conditions of the properties. 37 38

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dimension is constitutive (Immler, 2009). According to German historian Dan Diner, restoring the right to property “function[s] as a sort of lever for memory,” because property and memory are positioned in an “epistemic” relation with one another. (Diner, 2003: 40). From this point of view, restitution is a revived memory of sorts, in its legislative and material dimensions. At the same time, it is also a “lever,” which facilitates the restoration of memory, that is, simultaneously a consequence and a catalyst of memory. Family and kinship memory is anchored in materiality, acquiring its “sites” in the literal sense of the word. Following the rehabilitation of those ancestors who were convicted or disappeared without a trace, which makes it possible to talk openly about them, to inscribe them into family histories, the restoration of property is an important condition for the acknowledgement, valuation and appropriation of family memory, and with this, for the mastering and assertion of an identity. More broadly, memory in this case is not reduced to the immediate right to ownership of land or buildings, codified according to legal procedure; it concerns a past, which has been interrupted and usurped, and which, in this manner, is being reappropriated. Beyond the specific interests of proprietors and politicians, as ambivalent as it may be in certain cases, restitution guarantees, in essence, a symbolic continuity of sorts between the pre-war past and the present. What is being restored in this case are not just the properties, but the very principle of organisation of the society, its ‘memory’ in a more encompassing cultural sense. Not coincidentally, the topic of the memory–property nexus comes to the fore in all of Europe, not just in its eastern realms, in the context of the reassessment of political and ethnic nationalizations in the aftermath of World War II (including the assets of religious communities, ethnic groups that were deported or voluntarily relocated), as well as the pre-war “Aryanization” of Jewish property. The restitution of property in this instance is a form of recognition and restoring of justice with regard to ancestors and descendants in a broader sense than that of the immediate lineage. It is not merely intergenerational and familial memory that has been restored, but the memory of entire communities. In this sense, returned property also counts as cultural capital, which can be used not just economically, but also symbolically.

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Perpetrators’ Accountability—from the Judicial to the Moral Sphere The issue of responsibility after the fall of the communist regimes was seen again in accordance with the referenced template: this time the trials of war criminals after World War II. Certainly, the Nuremberg Tribunal41 is an emblematic example not just on account of its symbolic significance, but—no less importantly—because the convention on its creation, signed by the allies in August 1945, spelled out the crimes which were subject to prosecution: war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, which did not exist in ‘classical’ criminal law. These definitions were also used by national courts after the war. Determining the guilt for political decisions, (e.g. dragging the country into war) turned out to be a more challenging legal issue. In Finland, for example, a special law was adopted, under whose force seven leading politicians got two- to 10-years sentences. In Bulgaria, this subject matter was a prerogative of the so-called People’s Court, whose convictions were much more numerous, approximately 9600, and much more severe—over 2700 of them being death penalties. Although the legitimacy of the Nuremberg Tribunal has been contested, it forged a paradigm in both a juridical sense, and certainly—in a moral and political aspect. In its wake, and to a certain extent on the basis of the experiences garnered from it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Genocide Convention (1948), the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity (1968), and the European Convention on the Non-­ Applicability of Statutory Limitation to Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes (1974) were all created. These important international documents are foundational references in transitional justice, particularly for penalising the perpetrators, otherwise known as retributive justice. PACE’s resolution from June 199642 on the “Measures to dismantle the heritage of former communist totalitarian systems” stressed that the 41  It was subsequently criticized as being the “justice of the victors,” because it did not invoke any of the war crimes committed by the Allies. Additionally, it violated a number of procedural rules, chiefly those concerning the rights of the defendants. And, most importantly, the three categories of crimes of which they were accused were defined post factum, i.e. the legal basis of the Nuremberg Tribunal had retroactive effect. 42  http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fileid=16507 last accessed 20 December 2022.

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punishment of the guilty should not “cater to the desire for revenge instead of justice” and insisted on strict adherence to the rule of law. Several concrete measures were recommended, among them also those which concerned retributive justice: criminal persecutions, guaranteeing public access to the archives of the secret police, lustration. In Bulgaria, like in the other postcommunist countries, the implementation of these measures—and the coping with the past in a broader sense—was dependent, to a large extent, on the momentary political situations, to quote Helga Welsh, on the “politics of the present” (Welsh, 1996). According to her, the weaker and more delegitimized the former communists were in the contest for power, the easier de-communization was bound to be. An example of this was Czechoslovakia (subsequently Czechia, but not Slovakia), and of the polar opposite—Romania, where the former communists remained in power for several years after 1989s December Revolution, successfully distancing themselves from Ceaușescu. Similar attempts were made in Bulgaria, where the local version of the communist regime was critically labelled “Zhivkovism”. Welsh focuses only on lustration, while Lavinia Stan (2013) assesses all aspects of transitional justuce. She finds out that in certain spheres, like the symbolic one (renaming of streets, toppling of monuments, modifications of the national flag) the post-communist governments acted swiftly and decisively, while in others, they made concessions, under pressure from political opponents, external factors, or ‘from below’. The situation in Bulgaria is very much analogous. Criminal Prosecution In contrast with the period after World War II, the post-communist countries never adopted emergency legislation with regard to their former regimes. The majority of them introduced changes to their penal codes to include crimes against humanity, war crimes, and in some cases—genocide. The Lithuanian Penal Code in particular offered a broader definition for genocide than the one that was adopted internationally with the 1948 Convention: as a crime targeting not only national, ethnic, racial or religious groups, but also those of a social and political character (Closa Montero, 2010: 167)—a hotly-contested interpretation. In Hungary, a law was adopted classifying the suppression of the 1956 revolution as a war crime, to which no statute of limitations applied. In Romania, genocide trials were connected to the December 1989 revolution, where the

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number of those convicted was the highest, even though their sentences were later reduced. Alongside this legislature, the post-communist states relied on their own oft-revised and amended penal codes. In Czechia, the statute of limitations for serious crimes committed between 1948 and 1989 was voided. In Latvia, a new Penal Code entered into force in 1999, which foresaw punishments for the advocacy of genocide, for war crimes, for brutality against civilian populations in military conflict areas, for violations of the principle of equality and of human rights. In Poland, a 1998 law established the Institute of National Remembrance, with the Commission for the prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation as one of its departments. The same law defined the crimes subject to these investigations. Crimes against humanity were broadly interpreted in this instance as well, where not only those based upon national, ethnic or religious belonging, but also those based on social status and political conviction were also included and the statute of limitations was repealed.43 The limitations clock on crimes which did not fall into the above category only started counting up on 1 August 1990. In Slovakia, the communist regime being declared criminal was likewise a prerequisite for voiding the statute of limitations and for pursuing justice in accordance with the Penal Code. The evolution of legislative and judicial practices in Romania is an interesting topic. The statutes of limitations, according to the Penal Code in effect up until 2014, were quite short—15 years for murder and 8 years for torture—though in specific cases, judicial prosecutions would cite Article 128, according to which they ought to be suspended, if investigating the crimes were impossible, on account of legal limitations or unexpected/unpredictable circumstances. It was agreed that the start date from which the limitations period was to be calculated was 22 December 1989, Ceaușescu’s removal from power. Despite this, the Romanian judiciary were not particularly efficacious until mid-2000s, when the country was in preparation for EU accession, and a center-right government was in power in Bucharest. Raluca Grosescu (2017) follows up on the steps which made retributive justice possible, underscoring the role of the legal experts from the Institute for investigating the crimes of the communist regime (see below), central political figures, the generational changeover 43  The Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, retrieved 20 January 2022 from: https://ipn.gov.pl/en/about-the-institute/documents/327,The-Act-on-the-Institute-ofNational-Remembrance.html

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in the judicial system, and above all—researching and absorbing the experiences of international jurisprudence. It thus became possible for the director of the prison in Râmnicu Sarat, Alexandru Vișinescu and the director of the Periprava Camp in the Danube delta Ion Ficior to be convicted for crimes against humanity—a category introduced into the Romanian Penal Code in 2014. Both the accusations and the convictions were based on international judicial norms (the 1968 UN convention, the 1948 Declaration) and on the practices of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). With its judgements in a handful of emblematic cases, the best-known of which is “Kononov v. Latvia,”44 the ECHR calcified the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal within judicial practice, as far as communist crimes are concerned (i.e. with respect to the victors). The legal amendments in Bulgaria did not foresee investigations and punishments for the perpetrators. In contrast with other post-communist states, such as Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania, which revised their legislature in accordance with the UN Convention on the inapplicability of statutes of limitations towards war crimes and crimes against humanity (Closa Montero, 2010: 164–169), in Bulgaria this principle was not adopted. Only in September 2015 did the National Assembly adopt an amendment to the Penal Code, with invalidated the statute of limitations for crimes committed on political grounds by persons connected to the communist regime in the 1944–1989 period. Thus, the judicial obstacle to criminal persecution was removed, but many of the potential defendants were, by this point, already deceased. That aside, the amendment was repealed by the Constitutional Court in 2016 after a referral from the Chief Prosecutor, which was out of step with the trends in international criminal law, following the adoption of the 2002 Rome Statute,45 and prevailing national and international practices. 44  Soviet partisan Vasiliy Kononov was convicted by a Latvian court for the murder of nine villagers in May 1944 because of suspicions that they had collaborated with the German occupation forces. Section three of the ECHR upheld Konanov’s appeal in 2008, but the court’s Grand Chamber reassessed this decision in 2010, and reaffirmed the sentence of the Latvian court, whereby it applied universal normative standards to war crimes committed by the winners of World War II. 45  The Rome Statute defines the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, founded in 1998, namely: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. It cannot be applied retroactively, but it does set up the legal categories, which are to be applied to serious human rights violations. Thus, the Rome Statute has become a part of the international normative context assembled in the first decade of the twenty-first century that encourages the removal of legislative obstacles to the persecution of the crimes of dictatorial

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Despite the unresolved normative base, at the start of the 1990s, under immense public pressure, efforts were made to identify crimes, and respectively, to demonstrate individual guilt. The first concrete action in the pursuit of responsibility, in the context of heated public debates in 1990, was the setting up of a parliamentary commission to investigate the crimes committed in communist forced-labor camps. A huge body of eyewitness testimonies was collected, on the basis of which the notorious lawsuit dealing with 14 murders in the camp near Lovech, which were indisputably proven, was launched. The defendants were the camp’s commandant Petar Gogov, the vice-commandant Tzvyatko Goranov, State Security officer Nikolay Gazdov, Yuliana Razhgeva, a warden at the women’s camp, and Mircho Spassov, the then vice-minister of the interior, responsible for overseeing the camps. The trial commenced, despite the issues posed by the statute of limitations. Over the course of the next few years, however, most of the defendants passed away, and the trial was abandoned, much to the disappointment of surviving camp internees.46 Nonetheless, the judicial procedure did manage to produce certain results: the crimes committed in the camps became a societal concern, which was quite significant for the shaping of the public memory of the camps (see Chap. 5). Several emblematic court cases against high-ranking communist figures commenced in the early 1990s. No doubt, the one against Todor Zhivkov, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and chairman of the State Council of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria up until November 10, 1989, induced the liveliest public interest. He was charged with abuse of power and graft, with inducements to himself and other connected individuals totaling over 25 million Bulgarian Leva. The evidence collected (120 volumes) revealed the mechanisms of corruption in the context of unrestricted power. While Zhivkov himself labelled the trial “political”, in public discourse, the descriptor “chicken-­ coop court case” took hold, expressing a disappointment at the charges, and a sense of incommensurability between the scale and the nature of the actual deeds, and that of the accusations. Indeed, the legal categorizations upon which the accusation was grounded trivialized the actions and failed to position them within the context of the regime’s systemic policies. Zhivkov’s sentence, a seven-year imprisonment, handed down in 1992 regimes. The decisions by the ECHR relating to the persecution of the crimes of Estonia’s and GDR’s communist regimes strike a similar tone. 46  For detail on this trial see Hristov (1999).

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and rescinded in 1996, with a reference to the 1991 Constitution, caused further disappointment. According to this text, the president bears no responsibility for the actions he committed while executing the duties of his office, with the exception of treason and violations of the Constitution itself (Art. 103).47 Controversial, as well, was the outcome of the trial against Gen. Atanas Semerdzhiev, who served as Minister of the Interior in 1990, and Gen. Nanka Serkedzhieva, chief of the State Security archives in that same period, for abusing their positions, namely—for the destruction of State Security files. The trial lasted almost 10 years, likely on account of the changes to the political situation, and found the defendants guilty, at initial proceedings, in 2002. These verdits were appealed, and the case was reopened for additional investigation, which was never completed; Serkedzhieva died in 2012, and Semerdzhiev—in 2015. The case concerning the forceful changing of the names of Bulgarian Turks in 1984–1985, and their expulsion in 1989 never came to an end either. The defendants were Todor Zhivkov, Petar Mladenov (foreign minister at the time), Dimitar Stoyanov (minister of the Interior), Pentcho Kubadinski (vice-chairman of the State Council), Georgi Atanasov (Chairman of the Council of Ministers). Over the course of the trial, the charges against Kubadinski and Mladenov were dropped, while Zhivkov and Stoyanov passed away in the meantime. In 1992, amidst much media fanfare, the trial against a large group of high-level communist-party functionaries, headed by Todor Zhivkov, began, concerning secret state aid distributed to leftist regimes and communist parties around the world. This assistance was in the form of cash, weapons, medication, etc. and amounted to millions of dollars. The investigation never came to a conclusion. Other significant lawsuits however did come to successful end. One of them concerned the withholding of information regarding the harmful consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in April 1986. The defendants were Grigor Stoichkov, erstwhile vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers, and Lyubomir Schindarov, vice-minister of Health. They were convicted, respectively, to three and two years in prison. Also convicted were Georgi Atanasov, Prime Minister in 1989–1990, and 47  Professional criticisms of this decision have pointed to the fact that 1991 Constitution was applied retroactively, and that Zhivkov’s position was not ‘president’—two reasons why Article 103 was not relevant.

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Stoyan Ovcharov, Minister of Economics and Planning (1987–1989). Indeed, it was not the massive lawsuit on the economic crisis that drew the most attention from the public, but another, more specific allegation: that resources were unlawfully distributed to the descendants of active anti-­ fascist and anti-capitalist fighters for the construction/completion of their residences. Another, albeit humble triumph, was the 1992 conviction of Gen. Vladimir Todorov, head of unit in State Security, for the destruction, in December 1989, of the case file for dissident author Georgi Markov, murdered in 1978 in London. Todorov’s sentence was brief—14 months, but it nevertheless stands out as a success against the backdrop of the remaining attempts to criminally prosecute the regime’s key actors. These all-too-humble results do not particularly differ from the situation in other postcommunist countries. There, as well, the percentage of trials that ended with conviction was not at all large, and the number of sentences actually served was even smaller. According to available information, in Germany, where the policy of criminal prosecution was the most consistent and effective, 1286 out of 1737 trials (74%) resulted in convictions. Around 25% of them were exculpatory, whereas 40% (523 sentences) condemned the accused to prison. In fact only 40 people ended up in prison; the remaining sentences were for under two years, and were not served. In Lithuania, seven out of the 37 defendants were sentenced to varying terms in prison, and of those, four did not serve out their punishment on account of illness or amnesty. In Poland, several hundred individuals, predominantly from the security services, were tried in court; 126 received sentences from 1 to 10 years in prison, but many of them were for under two years, and so the condemned did not see the inside of a prison (Closa Montero, 2010: 198–200). The judicial proceedings against communist actors often failed as instruments of “post-revolutionary justice” (Mark, 2010: 31), but nevertheless remained a distinct “ritual of truth” (Humphrey, 2003: 181) in the period of transition. They contributed to the establishment of new narratives about the past, and to a certain extent, to balancing the “asymmetry” (A. Assmann) of memory, which surfaces in the aftermath of all authoritarian regimes. In the first place, they enabled the collection of significant volumes of information from documents and witness testimonies, which would otherwise have been lost. An example of this in Bulgaria is the lawsuit on the forced-labor camps, which managed to amass and make public an immense amount of information, which had been inaccessible up until that point. Next, the very selection of who was to be subjected to criminal

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persecution, and why, has got an epistemic function—it created resilient notions about the nature of the acts, the presence or absence of guilt, and as to which acts were punishable. The lawsuit on the forced assimilation of Bulgarian Turks thrust into the public sphere the comprehension of the so-called “revival process” as discrimination and abuse on the basis of ethnicity—a perspective which contradicts the traditional nationalistic interpretations, offered up by the regime. That aside, with their ceremonial form, the trials dramatize the information in question, reenacting certain episodes from the past, rather than merely reporting on them. Their coverage in national media, for the first time ever, made troubling facts about the breadth and the nature of the repressions, the abuse of power, and the actual dimensions of social inequalities, public knowledge. Moreover: in this manner, the emotional norms, or the “structures of feeling” (Williams) were shaped, and a new reading of the past was generated, more-or-less accepted, or at the very least acknowledged. An example of this new interpretation, around which a culture of memory was formed, is the Belene case, which I will further analyze in Chap. 5. The history of the twentieth century has seen trials like these, which have turned into critical junctures for understanding the past: the Nuremberg Tribunal (in spite of its problematic nature, from a legal perspective) and the one against Eichmann; and from the more-recent past—the trials against Argentine military from the 1980s. It is no coincidence that they are considered to be “site[s] for the production of meaning” and “transformative opportunities” (Levy & Sznaider, 2006: 662) for collective memory. Although they did not become true crucial junctures, some of the trials from the 1990s did, to a significant extent, contribute to new readings of the past. Thus justice, in contributing to the creation of publicly-accessible, and to some degree, shared notions about the past, took on at least two roles, in addition to its inherent one—it contributed to the discovery and disclosure of facts about the past, and it created the conditions for renewed solidarities on the basis of memory. Lustration In contrast with the court cases, which focus on the responsibility of individuals, one further restrictive measure, whose objective is to eliminate members of the communist nomenklatura from high-ranking executive

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positions, is the so-called lustration (from the Latin ‘cleansing’)48 or de-­ communization. “De-communization” is spoken of in the same breath as Germany’s post-WWarII “de-nazification,” i.e. the elimination of the remainders of the old regime at an institutional level. The goal of this measure is not to punish specific culprits, but to guarantee conditions for the growth and development of democratic processes, that is, to safeguard the democracy being constructed. This is spelled out in the previously mentioned PACE resolution from 1996, where a distinction is made between attributing guilt, which is specific to the individual and established by the courts, and lustration (or de-communization), which is an administrative step, taken in accordance with the principles of a lawful state, and for which special guidelines had been prepared. The resolution provides instructions for the compliance of lustration with the principle of rule of law. During personnel reforms, the priority was intended to be placed on institutions operating in the spheres of security and law enforcement, which are directly responsible for maintaining the rule of law. Lustration itself is considered most successful in Germany49 and in Czechia. As early as 1991, in the erstwhile Czechoslovakia, a law was adopted which barred former communist party functionaries, militia and state security collaborators from holding high public offices. The intention initially was that the limitations written into this law would remain in force for five years, but the law was renewed for another five in 1995, and in 2000—for an undefined period of time.50 In Slovakia, this law was never enforced. Also in 1991, in Estonia, the requirement for a written declaration (a “conscience oath”) was introduced for candidates for certain high-­ level positions, stating that they were never on the payroll of a foreign security service (KGB) and they never took part in persecutions against their compatriots. Similar requirements were introduced in Lithuania with a 1998 law. In Latvia, limitations were only applied to individuals who, in the period between January and August of 1991, were opposed to the 48  In English-language texts (including in international documents) the terms “vetting” and “screening” are used. 49  In 1995, however, the Constitutional Court imposed restrictions, nullifying the mandatory nature of lustration: it was not applicable if the person broke off their cooperation with the Stasi prior to 1975, it was applied only to high-ranking positions, and could be challenged in court. 50  By 2005, the Czech Ministry of the Interior had issued over 451 thousand lustration certificates, just over 2% of which certified that the person in question fell into one of the categories subject to lustration measures (Closa Montero, 2010: 211).

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country’s secession from the USSR. In Albania, the Law on the Communist Genocide was adopted in 1995, which foresaw criminal persecution for human rights violations, and the exclusion of high-ranking functionaries prior to 1991 from government offices, parliament, the judicial system and media until 2001.51 Lustration legislation in Hungary (1994), Poland (1992, 1997, 2006) and Romania (1999, 2006, 2007) was gentler, as it affected, in most cases, members of the communist secret services, and did not necessarily result in their removal from public office. Constitutional courts in the latter two countries disputed some of its elements. The Bulgarian Parliament passed a handful of lustration laws in the 1990s, the majority of which did not impact the sectors listed above. In the Ministry of the Interior, the military, and the judicial system, a “depoliticization” was carried out, wherein officers and judges signed declarations that they were not members of any political party. Article 5 of the Transitional and Conclusive Judgements on the 1991 Constitution is frequently seen as an instrument for lustration with regard to the judicial system, although it refers to professional qualifications, not necessarily party belonging. In the designated three-month period (February–April 1992) the Supreme Court dismissed approximately 30 prosecutors, judges and investigators, although a great deal more resigned on their own accord.52 The best-known lustration measure was the Law on the Temporary Introduction of Certain Additional Requirements for the Members of Managing Boards of Scientific Organizations and the Higher Attestation Commission.53 The law prohibited individuals who were formerly members of regional, municipal or local committees of the communist party, nomenklatura cadres of its Central Committee, state security collaborators, participants in the so-called “revival process,” political officers, etc. 51  Repealed in 1997. Between 1996 and 2001, the Law on Probing the Moral Character of Civil Servants and other Persons, linked to the protection of the democratic state, was also applied. 52  According to then-member of the Supreme Court and Assistant Chief Prosecutor (1991–1996) Vladislav Slavov, the majority of those fired subsequently appealed the decision, after being granted that right in the Judiciary Law (1994), but none of them won their cases; that is to say, their dismissal was not unfounded. According to Slavov, the reason why several prosecutors resigned was on account of their role in the forced assimilation campaign against the Turkish population in mid-1980s, when, with nothing more than the signature of a regional prosecutor and the chief of the Interior Ministry’s regional branch, people were sent to the labor camp near Belene without a trial. Interview by the author, 6 April 2017. 53  State Gazette, 104/24.12.1992, revoked in State Gazette, 29/30.03.1995.

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from taking on managerial roles at the universities and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Again in 1992, the Law on Banks and Credit Services foresaw similar restrictions concerning appointments to positions in management structures within the banking system. This text was found to be unconstitutional only a few months later.54 The analogous measures in the Law on State Administration, adopted in 1997, had much the same fate. A lustration effort was present in the Law on Radio and Television (1998)55 with regard to staff of the former state security service—they were barred from membership in the Council on Electronic Media. While in the 1990s, there remained a shadow of doubt as to the Constitutional Court’s decisions because of suspicion that some of its members were themselves the potential subjects of lustration (which later proved to be well-founded for three of the CC’s members), in the subsequent decade, the Constitutional Court was consistent in its decisions to nullify lustration clauses. The most notorious case was the diplomat scandal of 2010, when it turned out that 40 acting Bulgarian ambassadors and consuls were employed by the state security. It also came to light that 45%, or about 190 high-ranking diplomats from the 1990s were also at one time on the payroll of the state security service. This scandal provoked reforms to the Law on diplomatic service,56 whereby a lustration clause was introduced for persons with a proven association with state security, as well as a vetting requirement for candidates prior to their appointment in the diplomatic service. These provisions were immediately attacked and revoked by the CC, as unconstitutional, and in violation of international treaties to which Bulgaria is party.57 One of the very few examples of an operational lustration measure in Bulgaria was the Law on accessing and revealing documentation, and disclosing the belonging of Bulgarian citizens to the State Security Services and the investigative agencies of the Bulgarian People’s Army,58 adopted on the eve of the accession to the European Union. The state body established by this law and tasked with the preserving, uncovering and revealing the documents of State Security is the so-called ComDos (Dossier Commission, see Chap. 4). Its members could not be individuals who at  State Gazette, 25/27.03.1992, revoked in State Gazette, 62/31.07.1993.   State Gazette, 138/24.11.1998. Art. 26, #3 was revoked in State Gazette, 91/18.10.2013. 56  State Gazette, 69/08.09.2011. 57  State Gazette, 95/02.12.2011. 58  State Gazette, 102/19.12.2006. 54 55

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any point served or collaborated with the entities in question, who took on elected roles in the organs of state or local authorities, or were members of political parties. It is quite telling that the limitations have a broader nature, and concern potential conflicts of interest. Because one of ComDos’ fundamental tasks is to announce the belonging of public figures to the former State Security, the lack of such a restriction would likely reflect negatively on the independence of the commission, and the public’s trust in its work. Similar to the Hungarian and Romanian situations, the announcement that someone had worked for State Security bears no immediate consequences for the persons accused. It might lead to a condemnation by public opinion, but there are no known instances of public figures resigning from their offices on account of this reason alone. The most-notable example is Georgi Parvanov, president from 2002 to 2012, whose denunciation as a State Security agent caused a media flurry, but no real consequences. * * * This overview of transitional justice in the narrow sense of the term, limited to legislative measures, demonstrates the equivalent issues, which CEE societies had to resolve, and their parallel trajectories in that regard. We observe analogous problems, and the different rates and scales of the measures undertaken. In order to explain these discrepancies, theorists analyze the degree of legitimacy of the former regime, the presence of “release valves,” like relative liberalization (e.g. in Poland and Hungary, in contrast with the Baltic States and GDR), which partially “depressurized” the situation, as well as the infusion of communism with nationalism as the primary source of political legitimacy in Bulgaria, and especially in Romania (Stan, 2014). Understood in a broader sense, the “politics of the present” involves also compliance with external factors, in particular accession to the EU and NATO. Bulgaria is not an exception in even a single regard, despite its peculiarities. The measures taken with respect to those harmed by the regime were relatively well-developed, far-reaching and long-lasting. Rehabilitation was not restricted to the logic of pardoning, but included also civil rehabilitation and the restitution of confiscated property. The omission of those condemned by the so-called “People’s Court” from the reach of rehabilitational legislature (with the one exception mentioned above) was

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a controversial decision. The restitution was more comprehensive than it was in other post-communist countries. The arguments of transitional justice in most cases overpowered considerations pertaining to the effectiveness and the methodology of judicature, which invariably led to difficulties and negative reactions. With regard to retributive justice, the outcomes were shaky, and even more directly contingent upon specific political constellations. The latter becomes obvious as soon as the above-outlined chronologies of judicial action (or inaction) are juxtaposed with the parliament majorities and the executive branch. The lustration attempts, as in other countries, were met with consistent pushback by the Constitutional Court. Screeing and disclosing belonging to communist secret services had no impact on the disclosed, other than a stain on their public image. As a result of this, broad echelons within society were left with the impression of unaccomplished retributive justice (Luleva, 2013: 127), growing into a culture of impunity. The question of responsibility was shifted away from the juridical sphere, and into the moral one. A displacement of this sort is certain to permanently and negatively impact the trust in institutions. The transitional justice measures were adopted in the context of fierce confrontations, which were not simply a component of the ongoing political debate. What we are looking at in this case are real “hermeneutic wars” (Ganev, 2014). Despite the existence of a (relative) consensus with regard to the facts, their interpretations, and hence the respective memory regimes, are diametrically opposite. The rift between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ in the politics of memory is determined by the efforts of the anti-­ communist opposition to delegitimize the communist regime on one side, and on the other, those of the BSP to defend its own legitimacy via the symbolic capital of the anti-fascist struggle. For example, the initiative to shift the start of the timeline covered by the Law on Political and Civil Rehabilitation of Repressed Persons further away from the date 9 September 1944 (initially to March 1945, and later to 12 September 1944) is evidently dictated precisely by these legitimization concerns, articulated, in this instance, in the following thesis: although there were repressions, particularly in the first few years of the regime’s existence, the terror which immediately followed the 9 September 1944 was, more than anything, spontaneous retaliation, targeting the “enemy-fascists” exclusively, therefore it was morally justifiable, albeit illegal. The exclusion of those convicted by the “People’s Court” from the capacity of the law in question—a decision which undoubtedly impacted the setting of the mnemonic landscape in post-communist Bulgaria—likewise attests to the

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central role of political actors, negotiations among them, and their propensity to instrumentalize the past in their own interest. From the point of view of the formation of collective memory, transitional justice is important not only because of its effectiveness, or lack thereof. It is imperative to see the reciprocal linkage between legislation and memory: the laws mold and edify public and cultural memory, but the confrontations in the field of memory, in their own right, influence the character, the breadth and the enforcement of the respective laws. Transitional justice in the strict legal sense has got a crucial role for defining the victims and the perpetrators, the punishable and acceptable acts, through an (ideally) unbiased processual rationality. Its applicability, however, is restricted by the systemic nature of the violations itself, because of which they cannot always be reduced to individual actions. Whenever this does occur, the accusations end up being mundane, disproportionate to the public’s perception of the scale and nature of the deeds. There is an ever-present tension between the letter of the law on the one hand, and the historical point of view on the other. The former requires that a specific criminal act be defined, while the latter engages with the broader significance of given events or actions. Their trivialization understandably breeds disappointment with the non-fulfillment of society’s expectations. It must be noted, however, that transitional justice (with the exception of the ‘trial’ of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu) has functioned in accordance with the operative national and international norms, thus marking the end of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and providing evidence of true rule of law and authentic democratization. As Polish dissident Adam Michnik (2013) has asserted on more than one occasion, the alternative would have been an “anti-communist apartheid”. That, at least, is one thing post-communist transitional justice cannot be accused of.

References Closa Montero, C. (2010). Study on how the memory of crimes committed by totalitarian regimes in Europe is dealt with in the Member States. Retrieved 17 January 2022, from https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-­detail/-­/publication/ a47f10b9-­405e-­48b7-­b406-­fb758819a5e8 Deyanova, L. (2009). Ochertania na malchanieto. Istoricheska sociologia na kolektivnata pamet. KH. Diner, D. (2003). Restitution and memory: The holocaust in European political cultures. New German Critique, 90, 36–44.

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European Commission. (2010). Report from the commission to the European Parliament and to the Council. The memory of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes in Europe. Brussels, 22.12.2010. COM (2010) 783. Retrieved 20 January 2022, from https://eur-­lex.europa.eu/legal-­content/EN/TXT/ HTML/?uri=CELEX:52010DC0783&from=EN Ganev, V.  I. (2014). The inescapable past: The politics of memory in post-­ communist Bulgaria. In M.  Bernhard & J.  Kubik (Eds.), Twenty years after communism: The politics of memory and commemoration (pp. 213–232). Oxford University Press. Giordano, C., & Kostova, D. (2004). From local Nomenclaturists to capitalist entrepreneurs. Transformation and continuity in rural Bulgaria. In K. Roth Hg (Ed.), Arbeit im Sozialismus—Arbeit im Postsozialismus. Erkundungen zum Arbeitsleben im östlichen Europa (pp. 379–396). LIT Verlag. Grosescu, R. (2015). The use of transitology in the field of transitional justice: A critique of the literature on the ‘third wave’ of democratization. Historein, 15(1), 102–116. https://doi.org/10.12681/historein.272 Grosescu, R. (2017). Judging communist crimes in Romania: Transnational and global influences. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 11(3), 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijx016 Hristov, H. (1999). Sekretnoto delo za lagerite. ISRP/Ciella. Humphrey, M. (2003). From victim to victimhood: Truth commissions and trials as rituals of political transition and individual healing. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 14(2), 171–187. Immler, N. (2009). Restitution and the dynamics of mamory: A neglected trans-­ generational perspective. In A. Erll & A. Rigney (Eds.), Mediation, remediation and the dynamics of cultural memory (pp. 205–228). Walter De Gruyter. Judicial Practice…. (1998). Judicial practice of the supreme court of the Republic of Bulgaria. Penal Colleges 1996. Levy, D., & Sznaider, N. (2006). Souvereignty transformed: A sociology of human rights. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(4), 657–676. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-­4446.2006.00130.x Luleva, A. (2013). Transitional justice and memory culture in post-socialist Bulgaria. Our Europe. Ethnography—Ethnology—Anthropology of Culture, 2, 117–128. Mark, J. (2010). The unfinished revolution: Making sense of the communist past in Central-Eastern Europe. Yale University Press. Michnik, A. (2013, July 30). Adam Michnik: We are the bastards of Communism. Dnevnik. http://www.dnevnik.bg/analizi/2013/07/30/2113115_adam_ mihnik_nie_sme_kopeletata_na_komunizma/ Misztal, B. (2005). Memory and democracy. American Behavioral Scientist, 48(10), 1320–1338. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F0002764205277011 Nora, P. (2011, December 27). Lois mémorielles: pour en finir avec ce sport législatif purement français. Le Monde. http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/arti-

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cle/2011/12/27/lois-­m emorielles-­p our-­e n-­f inir-­a vec-­c e-­s port-­l egislatif-­ purement-­francais_1623091_3232.html Stan, L. (2013). Transitional justice in post-communist Romania: The politics of memory. Cambridge University Press. Stan, L. (2014). Determinants of Post-Communist transitional justice: An overview. Paper prepared for the Global Challenges Conference “Justice and Imagination: Building Peace in Post-Conflict Societies”. Mount Holyoke College, February 28–March 1, 2014. Retrieved 20 January 2022, from https://www.mtholyoke.edu/sites/default/files/global/docs/Stan%20 paper.pdf Welsh, H. (1996). Dealing with the Communist Past: Central and East European experiences after 1990. Europe-Asia Studies, 48, 413–428. https://doi. org/10.1080/09668139608412356

CHAPTER 4

Politics of Recognition

It is often assumed that preserving the memory of past injustices and crimes is only a meek substitute for justice delivered through the judicial process. The failures and limitations of legal mechanisms in coping with a traumatic past make the pursuit of truth all the more important. On the other hand, however, knowing and remembering are moral imperatives, which exceed the realms of juridical requisites. It is not just a matter of bringing to light facts suppressed by former regimes, but also of assembling a new narrative about the past, anchored in memorials, rituals, museums, and other institutions of cultural memory. When, in the fall of 1989, people marched along the streets of Leipzig, Prague, Sofia and Bucharest, some carried slogans insisting on ‘the truth’. Truth was a component of the moral catharsis, which needed to transpire. At about the same time, in another post-authoritarian environment, a constitutional judge in South Africa asserted that the public disclosure of the truth was “itself a form of justice.” (cited in Misztal, 2001: 71).

Establishing the Facts: The Archival Revolution The revealing of unknown, or intentionally-obscured facts concerning the violations of human rights is an important element of transitional justice in the broader sense. In the period immediately following World War II, it was linked with uncovering the true scale of Nazi crimes. In the final few © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_4

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years of the twentieth century, “the right to know” took on a broader meaning, relating to the access to justice and the right to compensation as universal rights. The widely used tactic for fact-finding in post-conflict situations have been Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, in front of which eyewitnesses and victims are summoned to testify. The commissions are charged with determining the causes, the nature, and the scale of the violations. More than 30 such commissions have already operated in different parts of the world, each archiving thousands upon thousands of testimonies, and publishing a report based on them.1 The Truth Commissions are unique, in that they hear out thousands of individuals—something which is not anticipated by any of the other instruments of transitional justice. Importantly, public hearings and the publication of testimonies make subsequent denial of the actions of the former regimes impossible, and the victims are granted recognition. The public procedure of the commissions galvanizes the populace, generates discussions, and thus contributes to the formation of a consensual narrative about the past. The very decision to create commissions of this sort is already proof of a political willpower to determine the truth. Finally, the work of many of these commissions connects truth, in the sense of factual evidence with judicial worth, and historical truth, that is, an explanation of the causes, context and structure of the abuse (Bakiner, 2015). In post-communist Europe2 commissions of this type were only established in some successor states of the former Yugoslavia following the armed conflicts, however, they either never became operational (Bosnia and Herzegovina) or they functioned primarily and in the interest of the ethnic majority (Serbia). In the remaining post-communist countries, the topic of reconciliation and unity has been exploited, for the most part, by the former communist elites. In the circumstances of the post-communist transition, the declassification of the archives of communist secret services was exceptionally important, because of the longevity of the regimes and their total control of the information. Its practical aspects related to the lustration measures taken (or at least attempted) in most of these countries. At the same time, truth 1  The best known is the South African Commission, in operation from 1995 to 1998. It collected more than 22 thousand testimonies, around 2000 of which were public. 2  With a few disclaimers, the historical commissions in the Baltic States and Romania can be recognized as truth commissions, given how similar their objective is. Their approach, however, is very different (see below).

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seeking, in its moral dimensions, went a step further: truth was seen as catharsis following the “living in lies” (Havel), as settling the score with the past, when the regime covered up its infractions, and, last but not least, as a manner of seeking retribution for those criminal acts—not so much in the judicial sense, as in the moral one. The first law on the archives of the communist secret services was the German law dealing with the archives of the Stasi (1991), which guaranteed citizens the right to access their own records. Its further objectives related to the rehabilitation, or the elucidation of the fate of those who disappeared without a trace, as well as to the investigation of the affiliation of members of the federal government or provincial governments, high-­ ranking public officials, etc. with these services. Moreover, the law aimed to reinforce the historical, political and legal assessment of the operations of the security services. The German precedent was adopted by all former communist countries. More than just an institutional model, it also served as a compelling argument for legislative and administrative decisions, although its rehashing was made manifest in far too disparate situations. (Mink, 2017: 1017–1018). The remaining CEE states likewise declassified the archives of their corresponding secret services. Czechia adopted such a law in 1996, Latvia and Lithuania in 1994 and 1996, respectively, Romania in 1999, Slovakia and Hungary respectively in 2002 and 2003, Poland in 2006, Estonia—in 2012, and Albania in 2015. The degree and the conditions for access vary from country to country. The general tendency is for the archives of the secret services to be entrusted to institutions created for this purpose, which are then tasked with collecting, processing, preserving, studying and granting access to the documents.3 Educational duties are frequently added on top of these basic obligations, and in certain instances (for example in Poland, Albania and others)—also cooperation with the judiciary. In several countries, like Slovakia and Lithuania, these specialized archives also encompass the World War II period. During the 1990s, laws on access to archival evidence were guided predominantly by lustration objectives. In most cases, however, these provisions were struck down by constitutional courts (see Chap. 3). The only fruitful solution turned out to be the  For a brief overview of these institutions, their functions, the conditions for access and the legislative base, see: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/echr-­ janowiec-­annex-20130116.pdf, last accessed 27 January 2022. 3

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depoliticization of access to the records, that is, disassociating it from lustration tasks. In Bulgaria, the talk of an archival revolution is not unfounded—it is the result of continued efforts to guarantee access to the archives of the Bulgarian Communist Party, State Security, and other key institutions of the regime. The first sign of its advent was the lawsuit against General Semerdzhiev and General Sekedzhieva mentioned in Chap. 3. In reality, the process was initiated by the transfer of documents from the Central Party Archive, including classified ones, to the Central State Archive, as negotiated in 1993. The first law on access to the documents of the former State Security was passed in 1997.4 It envisioned the establishment of a commission, chaired by the Minister of the Interior, which commanded information about politicians who had collaborated with State Security. It turned out that 14 representatives in the then-active National Assembly fell into this category, including the leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, Ahmed Dogan. In 2002, this law was practically overturned by the Law on Protection of Classified Information,5 which did not explicitly address the predicament of access to the documents of the former State Security. Meanwhile, the topic perpetuated itself in a series of public scandals concerning “the files” and their selective and manipulative promulgation morphed into a tool for culling political opponents and silencing critics of those in power. The scandal with journalist Georgi Koritarov is one such example: he was denounced as a State Security collaborator by then Minister of the Interior Rumen Petkov, in response to criticism directed at him on Koritarov’s TV show. This scandal served as the catalyst for public pressure, which led to the adoption of the Law for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgaria Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army in December, 2006,6 on the eve of Bulgaria’s accession to the EU. New conditions for the preservation and access to the archives of the former State Security were envisioned, akin to those in most of the other post-communist countries. In contrast with preceding laws, which foresaw that the respective commissions would request information from the departments which stored it, the new law established a single common archive, governed by a special commission—ComDos. The access to the  State Gazette, 63/06.08.1997.  State Gazette, 45/30.04.2002. 6  State Gazette, 102/19.12.2006. 4 5

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documents was much broader and more direct than before. Discontent was nonetheless provoked by the announcement of the existence of a file based on the so-called “card” (because of the vast illegal purge of State Security archives in 1990), which made it impossible in many cases to know the scale and the nature of the collaboration, and whether one was a collaborator or a pursued individual. Just like in the other post-communist countries, the unsealing of the records created a series of challenges. In the first place, in many cases they were incomplete—be it because of careless archiving and preservation, or of a purposeful sanitization. The other key challenge tied in with the fragmentation of many of the documents, and the concern that they might contain incomplete or twisted information, whether by intent, or owing to the negligence of the authors. No less important was the contextualization and interpretation of the files. The naïve conviction that the truth about the past was concealed within them and needed only to be brought to light has long since dissipated (if it was there to begin with). Despite that it appeared in the wake of numerous scandals and manipulations, in the prevailing mood of marked fatigue and a lack of trust, the 2006 law is a crucial condition for professional investigation into the history of the communist regime, and its repressive apparatus. This is why the term “archival revolution” is not hyperbolic. It makes possible, for the first time, a free and thorough study of important aspects of the recent past. Certainly, the accumulation of new, previously unknown facts cannot automatically engender a new interpretation, but without them, any alternative to the official communist narrative would be, if not impossible, then certainly unconvincing. Determining the facts is an integral component of more comprehensive strategies, wherein it contributes to the materialization of other transitional justice instruments: identifying the victims and finding out their fates, judicial persecution of the perpetrators, etc. In the circumstances of the post-communist transition, where the temporal difference frequently makes the application of judicial instruments impossible, establishing the truth takes on a broader sense from the perspective of solidarity with the victims, construed as the accumulation and distribution of knowledge about the past. Hence the term “politics of truth,” which is frequently used to denote the nature of post-communist mnemopolitics.

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Politics of Truth and Institutions of Memory Two types of institutions for coping with the communist past have been devised in post-communist countries: historians’ commissions and institutes of memory with investigative and educational functions. The former, which are temporary, and tasked with forging the new historical narrative, can be found in the united Germany, the Baltic States, and Romania. Constructing a New Historical Narrative: Historians’ Commissions In 1992, the Bundestag established an inquiry commission for the “Study of the history and consequences of the communist dictatorship in Eastern Germany”, composed of historians and MPs. Its 18-volume report was released in 1994. It contains the testimonies of hundreds of experts and contemporaries. In 1995, a second commission was established, tasked with formulating a strategy for overcoming the aftermath of the communist past in a united Germany. Upon its recommendation, The Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Eastern Germany was founded in 1998. Another one of its recommendations concerned the memorialization of the “two German dictatorships,”7 a turn of phrase which alludes to the intention of drawing a parallel between the national-socialist and the communist past. In Romania, two commissions were appointed, one dealing with the Holocaust, and one with the communist period, respectively (Cesereanu, 2008). The former, founded in 2003, is known as the Wiesel Commission, after the name of its chairman, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. The occasion for its creation was the international scandal provoked by a statement of the country’s then-president Ion Iliescu, that there was no Holocaust in Romania. Its objective was to track down the facts surrounding the persecutions of Jews and Gypsies from December 1937 to May 1945, as well as the trials against the perpetrators after World War II (1945–1951). The commission’s report (November 2004) provided an estimation of the number of victims, and stated the repsonsibility of the Antonescu regime, while also pointing to the traditional antisemitism 7  Deutscher Bundestag, Schlußbericht der Enquette-Kommission “Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozeß der deutschen Einheit”, Drucksache 13/11000 (10. 06. 1998), S. 226 u. passim.

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prevalent within Romanian society. The report’s adoption by the Romanian government is an important political gesture from the transitional justice point of view, particularly because this facet of the not-too-distant past was obscured with silence by communist historiography. The second commission is known as the Tismaneanu Commission, also named after its chairman, political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, a political emigrée, professor at the University of Maryland. It was set up in the context of ravenous conflicts of interpretations, and internal pressure from broader societal circles, who shared the sentiment that the revolution had been supplanted, or at best, left unfinished. This commission started work in 2006, focusing on the functions of repressive entities and the violation of human rights by the communist regime. The Tismaneanu Commission was criticized for its composition (several of its members turned out to have been Securitate collaborators); for its method of operation (it did not gather testimonies from survivors); for the broad interpretation of ‘genocide,’ which implicated communism with the Holocaust; for the controversial definition of victims, which included proven fascists among those victimized, on the basis that they weren’t granted fair trial.8 The adoption of the report on the eve of Romania’s accession to the EU was the occasion for president Traian Băsescu’s famous speech to parliament on 18 December 2006, in which the communist regime was declared criminal— a political gesture boycotted by some parties, which opposed the very notion of condemning communism. The Estonian State Commission on Examination of the Policies of Repression was operational between 1992 and 2004, with the objective of clearing up the crimes of the Soviet and the Nazi regimes. In 1995, the commission published The White Book: Losses Inflicted on the Estonian nation by occupation regimes 1940–1991 based primarily on archival research. From 1998 to 2008, the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity was also in operation, comprising politicians and public figures from Estonia and abroad. It published three reports, focusing respectively on the periods 1940–1941, 1941–1944 and post-1944, within which it performed an assessment of historical events, and fleshed out the crimes of the occupational forces (Soviet and Nazi). The reports of the two commissions laid the foundation of the new Estonian historical narrative.

 For details see Mark, 2010: 33–46.

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In Latvia, the Commission of Historians was established in 1999, with the task of researching the two occupations (Nazi and Soviet) and publishing a white paper on this controversial period. The intention was for it to be problematized as a counterbalance to the simplistic narrative of popular history. It’s difficult to determine whether, and to what extent, the commission was successful (Plakans, 2014: 12–14). A commission with analogous statute and tasks was created in Lithuania too, in response to the rivalry between two traumatic narratives: of the Soviet repressions over the Lithuanian population, and of that population’s participation in the Holocaust. The commission was conceived of as a kind of negotiation space between them. Negotiations were never able to take place, however, as the two subcommissions—the one on the Nazi period, and the one on the Soviet period—worked separately. Thus, while the history commissions in the Baltic States were initially meant to focus primarily on the Holocaust and the collaboration of the local populations in it, their actual work (especially in Latvia and Lithuania) took another direction, comparing the two regimes. In Bulgaria, no commission, or other forum of this nature, and with analogous tasks, was ever formed. Historical studies on the communist period remained predominantly an academic concern, with limited influence over public memory (Elenkov & Koleva, 2007; Koleva, 2017). In the field of research, there was hardly ever a dialogue between the divergent positions (see Gruev & Mishkova, 2013), on account of which a consensual ‘grand narrative’ about the communist regime and its aftermath is missing, and its very creation is rather problematic. Historians’ commissions in the post-communist states were created under pressure, frequently international, to reevaluate the period of World War II, and more specifically, the involvement with the Holocaust. The inclusion of communist regimes, and in particular, the criminal facet of their activities, to an extent followed that same externally imposed template for memory work, by restitching it so that it encompassed the local point of view as well—of the suffering of one’s own population. The latter was the result of internal pressure or the politics of local elites. The commissions were less research-centric as they were political and moral projects, aiming to create a new narrative about the past. The intention was for this narrative to be the focus of broad public debate, and the subsequent consensus was to lay the foundation of democratic development. Because of this disposition, the focus was not to be placed on the ‘normality’ of the regime, nor on its unfulfilled promises, but rather on the crimes and the

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victims. In a certain sense, it can be claimed that what did not take place in the courtrooms, was instead transferred to the historical commissions. Thus, they are moral projects, insofar as they shielded the victims from damnatio memoriae, and political projects, insofar as they created an official historical narrative, which was to serve the new elites, and the transition to democracy. Historians’ commissions clashed with onerous obstacles: the need to combine, on the one hand, their essentially political role as arbiters in interpretive confrontations, and on the other, the professional ethos, which demanded political and ideological impartiality; the need to reconcile the critical approach and the objective of generating a consensual historical narrative; the ambivalent stances of victims and perpetrators. Their work poses questions about the role of historiography in interpretative conflicts, which get entangled in (and serve in the interest of) politics. It is an illustration of the “national reflexive defensiveness” (Pettai, 2015: 1099), characteristic of the cultures of memory in most CEE countries. Institutes of Memory Institutions for the preservation of the archives of the communist regimes, and for guaranteeing access to them, as well as for researching their repressive structures, were established in numerous CEE countries: Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Albania. In contrast with historical commissions, whose mission is reevaluating the past, the institutes of memory address the question of the documentary inheritance of the former regimes (Mark, 2010: 46–47; Mink, 2013). Unlike the commissions, which are temporary, these institutes are permanent (or at the very least without a stated period of existence). Unlike the commissions, which are political and moral projects, the institutes, at least by definition, are neutral, and have got primarily archival and research functions. Their inauguration was dictated by the growing concern about the enormous corpuses of information stockpiled by the previous regimes, and maintained by institutions which still employed those regimes’ cadres. The necessity to entrust these archives to new, ‘clean’ and apolitical institutions was acknowledged. The understanding that the truth had to be revealed was as important, as was the conviction that a consensual narrative about the communist past was possible, based on strict adherence to the sources. Thus, at least in principle, the institutes of memory were called upon to implement the “politics of truth”.

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A model for these institutions was the Stasi Records Archive in Germany (BStU), which emerged under direct civil pressure, after an attempt to annihilate Stasi files. This archive’s mission is to preserve the Stasi records, to grant citizens access to their own records, to conduct background checks on public figures and announce any association with the Stasi, and to carry out educational and research activities. Among the first analogous institutions was Lithuania’s Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism, founded in 1992 to preserve and organize the documents of Soviet-era security institutions, to conduct checks on belonging to said organs, and to assist in the identification of the victims. At the same time (1993) the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania was created. It was tasked with researching the Nazi and Soviet occupations, and maintaining the memory of the victims and the heroes of the resistance. Part of it was the Museum of Genocide Victims,9 which prompted conflicting international reactions. Operating under it is the Commission on the rights of resistance members, which conducts investigations into persons who have applied for receiving the status of victims or participants in the resistance. The Estonian Institute of Historical Memory, founded in 2008, is the heir to the above-mentioned International Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity. It expanded its reach, focusing on human rights violations. In 2017, the institute merged with the Uintas Foundation and further expanded its tasks, including educational projects on the Soviet regime in Estonia. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance was established in 1998 with the mission of preserving the memory “about the enormity of the number of victims, losses and damages suffered by the Polish Nation” during and after World War II, as well as its struggles with its occupants, Nazism and communism; to investigate crimes against peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes; to assist the state in compensating “all the aggrieved”.10 Currently, the institute is one of the largest and most multi-functional, carrying out several types of assignments: archival, investigative, educational, and research-based. With the expansion of its activities, the consolidation of difficult-to-combine functions and its politicization, the institute was transformed from a non-political entity, 9  Since 2018—Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. See e.g. Mark, 2008, Radonić, 2018. 10  https://ipn.gov.pl/en/about-the-institute/mission/ last accessed 27 January 2022.

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preserving, managing and granting access to archives with the goal of generating new knowledge, into a “Ministry of National Memory” (as labeled by its critics), manufacturing a martyrological version of the Polish twentieth century (Mink, 2017). In Romania, several institutions were established, the result of different initiatives at different points in time in the post-communist transition. The National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism was founded in 1993, and has since then published the Archivele Totalitarismului/Totalitarian Archives, complete with historical studies and documents on Europe’s authoritarian regimes, the Cold War, the dissident movements, etc. In 2005, the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania11 was founded, subordinate to the government and coordinated by the prime minister. The institute performs research and education activities, collects documents, organizes excavations in mass graves, and even initiates judicial proceedings against functionaries of the former regime. Perhaps Romania’s most-important politics-of-truth institution is the National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives,12 established in 2000, and tasked with preserving the archives in question, guaranteeing citizens access to their own files, screening candidates for public offices, carrying out research and educational projects. In Czechia, the Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of the Communist Police was set up in 1995 under the Ministry of the Interior—in contrast with most of the other institutions of this kind in the remaining countries, which are independent. The Office collects documents from different archives and carries out checks and investigations, including at the request of ordinary citizens. In 2007, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes was founded. Its duties include investigating the Nazi and communist periods, as well as control over the archives of the security services. In Slovakia, a law on the declassification of documents pertaining to the state security apparatus in the period of 1939–1989, and their promulgation in the Nation’s Memory Institute, was passed in 2002, and it became operational the following year. The founding of the institute was closely tied in with the processing and access to the archives of security services (as in Germany, Bulgaria, Poland and elsewhere). Its obligations include the uncovering of documents dealing 11  Since 2009—Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania and the Memory of Romanian Exile. 12  http://www.cnsas.ro, last accessed 27 January 2022.

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with repressions and information about victims and perpetrators, preserving and processing documents from that period, providing information to public authorities, imparting the status of “anti-communist resistance participant” and, no less importantly, “perform[ing] complete and unbiased evaluation of the period of oppression”.13 In Hungary, an archive containing the documents of the political police was set up in 1997, which was subsequently transformed into the Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security in 2003, with the express mission of preserving the documents of the former state security service, granting citizens access to their own records, facilitating academic studies and providing information to the institutions, which can disclose information about the public figures’ involvement with state security. The Institute of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 has got a somewhat different focus. Created in 1989 as a private foundation, the institute received government support from 1995 to 2010. During this period, an impressive collection of documents, memoirs and oral testimonies was amassed. Studies and documents covering the entire socialist period in Hungary were published. After 2010, the institute suffered from a lack of funding, its activities were restricted and partially handed over to the National Library. At the same time, in 2013, the VERITAS Research Institute for History and Archives was established, subordinated to the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, “with the explicit goal of studying and reevaluating the historical research of Hungary’s past one hundred fifty years, and especially of those historical events generating much debate but never having reached a consensus understanding”.14 In Slovenia, the Study Center for National Reconciliation was founded in 2008, with a focus on “all three totalitarianisms that were present in the Slovenian territory: fascism, Nazism and communism”.15 Its research projects are supported by the Slovenian Research Agency. In addition to research, the institute has archival and educational functions as well. In 2010, the Institute for the Studies of Communist Crimes and Consequences in Albania was founded, closely following the model already established in other CEE countries. Funded in part by the national budget, the institute works in close collaboration with associations of the 13  https://www.upn.gov.sk/data/pdf/553_2002_en.pdf § 8, last accessed 27 January 2022. 14  https://www.veritasintezet.hu/en/ accessed 27 January 2022. On the revisionist narrative of WWII and the role of VERITAS in its imposition see Rév 2018: p. 134. 15  https://www.scnr.si/en/about-the-centre.html accessed 27 January 2022.

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repressed persons. Among its priorities, in addition to research and educational projects, is the aggregation of the testimonies and memoirs of the repressed, composed primarily of the pre-war political elites.16 In Bulgaria, an analogous state institution is ComDos, the Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgaria Citizens to the State Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian National Army, created by the 2006 law of the same name. ComDos is charged with centralizing and preserving the archives of the regime’s oppressive apparatus, providing access to researchers and citizens, processing and digitizing the archive. ComDos regularly publishes thematic compilations of State Security archival sources. Owing to its stature and the relatively-narrower scope of operations, the Bulgarian ComDos manages to dodge many of the problems inherent in sister-institutions elsewhere, and stemming from their politicization. It enjoys significant public trust, given the generally low levels of systemic trust in Bulgarian society. Unlike other post-communist states, the Bulgarian state did not set up a specialized institute for investigating the communist regime. The Institute for the Study of the Recent Past, founded in 2005, is an independent academic organization, whose research field—in contrast with the institutions listed above—does not focus exclusively on the crimes and repressions, but also encompasses labor practices, social policies, cultural and intellectual life and different forms of resistance, etc.17 Because of its independent status, and a tendency towards primarily academic research activity, the ISRP does not fit into the model of a state-sponsored “politics of truth,” which integrates archives and historical investigations into official policy, as is characteristic in most of the remaining post-­ communist states. Working to tackle similar conundrums, and frequently confronted with the very same set of problems, the institutions of seven different countries organized an international network—the European Network of official Authorities in Charge of the Secret Police files, with the aim of collaborating and exchanging experience concerning the preservation of archives, the promulgation of documents, and the execution of research and educational projects. The cooperation between analogous institutions from several states has undoubtedly solidified their authority at a national and 16  See Lleshi, 2019 for more detail about this institution, and the manner in which, according to the author, it institutionalizes the memory of a specific social group. 17  http://minaloto.bg/за-нас/ last accessed 27 January 2022.

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international scale. Along with other initiatives, however, it has also confirmed the above-mentioned mnemonic regionalization of Europe. As is seen from the overview, the institutes of memory are entrusted with authority that differs vastly in scope: while some (in Germany and Hungary) primarily manage citizens’ access to their records, others (Bulgaria) also serve as archives for the academic study of the communist past, and yet a third set (Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Romania) take on an even broader range of actions, including the collection of evidence for lustration measures and judicial persecution. The aggregation of multiple duties is the target of understandable criticism by historians, who take a stance against the conversion of the institutions in question into privileged centers of research on the former regimes. At the same time, the temporal scope of their competences is also different: while some are focused on the repressive apparatus of the communist regimes, others (in Poland, Latvia, Czechia and Slovakia) also encompass the World War II period. The scope and the proportion of their educational activities also differs: in certain cases, the educational program is the lead priority, while in others, the archival functions are central. Financed more-or-less generously by the state, and operating in undeveloped democracies, the institutes of the memory of communism are structurally prone to politicization. While some have managed to retain a certain degree of independence, others (e.g. the Polish Institute for National Remembrance) have turned out to be far too susceptible to political pressure, or have been burdened from the moment of their creation with undeniably political tasks. Most of them were established under the rule of right-wing parliamentary majorities, or rightist governments, sometimes as their partners (e.g. Czechia). The opposite scenario is not-­ too-­infrequent either: the Hungarian Historical Archive was founded during the governance of the Socialist Party and the Alliance of Free Democrats, the Bulgarian ComDos was created under a coalition government, whose leading partner was the BSP, while the Albanian Authority for Access to Information on Ex-Sigurimi Files was set up by a socialist government. Regardless of the context for their creation, these institutions are sensitive to the political constellations in the respective countries, and perhaps that is why they have not been granted the same moral legitimacy, which truth and reconciliation commissions outside of Europe enjoy. According to George Mink (2013: 166), the reason is that while the legitimacy of the institutions of memory lies in their quest for the

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truth, this truth does not result in reconciliation—in contrast, it leads to partisan radicalization, and twists the past into a political resource. On the other hand, the scope and focus of memory institutes’ operations leaves the impression that the archives of the secret services are the most important, if not the only resource for researching and comprehending the very nature of the communist regime, since the objectives of such institutions go far beyond understanding the role and the functions of the repressive machine. Claims of this sort, along with the complete inclusion of several such institutions into the governing apparatus, provoke sharp criticism, despite the undeniable benefits of both the preservation of sources, and the historical research. Criticisms are directed at the privileging of the so-called totalitarian paradigm in the study of communism, which focuses on the repressions and the culling of political enemies, particularly in the first few years following the establishment of the communist regimes. Thus, a mnemonic discourse focused on injustices is institutionalized, which can then readily be instrumentalized for political goals by right-populist and nationalist political actors. This discourse is based upon simple and clear dichotomies, which can easily penetrate collective consciousness and mobilize collective emotion and action, than the more complex and nuanced versions of the past. Moreover, painting the regime as criminal and foreign, imposed by external forces, and the population—as its victim, eliminates questions about responsibility and paves the way for a policy of the “nationalization of suffering” (Luthar). On top of all this, we can also chalk up the concerns about which/what type of sources are available, why it is that precisely they are available, and how the access to them ought to be structured. The answers to the first two questions depend largely on the regulation of the archives (what types of documents to keep, and for how long), and to the last one—on the preservation and access conditions. They, in turn, to a large extent determine which thematic fields are “researchable”, which research questions can be raised, and what the methodological limitations under the presumption of transparency and accessibility of sources might be. For example, some of the institutions which preserve the archives of communist security services are equipped with their own research departments, while for external researchers, additional restrictions are imposed. Such inequality does not foster a free and critical academic exchange. While the criticisms spelled out above are certainly valid, and point at actual risks to the modeling of the memory of communism, the hypothesis about the political authorship of the narratives which are centered around

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the regime’s crimes, and the recruiting of partial historians, who can lend it the requisite scientific legitimacy (Dujisin, 2015: 565) seems to be an overstatement. First, the memory of the past cannot be reduced to (or explained solely by) political pragmatism. Some of the institutions of memory listed above (in Estonia, Latvia, Czechia, Hungary) are heirs to earlier institutions, forged in the context of transitional justice in the strict legal sense, which have, to a large extent, exhausted their initial obligation to provide recognition and compensation for the repressed, on the one side, and hypothetical lustration measures on the other. By way of their creation, the conundra of storing the archives of the secret services and providing access to them, have been resolved. Their legal context has also got a sizeable, though not always evident significance—not the laws which address this subject matter directly, as much as others, which define the conditions for accessing and working with the archives. The German case, hailed as a model for all analogous policies and institutions, is enlightening in that regard. Inga Markovits cites the Federal Law on the Protection of Personal Data (1977) and the Law on the Federal Archives (1988) as having oriented the studies in a particular direction, eliminating other potential research avenues. Thus, “the law helps in the construction of history” (Markovits, 2001: 515). The binary approach criticized above is imposed, to a large extent, precisely by the juridical discourse on the subject. For example, the delineation between public figures (“notables”) and “ordinary people,” about whom the data is subjected to complete anonymization, prompts researchers to focus on major events and scandals, rather than on the normality and the everyday; on the victims and perpetrators, rather than on broad swaths of society. The Stasi Records Act (1991) imparts a moral tinge upon this delineation by classifying the records’ protagonists as victims (“affected persons”) or as perpetrators (“collaborators”), while in real life, a distinction like that might be impossible to make: the collaborator could very well end up being a victim at a certain moment in time. Thus, seen through the prism of this particular legislation, the GDR is depicted above as a lawless state (Unrechtsstaat), and its history appears to be “depicted as a chain of evil events caused by evil officials in which the everyday, humdrum experiences of socialism—usually a mixture of good and bad—remained largely invisible” (Markovits, 2001: 529). Furthermore, the fact of being followed by Stasi has turned out to be conducive to determining who the victims of the regime were. For example, socialist penal categories like “parasites,” “hooligans,” and the characteristic of the GDR “Asoziale” have found themselves excluded

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from rehabilitational legislature, on the account that, because of their standing, they were dealt with by the militia, rather than the security services (Markovits, 2001: 549–551). In contrast with transitional justice in the strict legal sense, the historians’ commissions and in particular the memory institutes have the potential to develop and impose permanent regimes of memory, that is, to determine what will be remembered, why, and how. Institutionalization is a precondition for the resilience of both the research and its influence upon the formation of public memory. The better number of these institutions, however, suffer from their inherently hybrid nature, conditioned by the above-mentioned simultaneity of history and memory. They are research institutions (alongside their other functions), at the same time, however, their mission and their very raison d’être presupposes a narrow channeling of their research into more-or-less predetermined outcomes.

The Emergence of Memory Cultures: Memorialization and Musealization An unchanging and unavoidable way of coping with a traumatic past is its memorialization: the erection of monuments and memorials, the establishing of museums with commemorative or educational objectives. All of these measures are present in the post-communist countries, and they will be discussed in this section. The Memory of the Victims in Public Spaces The duty to remember does not presuppose action as such; it is based on the understanding that in some regards, the past cannot be corrected, and action is impossible or fruitless. This “essential futility” distinguishes memorialization from all other forms of memory, discussed up until this point (Booth, 2008: 252) and permits it to transcend the realm of politics into that of morality. The duty to remember means acknowledging a responsibility for past injustices as ‘one’s own’, even though these were events which the current generation was not directly implicated in. In this sense, the memory of the Holocaust is a component of European identity—through a responsibility which exceeds the limitations of individual action, in a collective moral longue durée.

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Following the velvet revolutions, post-communist societies take up the task of whittling a public memory of the past. ‘Public memory’ in this section is to be understood as representations of the past in public spaces: literature, media, films, educational programmes, cityscapes, commemorative calendars, museums, etc. It is a terrain inhabited not just by professional researchers, historians, lawyers and politicians, but by a vast array of other social actors, with their own, often contradictory, sets of interests. In contrast with archives and historical institutes, this is a field of continuous, at times violent, symbolic struggles over the past and its meanings. It is impossible to cover all aspects of public memory here, so I shall limit myself to select elements from urban mnemonic landscapes, and in the next section—the musealization trends from the period in question. The first, and perhaps the most astounding manifestation of coping with the past was the iconoclastic wave, which immediately followed the velvet revolutions—the removal of monuments to communist heroes, and the renaming of urban locales which bore their names. In hundreds of cities, the name of Lenin, and also his statues, alongside those of other communist leaders, were scrubbed from plazas and boulevards. Other monuments became the focus of heated public debate: whether they ought to be demolished, thus erasing the past, or they ought to be kept in place as historical legacy. The renaming of cities and urban topoi oftentimes meant the restoration of their previous names, which further strengthened the conception of the communist past as an aberration or black hole, and the post-communist period—as restoration. This is the same effect that calls for “return”—to normality, to Europe, to democratic traditions, etc.—have had. In most cases, the fate of the dismantled monuments remained unknown. Elsewhere, they were disposed of in museums, or in parks custom-­built for the occasion. The most famous one is Memento Park near Budapest, created in 1992, in response to the vandalization of communist monuments across the city.18 Despite the stated intent that the park be a location where, using propaganda tools, the visitor is left with an anti-propaganda impression, the latter remained for the most part within the scope of irony. The park itself is predominantly seen as a tourist attraction. The private Grutas Park in Lithuania, opened in 2001, is quite similar, boasting over 80 sculptures, and a museum which exposes the “naked

 For further details, see: Nadkarni, 2003, Horvath, 2008.

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Soviet ideology”.19 In deliberating upon attempts to convert monumental propaganda into a history lesson, Svetlana Boym has asked whether this method of preservation is not a variety of “damnatio memoriae by restoration, rather than by physical destruction” (Boym, 2001: 108), i.e. a substitution, which cuts off access to the original meaning, and thus also eliminates the opportunity to reflect upon it. Apart from dismantling them, the other action taken was the relocation of monuments away from central spots in cities and towns. The relocation of the so-called “Bronze soldier”, Tallinn’s monument to the Red Army, to a military cemetery in the periphery of the city provoked a vicious outcry, internationally as well as domestically. It served as the impetus for the 2009 PACE Resolution on the attitude to memorials exposed to different historical interpretations. The resolution delineated military graves, subject to international legal regulations, from monuments, and insisted not to contort the latter into “tools for advancing foreign policy goals or increasing tensions in third states”.20 Very different in objective as well as in impact—and much more directly tied to transitional justice in its moral dimension—are the memorials to the victims of communist regimes. Towards the 1990s, when the question of their commemoration found its way onto post-communist agendas, there was already a well-accepted iconography and visual rhetoric, validated in Holocaust memorials and some others, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982) by Maya Lin. In contrast with most ‘unknown soldier’ memorials, which, with their ceremonial monumentality forge a heroic, frequently nationalist narrative, this one, and memorials similar to it, are intentionally non-monumental. The significance of the commemorative gesture, in these instances, is not to glorify the past, but instead to accept the responsibility for it, and to express solidarity with the loss and sorrow endured. The very notion of responsibility, a shift in the overtone (from heroic to tragic), and in scale—from the history and the nation to people and families—presupposes a turn towards counter-monumental forms. The paradigmatic example is Hamburg’s sinking Monument Against Fascism (1986–1991) by Jochen and Esther Gerz. At its unveiling, it was a 12-meter-tall column, which gradually sank into the ground over the course of the five years of its existence. Equally exemplary is  http://grutoparkas.lt/en_US/, last accessed 27 January 2022.  PACE Resolution No. 1652 (29 January 2009) Attitude to memorials exposed to different historical interpretations in Council of Europe member states, art. 8. 19 20

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Günter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) project, initiated in 1992. The artist embeds square brass tiles, bearing the names of murdered Jews into the sidewalks in front of their former homes. At this moment in time, over 75 thousand tiles have been installed in more than 20 European countries, making Demnig’s project the vastest, and transnational to boot, Holocaust memorial. The countermonumentality, the multiplicity of meanings, the transnational messages, as well as the repertoire of symbols, shapes, expressive mediums and materials, offer a justification for Holocaust memorials to be classified as an entirely novel genre within commemorative art. Harold Marcuse (2010) follows its development from the post-war years to the end of the twentieth century, by focusing on the sites of Nazi concentration camps. He observes the classic shapes of the early memorials—obelisks, stelae and pylons—which mark the spot, but do not elucidate its meaning. Reverence for the victims supplants the lacking message. This early period is characterized by a return to the ancient tradition of incorporating relics into hallowed sites: bodily remains, soil from the victims’ birthplaces. After the 1950s, he noted a transition towards more abstract forms, and towards the creation of all-encompassing memorial spaces. This practice was applied even in the then-socialist countries, where, as a rule, the archetype of heroic resistance (rather than of victimhood and loss) dominated the landscape, as told through the expressive mediums of socialist realism. From the 1990s on, museum exhibitions were set up or updated, which provided an explanation for the purpose and the history of concentration camps in a detailed and incisive manner, impossible during the Cold War. Silence in honor of the dead gave way to discussions about guilt and responsibility. The new conditions do however engender new problems, particularly when it comes to camps like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, used by Soviet occupational authorities post-1945, where tens of thousands of Germans perished.21 Commemorating the very same locales as memory sites for both Nazism and Stalinism turned out to be incredibly challenging. The families of the victims of the Soviet “spetz-camps” spontaneously converted them into sites of worship, by setting up, for example, wooden crosses in the forest outside Buchenwald. Anti-fascist organizations, however, protested this action, which they considered to be an equation of the two regimes. This undercuts the serene certainty that the place carries a  For further details, see Farmer, 1995, Niethammer, 2006.

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single, well-established and immutable narrative, whose undeniable proof is its very existence, materiality and specificity of the physical topos, which incorporates this narrative. It turns out that it is not just museum employees, historians and politicians who safeguard collective memory, and it is not only civil organizations that can get involved in its formation. The families of the deceased are in a position to populate the sites of their death with their own narrative, memory and meaning. This familial memory exists outside of the political dimension. By individualizing the mourning, it restitutes the deceased loved ones, and refuses to assign them to political categories. Further down, I will attempt to demonstrate that a similar trend can be observed when it comes to the traumatic familial memory of communism. So, at the moment when East-European societies faced the duty of honoring the victims of their former regimes, there were already internationally-­ established commemorative practices, whose semantics and iconography served as a template. In Estonia, in 1988 already, a memorial to the victims of communism was constructed in the village of Pilistvere. The local populace erected a tall cross, around which stones were piled up. After countless discussions, a memorial site in Tallinn was finally set in 2017. It comprises a long hallway under the open sky, named “The Journey”—an allusion to the deportations to Siberia—with some 20 thousand names inscribed into its walls. In Vilnius, the names of the victims were carved into the stone blocks from the plinth of the building where the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights (former KGB headquarters) is situated. The deportation destinations were inscribed on an obelisk in front of the building—mirroring memorials in Nazi death camps, where the names of the victims’ home countries are listed. In the 1990s, a mass grave containing the remains of over 700 people was unearthed in the Tuskulenai Park in the outskirts of Vilnius, the location of mass shooting executions by the NKVD. The bodily remains were relocated to a columbarium, and the site was converted into a memorial. During the attempts to identify the remains, however, it turned out that alongside with partisans of the anti-soviet resistance, Nazi collaborators were also buried there. Separating out the ‘worthy’ from the ‘unworthy’ remains was not possible. Ultimately, all of them were re-buried, and the location was designated as a memorial to the victims of the Soviet regime (Mark, 2008: 347–349). This case exposes the practical obstacles which transitional justice is faced with in coping with the communist past.

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The Prague memorial to the victims of communism (2002) consists of an alleyway-staircase, which several bronze figures are ‘descending,’ every one of them being more crippled and tormented than the previous one (Fig. 4.1). Embedded into the concrete pedestal are metal plaques, bearing the numeric values of communism’s victims: those killed, those chased out of the country, etc. In Slovakia, monuments to the victims of communism are erected in a few cities. In most cases, they represent stylized human figures, which symbolize the suffering of the victims, or simply boulder fragments and/or compositions. Across Poland, numerous monuments variously dedicated to the victims of Stalinism (as in in Wrocław and Katowice), to the victims of both Hitlerism and Stalinism (as in Zawiercie), or to the victims of communism (as in Łódź, Kraków, Gdynia, Bytom and elsewhere) were erected. In some of them, national symbols (such as the Polish eagle) take center stage, while in others, religious

Fig. 4.1  Memorial to the victims of communism, Prague. (Source: Author’s archive)

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symbolism is preferred. These decisions impart different impressions— either heroic-commemorative or mournful. In Romania, commemorative initiatives developed quite slowly, because of the peculiarities of the transition—a sizable part of it took place under the governance of the former communist party. Nonetheless, over 80 monuments were erected, supported by the Association of Former Political Prisoners (Cristea & Radu-Bucurenci, 2008). As a general rule, these monuments are modest—frequently in the shape of a cross, or depicting a cross. Most of them are placed inside graveyards, or in the vicinity of churches, even though the bodily remains of those whose deaths are being commemorated are not located there. Their inauguration is ordinarily accompanied by religious rituals. According to Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci (2008: 282) they are symbolic reburials of sorts, compensating for the lack of a funerary ritual at the time of death. Thе most significant among them is the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance, founded in 1993 in Sighet, in the walls of a former prison, known as the “ministers’ prison,” because that was where Romania’s political, religious and cultural elites were marooned between 1950 and 1955. The museum has evolved in stages, with its educational function gradually layered on top of its memorial role. In 1997, the Paupers’ Cemetery was grafted onto it, where the bodily remains of more than 50 political prisoners were buried in nameless graves. The vast space, dotted with crosses, was fenced off by a cordon of freshly-planted fir trees, arranged in the shape of Romania’s borders. At the spot on the map which corresponds to Sighet’s location, a so-called altar was raised—a large stone cross in the Byzantine style. In the crevice below it, urns were arranged containing soil from the sites of communist prisons, labor camps, deportation destinations, executions and mass graves. As evidenced even by their cursory descriptions, memorials to the victims of communism in different countries utilize a congruent visual rhetoric. The allusion to the memorial genre, forged in a different context, can be seen as well. Above all, to the extent that these commemorative symbols are seen as ‘anti-totalitarian’, they are, in most cases, conceived of in the spirit of a counter-monumentality of sorts, invoking the visual rhetoric of Holocaust memorials. The mournful impact prevails, while the heroic connotation is encountered much less-frequently. Human figures, if present, are never realistic and descriptive. They characterize the victims solely and exclusively as victims. The intention behind them is to express compassion, rather than to celebrate specific persons or categories of people.

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Writing out the names of the victims, reminiscent of many Holocaust memorials,22 reiterates their gesture of invoking personal memory (Fig. 4.2). The lists of the names of the deceased take on a different role in this context, from that of local monuments to fallen servicemen, for example. The latter set is in commemoration of people belonging to the community, who were known to everyone: “the names that mattered” (Winter, 2010: 321). The memorials discussed here list out the names not to deliver them from anonymity, and not because visitors are expected to read and memorize them, but as a facet of a commemorative rhetoric, articulated on other occasions in ‘walls of faces’, a visual solution, also

Fig. 4.2  Names carved into the plinth of the building housing the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius (former Museum of Genocide Victims). (Source: Author’s archive) 22  Walls inscribed with the names of victims are a feature of Holocaust memorials in Paris, Budapest, Miami, and others, including Amsterdam’s “Names memorial” opened in September 2021.

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borrowed from Holocaust memorials and museums. It reveals, on the one hand, the scale of suffering, exemplified by the endless string of names or portraits (Fig. 4.3), and on the other—the act of honoring each and every one of the dead, by identifying them by their name or by their face. There is an obvious parallel between a commemorative gesture of this kind, and the affirmation of the mnemonic discourse on human rights. As James Mark (2010: 42) points out however, the all-encompassing interpretation of the term ‘victims’ has led to their repeated objectification, and their reduction solely to the status of victims, which erases any distinctions between them, overlooks the causes for their persecution, and submerges them into a different kind of anonymity, despite spelling out their names on the monuments. The status of victim presumes a departure from the political and civil dimensions of this discourse, and its transference into the level of a general humanness. But, while in Holocaust commemorations the heterogeneity of the victims does not come across as an issue, within

Fig. 4.3  A cupola of faces in Bunk’art, historical and art center in an anti-nuclear bunker in Tirana, Albania. (Source: Author’s archive)

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post-communist memorialization, it is all too frequently fertile ground for confrontation. There are other distinctions as well. The tendency towards accepting responsibility for the past, and the secular nature of commemorating the Holocaust, where religious symbolism is for the most part absent, which makes them international and inclusive, and their messages—universal. With post-communist memorials, mostly the opposite is true—the symbolism tends to be predominantly religious. Invoking Christian funerary and commemorative traditions could be interpreted as undoing the atheism imposed by the former regimes. It must also be noted that memory activists, in this instance, are not equipped with a readily-available repertoire of alternative expressive means. A special visual language, which is to be used when talking about this past, has yet to be created. The local religious traditions are most accessible, and seemingly most comprehensible (Fig. 4.4). Thus, if we compare the characteristics of post-communist memorials with Antoine Prost’s typology of military monuments in France, they fall for the most part within the category of headstones, which “highlight the magnitude of mourning, without providing an explanation for it” (Prost, 1984: 206) In contrast with traditional headstones, however, those for the victims of communist regimes are often disconnected from the locations of their suffering and their death. While Nazi camps were, for the most part, preserved and converted into pilgrimage sites following World War II (and subsequently into museums), communist camps were usually assigned a different function after their closure, while the sites of executions were expunged or kept secret. This is why the commemoration of the victims rarely emphasizes the ‘authentic’, tangible story of the sites. Moreover, memorials to the victims of communism—in contrast with the majority of communist monuments themselves—are not, as a rule, organically placed within the urban space as its topoi, in central locations or linked to the city’s key attractions. They were not always set up in an atmosphere of consensus, neither with regard to the regimes, nor with regard to the victims. Bulgaria is no exception when it comes to the processes described herein: neither in renaming urban sites and settlements, nor in dismantling monuments, nor in efforts to restore the memory of the victims. Nikolay Vukov has characterized the iconoclastic actions taken against these monuments as an assertion of the citizens’ disposition in the first years of the transition and the requisition of previously inaccessible public spaces (Vukov, 2007: 76). At an institutional level, the approach to

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Fig. 4.4  An improvized memorial to Christians and Muslims interned to the forced-labor camp on the Danubian island of Persin near Belene (see Chap. 5). (Source: Author’s archive, 2008)

communist era monuments was inconsistent: while in some cases they were dismantled and preserved in  local museums, in others they disappeared or were melted down; in many cases, they were simply left without maintenance to disintegrate, or become the target of vandalistic attacks. The Bulgarian state has pursued a “politics of avoidance” (Vukov, 2012) with regard to the memory of World War II and its aftermath.23 The existing memorials, chapels, and commemorative signs were constructed without state financing or involvement, thanks to the efforts of civil organizations, donors and local authorities. The first monuments, erected at the very start of the 1990s, honor the victims of the forceful assimilation 23  Only in 2011 was the decision taken to declare February 1st as the Day for commemoration of the victims of communism in Bulgaria. On this date in 1945, the death sentences of some 140 members of the Bulgarian political and military elite in the 1941–1944 period, were announced and immediately carried out.

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of Bulgarian Turks in 1984–1985. Also at the start of the 1990s, commemorative plaques were placed at the sites of forced labor camps. Once again, religious symbolism was prevalent here as well. The first commemorative marker at the Belene camp incorporated both Christian and Islamic symbolism—a cross and a crescent moon, painted black, and wedged into a pile of gravel. A composition of three massive white limestone crosses, forms an arch above a mourning female figure at the monument to the members of Bulgaria’s political and military elite sentenced to death by the “People’s Court” on 1 February 1945. The monument was erected in 1995 at the site of the execution in Sofia’s central cemetery. Even in instances with no explicit religious symbolism, as tends to be the case for many of the monuments to the Goryani (who took part in the armed resistance to the communist regime in the 1940s and 1950s) the memorials are conceptualized as tombstones: they are concise and restrained; they designate, but do not narrate. At times they include oval faience portraits of the dead, which are usually reserved for headstones. The central (frequently deemed the “national”) memorial to the victims of communism is located in Sofia, in the park in front of the National Palace of Culture. It was constructed at the initiative of repressed persons and their families, with donations from Bulgarian political emigrées. The memorial was unveiled in September 1999 with an Orthodox mass attended by priests from the Catholic and Armenian Apostolic churches. It is comprised of a black marble wall, inscribed with over 7500 names, a nineteenth-century stone cross, situated on the ground in front of the wall, and a small chapel (Fig. 4.5). Above its entrance hangs a crown of thorns, fashioned out of rusty barbed wire, reminiscent of the fences surrounding concentration camps and prisons. The names were sourced from the convictions of the so-called People’s Court, the National Archive, the archives of the Ministry of the Interior; published memoirs and memories of the repressed served as additional sources, as well as historical studies conducted in the early 1990s. After the memorial’s unveiling, and on numerous occasions since, criticism has been voiced over several names, impugned on account of their membership in pro-fascist organizations, or their participation in the persecution of partisans or the deportation of Jews from Macedonia and Northern Thrace. The controversy is rooted in the conflicting understanding of victimhood: while for the monument’s creators, it originated from the legal discourse, where victims were all those whose rights were trampled, including the right to a fair trial, its detractors situate the term ‘victim’ within a moral discourse, categorical

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Fig. 4.5  Memorial service at the Memorial to the victims of communism in Sofia, 1 February 2020. (Source: Author’s archive)

and comprehensible, though at the same time overlooking the complexity of the concrete historical context. Commemorating the victims of the communist regime has led to a rupture in the memory of the Bulgarian twentieth century, the exposure of traumatic junctions within it, the search for new regimes of memory and commemoration. Present in the Bulgarian pantheon are no longer just heroes, but also victims—a category almost absent from the historical narrative up until that point, which was dominated by fighters, heroes, enemies and traitors. Who are the victims, and how should they be treated? A query which, on the surface, seems pretty straightforward. The victims are victims because they are stripped of their agency (and hence, of responsibility): they are passive, suffering.24 As such, they invariably come across as innocent, and induce sympathy. For as long as repression is evil, the victim of repressive acts is associated with the good. Nietzsche deliberates  On the social construction of victimhood see Giesen, 2004.

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upon the cultural foundations of victimhood, in particular the tendency to equate “the weakness of the weak” with “self-denying, quiet, patient virtue,” as if it were “something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment” (Nietzsche, 2006: 27, emphasis in the original) and identifies it as a substantial flaw in European morality. The remembrance of the Holocaust does not call this axiom into question.25 The victims of the Holocaust are just victims: knowing what we know about their deaths, we ask no questions about their lives. It is more difficult to accept that a victim, who in one situation is associated with righteousness, might, in a different scenario, turn out to be an oppressor, that is, to be on the side of evil. But many victims whose names are engraved into post-communist memorials are precisely such, with ambiguous standing. Within post-communist memorialization, however, the same rhetoric about the equivalence of the victims comes through: a differentiation would hardly even be possible, on account of the scale and the stochastic nature of the oppression (anyone could have been affected, the victims are replaceable: specific individuals were killed, but it could have been others); on account of the mass convictions or the lack of convictions; on account of the unclear grounds or the contentious status of the bodies which imposed them. All of this results in a general, amorphous mass of victims, which count as such only because they were stripped of their agency and their fundamental rights were violated. Congealed side-by-side within this generic mass are both the innocent victims and the ‘guilty victims’, the worthy next to the unworthy, the irrefutable alongside the contentious. But the argument which originates from the discourse on human rights sees what it is conditioned to see: it perceives the victims solely as individuals whose rights have been violated, extracting them from their respective context. This argument is irrefutable. Yet, nonetheless, it does not overcome the uncomfortable tension between legal recourse and the sense of justice. The disconcerting percolation from guilt to innocence, and vice-versa, remains. The salvation from damnatio memoriae does not ensure total and definitive justice. The problem with the unequal dignity of the victims and the ‘selection’ of those worthy of being remembered has led to a striking outcome. In 25  Susannah Radstone (2001) criticizes the approach taken by Marianne Hirsch towards “canonical” post-memory, which utilizes the image of children to depict the victims as “pure”, entirely innocent. As an alternative, she cites Primo Levi’s deliberations on the “gray zone,” according to which the space that separates the victims and the perpetrators is never empty.

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lieu of the above mentioned DIY-memorial sign at the site of the forced-­ labor camp on the island of Belene,26 a solid concrete monument was erected in 2009. It did not feature any religious symbols but, unsurprisingly, it included a wall where the names of the internees were to be inscribed. The list of the names had to be agreed upon by the organisations of persons repressed by the communist regime. Some of these objected against the names of members of pro-fascist organisations as they had sided with the WWII perpetrators. Others objected against the names of interned communists: they were seen as perpetrators of the communist regime. The negotiations came to a deadlock. For more than a decade, the wall has stayed blank and is very likely to remain so (Fig. 4.6). Museum Narratives of Communism Musealization extends beyond commemoration, into broader historical generalizations and the formation of durable public narratives about the past. Along with their commemorative ritualism, museums play a key role in the transposition of transitional justice into cultural memory. In this sense, museums, expositions and other visual/media projects (e.g. documentaries) can be evaluated as cultural texts creating resources and spaces of dialogue for personal and collective memory. Museums do not merely collect valuable items—they bestow value to what they collect. By extricating items from their context, museums incorporate them into a narrative, giving them meaning and making them significant in a different way. The exhibits do not just ‘attest’ to the respective epoch, they represent it mnemonically, and they serve as its codes. More than that, they provide hints as to the ways of deciphering. In this manner, they crown a specific narrative about the given epoch as the legitimate one, and shape the way in which it is perceived also outside the walls of the museum. This is why museums of communism, their conception, their messages, and their public reception, require particular attention. In one of the most thorough and in-depth studies on Europe’s museums of communism, Svetla Kazalarska (2013) rightly points out the tension between memory and history, the confrontation between conflicting memories within museums, the way they are used in symbolic and political altercations. On top of all these challenges, an additional one must be appended: the post-­ communist countries are the first ones facing a challenge of this kind: to  The Belene camp and the memory of it is discussed in detail in Chap. 5.

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Fig. 4.6  The blank monument at the site of the forced-labor camp, Belene. (Source: Author’s archive)

invent a new mnemo-cultural practice. The templates available for it, provided that they even exist, are again associated with the Holocaust. References (implicit, at the very least) to the rationalization of, and coping

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with the Nazi past can be observed both within the interpretive frames of communism museums, and in their visual choices. The musealization of communism started quite soon after its collapse,27 in parallel with the debates on its rationalization and evaluation. According to Kazalarska, the two central historiographic paradigms—the totalitarian and the revisionist—correspond to the two ideal types of museums of communism, the “demonizing” and the “normalizing”.28 The first type accentuates political history above all, and unveils the terror, the repressive structures and practices, while the second focuses on the everyday, on consumption, on popular culture. The former intends to portray macro-­ historical processes, particularly in the regime’s early years, while the latter is more interested in micro-history, and examines the later years as well, if it takes periodization into account at all. Most of the museums opened in the 1990s fall into the first category. These include the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius (1992),29 the Museum of Occupation of Latvia in Riga (1993), the Museum of Occupations in Tallinn (2003),30 the memorial museum in Sighet (1993), the memorial museum (Gedenkstätte) in the former political prison Hohenschönhausen in Berlin (1994), among others. Albeit opened much later, in 2012, the Pavillion of Communist Terror in Albania’s National History Museum is of this type. They adhere to the aesthetics of Holocaust museums, encouraging visitors to identify with the victims by way of pictures, testimonies, personal artifacts, etc. Confronted with the challenge of balancing the literality of the documentation and the poetics of representation, most museums of this kind can hardly function as a “contact zone,” where a space for encounters, dialogue and negotiation can be installed. In the general case, they provide answers, rather than raise questions; their messages are unambiguous, and articulated decisively not just by the artifacts, but through their subsequent arrangement as well. 27  In 1990 already, a campaign for the collection of objects, under the moto “GDR in the museum” was announced. These were objects from everyday life, whose worth was created precisely by their being collected. 28  The author consciously applies these terms, which certainly are not value-neutral, to hint at the critiques of the two types of museum representation (Kazalarska, 2013: 174). Outside of this dichotomy, she fleshes out a third type, a “Disneyfying” museum, which exploits one of the two representational matrices, with commercial ambitions. 29  Since 2018—Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. 30  Since 2017—Museum of Occupations and Freedom, with a new permanent exhibition, which constructs a more-complex and inclusive narrative about the period.

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The most emblematic, most thoroughly researched and seriously criticized among museums of this kind is the House of Terror in Budapest (Fig. 4.7). It was unveiled in February 2002, against the backdrop of an election campaign—a circumstance which undoubtedly places it square in the middle of contemporaneous political confrontations. Its name comes from the history of the building which houses it—starting in 1937, it was used by the nationalist Arrow Cross Party, and in 1945–1956, by the communist secret services. The pertinence of the location is meant to lend authenticity to the narrative, much like the above-mentioned museums in Sighet, Vilnius and Berlin, and Enver Hoxha’s bunker in the vicinity of Tirana. Despite having authentic items at its disposal, the museum relies first and foremost on the dramatization of its narrative through recognizable visual choices:31 the ‘wall of victims’, covered in countless photographs; the Soviet tank in the lobby; a map depicting the locations of the

Fig. 4.7  House of Terror, Budapest. (Source: Author’s archive) 31  For the repurposing of imagery from the Holocaust’s representational repertoire in museums commemorating communism, see Zombory, 2017: 11–13; Radonić, 2018.

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concentration camps; collages of propaganda materials, etc. The exhibition leaves the impression of a series of art installations, bound together by the theme of repressions. In the context of the museum, however, this type of approach is contentious, because it privileges the emotional impact over cognitive one, and establishes a mythopoetic narrative about an abstract evil, ripped away from its specific circumstances. This impression, and its deployment in Hungarian political life is one of the most frequent targets of the numerous critiques of the museum. A new tendency has become visible, however, in the development of many museums of this kind for the past few years. As Ljiljana Radonić (2014, 2018) has noticed, a further distinction is possible between two types of CEE memorial museums depending on whether they are geared toward mnemo-diplomacy or national mobilization. Some of the new or reconceptualized museums try to follow “Western standards” by addressing the complexity of the historical situations, including perpetration by the ‘own’ (most often, national) community. Others seem to perceive such a self-critical approach as threatening and focus instead on national martyrdom, externalising historical responsibility. The second variety—the “normalizing” museums, informed by revisionist social history and the history of the everyday (Alltagsgeschichte), privilege everyday life, consumption and popular culture, at the expense of the broader political, institutional and ideological context. The most-­ renowned among these would probably be the private DDR Museum in downtown Berlin, opened in 2006, which wagers on a playful, interactive, hands-on encounter with history. Initially rolled out in far too small a space, the exhibition is comprised of a scale model of a project housing, and its visitors walk amidst the prefab ‘buildings’ as if they were in the land of lilliputians, peeking into windows, opening drawers (Fig. 4.8), handling and examining everyday objects, most of them authentic, no less. Even though it was named museum of the year in 2008, the DDR Museum was justifiably criticized for the superficial, uncritical, nostalgic and even infantilizing picture of the past which it painted. A careful analysis of the exhibition would likely find that nostalgia did not originate from the museum’s message itself, but rather from its reception. Nonetheless, in response to these critiques, the museum was expanded considerably in 2010, and the exhibition’s new appendices cover topics such as ideology and propaganda, Stasi surveillance, the state and the army. The infotainment principle is, however, maintained, which doesn’t offer all too many opportunities for profundity. Even though it might be able to rouse an

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Fig. 4.8  DDR museum, Berlin. Some of the ‘apartments’ in the ‘prefab buildings’ are drawers with items to be explored by the visitors. (Photo courtesy of Svetla Kazalarska)

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interest in history, the DDR Museum can hardly nourish it competently, at least for the time being. Whether on account of the thematics, or the specificity of their expressive resources, “normalizing” museums cede their visitors a greater degree of interpretative freedom. While some read the museum’s narrative through the spectacles of their own nostalgia, others find it too innocuous and exculpatory, while a third group simply amuse themselves, chuckling at the pathetic coziness of socialist living. It must be noted, however, that while museums commemorating other historical periods or events do exist, and they serve as templates for those museums which focus on crimes and victims, museums dedicated to everyday living under dictatorial regimes are a heretofore unknown challenge. The aestheticization of horror through the museum gaze is not new. The aestheticization of the mundane and zooming in on the intimate, however, also ensconce political implications. Here, for the first time, a yardstick for the thematization and dramatization of the messages will need to be developed. While in memorial museums, the duty to remember is a self-evident rationale for evaluation, the presence of daily life, or of figures from the former regimes in museums raises a different set of questions. For example, the Ceaușescu Mansion in Bucharest was converted into a museum in the fall of 2016, which aims to depict “how Ceaușescu lived, not only as an internationally known head of state, but as a man in his own private life”.32 Visitors learn about the origins and qualities of the furniture, wallpaper and paintings; about the family’s healthy eating habits, and about Elena Ceaușescu’s penchant for furs and shoes. The museum’s staff prides itself, justifiably, that all items are authentic, and everything is exactly as it was in December 1989. Whatever it was that took place in December 1989 and why, what the prerequisites and the circumstances of this occurrence were—these questions are absent from the museum’s narrative, whittled down to the curiosities of the daily routines and the hobbies of the “internationally known head of state” and his family. Aside from the powerful impetus originating from the tourist industry, here we return—though in an entirely different context—to the question about the limits of representation (Friedlander, 1992). Bulgaria, unlike the remaining post-communist countries, has no museum of communism. The sole initiative by a central institution was the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia (2011). Initially conceived as a museum  https://casaceausescu.ro/?page_id=3412&lang=en. last accessed: 03.12.2021.

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of “totalitarian art”, it was eventually executed as a branch of the National Art Gallery, and became the target of divergent critiques: for having adopted “ideological” instead of “aesthetic” and “scientific” criteria, or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, for a “historical bait-and-switch” and attempts to “rehabilitate” the communist regime. Ultimately, the museum is still not able to formulate its own concept, and message. The very fact that it falls under the umbrella of the National Art Gallery makes it, in essence, a gallery and not a historical museum, which might be in a position to offer up a cohesive vision for the period as a whole. But even when art alone is concerned, there is no clear answer as to whether “socialist” refers to artworks created in the period between 1944 and 1989, or to those created in the service of the erstwhile ideology. After 1990, the period from 1944 to 1989 quickly vanished from museum exhibitions. The Museum of the Brigadier Movement in Dimitrovgrad is a rare exception—it was transformed into a historical museum, with archeological and ethnographic departments being added to the existing exhibition on the history of the brigadier movement. In 2007, in the midst of a commemorative program honoring the 60th anniversary of Dimitrovgrad’s founding,33 the notion of its conversion into a museum town dedicated to early socialism was once again resurrected. At the initiative of local intellectuals, and with wide-reaching public support, the central section of the town was recognized in 2011 as a piece of urban heritage bearing significant cultural value. The most striking aspect of this process is the positive disposition of Dimitrovgrad’s citizens, who now readily take pride not in the ideological, but rather in the architectural metaphors present in their city. If we do have our heart set on discovering a socialism museum in Bulgaria, then the one in honor of Todor Zhivkov in his native Pravetz seems to fit the bill. Opened in the 1970s, it comes complete with Zhivkov’s own refurbished birth home, alongside a small ethnographic exhibit, which emphasizes his origin from the common people. More to the point, as Nikolay Vukov (2008: 326) points out, the exhibition emulates the museum-houses of the nineteenth century fighters for the Bulgarian national liberation situating the communist leader within a reverent mytho-historical lineage. A two-story exhibition hall was erected adjacent to it, where the gifts he received in his capacity as head of state, 33  Founded in 1947, during a period of rapid industrialization, built in large part by youth brigades, Dimitrovgrad became a propaganda symbol for socialist construction.

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as well as pictures from the state visits of world leaders, are on display. This approach is reminiscent of the Tito museum on the island of Veliki Brijun, which highlights the Yugoslav leader’s international eminence, showcasing his distinguished guests. The museum has certainly got a commemorative slant, though not with regard to the regime’s victims, but rather to its leader. As with all commemorative museums, this one leaves no room for doubts or heterotopias, and instead provides unambiguous, though unsurprising answers. The initiatives of the local communities of Dimitrovgrad and Pravetz are examples of memory being constructed ‘from below,’ in the absence of a consensual ‘grand narative’ about the past. While in these scenarios, the nostalgia for lost symbolic capital is easy to detect, other attempts of this type, at a smaller scale, find a perfect fit within the local societal, economic and cultural contexts without seeking to establish an all-­ encompassing narrative about the past (Guentcheva, 2013). The privately-run Retro Museum in Varna is the most transparently tourist-­ oriented, and in this sense, most commodified and ‘disneyfied’. Taking up a substantial amount of space in one of the city’s malls, it opened its doors on May 1, 2015. The preeminent artifacts are a few dozens of automobiles from the period in question, perfectly restored, with information about their technical specs provided on digital screens in four languages. Scattered between them are the wax figures of the leaders of communist countries from different eras (Stalin, Brezhnev, Honecker) and of socialist pop culture icons. The walls are lined with well-arranged assortments of everyday tech, telephones, children’s toys, cigarettes, cosmetics, magazines, etc. The homepage of the museum website invites us to dive into “a bygone era”.34 The era itself is never mentioned, however. The Retro Museum remains merely a collection, without forging a narrative about the context behind the artifacts exhibited, and the connections between them. The latter, it would appear, was never really its objective. What museums don’t do—at least in their permanent exhibitions— does take place, at least to an extent, within their temporary exhibitions. An example of this is “Without a trace? The Belene Camp in 1949–1959 and after” by the The Institute for Studies of the Recent Past in the National Art Gallery (2009). It exhibited documents, paintings by internees, objects from the camp life, survivors’ memories. One of the 34  The site is inactive, and the museum itself was severely affected by the Covid-19 lockdowns, and its fate remains unclear.

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showrooms was wallpapered with photographs—a well-known approach in memorial museums. The exhibition’s conception was based on the conviction that it was precisely the forced-labor camps, where the regime’s victims were marooned, that exposed its nature. This was also the reason why, despite being devised as an “attempt at the archeology of the concentration-­ camp past” (ISRP, 2009: 9), the exhibition delivered a more general, anti-totalitarian message (ISRP, 2009: 84–85). The 2016 exhibition “Forms of Resistance 1944–1989” by curator Krasimir Iliev falls within this same paradigm, though its focus was on repressions against artists. It weaved a story of the repressions mainly through primary documents: decisions by institutions of authority, protocols from comissions and artists’ councils, letters, etc., through which the imposition of full control over artistic life is mapped out. Next to the documents, the criticised and ‘arrested’ artworks were shown. The more-frequent approach when depicting the socilaist past is through the prism of the everyday, consumption, and private life. A noteworthy example is Sofia City Art Gallery’s experimental exhibition “The Afternoon of an Ideology” (2016). The curators—professor of media research Georgi Lozanov, and author Georgi Gospodinov—intentionally looked at the artworks through “nonartistic eyes”, trying to find out how deep the ideology was able to colonize the life world, and if there were “authentic resistance” spaces and “little moral personal stories, which dropped out of the Grand Narrative of Socialism” (Lozanov & Gospodinov, 2016: 27). Their selection displayed an everyday life scarred by “social melancholy” and an absence of a sense of meaning. This was an unorthodox situation, wherein the gaze towards an otherwise “normalizing” topic managed, to a certain degree, to counter normalization. The lack of a museum of socialism is also offset, to a certain extent, within virtual spaces. The internet provides many opportunities for memory ‘from below’, both in terms of who its actors might be (different organizations, groups, even private persons), and with regard to the content—what is deemed worthy of remembering, and why. From this point out, it is not all too difficult to sight the two ideologically-distinct museum narratives. The website https://desebg.com/ (State Security), maintained by investigative journalist Hristo Hristov, features a special column titled “Virtual Museum of Bulgarian Communism”. In this subsection, the author puts up photographs, documents, personal narratives. The ‘museum’ label is also claimed by the SOCMUS website, created by photographer Nikola Mihov, and architects Valeri Gyurov and Martin Angelov.

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The authors titled their project “a virtual museum of socialism”. It is made up of graphic-design works from the 1944–1989 period: film posters and theater playbills, book covers, logos, stamps, etc. The artifacts are arranged down a straight line, against a white background, which the visitors view sequentially, by toggling the arrow keys on their keyboard. This gives the feel of a gallery or a collection. It lacks contextualization, and therefore, a museum narrative as well. Much like in the Museum of Socialist Art, the authors uphold artistic integrity as the only criterion. Thus, SOCMUS complements the above-mentioned museum, but also mirrors the shortcomings of its conception. Without claiming to be a museum, other online initiatives approximate in meanings the ones assessed above. The Instagram project Imaginary Archive by Tihomir Stoyanov is one such example, which deals in so-called “found photography”—a popular art practice, which utilizes found/collected photos. Without aiming to investigate socialism’s visual images, Stoyanov discovers precisely them, on account of the nature and origin of his materials. His exhibition “Stoyanovi Family” (2018) chronicles the history of a fictional family from the 1940s until the 1980s. As the author himself acknowledges, the better part of the photos in his collections come from family albums, and depict the “more positive” side of the everyday, that which people found to be worthy of capturing and remembering. Hence, too, its normalizing impression. The website “Our Childhood” is very different in both conception and organization, yet its creator concedes that it can be viewed as a virtual museum of socialism. Unlike most of the initiatives covered so far, this site relies on visitors’ active participation in generating not just content, but a community as well. From its start in 2007, over 3000 participants have registered. The topics are connected exclusively with the childhood of the 1960s to the 1980s. The discourse on the website forum is described as “nostalgic and relaxing,” “unstrenuous” (the ban on politicization is a fundamental rule, along with bans on advertising, foul language and insults): endearing or humorous memories and pictures are published, images of children’s toys and books, the lyrics to children’s songs, etc. The archive is colossal in content, and varied in topics, gingerly sidestepping any reflection upon, or the mere mention of, socialism. Thus, these childhood memories inhabit a contextual vacuum, forming a cloud of signifyers linked only with one-another, and not with the signified. Contextual isolation and the miniaturization of experiences imparts, unavoidably, a normalizing effect.

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In contrast with the websites where the hands-off interpretative approach acts to normalize, the last website, which shall be mentioned within this brief overview, defines itself as a “virtual monument” to the victims of communism in Bulgaria.35 Created in 2009, it publishes the names and brief biographical information of those killed or repressed by the communist regime, sourced from archives, studies, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, state and private collections. At this point, more than 23 thousand names have been uploaded, including those of Turks and Muslims, repressed during the assimilation campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s. The project is simultaneously a memorial, in listing out the names of victims, and a thematic archive, in that it consolidates all known information about them. The construction of memory of the 1944–1989 period takes place in other spheres as well. During the 1990s, evidence of the terror in the wake of 9-September coup, which had long been kept hushed, finally began to emerge, as did the memories of those repressed by the regime, imprisoned or interned in labor camps. Several periodicals dedicated special columns to this evidence. The memoirs of former camp internees were published, and documentaries were produced.36 The testimonies of eyewitnesses, and those harmed by the regime, which had previously been unknown, engaged the public both emotionally and morally. Undeniable proof of the confrontations on the field of memory was the avalanche of memoirs and autobiographical books by members of communist elites, which emerged at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. Although these were often critical, with regard to both specific individuals, and the “system” as a whole, because of its bureaucratic nature, its centralization and its fruitless reforms, these texts did not allow room for any alternatives to the one-party rule, “democratic” centralism, the leading role of the party and the dominant ideology. Their authors often ended up in the ambivalent position of simultaneously having been ‘in the regime’ and slighted by it (Daskalov, 2004; Kiossev, 2017). Memorials, museums, memoirs, documentaries, and the media’s focus on the topic of the communist past (often referenced using the vernacular shorthand “sotz”) outline a broader field, within which the cultures of memory are formed. Its comprehensive study goes beyond the scope of this book. But even from the cursory glance provided this far, it becomes  http://www.victimsofcommunism.bg, last accessed: 12.02.2018.  See the following chapter for details.

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clear that in Bulgaria, reaching a consensus about the recent past was problematic. There are no spaces for dialogue, which would allow for the constitution of a broadly acceptable narrative. The institutions’ politics of avoidance provides room for differing, to the point of incompatibility, vernacular memories. The digital turn, in its own right, has led to the deinstitutionalization of museums and archives, which have now become an entitlement of individuals and groups, articulating and legitimizing their own memories. In this fragmented space, not only is no dialogue allowed to take place; even mutual contestation is rare. The impression is that almost nobody, on almost no occasion, ever leaves their echochamber, where they are surrounded by people who hold the same opinion, subscribe to the same narrative of the past, and position their own memories within the same set of semantic frameworks. Looping back to the beginning of this book, the impression is of an archipelago of memories, fragmented and isolated from one-another. The better part of the actors in this space seem to value more their freedom to express themselves (which they do), than the necessity to hear and to respond to others. Given the lack of institutionalization of any kind whatsoever, the archipelago has no center, nor any conduits between the islands. * * * The examination of parallel, and oftentimes interconnected processes for coping with the communist past in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc makes it possible to contextualize the Bulgarian case, so that it might become clear that it is in no way extraordinary, abnormal, misguided, or failed. The post-communist states (except East Germany) find themselves in all-too similar situations, resolving the very same set of tasks, and applying, in broad strokes, the same approaches, more or less successfully. It can be said that there is a transfer and absorption not just of judicial and institutional models, but also of “cultural tools” (Wertsch), including images, tropes and plots. At the same time, certain peculiarities stand out. The Bulgarian transition started out with a ‘palace coup’, and continued with negotiations. This scenario, as well as the victory of the communist party’s successor in the first democratic elections guaranteed elites a substantial continuity. (The Romanian case is similar, although there, the December 1989 conflict which left over 1000 dead, denoted a historical rupture, at a symbolic level at least.) This continuity defined the context, within which politics of memory were formed. The struggle to impose a legitimate

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vision for the past mobilized symbolic capital: it originated from a selection of discursive strategies, though its success was contingent not so much upon the qualities of this discourse, as on its power to mobilize, that is, its capacity to attract different groups, which could identify with its dichotomies. Like in the other post-communist states, the mobilization of the symbolic capital of anti-communism was realized, in large part, through the politics of memory. As in those countries, so too in Bulgaria the attitude towards the past was one of the cardinal divisive lines, and— perplexing at first glance—continues to be so for years on end. As it seems, this is a trend characteristic of the post-communist period, in contrast to Southern European societies breaking free of their authoritarian regimes earlier in the twentieth century: there, the quality of democracy is not associated with the intensity of memory politics. The processes of coping with the past unfolded on a field of tension between political pragmatism, and the imperative for legal and moral justice. The formulation of a ‘grand narrative’ about the communist past developed quite hesitantly. From the start of the 1990s, Bulgarian public sphere, much like that in the other CEE countries, was inhabited by social actors, some of whom contributed to the articulation of the narrative about communist repressions. But the results of transitional justice came in far below expectations, which led to the perception of a deficit of justice and the incompleteness, the failure even, of the transition—and hence, a certain exhaustion and resignation prevalent throughout society. On the other hand, the consensus that formed around the dual-objective of joining NATO and the EU, and the expectations associated with these actions, shifted the attention away from the work of memory. Thus, Bulgaria’s pathway towards the EU and NATO circumvented the possible dialogue about the nation’s communist past, as well as the potential societal consensus resulting from such a dialogue. It can be asserted, that up until now Bulgaria has adhered more-closely to the Spanish model in the aftermath of Franco’s death, where the consensus of silence lasted almost an entire generation, and was broken only in the past few years. The Bulgarian consensus to maintain the silence was dictated by pragmatic considerations, connected to the need for compromise between political powers. But it is not just that. Communism also easily lapsed from myth-history in its Bulgarian versions, based on victimhood nationalism or on the affirmation of national pride on the basis of concordant historical periods: antiquity, the middle ages, and the struggle for national liberation.

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This condition might appear, at a first glance, conducive to the enactment of a free and open debate about the past, but only at first glance. While there no longer are serious obstacles standing in the way of historical research, public debate has reached a post-polemic phase—inhibited by resignation and quasi-reconciliation, grounded in avoiding the topic rather than in recognition and (the readiness for) forgiveness, which precedes true reconciliation. What is missing are the moral and normative conditions, imperative for public debate. The simultaneity of history and memory does not necessarily mean their convergence. History, as a deliberated, explanatory, falsifiable and critical narrative about the past does not appear to tangibly influence memory—a shared and emotionally-­cushioned narrative of the past, frequently ‘liturgical’, that is, quasi-sacred. The accumulated results of serious research have not (yet?) been converted into guideposts with regard to the values upon which the social contract must rest in the present day. Even if the creation of a mnemonic canon were possible, one hasn’t yet sprung into existence. In this chapter, I made an attempt to cover, in the first place, so-called official memory, or the contribution by institutions to the formation of cultures of memory, and subsequently to zoom out on other cultural practices, which are not necessarily a translation of, or an immediate reaction to the institutional strategies. The different spheres within which the politics of memory are formulated and mnemonic narratives are forged, rarely come into direct relation with one-another, but they contribute in different ways to the conceptualization of communism as a memory site—a common site of memory, but not a site of common memory. Further on, I shall take an in-depth look at the alternative meanings, which are invested into this common site of memory. To accomplish this, I shall pivot to vernacular memory, i.e. the communicative and biographical memory, in the context of two types of mnemonic communities—local and generational. I shall abandon the overview perspective, which has been applied thus far, and I shall concentrate on the two narratives about the communist past— the tragic, and the nostalgic, fleshed out in concrete case studies.

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Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books. Cesereanu, R. (2008). The final report on the Holocaust and the final report on the Communist dictatorship in Romania. East European Politics and Societies, 22(2), 270–281. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325408315764 Cristea, G., & Radu-Bucurenci, S. (2008). Raising the cross. Exorcising Romania’s Communist past in museums, memorials and monuments. In O. Sarkisova & P. Apor (Eds.), Past for the eyes: East European representations of Communism in cinema and museums after 1989 (pp.  275–305). Central European University Press. Daskalov, R. (2004). Se souvenir du socialisme: le socialisme dans les mémoires de quelques grands fonctionnaires communists. Divinatio, 19, 41–51. Dujisin, Z. (2015). Post-Communist Europe: On the path to a regional regime of remembrance? In M. Kopeček & P. Wciślik (Eds.), Thinking through transition: Liberal democracy, authoritarian pasts, and intellectual history in East Central Europe after 1989 (pp. 553–586). Central European University Press. Elenkov, I., & Koleva, D. (2007). Historical studies in post-communist Bulgaria. Between academic standards and political agendas. In S. Antohi, B. Trencsenyi, & P.  Apor (Eds.), Narratives unbound. Historical studies in post-Communist Eastern Europe (pp. 409–486). Central European University Press. Farmer, S. (1995). Symbols that face two ways: Commemorating the victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen. Representations, 49, 97–119. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928751 Friedlander, S. (Ed.). (1992). Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the “final solution”. Harvard University Press. Giesen, B. (2004). Triumph and trauma. Routledge. Gruev, M., & Mishkova, D. (Eds.). (2013). Bulgarskiat kommunism: debati i interpretatsii. CAS/Riva. Guentcheva, R. (2013). Napravi si sam muzei na sotsializma. Seminar_BG, 8. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from http://www.seminar-­bg.eu/spisanie-­ seminar-­bg/broy8/item/374-­napravi-­si-­sam-­muzei-­na-­sotzializma.html#ref7 Horvath, Z. K. (2008). The redistribution of the memory of socialism. Identity formations of the “survivors” in Hungary after 1989. In O. Sarkisova & P. Apor (Eds.), Past for the eyes: East European representations of Communism in cinema and museums after 1989 (pp. 247–273). Central European University Press. ISRP. (2009). Institute for the Study of the Recent Past, Bez sleda? Lagerat Belene 1949–1959 and after… Catalog na izlozhba. ISRP/Ciella. Kazalarska, S. (2013). Muzeiat na komunizma mezhdu pametta i istoriata, politikata i pazara. St. Kliment Ohridski University Press. Kiossev, A. (2017). Zhivot v nesvobodata: pet usporedni zhivotopisa. In A. Kiossev & D. Koleva (Eds.), Trudniat razkaz. Modeli na avtobiografichno razkazvane za sotsializma mezhdu ustnoto i pismenoto (pp. 243–278). ISRP/Ciella.

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Koleva, D. (2017). On the (in)convertibility of national memory into European legitimacy: The Bulgarian case. In O.  Luthar (Ed.), Of red dragons and evil spirits: Post-Communist historiography between democratization and new politics of history (pp. 11–31). Central European University Press. Lleshi, S. (2019). Reconstructing the past in a state-mandated historical memory institute: The case of Albania. European Politics and Society, 21(3), 277–291. https://doi.org/10.1080/23745118.2019.1645420 Lozanov, G., & Gospodinov, G. (2016). The afternoon of an ideology. Sofia City Art Gallery. Marcuse, H. (2010). Holocaust memorials: The emergence of a genre. The American Historical Review, 115(1), 53–89. https://doi.org/10.1086/ AHR.115.1.53 Mark, J. (2008). Containing fascism. History in post-communist Baltic occupation and genocide museums. In O. Sarkisova & P. Apor (Eds.), Past for the eyes: East European representations of Communism in cinema and museums after 1989 (pp. 335–369). Central European University Press. Mark, J. (2010). The unfinished revolution: Making sense of the Communist past in Central-Eastern Europe. Yale University Press. Markovits, I. (2001). Selective memory: How the law affects what we remember and forget about the past: The case of East Germany. Law and Society Review, 35(3), 513–563. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.2307/3185395 Mink, G. (2013). Institutions of national memory in post-communist Europe: From transitional justice to political uses of biographies (1989–2010). In G.  Mink et  al. (Eds.), History, Memory and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe (pp. 155–170). Palgrave Macmillan. Mink, G. (2017). Is there a new institutional response to the crimes of Communism? National memory agencies in post-Communist countries: The Polish case (1998–2014), with references to East Germany. Nationalities Papers, 45(6), 1013–1027. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2017.1360853 Misztal, B. (2001). Legal attempts to construct collective memory: The necessity and difficulties of aiming for both truth and sollidarity. Polish Sociological Review, 133, 61–75. Nadkarni, M. (2003). The death of socialism and the afterlife of its monuments: Making and marketing the past in Budapest’s Statue Park museum. In K.  Hodgkin & S.  Radstone (Eds.), Contested pasts: The politics of memory (pp. 193–207). Routledge. Niethammer, L. (2006). Buchenwald: KZ und NKWD-Lager. Der Zeithistoriker im Konflikt mit Zeitzeugen. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 54(12), 1039–1053. Nietzsche, F. 2006. On the genealogy of morality (ed. K.  Ansell-Pearson). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published in 1887).

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Pettai, E.-C. (2015). Negotiating history for reconciliation: A comparative evaluation of the Baltic presidential commissions. Europe-Asia Studies, 67(7), 1079–1101. https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2015.1064862 Plakans, A. (2014). The commission of historians in Latvia: 1999 to the present. Journal of Baltic Studies, 49(1), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/0162977 8.2014.937905 Prost, A. (1984). Les monuments aux morts. In P.  Nora (Ed.), Les lieux de mémoire. I. La République (pp. 195–225). Gallimard. Radonić, L. (2014). Slovak and Croatian invocation of Europe: The museum of the Slovak National Uprising and the Jasenovac Memorial Museum. Nationalities Papers, 42(3), 489–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/0090599 2.2013.867935 Radonić, L. (2018). From “double genocide” to “the new Jews”: Holocaust, genocide and mass violence in post-Communist memorial museums. Journal of Genocide Research, 20(4), 510–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462352 8.2018.1522831 Radstone, S. (2001). Social bonds and psychical order: Testimonies. Cultural Values, 5(1), 59–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580109367221 Rév, I. (2018). Liberty square, Budapest: How Hungary won the Second World War. Journal of Genocide Research, 20(4), 607–623. https://doi. org/10.1080/14623528.2018.1522820 Vukov, N. (2007). Refigured memories, unchanged representations. Post-socialist monumental discourse in Bulgaria. In U.  Brunnbaner & S.  Troebst (Eds.), Zwischen Amnesie und Nostalgie. Die Erinnerung an den Kommunismus in Südosteuropa (pp. 71–86). Böhlau Verlag. Vukov, N. (2008). The ‘unmemorable’ and the ‘unforgettable’: ‘Museumizing’ the socialist past in post-1989 Bulgaria. In O. Sarkisova & P. Apor (Eds.), Past for the eyes: East European representations of Communism in cinema and museums after 1989 (pp. 307–334). Central European University Press. Vukov, N. (2012). The museum of socialist art in Sofia and the politics of avoidance. Cultures of History Forum. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https:// www.cultures-­of-­history.uni-­jena.de/exhibitions/the-­museum-­of-­socialist-­art-­ in-­sofia-­and-­the-­politics-­of-­avoidance; https://doi.org/10.25626/0002 Winter, J. (2010). Sites of memory. In S. Radstone & B. Schwarz (Eds.), Memory: Histories, theories, debates (pp. 312–324). Fordham University Press. Zombory, M. (2017). The birth of the memory of Communism: Memorial museums in Europe. Nationalities Papers, 45(6), 1028–1046. https://doi. org/10.1080/00905992.2017.1339680

PART II

Memory Narratives and Mnemonic Communities

CHAPTER 5

‘Thorns in the Spirit’: Traumatic Narratives

“Thorns in the spirit” is how American psychologist William James referred to psychic traumata, that is, recollections of a shocking event which have left one’s consciousness stunned (W.J., 1894: 199). His text is a brief review of Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s article on hysteria, conceptualized as an “illness of the memory”. Precisely through Freud’s work, the term trauma has worked its way from medicine into psychology, and further still into the study of memory, where it has taken on a central role, and has become the subject of a huge volume of scientific literature.1 In this chapter, I plan to examine the traumatic narrative of communism, and its articulation in the instance perhaps most emblematic to Bulgaria— the Belene forced-labor camp. To start off with, I will address two of the focal points of theorizations about trauma, which relate indispensably to my topic—the link between trauma and memory, and the extrapolation of the notion of trauma beyond individual memory. Next, I will apply this model to the construction of the traumatic public narrative in the 1990s, and the formation of the culture of memory surrounding it. Subsequently, I shall discuss in detail the dynamics of vernacular/local memory, in order to outline the stages of coping with trauma—reticence, denial, reformulation—in this specific context. 1  For example: Antze and Lambek (1996), Felman and Laub (1992), Bal et al. (1999), partly Radstone and Hodgkin (2003), Radstone and Schwarz (2010).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_5

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Trauma and Memory It might seem confounding, but psychoanalysis, which initially established the link between trauma and memory, was interested not in memory, but rather in forgetting. Freud’s notion of the unconscious as a repository of suppressed memories was fundamental to his conceptualization of trauma. In designating mental illness as a particular form of memory failure, Freud made it the focal point of psychoanalytic theory and therapy. More to the point, he transformed memory into “a clue to the human condition” (Misztal, 2003: 140). Memory, in this instance, is not a passive imprint of the past, but a choice (albeit an unconscious one) between preserving and rejecting memories which pose a threat to the psychological stability of the individual. Consequently, amnesia is a natural process, which occurs not so much due to the fading of a memory, but to its expulsion into the unconscious; it is an active, motivated forgetting, whose causes remain incomprehensible to the conscious mind. Precisely because they have been expunged, rather than just having faded away, those memories obscure risks hazardous to the person and their mental health. As root cause to hysteria and certain types of neuroses, Freud singled out traumatic experience, which “within a short period of time presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way” (Freud, 1991: 315). Emotional stress of this intensity cannot be corralled by relying on the cognitive system at our disposal. Traumatic excitations break through “the protective shield”, i.e. the defense mechanism of the “mental aparatus” and it summons “cathectic energy” at the point of the breach (Freud, 1955: 29–33). The memory and the emotion linked to it are repressed, but they remain as a foreign entity during a period of latency, only to return in the shape of dreams or symptoms, triggered, usually, by some other factor. Particularly important in this instance is the idea of temporal distance and the retrospective character of the trauma (Nachträglichkeit): an event is not traumatic in and of itself at the time of occurrence; one might not even be cognizant of it as it happens. It becomes a trauma only after the fact, within the temporal regimen of memory. It remains embedded like a thorn in the flesh, unknown and unfitting in any explanatory system. Psychoanalytic therapy helps to extrude this pathogenic “thorn,” by summoning the repressed memory back, and articulating the emotion connected to it. This rationalizing “memory work” is the essence of therapy; it makes possible the formation of a link between the conscious and

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unconscious, between memory and affect. The position of memory is key to this understanding—it is the mediating element in a particular teleology connecting the actual event and the trauma which this event is retrospectively set to provoke. Freud acknowledged not only the selective nature of memory and forgetting, but also the significance of context— the latter can render traumatic an event which objectively might not appear as such: “the same symptoms sometimes came about without the intervention of any gross mechanical force” (Freud, 1955:  12). This is made possible because memory, rather than providing direct access to the lived experience, reconstructs a version of it based on the traces and ramifications of the event. The founder of psychoanalysis even allowed for the possibility that the memories of early childhood incest, shared by some of his patients, could likely be mere fantasies. Thus, he directed his attention towards a more nuanced and multi-layered understanding of trauma, namely that it “is not a thing in itself but becomes a thing by virtue of the context in which it is implanted” (Smelser, 2004: 34); i.e., not the “thing,” but its meaning is of importance. Thus, the direct causal link between the experience and the trauma is severed, and memory is assigned the task of formulating meaning in the process of reconstructing the past. These ideas in Freud’s work lie at the foundation of more recent constructivist understandings of trauma, which I follow in contemplating some of the representations of the communist past. In the words of a contemporary researcher, traumatic memories are “constructed with regard to reality, rather than reincarnating it; a traumatic memory … substitutes for an event which is too terrible to acknowledge” (Walker, 2003: 109). Not too far removed from this is the understanding of memory as a therapeutic discourse, which guarantees an authentic connection to the past, and indeed not just for the individual, but for groups and societies (Klein, 2000:  138–139). All too likely, it is the psychoanalytic origins of the topic of trauma that have led to its positioning within a particular “therapeutic ethics” (Colvin, 2003:  155–159), in the context of which merely the recollection of hardships suffered is already considered a distinct form of therapy, not only for the individual psyche, but for the identity of the group—a notion further developed in the studies of collective memory. Departing from the psychoanalytical paradigm, Canadian constructivist philosopher Ian Hacking has researched the role of social context by observing the impact of medical, legal, political, judicial, pedagogical and media discourses on the formation of the contemporary notion of child

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abuse, and the conjectures as to the role of this trauma in the later lives of such children (Hacking, 1991). Such research is of significance for my project as well, because it calcifies a non-naturalistic understanding of trauma, which allows for the pivot towards anthropological and culturalist approaches. It thus becomes possible to inquire into the cultural conditioning of individual psychological trauma, and also into trauma as a supra-individual phenomenon and the potential sociocultural reactions to it2—questions relevant to the study of the traumatic memory of communism as well. Social historian Catherine Merridale insists, for example, that while suffering is universal, the manners in which humans cope with it are culturally-specific. During her fieldwork in Russia in the 1990s, she did not discover the anticipated symptoms of trauma among her interviewees—survivors of Stalinist camps and World War II.  They were plagued not by nightmares, but by poverty. Rather than walling themselves off, they turned outwards, doing everything in their power to not appear weak or despondent. Merridale rationalizes this existential predisposition with their traditional collectivist culture, but also with the communist regime’s ruthless approach to any signs of weakness. Not just that—on an individual level, the stories of survival, endurance and strife elucidate the belief that the casualties and losses had been worth it (Merridale, 2010), and this belief transforms personal embitterment into solemn dignity. As we shall observe in due course, similar attitudes are present among members of the first socialist generation in Bulgaria, which currently considers itself to be under a ‘moral siege’. From the perspective of the psychology of memory, intentional recollection has a healing effect. Reminiscing on these experiences is a manner of ‘processing’ trauma in such a way that it can be incorporated into the biographical narrative. More to the point: recounting it transforms a personal memory into public testimony. This traumatic recollection has yet another effect, namely upon the ‘witnesses to the witness’—those who contemplate the stories of the victims. The impact upon them can range from vicarious trauma (i.e. relating to/identifying with the victims), to

2  Some authors connect the discovery of PTSD (or the rebranding of “shell shock,” known since the World War I, as PTSD) with the pacifist movement which picks up steam during the 1960s; others see a link between society’s concern with child abuse and sexual abuse on one hand, and the rise of feminism in the 1970s on the other (Hacking, 1995: 212–213; for the latter, see also Hacking, 1991: 260).

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empathy, to mobilization into action. (Pillemer, 2004).3 Precisely such is the case I will discuss below. Thus, vivid memories have the potential to create or reshape relationships/attitudes towards the past not solely for individuals, but for groups of people as well; consequently, the trauma can pertain not only to individuals, but also to societies. This hypothesis is important for making sense of the case that follows, which is why I shall consider it in some detail.

Collective Trauma? Is It Possible? Freud’s ideas of an intentional, motivated forgetting, and of the work of memory needed for the understanding and accepting of a traumatic past, encounter favorable reverberation within the humanities and social sciences. From the last few decades of the twentieth century until today, ‘trauma’ transforms into a powerful interpretive blueprint. Traumatic memory is equivocated as an element of the collective identity of groups, societies or entire civilizations (the European one in particular). Moreover, trauma is often assessed as one of the self-evident bonds between collective/group memory and personal memories (e.g. Hacking, 1995: 211). Our understanding of suffering, and coping with it, seemingly necessitates an uninterrupted, though certainly not unproblematic, back-and-forth movement between private and public, individual and society, therapy and politics. The editors of an influential collective volume dedicated to this topic characterize these interferences in a manner that directly relates to the project at hand: they “sharpen the problematic issues of truth, history and representation that circle endlessly around the circle of memory” (Lambek & Antze, 1996: xxvii). No doubt, a crucial role in the conceptualization of trauma as a collective affliction was played by the assessment of the memory of the Holocaust—an event far too colossal to be forgotten, and far too horrific to be wedged into the ‘normal’ historical narrative.4 Regardless of whether it is accepted as a one-of-a-kind civilizational “return of the repressed”, the memory of the Holocaust is a field of (quasi)psychoanalitical p ­ rocessing 3  For the trauma inflicted upon subsequent generations, the so-called “post-memory,” see Hirsch (2012), Hirsch and Spitzer (2003). 4  Not coincidentally, within the last several years, there has been talk of “exporting” testimonial methodologies, developed in connection with the study of the Holocaust, to other traumatic events (Shenker, 2016: 145).

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of a historical trauma, with regard to which fundamental psychoanalytic terms, such as repression, transference, resistance, response and processing are deemed applicable. The direct transfer of terminology concerning individuals and the individual psyche to groups or entire societies stirs up legitimate doubts (e.g. Kansteiner, 2002: 186–188). In particular, the notion of trauma carries with it a risk of a type of ‘pathologization’ of historical figures or processes, or the transformation of trauma into an all-encompassing trope.5 In response to such suspicions, Dominick LaCapra offers forth the thesis that the psychoanalytical approach allows for the overcoming of the dichotomy between individual and collective. According to him, terms such as repression and processing do not presuppose anything particularly “individual.” They refer to processes which always necessitate interaction, mutual support, conflict, censorship and an outward orientation towards others, because of which “their relative individual or collective status should not be prejudged” (LaCapra, 1998: 43). An argument in favor of this thesis is the fact that mourning takes on collective forms as well: countless memory sites are also sites of trauma or mourning, that is, the processing of trauma by way of “homeopathic socialization” (commemorative rituals, memorials, museums)—a performative relation to the past, which simultaneously recalls it, and enables its critical evaluation (LaCapra, 1998: 45). According to LaCapra, a flaw with most theories is the assumption of either an entirely positive negation of trauma, or an endless repetition and fragmentation if the former turns out to be impossible. He does, however, allow for the processing of trauma, which does not necessarily lead to categorical acceptance. Hence the possibility of social practices and rituals, which create legitimate normative limits, subject, at the same time, to challenge and change. (LaCapra, 1998: 46). Precisely this is what epitomizes the working through a traumatic past. It presupposes, first and foremost, an acknowledgement of the problems. Only in this manner is their contemplation and sharing among the members of a community possible. An understanding of the traumatic past, and the incorporation of this knowledge into public narratives is precisely what makes possible the ‘healing’ of the collective memory, and the 5  In warning about the dangers of imprudent analogies, and of psychological reductionism, Neil Smelser does after all unearth meaningful parallels between psychological and cultural trauma. He suggests a continuity between the two, owing to the effect rendered—unfortunately, he does not delve any further into this fascinating hypothesis (Smelser, 2004).

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strengthening of collective identity. This usually happens through the substitution of the traumatic narrative, in which the problems are unsolvable, with another, in which they can be overcome by mourning. This process differs from both the entirely positive overcoming and the normalization of the traumatic past, which renders processing impossible, as it rejects any need for it. Attempts to normalize trauma impregnate additional “thorns in the spirit,” as they force the past out of focus, and foster the risk of future disorientation. Hence, in LaCapra’s theory, processing ultimately ends up being a normative ideal, “whose desirability is affirmed but acknowledged as problematic” (LaCapra, 1998: 196). In reality, processing can end with the acknowledgement that not everything can (or should) be processed and overcome. Because the permanent questions concerning the normative and critical character of processing have been diagnosed, but underdeveloped in LaCapra’s theory, one is left with the impression that the latter is after all burdened with far too great expectations. A culturalist reading of the theory of collective trauma, stemming from the selective and non-dogmatic application of psychoanalytic concepts toward the problematic past of groups or societies, takes on distinctly ethical and ethico-political overtones. An active effort to understand is prioritized, and in contrast, the obfuscation of trauma with fetishist, normalizing or harmonizing narratives is rejected as counterproductive. The positive message of this theory is encapsulated in a normative affirmation of a shared, solidary critical processing of a traumatic past, and not in the promise of a wholesale emancipation from it. On the other hand, it also poses certain problems emanating front the tendency to intermix therapeutic discourse, from which the notion of trauma originates, with the moral and legal ones, which utilize concepts such as guilt, responsibility and compassion, victim and perpetrator, good and evil. Thus, “trauma” potentially obscures legal and political judgements, by illegitimately converting them into moral valuations. As an alternative to the psychoanalytical paradigm, I shall turn to an influential attempt at theorizing cultural trauma from the position of cultural sociology (Alexander et al., 2004). This theory is grounded in the presumption that trauma does not exist in and of itself, but is rather constructed as such by a group or society through the significance imparted on particular events, that is to say, interpretively. Cultural trauma arises “when members of one collective feel that they have been subjected to a shocking event, which leaves indelible traces on their collective conscience,

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permanently marking their memory and altering their future identity in fundamental and irreversible ways” (Alexander, 2004a: 1). In other words, cultural trauma breaks through the surface whenever some societal crisis grows into a crisis of meaning and identity. Therefore, recognizing a particular event as cultural trauma is a matter of retrospection and interpretation. The latter presupposes, on the one hand, the claim of an ontological reality of trauma, and on the other, a reference to some type of a moral imperative (most often—the duty to remember). As the authors of the cultural-trauma theory point out, however, this theory concerns itself with neither ontology nor ethics, but solely with the epistemology of construction, that is, with questions regarding the conditions which enable the said claims, with the forms of agency involved in their transmission, and the results rendered, i.e. the introduction of new representations or a new “cultural classification” (Alexander, 2004a: 9–10). Collective trauma thus ends up being not merely the shock or suffering experienced by a particular group, but the incorporation of this suffering into the group’s identity, into the group’s narrative about the social world, the cause-effect interactions and the moral responsibility within it.6 In light of the memory–narrative nexus discussed in Chap. 1, we can summarize that cultural trauma necessitates the forging of a new narrative, and a mnemonic community around it. The narrative is created by a group which takes up the mission of convincing society of its veracity, and of compelling others, who had not lived through the trauma, to empathize with it, and to offer solidarity to those who still bear it. The persuasiveness of the narrative is dependent on convincing responses to questions concerning the nature of the suffering, who the victims are, who the perpetrators are, and why all of this bears any significance for society as a whole. The answers to these questions can be mediated by historical studies, the law, institutions, media outlets, art, religion, etc. (Alexander, 2004a: 13–20), as well as by distinct individuals. The thusly grounded and mediated experience is always the result of selective construction, dependent on the decisions of experts (such as intellectuals, artists, politicians) 6  According to some theorists, cultural trauma is a rational response to radical change, such as the end of the communist regimes in Europe and the ensuing transition to market economy (Sztompka, 2004). Others see cultural trauma in terms of the psychoanalytical ideas of repression in their culturalist version. According to them, trauma is related to amnesia, which impedes society from coping with a problematic past, such as slavery in the USA (Eyerman, 2004) or Holocaust (Alexander, 2004b).

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as to what is important and how it must be presented. This is why cultural trauma is always a “meaning struggle” (Eyerman, 2004:  62). Representations generated in this manner have not only a cognitive, but also a political, moral and esthetic dimension (Eyerman, 2004: 72–73). If they are persuasive, the collective (group) memory can become public, creating a new culture of memory. For the time being, in the post-­ communist context it appears that most-influential are those narratives which externalize guilt outside of the national community (i.e. the national-victimhood narratives). The transformation of a given group experience into a culture of memory may well take years. After the period of activism and debate on the recognition of the new narrative comes a period of routinization (e.g. establishing regular commemorative rituals) and objectification (through museums, memorials, textbooks, symbols, etc.). Emotion gives way to institutionalization, affect to competency, spontaneity and charisma—to ritualization and formalization. The activists of the traumatic narrative often end up feeling dejected by this ‘cooling off’, without realizing that they have achieved their objective, and that their version of events is now a part of the new collective identity.7 This manner of coping with trauma is not solely a cognitive process (i.e. acquiring and perpetuating knowledge about tragic events). It is also a kind of catharsis, as a result of which people develop an empathy for the suffering of others, even though they haven’t been directly affected by it. By recognizing trauma, unearthing its causes and taking on moral responsibility, groups and societies strengthen solidarity and open the door to further inclusion. This act of memory is “potentially healing,” because it recognizes trauma and generates meaningful narratives (Bal, 1999: x), which overcome its threatening inexplicability. Hence, the moral imperative of memory, the duty to remember, ends up being indispensable in stimulating democratic processes in the present, not just calling to mind past suffering and injustice. Of course, it is also understandable to maintain certain reservations towards the theory of cultural trauma. Firstly, the way of articulating and resolving cultural trauma outlined above is an idealized form, because social constructs of the past will rarely be adopted with unanimity. A more realistic scenario would envision competing narratives and memory cultures, conditioned by the respective life worlds of the bearer groups. One 7  See Assmann (2016: 69) for the skepticism of the German left with regard to the successful institutionalization of the mnemonic narrative promoted by the movement itself.

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could concede as well that their narratives will alter as generations change. Secondly, this theoretical framework (as well as the one proposed by LaCapra) is not unconstrained by normativeness, stemming from the conviction that confronting suffering strengthens solidarity, that the pain of individuals/groups might be transposed into institutional memory, into a mnemonic culture, into legal and civil reparations procedures. And lastly, there is a debate to be had as to the therapeutic potential with regard to the historic ‘wound’ and the constructive nature of this so-called “trauma-­ tropism”—the twisting (of memory, in this instance) in response to injury or suffering (Feldman, 2002: 236). Communist Repressions as Cultural Trauma Despite the reservations outlined above, the constructivist theory of cultural trauma appears to be a promising tool in contemplating mnemonic narratives about the communist past, and the memory cultures configured around them. First and foremost, this theory instructs us that the past can be seen and portrayed in varying ways, that is, that reality does not govern the concepts which individuals use to present it, and that a narrative of the past is as much a matter of interpretation as of fact-finding. Furthermore, this theory offers a path to understanding the steps toward constructing a memory of the past: to identify memory activists and their motives; to comprehend the choice as to what is remembered and what is forgotten, as well as the criteria underlying this decision; to analyze the shaping, maintenance and uses of memory. These processes were particularly intensive at the start of the post-communist period, when it became possible, for the first time, for previously-suppressed stories to enter the public space; for them to be heard, recognized and accepted; to provoke a response not just among the public, but within institutions as well. Transitional justice was precisely this type of institutional response. A parallel response on the side of local communities were the memorials to the victims and the commemorative practices connected to them. In contrast with the previously dominant meta-narrative of heroic struggle and victory, where each casualty was rendered in the name of a noble ideal (fatherland, victory, a bright communist future), the narrative of communist repression and its victims, which emerged at the beginning of the 1990s, offers no satisfactory answer to the question of meaning and higher ideal, which is why it is potentially traumatic. The “revolutionary justice” version of the post-WWII events present in history textbooks until that point

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was replaced with one of reckless terror in the first few weeks after the 9th of September putsch and the repression campaigns of the following years, which were directed not just against opponents of the regime, real or imagined, but also had at times a large-scale and stochastic character. The latter is of particular importance: any discrepancy could be punished, even though its limits were not clearly-defined—meaning that everyone was under threat. This ambiguity violates the cause-effect logic of crime and punishment, as well as the principle of the commensurate severity of the castigation relative to the heft of the act.8 As a result, punishment is reduced to suffering, deprived of cause, explanation or meaning, while the “criminals” are turned into victims. Stripping the meaning away from the punishment fosters trauma. As such, the narrative of revolutionary justice as fair and impartial retribution is severely shaken up, and a brand new “cultural classification” is created centred on trauma as inexplicable suffering. Transitional justice does not in and of itself engender a traumatic narrative of the past. It provides an answer to questions about the character and causes of suffering, the victims and the perpetrators. Guilt and suffering in this instance are legal categories, constructed rationally, measurable and demonstrable. In the post-communist context, transitional justice focuses predominantly on the victims, it is based on juridical discourse of rehabilitation/compensation, and it creates rather a narrative of deliverance. The restitution of judicial fairness during the post-communist transition—in the moral and symbolic, not just the legal sense—is often tied up with particular approaches to coping with the past—‘turning the page’, ‘closing the book’ of the past, etc. According to some analysts this early and relatively optimistic tale of the “exodus” from communism and its vanquishment during the transition to democracy is indispensable to the new political elite, given the lack of a powerful origin myth, as was, for example, the one of the antifascist struggle following World War II. In the Bulgarian context it appears that it is rather the result of compromise and the continuity of the political elites, and the inability to adequately cope with the past, which discredits democratic institutions. That aside, as James Mark (2010) notes, the imperative to remember communism gains strength only later on, accompanied by the suspicion that these democratic revolutions have remained uncompleted. 8  Disproportionate punishments, imposed by the so-called People’s Court, have been highlighted time and again, not just by historians but by punitive lawyers as well.

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Parallel to, and often independent of the optimistic or edifying official narrative of the elite, testimonies of repression in public spaces, along with the remembrance of victims, offer forth the outline of a traumatic narrative of the past. This narrative calls into question the mnemopolitics of the regime itself (overlooking the violence of its early period) and the efforts to maintain them even after its end (justifying or trivializing abuse). It is based on the testimonies of those harmed, which are appraised more highly than those of neutral actors or supporters of the regime. Memory is seen as the territory of a suppressed authenticity, and the struggle between remembering and forgetting—as the struggle of ordinary people against institutional power, according to Milan Kundera’s famous quote. Whence also the belief in the possibility of rewriting history on the basis of such a counter-memory. The traumatic narrative is nourished not just by directing the focus of the public’s attention towards the victims and their suffering (Alexander, 2004b), but—particularly in the post-communist context—also by the failures of retributive justice. The fruitless, in most cases, lawsuits against functionaries of the communist regime did not fulfil the expectations held by broad swaths of society and fostered the feeling of a lack of justice. This is why the narrative halts at the point of suffering and victimization, “buffering” upon it, without ever reaching a resolution or catharsis. Shifting the focus from perpetrators to victims leads to a switch from the legal to the ethical discourse, and from terror to trauma. Following the steps for the construction of a cultural trauma outlined above, I shall sketch out the construction and the bearers of the traumatic narrative of communism in Bulgaria. On the one hand, these are political entities, such as the opposition parties prior to 1948, reinstated in the 1990s, as well as newly-created organizations, like the Union of the repressed post-9-September 1944.9 The latter sent five representatives to the Grand National Assembly elected in 1990. The very same year, an organisation named “Truth” was founded, whose objective was to collect information about the victims of communism, and to keep their memory alive. On the other hand, creators of the traumatic narrative of the communist past were the repressed persons themselves—labor-camp survivors and political prisoners, descendants of the condemned and of those who disappeared without a trace. Many of them published their memoirs; some periodicals set up special columns, in which they published the memories 9  Established as the “Club of the Repressed post-1945.” Subsequently it split into several organizations.

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of the repressed. Although the schematic narrative template (Wertsch) is the same, the stories are typologically different. The politically-mediated ones tend to visualize categories of people, most often defined by their political affiliation: agrarian oppositionists, social-democrats, anarchists, etc. When it comes to individuals, they tend to be well-known political actors from the past or the present. In the narratives of the second type, the characters are specific people and their individual fates; their stories are told by their loved ones or their cellmates and friends, who bore witness to their lives and deaths. The intimacy of these accounts depoliticizes their protagonists, making their victimhood open to understanding and empathy. As such, the questions of who the victims are and what the nature of their suffering was are met with disparate responses. In one instance they appeal to political subjects and their wholesale mobilization, while in the other they invoke human empathy as a universal moral capacity. By following the above-outlined theory of cultural trauma, I ought to, at this point, contemplate the mediation and mediatization of the traumatic narrative by means of historic research, documentary cinema, works of art, etc., as means by which the traumatic narrative becomes compelling to factions of society outside of those directly harmed. To this end, I shall alter the scale of inquiry and focus on one of the key sites of the traumatic memory of communism—the Belene forced-labor camp. It is not my claim that the local level inadvertently provides more direct access and a deeper understanding of mnemonic narratives and the memory cultures connected to them. I do insist, however, that this is a scale which can guarantee a close reading of the connection between memory and reminiscences, as well as the opportunity to understand the social construction of memory. The commitment to this scale, and the very specificity of the narrative with its inherent form of causality, which presupposes links between events and contextual explanations, does not permit me to deliberate upon other significant sites of traumatic memory of communism, such as those who disappeared without a trace in September 1944, or the forceful assimilation of Muslims in the 1970s and 1980s.

Belene as Topos in the Traumatic Narrative In the years following the end of the communist regime, the forced-labor camp on the Danubian island Persin, close to the town of Belene, became a key site of memory and to a great extent—a site of trauma. In order to follow these processes, I will rely predominantly on fieldwork and oral

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history carried out in 2008–2009, with several brief site visits in the last few years, some of which connected to the annual pilgrimages to the island (Koleva, 2010, 2012, 2020). As a supplement to oral history, I will make use of State Security archives from the period of the camp’s existence. Additionally, I will take advantage of some methodological inventions of micro-history, namely that an alteration in scale can uncover new meanings even for the best-known of phenomena. This is why, I reference as well some forms of mediatized public memory, such as memoirs and documentaries. Public Memory: Sites, Topoi, Plots How exactly is Belene forged into a site of memory and of trauma? Public memory, formed since the early 1990s, is anything but homogenous. We can pinpoint diverse mnemonic communities, as well as institutional entities which create, maintain and govern it. In response to the questions posed by the theory of cultural trauma: about the victims, perpetrators and the nature of suffering, I will concern myself in the first place with those elements which contribute to the demarcation of central themes (topoi, “sites”), to the creation of common discursive instruments (shared meanings, tropes, linguistic and visual formulas) and plot lines, or schematic narrative templates, which encompass the interpretative toolbox (relatively coherent manners of speaking about the labor camps and Belene in particular, and about the broader socio-historic context as well). To put it in other words, my attention will be centered on the topography, tropology and semantics of the memory of Belene. I will initially outline the creation of the mnemonic “canon” in the public space, then zoom in on the dynamic of the local/collective memory in the town of Belene itself, and of biographical memory, that is to say the personal memories about the camp of the townspeople who lived next door to it. The memories, memoirs and autobiographies of former camp inmates and political prisoners published in the 1990s are a fundamental contribution to the shaping of the Belene mnemonic cannon. The broader audience’s first contact with them was by way of print media, like the newspapers Democratsia, Anti, Pro&Anti, Istina, and others, in which journalists collated the memories of those repressed by the communist regime.10 In the 10  Subsequently, many of these testimonies were published in collections: Boncheva et al. (1991), Stanilov (2007).

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years to follow, the memoirs of quite a number of victims of the regime, including former camp inmates, were published.11 Via this plenitude of mutually-influenced and mutually-reinforcing memories, resilient tropes such as the “island of the doomed,” “island of the forgotten,” “island of death” and “marathon of death” were created (Boncheva et al., 1991: 94, 96, 150, 193); and meaningful topoi, such as Site II, the Barrows, the solitary confinement cells, the mosquitoes, the pigs, the floods, etc. were introduced (Stanilov, 2007: 38, 177, 258; Genchev, 2003: 20–22, 70). A repertoire of emblematic incidents was amassed, retold time and again in the memories of the survivors: the death of the journalist Tsveti Ivanov from tetanus, after he was denied medical help (Boncheva et al., 1991: 113, 120–121); the sinking of a boat in the spring of 1953, which resulted in the death of eight inmates (Stanilov, 2007; Boncheva et al., 1991: 106–107); the “Horror” pontoon, upon which thirty-odd camp internees spent fourteen days and nights, outdoors, in January of 1953 (Geshev, 1992: 68–73; Ogoyski, 1995; Znepolski, 2010: 216–22012); the murder of the “human” (anarchist Ivan Yondev, who stubbornly identified himself as “human,” rather than by his party “color,” as he was demanded); the “marathon of death,” which all newly-­arrived internees had to run from the shores of the island to the camp site, escorted by the blows of mounted guards; the murders for any deviation from the convoy (most-often to pluck some edible plant) or for simulated escape attempts, feeding the bodies of the deceased to the pigs (Boncheva et al., 1991: 77, 178; Stanilov, 2007: 91, 171, 333; Genchev, 2003:  121)13 etc. These repeating motifs become resilient touchstones for the memory of the camp, creating a repertoire of stories worthy of being retold. A distinct “vocabulary” was also formed, that is to say, a compilation of tropes, some of which have since become clichés, molding the expectations as to how the camps are to be discussed, 11  Bochev (1990), Geshev (1992), Ogoyski (1995), Vasilev (1995), Moskov (1997), Yanev (1998), Horozov (1999), etc. The publication of camp inmates’ memoirs continues after the 1990s as well: Nedyalkov (2003), Momerin (2005), Ognyanov (2013), Baychev (2014), Tutev (2018). 12  The latter reference is particularly interesting in that it reveals one of the mechanisms for the creation of this type of shared repertoire: this is the memories of Georgi B. Nedyalkov from his time in the labor camp , where, on the pages cited, he directly quotes excerpts from Ogoyski’s memoir about the “Horror” pontoon. Ogoyski was on the pontoon himself. 13  The topic of the pigs also comes up in the sensational Black Book of Communism, according to which the Belene camp is “unforgettable to Bulgarians, because the bodies of the deceased prisoners were fed to the pigs” (Bartošek, 1999: 421).

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which words to use to describe the inmates, their guards, etc. Equally important—the emotional tone and the interpretative framework of the narratives were established. The survivors’ testimonies about their experiences formed public memory as an emotional and not just cognitive frame of the reminiscences to follow. We learn not only what happened on the island, but we also gain a sense of how to evaluate it and approach it. Alongside of memoir publications, documentaries have played an important role in the broader distribution of testimonies, in as much as they are accessible to larger audiences. Through them, the topoi, tropes and plots which comprise the new mnemonic canon have been restated and reaffirmed. Furthermore they construct the visual ‘vocabulary’ which, in the absence of photographic documentation from the camp, has been used in visual narratives about Belene. Footage of the pontoon bridge (Fig. 5.1), the willows, the toadstools, waterfowl and slow-moving river, among others, make up the ‘typical’ Belene landscape, and are inadvertently utilized in nearly every visual narrative about the island and the camp. The first and most impactful documentary was The Survivors. Camp Tales (1990) by Atanas Kiriyakov.14 Part One is dedicated to the labor camp at Belene and was filmed in part during the first pilgrimage to the island of Persin in 1990. The second part deals with the camp near Lovech, where some fraction of the staff and the internees were transferred after the closure of the Belene camp in 1959. The popularity and the impact of this film are due, perhaps, on the one hand to the heightened sensitivity surrounding this topic in those early years, and on the other, the fact that the Bulgarian National Television, which broadcast the film during primetime, was at this time still the sole TV station in the country. Some of the personas caught on that footage would go on to participate in the nation’s political scene in the following years, while others would reappear as witnesses, sharing their stories in later productions as well.

14  Followed by The Longest Shadow (1991) directed by Kalina Ivanova; Sentence-­ Accusation (1999) directed by Anna Petkova (with a focus on the camp in Lovech); The Secret Case on the Camps (1999) based on Hristo Hristov’s eponymous book; The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (2007) directed by Andrej Paunov; A Ballad for Bulgarian Heroes (2007) directed by Iliya Troyanov; Catharsis (2010) directed by Vanya Zhekova; The Song (2016) directed by Rosen Elezov (with a focus on the 1980s), etc. One might also mention the Bulgarian National Television’s documentary series “Open Files,” written by Hristo Hristov, since a handful of the protagonists from the separate installments had been interned at Belene camp.

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Fig. 5.1  The pontoon bridge leading to the island is present in all visual narratives. (Author’s archive)

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This is how media outlets create a “spectacle of suffering” (Boltanski), accessible to broader audiences, controversial, and impactful not just with its concrete imagery, but with its messages as well. Later on, I’ll loop back to individual topoi, tropes and plot lines from this public mnemonic narrative, stratified upon the local memory in Belene, which mold the personal memories of our interlocutors. Yet another regime of the memory of the camp are the annual pilgrimages on the island of Persin, based on the initiative of societies of the repressed, including Bulgarian Turks, interned there in mid-1980s. Since 1990, ex-internees and their descendants from many parts of the country have gathered every spring at the camp site to lay down wreaths and flowers at the memorial plaque located on the wall of one of the buildings. These pilgrimages have usually been attended by representatives of political parties and non-government organizations, and less frequently, by high-ranking politicians, such as the President or the Speaker of the National Assembly. A mass for the departed is serviced, and former prisoners share their stories. The participation of politicians varies from year to year; sometimes they merely attend, without taking the podium. The very first pilgrimage attracted thousands of people. Many of the residents of Belene with whom I talked had visited the island for the first (and most often only) time precisely on that occasion. As the years pass, the number of participants has dwindled, only to reach a new period of activism within the last few years, which will be addressed in due course. As can be seen, the formation of a public memory for the Belene camp adheres quite closely to the steps outlined in the theory of cultural trauma. On hand is the creation of a new narrative and a mnemonic community around it. The narrative in this instance is contrived by the camp survivors as a group, forging the scaffolding of a shared memory of the camp, with its topoi, tropes and emblematic plots. Precisely within this framework is where personal memories, mutually supporting and certifying one-­ another, are positioned. Thus, this group convinces society at large in the veracity of its narrative, and provokes acts of empathy and solidarity. Local Memory in Belene: Topoi, Tropes, Plot Lines During my first fieldwork period, my colleagues and I conducted 34 biographical interviews with men and women born between 1920 and 1941, who lived in Belene.15 From those, I derived via open coding a handful of  Kept in the archive of the Institute for the Study of the Recent Past.

15

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central themes, which were further discussed during informal interviews upon subsequent visits, including with younger subjects as well—the so-­ called theoretical sample, recommended by grounded theory. The topography of the local memory includes the different communities (Roman Catholics and Vlachs, a Romanian-speaking Orthodox minority,) the town’s past and its socialist development, the island and the “prison.” The most-frequent rhetorical pattern is the contrast between “then” and “now,” where in the stories of the older generation, the watershed moment tends to be 9 September 1944, but for the younger—1989.  he Community Narrative: “Here We Are Split in Two” T The residents of Belene explain to visitors first and foremost that “here we are split in two—Eastern Orthodox and Western Orthodox,” that is to say, the Roman Catholics, and the Orthodox Vlachs. The town has a Turkish neighborhood as well, but our interlocutors usually only mentioned the Catholic and the Vlach communities, skipping over the Turks—in contrast with other places in Bulgaria, here the Turks are not the significant Other. The topic of communities was invariably deliberated from the perspective of their changing relations. In the past, there were “spats,” “conflicts” and “animosity” between Catholics and Orthodox. Everyone still recalled the first wedding between a Catholic bride and an Orthodox groom—the bells of the Catholic church rang out a death knell, because marriage to a person from the other community was seen as a betrayal of the “strong faith.” Everyone agreed, however, that these conflicts were a thing of the past, and mixed-marriages were anything but a rarity. Some credited this to the new patterns of cohabitation imposed by the socialist reforms: “…and all of Belene gathered. Together—Orthodox and Catholics. There were no longer spats: there was one mayor, and one chairman of the collective farm”. Others cited the “mixing,” i.e. the fading away of spacial divides between the former neighborhoods: “…they hated each-other, perhaps it’s a remnant from the older generation, I don’t know, but gradually, gradually it’s no-longer like that, it’s gone. Catholics over there, Vlachs over here—we got all mingled up, and now you can’t recognize them”. The distinctions between the communities were described in terms of ethnographic specificities—cuisine, speech, songs, celebrations, outfits— and were addressed jokingly, in anecdotes and town legends. The otherness did not manifest itself in as much a religious discord, as a quasi-­ethnic one, bracketed, all the while, within the sphere of folklore and tradition.

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Belene residents almost never introduced themselves with their ethnic or religious affiliation. Even when they resorted to generalizations, the interviewees expressed respect for the other faith, because it was grounded in the same ethical principles: “Nobody instructs you to kill, to steal, to be envious, to hate others and to wish them ill… All of it teaches you the good. … There is no divergence—that you’re a Turk and I’m Catholic, and the other one is a Vlach, but we’re all mixed here… That you say in your faith Allah—it’s the same again, that I say God—it’s the same thing”. Thus the separate groups end up united in a broader moral community, which enables integrated living: “God is one, there isn’t a Catholic one or an Orthodox one. And it’s the same with people—I get along with Catholics, and with Orthodox, I haven’t got anything… and with Turks.” The tale of the first Catholic-Orthodox mixed marriage has all the benchmarks of an urban legend: it is popular, retold as an anecdote, and nobody ever identifies those newlyweds, or discloses any of the other circumstances, aside from their belonging to different communities. Our team talked with two spouses—a Catholic wife and an Orthodox husband, who tied the knot in 1955—it is possible that exactly this couple were the proverbial newlyweds who caused the scandal back in the day; at any rate, one of the first mixed families. This topic, however, did not make an appearance in their stories. The wife indeed did divulge about a conflict with her parents, who were “deeply devout,” and the covert wedding, in accordance with Catholic tradition, was devised as a compromise. She shared it in a single sentence at the end of our conversation: “My parents were very much against it, because he wasn’t Catholic, which is when I fell ill and they forced me—they summoned the priest, and we performed a mixed wedding.” Also towards the end of our discussion, she mentioned in passing that his father had been a communist, whereas hers was a farmer, and sided “more with the opposition”. Whether this factor had any significance, whether it was political or other disagreements repackaged as religious strife is now impossible to determine. In the husband’s narrative, all these details are absent. He told about his romance with his future wife, failing to mention his family’s religious belonging. He responded to an interviewer’s question by stating that he was not religious: “I haven’t gone to church, nor to any of the religious celebrations that there have been.” His wife, however, recounted how she abandoned her “Catholic dishes” and learned to cook according to his preference, how her family celebrated at home both Catholic and Orthodox holidays, and how their children were baptized in accordance with both traditions, albeit secretly and in the

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absence of their parents, both of whom were members of the communist party. “I worked in the townshall—who would allow me to go to church?” she disclosed, and continued: “I used to be devout, but after that, now, I haven’t got any time. On Sundays I have to cook for him, he’s very temperamental about food.” Cooking on Sundays could hardly have been an insurmountable obstacle to revitalizing religious habits. It is more likely that the topic of religion, which divided the family, was systematically disparaged during their life together. That must not have been difficult, given the conditions imposed by socialist atheism, and appears to have been possible after the fact as well. Aside from the gender-specific characteristics of biographical memory, this example also depicts one of the possibilities granted by the change of scale. We witness that collective memory retained what at the time was labeled a dangerous transgression. Undoubtedly the “abduction” of the girl away from the Catholic community was not merely her personal “betrayal of the faith,” but the humiliation of the entire community as well. This hypothesis is reinforced by testimonies about street fights between the youths of the two communities (“we shouldn’t go out with their girls… that’s why, they were fighting us because of girls”). As the exogamous marriage pattern was normalized, this incident became an anecdote, drained of its original meaning and reduced to its superficial markers. All the while, it is still remembered and retold. One might acquiesce that it is still important to the people of Belene, inasmuch as it dramatizes the negativism in the relations between the communities, and transports them to another dimension—outside of the everyday, and to the past. Within the biographical memory of the two spouses, however, after more than half a century of marital life, the memory of its inception appears not just to have faded, but to no longer be relevant, nor particularly important to their relationship. They do not even recognize themselves, or their circumstances, in the stylized topos of the collective memory.  he Past: Floods, Mud, Polenta T The motifs of flooding, mud and poverty stood out within the narratives of Belene’s past. Many interviewees referenced the mud in a serious or (more often) humorous tone, in varying contexts: in order to describe the location, to give an idea of the past, or to accentuate the changes, which have taken place since then. The mud shows up in landscapes, as well as in stories about maneuvering through the streets of the erstwhile village:

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A dusty village, and a muddy village. In the wintertime, you couldn’t make your way around without boots. In the summertime, mud from the ground up to your knees. The streets were muddy, and without boots, you couldn’t get anywhere. … large village, very dusty, very muddy. Well my earliest memories, from when I was a young child, I mean, this was a village, a big village, very dusty, and very muddy whenever it rained. This was a [main] street, with these pebbles, sort of like gravel, but on the left and on the right—mud up to your knees. From that point out, mud up to the knees. … one street, paved with crushed stone. Everything else, left and right— mud. … Other than boots, there was no way you could move around in late autumn and early spring, when the rains began and the snow started melting. Back in those days… there was a ton of mud on the streets. A ton of mud. I said about Belene that is was dirt, mud… you didn’t have those trees, you didn’t have that park, and there was no water supply… At that time we used the water from the Danube for drinking. There was only mud in Belene, there were no drinking fountains. Back then Belene was so muddy… So dusty in the summer. There weren’t any streets, there were none of these sidewalks, curbs, pavement… No, dust from one house to the next… And when I came back [from the town where she had studied] I had put on a pretty dress, these pretty, high-heel, black suede shoes… But before I could get there, those heels sank into the mud, completely muddy, and in the front too—filthy, filthy, filthy… You can’t even imagine how much mud there was. There’s no tiles, there’s no sidewalks, there’s no curbs. Dirty roads and mud. … When I left, when I went to the first site [on the island], my shoes had filled up. Mud. There were two prisoners, they were working. They were like «Оh, city boy—that’s what they said to me—take them off and give them to me.» They took my shoes, washed them, laundered my socks, everything, they dry off, I put them back on, and by the time I get back here—same thing again. Lots of mud, tons.

The repetitiveness of the verbal formulation is worth noting: “mud up to your knees”, “very dusty, very muddy”, “left and right (of the main street)—mud”. Ubiquitous in these stories, and in the humoristic local folklore, mud becomes a speech trope loaded with meaning, a symbol of Belene’s past. One of its important rhetorical roles in the statements is the contrast with the subsequent amelioration (“there’s no tiles, there’s no sidewalks”; “you didn’t have that park, and there was no water supply”), which will be addressed further on down.

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The majority of our interlocutors underscored the poverty, because of the annual flooding of arable land during springtime. These floods annihilated the wheat crops, and villagers could only plant corn after the waters had receded. This is why the other symbol of the arduous past is polenta, made from cornmeal. It bonds primarily the “Vlachs,” who were disproportionately harmed by the floods: “we were paupers, because here the water used to drown us a lot”, one of them explains. Older Belene residents would often talk about bread or polenta as a way of indicating the wellbeing of their families. A woman born in 1928 pointed out, in this manner, that she married into a poorer family than that of her parents: “When I married, we only ate polenta”. That is also how another one of our interlocutors described the Vlachs: “they were very poor, they only ate mamaliga [polenta]”. There are, however, several nontrivial details missing from this shared picture of the past. Only one interviewee, a man born in 1924, who owned a small shop, informed us that during his youth there were many pubs and groceries in Belene, two dairy farms, two or three textile workshops, tanneries, bakeries, tinsmiths, cobblers and other craft workshops. None of the other interviewees mentioned this. People only remembered the thriving husbandry once the island was mentioned. Though it will be mentioned again later on. S ocialist Reforms: Housing, Asphalt, Sidewalks 1964 is yet another important date for Belene: the erstwhile village was reclassified as a town. A couple of our respondents covered this period with the most detail: one of them was mayor at the time, and the other— the municipal supplier. The mayor listed among the town’s new acquisitions a community center, a water main, new city planning, etc. The supplier went into detail about his duties: After that it became a town. They started mapping out the streets, straightening them out. They constructed sidewalks, laying down pavement. I used to arrange it… There was a supervisor at the distribution bureau for appropriating different materials. I went: «Comrade Supervisor, I come from Belene, I work this and this—please issue some cement for us!»

On the whole, the enhancement of the town and the infrastructure improvements were a frequent topic in discussions about Belene. The

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listing out of “asphalts, sidewalks, parks,” came as a counterpoint to the mud of the past, and our interlocutors never skipped over it. If the discourse of asphalt and sidewalks appears at times as if imposed by the chosen rhetoric of contrasting “before” and “now”, then one of the other recurring themes—the growing prosperity of the people and the construction of new houses—certainly is not. It corresponds to the tendency of the domestic narrative to take on the perspective of the everyday, and to focus primarily on personal life and family. From this viewpoint, the building of a home was a major domestic accomplishment and our interviewees never failed to mention it. In most instances, this biographical event was placed in the context of a narrative about the city’s development in the socialist period, after the collectivization of agricultural lands. Although some of these statements call to mind the propaganda rhetoric of old, there was also an objective reason for the construction of new homes to be linked to the formation of the collective—the de facto revocation of property over the land put an end to the need for investments tied to the costs of its procurement and cultivation. This freed up resources for the construction or amelioration of a dwelling. The latter, along with the children’s education, remained the only possible form of investment, as well as one of the few remaining domains in which families could show initiative. Our interviewees testified to the outcomes: After that people’s lives started improving, they started paying us rental fees, started giving us wheat and corn, started helping the families themselves. And that’s when many people built their houses. The town changed, everyone built themselves a new domicile, we tossed the roofing tiles out by the edge of town, bought shingles, and now you see the whole town renovated with shingles. We were content. Money too—we prospered, and built houses, and everything. After the 9th they started making their houses… they went to the farms when the TKZS [agricultural collective] happened, the pay was better there, the tractor operators among them weaseled their way in… They opened the prison here, and the tractor lads went to [work for] the prison, took courses, and built houses, and now they have wonderful houses.

Speaking about the amelioration of their town, our conversation partners most often use 9 September 1944 as a temporal marker. On this date, nothing of particular import happened in Belene, but it is considered the unrivaled ‘day one’, consecrated for decades on end in propaganda,

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symbols and celebrations. It is unthinkable that such coordinated, longlasting efforts would not leave an impression in people’s minds. They did, and indeed a deep one. Spontaneously, and without putting any thought into it (strictly speaking—incorrectly) our storytellers used this date as a temporal benchmark for the history of the town and for their own biographies. “Before the 9th” is used to reference the poverty and backwardness of the past: “I didn’t have shoes, I walked around in clogs. This was before 9th September still”; “It was otherwise quite primitive, our life, prior to the 9th of September”; “before 9th September they were very poor, they ate only mamaliga”; “how they lived before the ninth… there wasn’t a bed even”. “After the 9th” in contrast signals the start of stories of betterment: “When the 9th September came and they founded the TKZS”; “After 1944 it started—the lowering of prices”; “people changed after the 9th September, we changed gradually, there was more access to culture”; “after the ninth they started building houses”. Such sentiments are aired, it goes without saying, not just by the citizens of Belene. For all those who spent a large part of their lives in socialist Bulgaria, this was one of the self-evident dogmas with which we grew up. Calling into question the incontrovertibility of this belief makes it possible to ask about the ways in which the institutions of public memory frame our personal memories. In this case, it is accomplished through a quasi-­ causality of sorts, imposed by propaganda structures, which follows the logic of post hoc ergo propter hoc—after, therefore because of. Even to this day, people reproduce it automatically, without thinking that the innovations they are referring to did not necessarily occur thanks to the regime. It is logical to infer that similar development would have taken place under alternative socioeconomic conditions as well, which is a fact in countries comparable to Bulgaria, but in which no communist regime was ever instituted. Memory, however, continues clinging to the benchmarks provided by the monolithic ideological narrative. A minority among our conversation partners however were the older subjects, who had somewhat different memories. A man born in 1924 told about the politicized atmosphere following the 1944-coup: “the meeting was over and we left, and started chasing each-other, one of them says: «You’re a kulak, an enemy of the people!» Another one says: «I’m a communist,» yet another: «You’re a fascist!» We started splitting up into parties…” A woman shared, in a hushed tone: “At the beginning after the 9th September, those were terrifying years, terrifying they were.” These memories remain outside of the established abstract narrative of 9 September, and do not challenge it.

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Even the subjects quoted here spoke approvingly about “after the 9th” and attributed the asphalting of the streets to this period, although it was tied to the ‘promotion’ of Belene to a town some 20 years later. Precisely this discrepancy between a specific recollection and generalized statements, that is, between episodic and semantic memory, lends credence to the hypothesis of the automatic reproduction of propaganda clichés from the past, even if they do not correspond to lived experiences. Belene is located in a fertile agricultural region. That is why it seems odd that from the stories of the socialist reforms and the relative improvement “after the 9th,” the topic of the agricultural collective (normally referred to by the shorthand TKZS) is altogether absent—that most important to the village, and indeed socialist in its essence (unlike the asphalt) reform. Actually all interviewees—at least among the older generation—remember the collectivization, but this memory does not in any way dovetail with the riveting tales of socialist construction. With only one or two exceptions, the stories attest to the fears, doubts and resistance of the people during the collectivization at the beginning of the 1950s. In contrast to the warm memories about other changes during socialism, almost all of them note that joining the collective was “compulsory”, “mandatory”, “forceful”, “violent”, “voluntary with the whip”, and that their parents had a hard time living it down, that they became ill, “simply died of grief”. An interviewee told about her father: “He was torn up about it… Back then many people suffered strokes. My father also died from a stroke.” Another one informs us about her father, whose hair went completely white over the course of a single night. Some try to explain the relationship of the peasants of the beforetimes to their land and their livelihood—not as an asset or a resource, but something much deeper and more intimate: “they hailed the fields as something grand”; “I can still picture the oxen, particularly Sivtscho”; “I only thought about the oxen, I had named them, I had these young oxen—one of them was Tolbukhin, the other one Traytcho Kostov”. Stories of beatings and intimidation were commonplace. One of our interlocutors reported that her father was detained and beaten over the course of a full day and a full night. When her mother went to seek help, they advised her to have him sign the application form for the collective, otherwise they would send him to prison. A man born in 1934 told us about administrative coercion:

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Despite all of the pressure, intimidation and sanctions, we kept working our fields, come what may, and that same year the harvest was very good. I was in the conscript army at the time, and I got a letter that they’re summoning all private owners like us, and since the fields had been planted, with the harvest, they were absorbing us into the TKZS and collecting the harvest.

Other interviewees attested to psychological pressure and hopelessness: “we didn’t want to, but you know—others joined, how could we not join”; “those who remained [out of the collective], they were very much bullied”; “they threatened them, there was no way out”; “There was nowhere to go!”; “No escape!” “Well we joined, we had nowhere to go”; “Either in the TKZS or in the dungeon”; “I joined against my will—no choice, no choice”. The adverse memories of joining the collective would sometimes determine the attitude towards it altogether. An older man, who spent his entire working life in the fields, divulged: Cart, oxen, property—everything in the TKZS… Tough, because they only left me my two strong arms, I had nothing else at home, everything went into the TKZS. I’ve become like a slave, like slavery. Don’t think that the TKZS… like they say, was noble. Only those who worked, they know. Whoever didn’t work—from the sidelines it’s easy, as if you were at the movies: ooh, the TKZS, it’s such a noble thing. Tons of production, but what can I say, difficult and unappealing work—that’s it! And that’s why nobody wanted it, and that’s why it fell apart.

Others had more ambivalent memories. They were inclined to value the security offered by the collective, comparing it to the scarcity during their childhoods. Food, in particular bread, denoted in many instances the humble baseline of basic needs for that generation, accustomed to modest levels of consumption: “And we were very fortunate. There’s food, bread, everything.” Bread here becomes a symbol of the unpretentious socialist well-being. This is accompanied by the positive experiences of the youth of the day from the new social experiment: new ways of interacting with their peers and the elders, communal work, a liberation from parental control: We were young, crazy, in the fields, joyful young women—how much we would earn for the day didn’t concern us, let them mark down a point on the tally…

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Later, when the harvesters started arriving—what songs we had here… that the harvester arrived, and we were there to welcome it.

Stories of this kind have definite generational characteristics. They are shared exclusively by people who at the time were in their early adulthood, and in most cases the backdrop to their stories was their youth, not necessarily the collective. Later, many of them transitioned over to work in other industries. Nobody failed to mention as well the conditions that repelled people away from the collective and agriculture: the unappealing and unreputable labor, the low pay. It’s joyful, they laugh, they worked as a team, but there was no money. At the start, the TKZS was good. ‘Cause they paid people in kind, they gave out wheat, cheese, onions, just everything, everything, all of the staples that a household needs. They kept this up for a few years, and when they said that something had to be in cash, that’s when the people started dispersing—they didn’t want it anymore. ‘Cause money was tight… It was better at the weaver’s. It felt like I was a factory worker, not an agricultural one.

The inevitable conclusion is that collectivization was an important episode from the past, and that it left a deep imprint on the memories of Belene’s population, though a negative one. This was, in fact, a radical and fateful change, which impacted every member of that generation, forged in the atmosphere of the calcification of the communist regime. Talking about it is more difficult, because for decades on end, there existed no rhetorical resources to that end: personal memories were in discord with the broadly accepted public narrative, and they could not lean up against it. Because of this traumatic repression, the collectivization process to this day is not a part of the narrative of communist reforms, although precisely this was their chief dimension in agricultural regions such as Belene. Without the support of a shared schematic template, dissonant biographical memories end up colonized by the dominant narrative, and difficult to articulate even today, years after the collapse of the regime.  he Island: “Sheer Heaven, Golden in Our Eyes” T The island and its role in the village’s livelihood prior to the establishment of the camp in 1949 appears as a motif only in conversation with the oldest of Belene’s residents. Most of the younger ones are unaware, and as it appears, not particularly interested in this aspect of their town’s history.

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The island of Persin is the largest one in the Belene archipelago. Its western half is located opposite the town, across a narrow arm of the river. It is about 15–16 kilometers in length, and at its broadest point, up to 6 kilometers wide. From north to south, it is surrounded by a handful of smaller islands. During the springtime high waters, the river floods a large segment of the island, leaving behind swamps afterwards, where, up until 1949, Belene’s townsfolk went to catch fish. They also utilized the largest island for lumbering, and in the summertime, animal husbandry. During the spring, cattle and beehives were transported to the island with large flat-bottomed boats, where they remained until fall. The caretakers rotated in order to milk the sheep, and once or twice a month to look after the pigs and the calves. Aside from that, the cattle “looked after themselves” without human interference. There were special boatmen, it was a private boat, private fleet. You reach the Danube, and he ferries you over, you pay for it. And cows, lots of cows. We had pigs. My father had a sow, an enormous sow. And he used to take it to the island, and from time to time he’d go over to see it and to feed it a bit. And when it finally farrowed, he went, sorted everything out… There were people who loaded up a whole wagon—they’d round up the pigs and load them on. So much husbandry! … It [the island] was an immense resource for us, for Belene, and for animal husbandry. That was that: animal husbandry and lumbering. In the fall they took off with their axes, collecting wood, and then ferrying it across, and so on.

Some interviewees reported that their families used to keep 150–200 sheep, 50–60 pigs, 16–17 beehives on the island. One of them recalled many beehives throughout an enormous field of mint. A path wove its way through it, trampled by the livestock, which went to the shore to drink water. During the fall, the owners sold the better part of the flock, which was a significant income for the households. Two dairy farms operated on the shore of the river. In one of the interviews we learn about how the dairy farmer once bragged how he processed twelve tons of milk in a single day. The former camp custodian recalled how one day in 1949, when the livestock had to be “evacuated” from the island so that it might be converted into the base of the newly-created “labor-reeducation residence” (TVO),16 there were approximately 20 thousand sheep, and 16   The official term for forced-labor camps; trudovo-vazpitatelno obshtezhitie, labor-­ reeducation residence.

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several thousand cattle and pigs on it, respectively. We can certainly take the word of those who insist that the island was a “great paradise, a pure paradise,” an “enormous wealth” and “golden in our eyes”. These statements resonate with the conclusions in the report on the security of the newly-established camp from April 1949. It points out that Belene residents earned, per  annum, some 100–200 thousand leva per household from the breeding of livestock on the island.17 According to the same report, at that time the village was comprised of some 1400 households, with a population of 7500. Among those, the electoral turnout was only 60%, a quarter of whom voted against the Fatherland Front (the communist-dominated coalition which took power in September 1944) or, per the calculations of the report’s authors, “more than 50% of the villagers are enemies of the FF”, who “will now become more dissatisfied and greater adversaries, since until now they could utilize the island … and now their livestock is dispersed and the discontent is sizeable.”18 In most of their stories, one cannot now detect a trace of that discontent. Only one man delved into the pandemonium in the spring of 1949, when Beleners had to quickly gather their livestock: “everyone is wondering what to do, they slaughter, they sell, and we’ve been treading water ever since”. This repertoire of topoi, tropes and plot lines of the local memory draws up the relatively stable frames of the biographical narratives. Memory divides and compartmentalizes these experiences into different storylines. The thriving animal husbandry was a part of Belene’s pre-socialist past as well, but it is absent from the narratives about “before”—likely because it does not fit with the chronicles of floods, mud, poverty and backwardness. On the other hand, the forced collectivization of agricultural land is a part—indeed the most substantial part—of the communist reforms, but this very topic vanishes from the stories about those reforms, because it contradicts their tone and significance. The disparate mnemonic narratives exist in parallel, without a bond between them. While some are obviously modeled on the official ideological discourse, others are more-so a part of the local (counter)memory, at times influenced by the new public narrative formed in the 1990s. The lack of a conjunction between the two is not illogical, on the contrary—it stems from memory’s meaning-making role. 17  Archive of the Ministry of the Interior (hereafter AMI), holding. 1, inventory 1, archival unit 1205, sheet 9. As a comparison: in 1945 the average price of an ox was approximately 36 thousand leva, and that of a horse—approximately 41 thousand leva. 18  Ibid.

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The differing (even contradictory) messages quite obviously cannot be situated within the same storyline. Whence originates the observed contingency and inconsistency of local memory. The Camp in Local Memory: Traumatic Repression or Limited Rationality The forced-labor camp on the island of Persin19 was constituted by governmental ordinance on 27 April 1949.20 To this end, the Ministry of the Interior was granted several of the Belene Archipelago islands, Persin among them (Fig. 5.2). The general basis for the existence of this camp and dozens of others, adopted in December 1944, was “The decree on

Fig. 5.2  Map of the Belene archipelago with the campsites on the main island. (Drawing by Krum Horozov, former internee. Reprinted with permission from ISRP, 2009) 19  For the camp’s history, see Skotchev (2017). For the difficulties of researching it in the purged archives see Topouzova (2021). 20  AMI, h. 23, inv. 1, a.u. 144, l. 29.

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labor/reeducation residences for politically dangerous persons”.21 It designated as “politically dangerous” individuals “perilous to the order and security of the state”—a tautological and far too general definition, which granted the institutions of the Ministry of the Interior far too much discretion in appraising “danger” without envisioning any mechanism whatsoever for the oversight, judicial or otherwise, over their actions. The camps were intended for the interment, for various lengths of time, of persons without a conviction, directly at odds with the then-in-effect constitution. Initially, this term was not to exceed six months. In 1951, however, it was increased to 3–7 years.22 Towards the end of 1952, 218 (more than 10%) of the 2145 internees were interned for a period of up to seven years, 308—up to five years, 342—up to three years, and 1026 people received terms of one or two years. Only 50 people were sentenced to the originally preordained 3–6 month term.23 The camp on Persin island (Fig. 5.3) is the largest and longest-­enduring one, albeit with a few notable interruptions. The total count of the internees numbers at 9933 people before 1959. (Stoyanova & Iliev, 1991: 39) and more than 15,000 people by 1987, approximately 11,000 of whom without conviction (including the Turks interned in 1984–1985) and about 4000 convicted, who occupied the camp in 1952–1953 (Skotchev, 2017: 14). It is quite easy to detect the correlation between changes to the camp, and prominent events on the world stage: after Stalin’s death in 1953, the camp was closed and converted into a prison, with the better part of the internees being released, and the remainder handed over to the court system; following the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the camp was reopened, and continued operating until 1959, when most of the inmates were released, while a fraction of them was relocated to the so-called “labor group” near Lovech, to which staff from Belene was also delegated. The prison remained on the island. During the years 1984–1985, the camp was reestablished and until 1987, Turks who opposed the forced assimilation process were interned there. The prison exists to this date on the western part of the island, while the eastern part, along with a few of the smaller islands and areas along the shoreline are now within the territory of the natural reserve “Persina” designated as such in 2000.

 State Gazette, 15/20.01.1945.  AMI, h. 1, inv. 1, a.u. 2268, l. 3–4. 23  AMI h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 391, l. 36. 21 22

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Fig. 5.3  The camp in 1954. (Drawing by Krum Horozov, former internee. Reprinted with permission from ISRP, 2009)

The longevity of the camp has an interesting impact on how it is remembered among the local community. Belene’s townsfolk do not make a distinction between the two institutions: When they hear Belene, they get scared… the prison is here. In broad strokes, Belene is notorious for the prison, you know, more-so… So you can see where the renowned Belene prison is. I read a book about the Belene prison, from this one man, he was a real saint… Great, but Bulgaria hates us with this prison. When you even say “Belene,” it sends chills down their spines out there. We earned ourselves a bad reputation with that prison.

In reality, it was the camp, not the prison, that was behind Belene’s ‘bad reputation’ at the start of the 1990s. But even when the interviewers asked about the camp explicitly, the respondents would often answer about the prison, mingling the two institutions: Did they ever talk about the camp, were you aware of anything?

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About the prison, you mean?

[In response to a question about the difference between the camp and the prison] No they’re one and the same thing. “The Camp” maybe is what they called the Lovech camp. There are no camps here just… site site. There’s several sites. The TVO has still not been closed.

The ignorance of (or refusal to acknowledge) the presence of two distinct institutions, which existed to some extent in parallel, is made all the easier by the characteristic local parlance: as a rule, people talk about “the island,” when referring to one of these institutions (“I worked on the island”). Most frequently, however, “the island” means the agricultural farm, for which the labor of the prisoners and camp internees was utilized. In conflating the camp, a repressive, totalitarian and unconstitutional institution with the prison, a legitimate and lawful institution, Beleners put forth their own idiosyncratic, benevolent interpretation of local history. Fusing the camp and the prison might come across as a traumatic symptom, a manifestation of some sort of a collective amnesia, caused by a kind of repression of the memory as difficult to accept and to process, or perilous to the stability of the local community. Thus, a peculiar relationship with the past is formed: cultivated nescience, a refusal to acknowledge and an attempt to purge from the mind whatever is problematic for one’s own mental universe (Siebert, 1992). Through such an elimination of the uncomfortable past, the expectation is that the historical ‘statute of limitations’ will expire, and that with time, it will become trivial. Something similar, perhaps, occurred in the local memory, until the traumatic memory was summoned back at the beginning of the 1990s. Aside from the aforementioned benevolent interpretation, we observe also other symptoms of unprocessed trauma, likely aiming to eliminate something which is seen as a threat to the unity of the local society. One of them is the fastidious evasion of identifying Beleners who served as camp guards or militia men, who, at the time of our field visits, resided in the city. In these instances, the interlocutors avoided any designations more definite than: “a cousin of mine”, “from a different neighborhood”, “a neighbor of some close friends of ours”. They carefully sidestepped as well the topic of their erstwhile careers and the deeds of which they were

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publicly accused after the fact. Even while talking compassionately about the internees, our interlocutors did not associate that suffering with the actions of their fellow townsmen, who at the time were guards, militiamen, or camp staff. Instead, they resorted to innominate statements in the passive voice: “they were greatly tormented”, “they were beaten”. That which they wrote about Lovech, there they set up a camp so they could extract stone… I knew about it because my cousin was selected to go there, they departed from here to that they could know their policemen—reliable people, but what they did there… After that we heard that most of them [camp internees] were marked to never get out of there, to leave their bones behind.

In this narrative, we observe the gradual slide in the legitimacy of the witness’s authority. Initially, the witness knows, because he was ‘privileged’ to be close to one of the principal actors, perhaps a member of the militia or a camp guard (“I knew because my cousin…”). This is followed by a distancing (“but what they did there…”) and citing later revelations (“after that we heard”). Expressions like “to leave their bones behind”, which allude to the rhetoric of bringing to light the crimes in the camps only after 1990, reinforce this silent distancing. It does not extend much further, however, than the implied solidarity with the victims—the interviewee is not interested in who/why “were marked” not to leave the camp alive. The perpetrators are either left unmentioned, or spoken about in the undefined, third-person plural form. It must be noted that the cousin does not number among them, he is stripped of agency, simply “selected to go”. A similar abdication of responsibility to remember can be interpreted as an abandonment of any responsibility for the past. The amnesia surrounding the camp is not necessarily meant to justify the regime, but rather to step away from its consequences. The latter however is at times indirectly tied into a condemnation of the internees themselves, fortified by the unspoken concession that if they were incarcerated in the camp, there might have been a good reason why after all. An interviewee recounted a conversation with a former detainee, who attended the commemoration. When he began talking about the famine in the camp, our subject repudiated: “Ok, well why didn’t they take me? Why didn’t they take my father?” This frame of mind shifts, in part, the blame on the victims, postulating in a way the perspicuity of the penalty: since they were punished, it is likely that they were guilty in some way. On top of that, the castigation has been

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prescribed by an institution, granting it a systemic character, which makes it appear precisely as punishment, rather than arbitrary retribution.24 The victim-blaming syndrome, widely discussed with regard to the Holocaust, for example, is ultimately the flip side of the personal exoneration: calling into question their innocence repudiates their very victimhood status, and with it—at least in part and indirectly—the guilt of the perpetrators. The suppressed trauma hypothesis, however, could lead to an exorbitant interpretation of this case and to the unjust portrayal of the local population in the role of the ‘perpetrators’.25 Moreover, it is constricted to a presentist understanding of memory, which limits the number of potential explanations from the point of view of Belene’s people only within the bounds of contemporary public memory, and the image of their town created in the 1990s, neglecting their own past experiences. Certain ideas from the field of microhistory could help to better understand this palimpsest of memory and counter-memory. More explicitly, Giovanni Levi poses the question of the different operational forms of human rationality in varying situations and their historic and social volatility. He introduces the notion of limited rationality in order to describe the selection of memories, termed self-protective by him, which allows people to function in the world and to impart meaning to it. (Levi, 2001: 107–108). This limited rationality however is not a constant. It takes on different forms in relation to the historical context, social conditions and the individuals’ actions. It is limited exactly because the actors do not allow for the existence of broader horizons and of relevant alternatives. In his article on the uses of biography, Levi is interested in the type of rationality we ascribe to the actors whose biography we compose within the borders of this rationality (Levi, 1989:  1326, 1334). This prompts me to ponder what sort of a rationality I am ascribing to (or expecting from) the Belene residents of 24  The citizens of Belene could hardly have imagined that this was far from always the case. For example, in a report to the Vice-minister of State Security from 15 May 1951, the acting head of the Internment and Displacement department admits that he cannot inform “how many and what type” of displaced and interned persons there are, given that the investigation “happened randomly” and “very irresponsibly” (AMI h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 5, s. 3) In a later report on the work of the department (likely near the end of 1951) he self-critically points out: “… we’re counting on receiving some data from below, without having checked whether the data sent reflected the truth, whether they’re objective, if there isn’t a personal element to them” (AMI h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 5, s. 5). From a report dated 15.11.1952, one can conclude that a year later, this problem had still not been remotely addressed: it cites instances wherein for one and the same allegation, different lengths of internment were assigned. 25  On perpetrators’ trauma see Giesen (2004).

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the day. To inquire as well into the conditionality of my own perspective, forged in the context of the revelations about the crimes of the communist regime, and in particular the published memoirs of camp survivors. The notion of limited rationality in this case presupposes an interest in the circumstances present in the personal experiences of the interviewees, which contributed to the formulation of their perspective(s). One such important circumstance is the institutional setting and its changes, to which the residents of the town doubtless reacted. In other words, this is a question about their practical approach to the camp and the prison. What do we discover here? For the duration of its existence and in the present day, the prison is among Belene’s most stable employers. The camp, for as long as it was operational, provided the town of Belene with an even larger number of work places with good pay and social benefits. It is precisely in this role as an employer that I am now interested. What advancement opportunities did the people of Belene have access to at the beginning of the 1950s, and how did employment at the camp stack up when compared to other alternatives? With its founding alone, some 120 men were recruited from the neighboring villages, predominantly as guards, according to its custodian.26 Subsequently, their number swelled, with the majority of the recruits being local residents. On top of those, administrative staff needs to be added. Their count increased from 28 in 1951 to 62 in 1953, while the size of the security corps during the same period grew from 86 to 186 people, respectively (Skotchev, 2017: 532–533). There were operational duties within the camp as well: coach drivers, boatmen, fishermen, which towards 1950 tallied up to 53 full-time positions (Skotchev, 2017: 547). During the second stretch of its existence (1957–1959) a total of 225 people were deployed to guard the prison and the camp; in addition to them, the number of wardens varied between 44 and 48, while a total of 34–38 people were employed in the various operations and administration departments (Skotchev, 2017:  562–563). All said, during the 1950s the camp and the subsequently established prison provided work places to over 300 people. Aside from that, a state farm of approximately two thousand hectares of arable

26  In the report cited, for the camp’s internal security 147 junior militiamen (121 patrolmen and 26 mounted) and eight senior militiamen are requested. AMI h. 1, inv. 1, a.u. 1205, s. 10–11.

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land was created on the island, according to the interviewees,27 which included a vegetable garden and animal farms. The labor of the prisoners and the interned was utilized for its maintenance. It boasted its own administration and other full-time staff, including “civilians”—amounting to about 30 people in 1951 (Skotchev, 2017: 548). Accordingly, it can be stated with little hesitation, that in approximately one out of every five to one out of every four of the 1400 households in Belene, someone worked on the “island”, i.e. the camp/prison or the agricultural estate belonging to it.28 In the 1952 registry of newborns in the village of Belene, the prevailing occupation of the parents is listed as agriculture (61% of fathers). For about 10% of the fathers, however, the occupation listed is “militiaman” or “workplace TVO”. The latter goes for one of the mothers as well. In 1953, 22 of the 198 fathers are in the militia or army. Another nine of them take on other (“civilian”) roles at the TVO.  The homogenous local population begins to transform, initially with the appearance of the camp as a potential work place, and subsequently with the collectivization of agricultural land, which prompted drastic changes to the traditional vocation and way of life of Belene’s people. From the perspective of the then-available occupational opportunities, a job in the camp must have come across the same as any other: if not more appealing, then certainly better-paid.29 That at least some of the positions were considered prestigious, we gather from the story of the statistician (born in 1929), who completed high school in the nearby town. The educated young man returned to his native village and was unable to find work, suited to his qualifications. Forced to work at the collective “with the hoe”, he was enthused by the possibility of starting work at the camp, where his cousin was the treasurer: “Please ‘cuz, hire me to work here. … whatever kind of work it is, I’ll go, I’ll obey every command”. Decades later, he still believes that this had been his chance to 27  According to a report to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the communist party from 31.12.1964, the land acquired for agricultural use after 1949 amounted to 1.6 thousand hectares. AMI h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 1512, s. 2. 28  I offer this conjecture with the disclaimer that it is an estimate, and without overstating the fact that it is supported by our sample, in which seven men out of the 31 households worked on “the island”. 29  In a report on an internal audit (28.01.1953) it is stated that the monthly wages of the employees fell between 500 and 600 leva (AMI, h. 1, a.u. 1993, s. 122–124) At the same time, the compensation for a day’s work at a collective was 0.50 lev (with thanks to Daniel Vatchkov for providing this information).

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change his life. Decades later, the former tractor operator attests not only to the prestige of the work, but also to the atmosphere, which, to put it lightly, did not encourage empathy and moral qualms: When I went to the TVO that first year, 1951, Major Kitov notified me: “These people are toxic to Bulgaria,”—I still remember how he told me that—“they are against Bulgaria, they’re with the fascists, and so on. … You are not allowed to give out cigarettes, you are not allowed to give him water, you are not allowed to talk to him, you are not allowed to smuggle out any letters”—that was the last thing, not to smuggle out any letters, lest they get in contact with them and then… by and large I still remember that, as I’m telling it to you now. And I obeyed it, because there was no other employment back then; this was the best enterprise in our eyes, where we could start working, earning, living.

Seven of the 17 men interviewed had worked at the camp and/or the prison (it is not always clear where), or at the state agricultural estate belonging to it at various points in time. Their positions were always “civilian”: tractor operator, brigade leader at the vegetable garden, electro-­ technician, switchboard operator, statistician, courier or camp custodian. Other elderly men also disclosed that they had worked there. Not one among them admitted to having been a guard or militiaman. Not all of them had direct contact with the inmates. Every one considered the camp/prison as their place of work, the setting to their day-to-day duties. Most worthy of attention, from this point of view, turned out to be the management of the island and its production: And so they worked, the inmates worked at the prison—in the mornings they brought them out… and it’s, there were large plots of land, and it’s fertile land, because… a while back when the Danube came through it covered the whole island and the sediment, it layered the wonderful soil on the island… And then they started working the island, you haven’t even got a clue what tomatoes, tomatoes—so large (gestures) a tomato, and the beets like a horse’s head, and the corn—so big (gestures) you can’t even snap them off, bountiful stuff, so very bountiful, and the watermelons—watermelons that big, really that big, I went to buy myself watermelons—couldn’t carry them. For example, I have renowned yields from on the island. I’ve got six-and-­ a-half—seven tons of eggplant per decare, which nobody can produce, because the land on the island is tremendously fertile… We produced superb vegetables, I sustained “Georgi Kirkov”[cannery] in Pleven, a cannery in

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Svishtov, “Republic”, every day 30 tons of eggplant and 14 tons of pepper came out of there per day—huge production, SUPER production! Yes! It was wealthier than the TKZS! Hens, machines, tractors… it had everything! The prisoners worked, watermelons—sooooo big! Cheap, they produced everything: fish, they had lots of fish.

People remember the agricultural enterprise where they worked and where they purchased vegetables. They do not remember the camp, in which crimes were committed. The older among them often mention the cheap vegetables and the enormous watermelons grown on the island. The prison is only mentioned in passing, and the camp—not at all. This is a stunted point of view, but in reality, it is exactly the point of view of the witness, who garners their authority precisely from their own insularity: the witness cannot know the whole truth, only what they observed. This is also a limited rationality according to Levi’s definition, that is, singling out the favorable circumstances and obfuscating everything else. It was this type of rationality that guided these people in their actions in the past. Namely this limited rationality can be observed today in the memories about the camp as well. The limitation of this viewpoint leads to a certain normalization, a banalization of the camp. This normalization demonstrates that the ways in which people define their everyday life and its meaning are restricted by the alternatives at their disposal. Such a comprehension of the camp may likely come across as the result of a self-protective choice of information, and in that sense—a form of limited rationality: their understanding reduces the unknown and potentially threatening to something familiar, i.e. the existing classification system is enabled, whereby it is now interpreted as something non-sinister, even as something necessary. Familiarization through a ‘relocation’ from the realm of unclassified and potentially hostile to the realm of codified experience, via sublimation to familiar categories, is not the result of accummulation of knowledge, on the contrary—it is made possible by the obfuscation of ‘redundant’ knowledge and establishing a correlation to a familiar model. That is how the bizarre, the out-of-the-ordinary is trivialized and transposed into the established order. As it were, the understanding, and from that point out, the normalization, is the result of schematization and recoding—cognitive functions, which supplant the practical, everyday interaction with the camp institution.

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Edification of Memory? In this section, I will attempt to bring to light the breakthroughs to limited rationality described above, and to formulate hypotheses about the dynamics of the memory of the camp and the course of its development. One of the immutable questions about the camp was who the camp inmates were. During the 1990s, and even later, this was a point of contestation—that camp internees were for the most part delinquent criminals, rather than political opponents of the regime. The question of who the inmates were was raised 63 times in the interviews. And here is where the logical fallacies show up, which speak to the layering and mingling of different mnemonic narratives. Most interviewees responded to the question with categories utilized by the repressive institutions of the communist regime. Shortly after the camp was established, the practice of delivering routine statistical reports, which provided for the indexation of the camp inmates, was introduced. On a base level, the internees were classified into political or criminal, where in the first period of the camp’s existence, the political ones prevailed decisively, considered more dangerous than the criminal offenders. They were, in turn, subdivided into 15 categories, in accordance with their political affiliation: members of the communist party, of its youth organisation, of the collaborating agrarian union, of the oppositional agrarian union, socialists, anarchists, democrats, former policemen, former officers, etc. Other categories were sometimes included on top of these, e.g. Trotskyists. In the statistical accounts, the specified categories were broken down into sex and age, social background and social status, nationality, type of crime and length of term.30 Thus, every internee was classified across nine different criteria, in accordance with which the camp population was succinctly presented, and hierarchically ranked according to their “political hazard”. These categorizations are important, because the inmates were not interned for what they did (the infractions, if there were any, would have allowed for trials and prison sentences), but chiefly because of what they were: “former people”, “kulaks”, democrats, and so forth. A parallel can be seen between the substantializing implementation of class (under communism) and racial (under Nazism) criterion: it was inconsequential what one did or did not do, it was important what one was: a class enemy, or a subhuman being. The imposition of categories makes the internees one-dimensional,  AMI, h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 371, 391.

30

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s­ ubjugating them to an authority which seemingly lacks any one concrete subject. Decades after the direct abuse has subsided, this anonymous classification authority still persists. Although they were only vaguely familiar with this classification system, Belene’s older residents still think of the internees in terms of these categories. Fifteen respondents, amongst them those who worked at the camp, stated that the internees were exclusively or predominantly “political”: former government officials, members of the anti-communist opposition, former army personnel. They mentioned the names of politicians who in the 1990s became public figures once more. Those, along with the rest of the “politicals” are invariably spoken of with respect, sometimes with empathy—even in those two-three instances when the term “contras,” commonplace for those times, was used.31 The camp custodian insisted that the inmates were not criminals, that they were “intelligent people”, “cultured”, “well-mannered”, “respected”, “literate people”. He unequivocally stated that there “were no criminals, all of them were interned without sentences”. In his glaring attempt to normalize the camp, he clarified that there were “ministers, generals” and “of all professions”, there was a hospital, a pharmacy—the camp was “like any village”. Several interviewees were of the opinion that one of the principal causes for internment on the island was resistance to the collectivisation of the agricultural land. According to them, the inmates were primarily well-to­do peasants, who refused to join the collectives. Two of our respondents identified them as kulaks,32 but went on to explain that most of them were only “denounced” as being such. According to camp statistics, towards the end of 1951 only 6.5% of the internees fell into the kulak category, and their total number, as well as their share of the camp population fell to 31   From “counter-revolutionaries,” the term used in State Security documentation. Towards the beginning of 1953, the largest group amongst them, according to their political “coloration,” were members of the oppositionist agrarian union, at about one third. Those with no party affiliation numbered almost as many, followed by the so-called “former people” (former members of “fascist organizations” and wealthy citizens). (AMI h. 1, inv. 1, a.u. 1993, s. 63–70). According to another document, 82.2% of those detained in 1952 were members of the “Nikola-Petkovist Underground”, i.e. the oppositionist agrarian union. (AMI h. 1, inv. 1, a.u. 2965, s. 53). An analysis of their class background found that more than 2/3 were “from circles close to the people’s power”. 32  From Russian: the word means ‘fist,’ and in the metaphorical sense—stingy person. It was used in the Soviet Union in the 1930s to denote the ‘class enemy’ in rural regions. This is the same connotation with which it was adopted in Bulgaria after 1944.

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3.4% at the end of 1952, and 2.7% in May 1953. At the same time, 35% of all detainees fell within the “poor and middle peasants” category in 1951, and respectively 36.65% and 32.4% towards the end of 1952 and in May 1953—a significantly greater, and relatively stable fraction of the inmates. These administrative categories underwent certain changes when they were adopted by the local community. The terminology was maintained, but its connotation changed. The possible social hostility towards the kulaks, if it existed, did not stick in the memory of the interviewees. Today, these internees are always discussed with sympathy and compassion. It is implicitly understood that they paid a high price for having expressed more decisively and resiliently a conviction that many apparently shared, but did not dare to express. “Denunciation” was cited as a reason for internment by a number of our subjects in another context as well: the unwillingness or refusal to cooperate with the authorities. According to several interviewees, the inhabitants of the island, or at least many among them, were those “who spoke out against the party.” Some accentuated the resistance to party membership: “that he was I don’t know what… he didn’t become a communist”; “they didn’t comply with the decrees of the Bulgarian Communist Party, they didn’t approve of its… you know, causes”. And at this point, as in the previous case, they allude to coincidence or arbitrariness: the interned were “denounced”, someone had heard them, they had said something, etc. in the dimension of indefinite discrepancy. The interviewees couldn’t have read the inmates’ files, but their inferences actually come pretty close to the verbalizations of the reasons for internment stated there: “he disseminated enemy rumors”, he “spearheaded enemy provocation”, “agitations against the collectives”, “hostile predisposition to the people’s power and the communist party”, “revealed himself as an enemy of the people’s power”;33 “attitude towards the people’s power is negative”, “retaliated against party and government activities”, “his son is a traitor to the motherland in Yugoslavia”, “expressed dissatisfaction with the activities of the people’s power”, “negative attitude towards the people’s power”, “her brother is a traitor to the motherland—escaped to Yugoslavia”, “her step-son escaped to Yugoslavia”, “daughter-in-law to a traitor to the motherland”, “hostile attitude”, “has made hostile statements”, “malevolent attitude towards the activities of the party and the

 AMI, h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 232.

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government”.34 In the statistical accounts, the most frequently-cited causes for internment are “sabotage and injury” and “hostile propaganda”. Almost half of the 2145 internees had such accusations levied against them towards the end of November 1952. Of the eleven categories of infractions, eight are political, and only three are criminal in nature (theft, immoral acts, drunkenness and gambling).35 In 1957–1958, an overwhelming majority of the political prisoners—between 80% and 95%— were interned on account of “hostile provocation and propaganda”.36 This circumstance is mirrored as well in the era’s informal (shadow) public sphere: the ones who got sent to Belene were those who “talked too much”. In all of these cases, the internees were seen as victims, and not as castigated offenders. In 16 other statements, however, the categories were different and referred to the second period of the camp’s existence, more precisely, to the so-called “hooligan action” from early 1958.37 The internees were labeled “hooligans”, boisterous, aggressive youths, “zozi” (girls who wear makeup and short skirts) and “swingers” (admirers of Western culture). They were described as slackers, who frequented bars, were fans of “jazz”, “where they gyrate”, i.e. they danced to contemporary music: … the sons of money bags, swingers—long hair, tight pants… they don’t work at all, they had enough to live off from their fathers, property, somesuch and… [the police] caught them at bars, clubs. And did you know how the militia used to catch them in Sofia? That’s what I’ve heard, I haven’t seen it: when they walk into TZUM [Central Universal Mall], or some of the larger stores, when they play the music of the West, and they—boogie, boogie—those where they gyrate. And they, since they’re used to that kind, they instinctively start, start dancing. And— come over here, come over here—when the militia sees them, and stashes them away.  AMI, h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 232.  AMI, h. 12, inv. 1, a.u. 391. Historian Daniel Vachkov illustrates how salient the notions of damage and sabotage were, as justifications for the economic collapse in the first post-war years (Vachkov, 2018: 42–47). Appropriated verbatim from the Stalinist thesis of the exacerbation of the class war, this hypothesis cloaked countless instances of staggering incompetence and irresponsibility. 36  Own calculations, based on Skotchev (2017: 335). 37  Carried out in accordance with the January 21st, 1958 resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the communist party, which envisioned the internment and forced labor of the “perilous to the public order and serenity hooligans, recidivist thieves and other decrepit entities” (Stoyanova & Iliev, 1991: 155). 34 35

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Of particular import here is the class/social background—sons of the rich, not children of the ordinary people. On top of that, they come from the cities—“Sofia college students” and “zozi from Pleven”—which, for rural folks, is traditionally grounds for mistrust. In the second quote, an endorsement of the militia’s ingenuity is detected, while the question of the “danger” posed by those dancing is absent. Two of the other interviewees specified that the hooligans and do-nothings were college students and “intelligentsia”, evidently discerning a dangerous proximity between intellectual labor and idleness. From this characterization of the internees, quite a logical conclusion is to be drawn as to the reason why the “hooligans” were brought to the island—to learn the value of labor, so that they could be integrated anew into socialist society. Although none of the interviewees spoke approvingly of the punishments imposed on the “hooligans”, the reeducation methods appeared to have been met with some level of understanding. No one expressed any sympathy towards this category of inmates. In this case, the regime’s propaganda mechanism conveniently offered categories within which the internees were to be envisioned. In contrast with those reviewed above, however, this categorization has not been renegotiated since the fall of the regime, and the attitudes toward it appear unchanged. With the passage of time, the manipulation developed into a widespread and unquestioningly acknowledged public “truth”, which is not called into doubt after the fact. Within the different pronouncements on the categories of detainees and the mindset towards them, we observe the signs of informational stratification (who could know what/how much), of the propaganda, disinformation and censorship. They demonstrate the capacity of the totalitarian regime to engender public amnesia and silence by means of fear, threats and distorted communication. As we can see, the attitude towards the internees is a function of their classification—as “hooligans” or as “politicals”. It can be conceded that this distinction, at least to some extent, is a result of the rehabilitation of the “politicals” during the 1990s (see Chap. 3), and the active entry of some of them into the public sphere. Contrary to that, the designation of the internees as hooligans or criminals voids the obligation to take a moral stance regarding the camp, and regarding the regime whose interests it serviced. Thus, the speakers lodge themselves in the gray realm of know-nothingness:

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But I didn’t know, that they were there without a sentence… I knew that, I don’t know, back then… I don’t know what was right… They were very, you know… aggressive, I can’t think of another word. Just like now, the hooligans who drink, smoke, commit crimes…

Only in two instances, when addressing the questions of who the internees were, the respondents answered not with categories of people or acts, but with something they personally witnessed and felt: People like us. Beaten, beaten, beaten, crippled… When they went in, when they brought them in, we saw them from the train when they were taking them there. Destitute, those poor people! (in a hushed tone) They were men, handsome men… Later when they left, who knows where they passed through—we saw nothing.

But the sight of the detainees, making their way to the island, appears to have provoked not just empathy, but fear as well. Given the image formed by the propaganda, given the lack of information, supplanted by hearsay, it is no wonder that many may have been scared. As time went on, this dread likely dissipated from the memories of Belene’s townsfolk, and following the rehabilitation of the repressed, it has become inappropriate to talk about it. Only one woman took us back to memories of this sort: But they’d drop off here thousands of folks, what do you think? And you see all of them with those striped outfits, walking along the railway, and they go down there and they load them up on pontoons and ship them over to the island. Whoever sees them can’t help but be worried, be afraid. You couldn’t, it was very terrifying.

Such flashes of episodic memory, which reproduced specific moments and images, cropped up much less frequently in conversations about the internees, than the displays of semantic memory, which utilizes categories and judgements. No doubt, one of the reasons behind it is that Beleners who did not work on the island never had an opportunity to interact with its inhabitants, and everything that took place there had to remain a secret. Whatever our conversation partners knew and disclosed about the camp and its inmates was gathered from different sources, official and alternative, past and recent. Thus, layered on top of the personal memories, to the extent that there were any, are official categories (hooligans, criminals), rumors (kulaks, the denounced), information which was only

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released and verified much later, images, appropriated in recent years from memoirs, publications and films. These are the forms of public memory which cultivate personal memories and establish their social frames—or, a culture of memory. Consequently, it is not only possible but all too natural for everyone to ‘remember’ more than what they witnessed firsthand. The memory of the camp is a complex conglomeration of personal memories, local legends, media imagery, shared and contested judgements and attitudes. I continue, further along, in the pursuit of the traumatic narrative thread within this conglomeration. Bare Life and damnatio memoriae ‘Remembering’ more than what was seen and heard in the past, applies to a great extent to our interlocutors’ memories about the camp order, and what happened inside. A part of the testimony about the camp touched on exactly the prohibited entry: That’s what I heard. So, we couldn’t go and see it, because no one will let you. Before the Ninth [September 1944] you could enter, but after they set up the concentration camp—no entry for private persons. … It was forbidden, and that’s appropriate, after all it’s a concentration camp. It’s not a resort. Even when we went there with our carts, they didn’t let us pass by the political prisoners. … No, no, no, we have zero contact with them, so that they could’ve told whomever, whatever, no, no, there wasn’t anyone who would tell us. We went through there, the militia, no one lets you get close to there, to talk with them. … earlier, it was forbidden, back then they wouldn’t let a bird fly overhead, let alone outsiders. … You can’t talk about the camp here. I had no right here to talk about what I saw at the camp. Only in my soul…

This is why most of Belene’s residents know about the order and the goings-on inside the camp not from firsthand impressions, but from other sources. This becomes evident from the relatively frequent metamnemonic formulations, when the interviewees referred not as much to the substance of a memory, as to its formation.38 The chronology and the nature of these 38  As a rule, focusing on the personal mental process provides the listener with a hint, as to the manner in which they are to grasp the substantive statement: relativization, doubt or otherwise, conviction, intensification, etc.

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sources can be guessed on the basis of occasional hints in the stories. Some relied on what they heard and saw during the commemorations on the island: “they come, they mark the anniversary, people who were imprisoned… And they recount staggering things, they recollect, those who were there… those who survived.” It is quite challenging, nowadays, to uncouple the erstwhile rumors from the later agglomerations. The latter applies to the first-hand witnesses as well. Thus, the camp custodian told about his work from the perspective not of a person seeking his own exoneration (in his mind, the question cannot even be framed in this way), but rather, with self-assurance. His frame of reference does not allow for even a shred of doubt in the righteousness of what took place back in the day. On the contrary—he wished to correct the subsequent twisted, in his eyes, perceptions. In his tale, the campsite looks like this: It was an exemplary locale. Flowers, roses everywhere. A cultured thing. Not like some believe, that it’s camp what-have-you. The camp was disciplinary as well as political as well as occupational. … Everyone had their own separate bed, bedding, clothes to wear, laundry, everything. They had a bath house, restrooms—all of the contemporary living essentials.

In the best-case scenario, this description might apply to a later period than the one during which the custodian worked at the camp (1949–1959). Other subjects, having also worked on the island, describe it in a different light altogether: the inmates’ lodging was fashioned from wooden planks plastered with mud, and inside they were “crammed body against body”. Only the camp guards had “a nice, solid building”. Most of the stories referred of the internees’ labor, particularly at the levees—a topic introduced in the 1990s with the recollections of former detainees: … they demanded to dig four cubic meters of soil, transport it across 20–30 meters, together with a workmate or two. … here their arms were disembodied from the pain, do you understand, and hungry, most-­ importantly, because they gave them very little bread. It was a harsh regime, they kept them under strict control, they were building the levee, do you know what a levee is—so the island doesn’t get flooded; they carried the dirt with a yoke, do you know what yoke is—no wheel, no nothing, everything by hand.

A recurring topic, which also resonated with the public memory, were the afflictions upon the internees. Although the narratives were

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constructed upon hearsay from others (and in this sense, were not authentic), the interviewees’ attitudes and emotions which accompanied them were their intrinsic, spontaneous, authentic: “It was terrifying. Terrifying, I just couldn’t… You can’t even say it out loud”; “What an ordeal it was, what ferocity! Can you imagine that?!”; “Torture, immense torture”; “Work and beatings. … Thrashing, work, thrashing”; “I still can’t comprehend it… Why they tormented them like that, I don’t know”. The not-paricularly-flowery phraseology is reduced primarily to interjections: “unbelievable”, “horror”, “terrifying”, “the horrors”, whose expressive force is rather in the intonation and gesticulation. The deficit of “cultural tools” (Wertsch) for the mnemonic processing of the past is palpable. Alongside these emotional outbursts, there are a couple of instances of a refusal to share, a calling into question or a disavowal, also characteristic reactions to a traumatic experience left unprocessed. A man who worked “in the prison” during the latter half of the 1950s, otherwise coherent and loquacious, dodged the question: I don’t know about political prisoners, I know that the political prisoners were at some, some sort of site—Site II, it was called, but we had no access to go there, it was guarded, the site, and what they did, why they did it, I had nothing to do with those people, and I can’t say anything more substantial. They said they were beaten, I don’t know what, I don’t know why… Well, I don’t know, that could have been the case… Nobody saw it, right… Or they could have been lying. You have to see [the commemorative plaque] that Zhelyu Zhelev and the others put up: “So-and-so was killed”. And I told the commandant [of the nowadays prison]: get rid of that thing.—“Why?”—“Noone was killed here”.

Indeed, the first commemorative plaque, placed at the campsite, was destroyed shortly after its unveiling. The investigation came to an end without а resolution, where the hypothesis of the police was that it was the act of “hooligans”. Given the restricted access to the location, this explanation is near unbelievable. More likely, we’re looking at an act of denial, a characteristic traumatic symptom. I will now examine in some detail two topoi central to the public memory of Belene, which we find in the biographical narratives. Several interviewees talked about the “marathon of death”: those interned in 1958

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were forced to run several kilometers from the shore of the island to the campsite through the mud and under the whips of mounted guards. It was a mob, so many people. And the spot there was so low, such mud, such—up to your knees! You couldn’t walk, you couldn’t even stand up. And they’re chasing them on horseback, that’s what I heard… They were being chased with horses and whips, if you couldn’t walk—beating. If you fall—beating, beating! And from the island, one horse out front and one horse behind, and on each of them a militiaman with a whip. And out to Site II it’s eight kilometers, from here it’s eight kilometers. Running, falling down, getting up, whatever—just to get there.

Some of our conversation partners admited that they had only heard about this, others claimed to have witnessed it. Other than in published memoirs, these stories were also included in A. Kiryakov’s documentary The Survivors: an older woman chokes back tears as she recalls how her husband begged her not to show up for the visitations anymore, because he couldn’t endure once again to run, in front of the guard’s horse, the entire distance between the campsite and the portal. Immediately after her, two men talk about the “marathon of death”, which they themselves lived through. These stories undoubtedly had a strong impact on the audience, and it is likely that their tone became a part of that “communicative unconscious” (Welzer), through which people manage to link aspects of their own experience and that of others, and to attain more ‘knowledge’ than the consciously accessible one. This unconscious is not a suppressed trauma, but rather a “functional unconscious”, that is, something which a person both knows and does not know, positioned beyond the threshold of consciousness, and by virtue of which an emotional dimension is imparted, the connotation of a particular message, defining its perception and further interpretation. (Welzer, 2008: 294–295). An emotive coding of this sort can be discerned within the narrative of the electro-­technician, to whom the second quote above belongs. Without being prompted by the interviewer, he returned to this topic later on in the conversation, when describing his career path: There [in the nearby town] I worked for a while, after that they talked me into going to the prison, I worked there two-three years, but I couldn’t bear it. Two years… [Interviewer: Why?] ‘Cause… Seeing how they beat them, how they, did that… I’m watching one time, this one with the whip and the

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horse, chasing the prisoner, what have you, and beating him. And since then I became repulsed, and on the very next day I tell myself, I’m submitting my notice and getting out of here. And I left.

It is worth noting, that in contrast to some of the other interviewees, who admitted that work in the camp was coveted, he had to be “talked into it”. In all likelihood, during the second period of the camp’s existence (late 1950s) there were a greater number of alternatives to working in the collective, particularly among people with any sort of a qualification. It is possible, however, in depicting the circumstances in this manner, that he articulated a position appropriated from a contemporary culture of memory. Serving in support of this conjecture are the following statements made over the course of the conversation, from which any semblance of empathy for the internees is lacking: All of them were oppositionary, that’s why they were brought here. Even now we’ve got to do it, … got to pluck them and take them to the island, so they can get sorted out [Interviewer: Well, that’s not a good thing—the opposition on the island.] No, they’re so very, they’re so… I, according to me, the opposition hinders the people, they get in our way.

It is not particularly difficult to identify yet another example of the “functional unconscious” in statements such as this one, formed in various types of communicative situations. The day-to-day rinsing and purifying of politics fits comfortably within old, deeply-internalized mental blueprints. The electro-technician appears not to notice a contradiction between this template and the newly-created mnemonic plot line, which he manifested numerous times during the interview, converting it into the leitmotif of his narrative about the camp: Isn’t that why I quit, when I saw them being chased with a horse and beaten, and I quit. And I left, and the very next day I quit. I can’t, I can’t bear those things. At the end of the conversation, he returned again to this topic: So that’s that with the island. It, it’s got a lot of history. But whoever worked there a longer time, knows many more things, but me… very little, I worked for two years. And I couldn’t bear it, like I told you, I couldn’t stand it. When I saw how they chased them, the prisoners, and I couldn’t bear it and…

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Upon superimposing the facts over the biographical narrative, however, it becomes clear that the electro-technician left work in 1959, when the camp was closed down and many of the “civilian” positions were furloughed. This coincidence prompts speculation into the true reason for his change of occupation. It is reasonable to assume that the objective circumstance (the closure of the camp) played a decisive role, and not the moral reaction. It might even be conceded that the decision was not a personal one, but rather imposed by the employer. This concession does not eliminate the possibility of the purely human emotional response of empathy towards the internee, and indignation at his treatment—back then as well as now. And if at that time, this response was difficult to verbalize and share, in the setting of the mnemonic culture of today, it is precisely moral outrage that comes across as an acceptable motive, whose ‘tellability’ and appropriateness are at the foundation of mutual understanding between the conversation partners. It is entirely natural that past experience is recounted from a present-day perspective, contingent on the presumed expectations of the audience. This is how the shared “landscape of consciousness” (Bruner) is constituted, i.e. what the discourse participants know, think or feel (Tschuggnall & Welzer, 2002). It is possible, however, that this change occurred also within the “landscape of action” (according to the same narrative-psychological theory), that is, in the retrospective deliberation of situations, intentions and objectives. Tangling up a topos of public memory in the contemplation of one’s own agency reaffirms J. Bruner’s observation about the integration of the public and the personal in biographical narratives: although specific situations are concerned, they become the means, rather than the objective of the storytelling (quoted in Tschuggnall & Welzer, 2002: 135). The moral gesture of handing in a resignation falls within a typological plot, which garners understanding, if not sympathy, from the listeners, as well as self-­respect. Thus, the electro-technician retroactively reinvents himself, by selecting, perhaps without realizing it, an acceptable manner of biographical codification sourced from the thematic repertoire at his disposal. Similar facets of self-invention, or the formulation of a desired identity, can be observed in the stories about personal interactions with the internees. The interviewees always recount a specific event with a specific individual, rather than discussing categories of detainees. Here is one example, picked out from among several similar stories, in which the acknowledgement of the internee’s humanity highlights the kindheartedness of the speaker:

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An older man comes up to me… and he begged me to give him some bread, because they gave them very little bread… He sobbed out to me, but I know, that they warned me here not to give them anything. But I’m just so, compassionate. I told him: “I’ll go on ahead, you walk there past the cart, there’s a sack”—a bit of bread, a bit of cheese, there wasn’t anything else inside, you didn’t bring anything else to the fields, but back then we weren’t rich either, we were poorer then… And I, when I went back, he had taken the bread. [A year later, now employed as a tractor operator, the narrator met the same person in the camp] When he saw me, he starts crying, and I start crying. And now we became friends with him, not friends, we just know each-other, he recognized me and I recognized him.

In memories of this kind, the interactions with the internees are depicted as interpersonal, and they themselves—not as a category, but as distinct individuals. This is another way of expressing the same limited viewpoint of the eyewitness who does not pass judgement about people en masse, as a category (nor does he refute the stereotypes of the internees as hooligans or adversaries), but divulges about concrete interactions with a specific individual, who can always be singled out as an exception. The public memory of the camp is a premise for the recontextualization and redefinition of biographical episodes, left unshared over the course of decades. But although this memory no doubt forms (particularly during the 1990s) a potent authoritative node, I would not reduce the memories of Belene’s residents to a simplistic echoing of the new narrative. As with the electro-technician, we are dealing in these instances as well with a biographical knowledge, formed by entangled and heterogeneous interactions, uniting individual, social, cultural, economic and even somatic elements, intrinsically ambivalent, pluralistic and contradictory, practical and pragmatic (Gardner, 2001: 194–195). Finally, I highlight the topic of deaths in the camp. It always came up spontaneously in the conversations, without being introduced by the interviewers. All statements about death and murders were imparted at the initiative of the interviewees in the context of discussions about the camp.39 This circumstance gives us ground to infer the meaning that they themselves attribute to the topic. 39  According to statistics, the number of deceased from the start of 1951 to 10.09.1952 is 98. (AMI, f. 12, op. 1, a.e. 391, s. 1–39). According to Skotchev (2017: 34) the confirmed documented number of dead thought the entire period of the camp’s existence is no fewer than 173 people. To those we must add the ones killed in the camp near Lovech, approximately 150 people, whose burials on the small islands near Belene are a central topos in the traumatic narrative.

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Yet here, how many people died, here, how many people died here… (sighs) We didn’t see them, ‘cause no one could set foot there… And when they exterminated those, killed them, whatevered them, and people shivered and got on the straight and narrow path. There’s no skulking, no nothing, that’s how it is. They [the internees] don’t even come back, they killed them and buried them here, right on [island] Magaretza. They beat them, they killed them, and announced… my father went over… the people who came to collect [the bodies of] their close ones, and when they came, dad went over to dig up people who had been beaten, beaten to a pulp, so their close ones could collect them. Horror. Horror. Work and beatings. And ma…many people were killed there, who… who you don’t even know. Where they are, what they are, what’s what. I hear, all sort of things we hear, that… We heard, they… Some of them survived, others… But many of them were killed there… like animals. If you can’t work, let’s go—they pulverize you and straight into the body bag, on the pallet and over to Site II—just like that, there were… many atrocities were committed.

Most frequently in the conversations about murders and death, the Lovech camp was mentioned. Dead bodies were brought over tied in sacks and buried on one of the small islands in the Belene archipelago. Our subjects invariably described this island as distant and desolate. A key plot line in narratives about the burials is that the pigs would dig up the bodies, because the graves were shallow. A handful of the interviewees refer to a documentary film, most likely The Survivors by A. Kiryakov again: Like they showed in that film, that the pigs dug them up, that… A film, that whoever they buried here was buried in the shallow. I watched it, on the television they showed it, in 1990.

Kiryakov’s film does not discuss this directly, but it is hinted at in the story of one of the survivors, who recounts that once, upon passing the island of Predela by boat, he saw how the river’s current bobbed up and down the legs of a body buried in a shallow ditch next to the water. One of our speakers broached the topos of the pigs with an eyewitness account about the person tasked with burying the deceased:

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He picks them up with the ship, with a prisoner, and they go down to Predela, beneath Shturetza there’s one island down there, Predela… And the island takes them in, the deceased. They go there with the ship, dig, one shovel, it’s sandy and… And now one time they asked Operata [nickname]: “Gosho, is it really deep so, like…”—“It, he say, you can’t walk it, it’s sand, such… It crumbles.” … And it’s no wonder that the pigs, the boars when they pass by at night, to drag you out, to eat you, but when the water came, it concealed everything—no grave, no nothing. … The sand crumbles and there’s no trace. The Danube comes and… the water obscures everything, it drains off, and so…

Another interviewee pithily denotes this as a trustworthy fact, not susceptible to any doubt: “And they buried them very shallow, and the wild boars would dig them up and eat them.” Later on, on top of that recognized as systemic practice, the idea of intent is added, wherein the guilty are named (as a category, not as individuals). The latter changes the status of the statement, converting it into a moral valuation of the communists and their regime: Well under the communists—now, how can you bring a man from Lovech here to the camp, to Belene, to toss him into—here we have a smaller island—on that island, and… (whispering) and they gave him to the pigs to feed, the wild boars.

None of the stories relayed here lay claim to authenticity. The interviewees did not discuss the topic of death in the camp as eyewitnesses. Some of them explicitly credited their ‘sources’: cousin, film, testimony from internees, etc. Only one of them reported from the perspective of a first-hand witness: It was horror there. There, if you even flinch—immediate bullet, and to the pigs. [Interviewer: I can imagine whole lot of things, but I can’t believe that people were fed to pigs.] You haven’t seen it, that’s why! Here we have an island Magaretza, there’s two structures there, I worked there for 45 days as punishment, at these structures. And there I saw how pigs pulled up human bones, human heads… What do you know! Form there I’m certain that they didn’t bury them deep. And that’s what the wild boars are waiting for.

In this dialogue, we observe an encounter of interpretations, at which point the testimony becomes mythologized. The interviewee talks about

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the pigs, and only in the last sentence does it become clear that he means wild pigs, boars, as did the speakers in the previous quotations. The interviewer, with the knowledge that there was a pig farm on the island, and perhaps under the influence of what she heard or read in the press in the 1990s, envisions the pigs being raised there. Thus, this scene is no longer construed as internee burials, but as a premeditated and systemic barbaric practice—an interpretation, which is not repudiated by her conversation partner. On the contrary, his outburst: “You haven’t seen it, that’s why!” seemingly affirms this rendering, and only from his subsequent explanation does it become clear that this is not quite what he had in mind. Similar slip-ups are evident in several of the other statements. When it comes to rumors about the camp, one subject, cited above, noted: “But that’s what I’m telling you, they were feeding the pigs”—substantializing the impression of premeditated action. It is difficult to determine the extent to which, in these episodes, Beleners are recalling things heard or experienced at the time, and to which they are fleshed out under the influence of public discussions about the camp in the 1990s and in the years since. I will, after all, attempt to uncover the traces of varying mnemonic discourses, which likely had an impact on the formation of the current day vernacular memory about the camp. To this end, I skip back to public memory. The majority of the published eyewitness stories about the burial of the internees reveal the smaller islands surrounding Persin to be the burial sites. Only one woman, who searched for her father’s grave, testifies to 72 “nameless and crossless graves” in the desolate Catholic graveyard on the shore of the Danube, subsequently demolished by bulldozers. (Stanilov, 2007: 504). The unknown grave with no name and no cross is a widespread image, tied to death in the camps (Stanilov, 2007: 229). The preeminent trope with regard to Belene, however, is undoubtedly the pigs. While a few of the stories concern wild pigs (boars) or feral pigs, roaming around the island, which dig up the bodies, others talk about “the pig farms in Belene,” where they “gave” or “tossed the corpse to the pigs”.40 This version is reproduced in several of the memoirs published later, where 40  Stanilov (2007: 124, 131, 280, etc.) including captions like: “The famished pigs are also waiting” (p.  124); “They sent them to Belene—as pig food” (p.  131); Boncheva et  al. (1991:  77, 91, 171, 178, 333). See also Stoyanova and Iliev (1991:  35–36), where the authors refer to the press and the Commission for investigation of the crimes and the atrocities in the camps.

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it is no longer firsthand testimony, but rather a dialogue with the memories of others: “Could they have given him to the pigs on ‘Magaretza’? It was located adjacent to Persin (against the current), only one stream of water separated them, but back then it just wasn’t discussed, that there… that… pigs… people…” (Ognyanov, 2013: 79–80). This example demonstrates how specific memories take on a life of their own as a generalized topos of memory. Here, I concern myself not with the trustworthiness of the memories, but with the tropology of memory, comprising the retrogression of the camp’s crimes. They are violations not just against the internees, but indeed against civilization, morality and decency. The parallel to the rumors spread following World War II about the production of soap from human fat forces its way in. In the same manner, we observe there a reversal in the rationality of civilization, “a grotesque triumph of the very logic of efficient production upon which the economy of civilization is based” (Douglas, 1998: 54)—the deceased are utilized “efficiently” as raw material. This monstrous efficiency, as Zygmund Bauman (1989) demonstrates, serves as the “test of modernity”. Pushed to its limits, civilization becomes its own polar opposite. Thus the pig motif allegorizes not as much the martyrdom of the dead, as the barbarity of the perpetrators. Following once again the principle of limited rationality, I pose the question of what Beleners could have known back then about the murders and the burials in the camp. A valuable document, which offers insight into the situation, is a correspondence from July/August 1961 between the commandant of the prison and the vice-minister responsible for overseeing the camps, about the burials of dead internees from the Lovech camp. The commandant describes in his letter how the transportation of the bodies was carried out, and announces that the truck is well-known in “the whole of Belene village” and that the prisoners, upon seeing it, remarked that “a parcel from Lovech has arrived”. The prisoner tasked with the burial of the bodies was nicknamed “Kanto the mortician”. From the driver of the pickup truck they learned “even the names of the deceased and ‘data’ about who else had expired and would be brought over with the next delivery”. This is followed by recommendations as to how the procedure could be carried out, without being quite so conspicuous. Vice-­ minister Mircho Spasov resolved that “an immediate end should be put to this demonstrative act, and to the dangerous buzz about the bodies,” that all recommended measures be followed thoroughly, and that “the

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notorious and abiding pickup truck is altered in appearance and frequently swapped out… so that the transportation is diversified”.41 Conversations with older Beleners do indeed turn up traces of a local underground, which could not have been invented recently, and which contains unambiguous hints that what was happening on the island, including the most sordid details, was known to the town’s residents even prior to the regular expeditions of the pickup truck from Lovech. One interlocutor mentioned a threat directed against him by the then chairman of the council, that he will be sent “to the other side”. “You know what’s waiting on the other side,” the chairman added, according to the account of his prey. At this point, he conveniently informed the interviewer where “the other side” was, and what awaited him: “In the prison on the island. That’s where the pigs are going to eat me”. A quoted remark from another local leader attests to the pervasiveness, even then, of a shared knowledge about the goings-on on the island. According to the interviewee, this threat was lobbed against those unwilling to join the collective, him amongst them: “You’re too late! The Danube is going to drag you!” Much more apparent and obtrusive is the other characteristic of local memory—the externalization, and in this sense, the negation of trauma. Even while expressing empathy with the victims, the people of Belene do not advance the question of guilt. They do not deliberate upon the causes of suffering and the liability of those who caused it. The camp takes the shape of something akin to a natural disaster or a curse upon the town, othered, situated ‘on the outside’ of the local community, despite many of its members having worked there. During the fieldwork, we chronicled vague notions that the camp had come as a punishment for the town, or that it was sent to service its atonement.42 When talking about the suffering of the internees, the interlocutors always, without exception, use the disembodied “they” when referencing the perpetrators—as if “they” were not their neighbors and fellow townsfolk. Thus, the engagement with the collective meta-narrative of the local community coexists uncomfortably with a partaking in the newly-created public culture of memory. With regard to the camp guards and militiamen, the conviction seems to persist  AMI, f. 23, op. 1, a.e. 102, s. 1.  Among the reasons cited for this punishment is the ‘crippling’ of the land, whereupon people dared ‘fix’ something created by the Lord, and thus intervened in His divine plans. Another version leans on the legend of an abused cross at the entrance to the town. With appreciation to local historian Todor Gospodinov who directed my attention to these plot lines. 41 42

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that God has already punished those who partook, by bestowing them insanity or a painful death. On the flip side, those who are still alive, it is understood, are not deserving of divine punishment, and consequently, do not need to be held accountable for their actions. The very fact that they are alive is proof that He has not smote them. These archaic rationalizations are an ostensible local resolution to the question of guilt. Embedding the Christian notion of divine justice, they make possible the belonging to the same community of both the perpetrators and the victims. Violent death, in contrast with the “tamed” death of a person lying in bed (Aries, 2004), is wild and threatening in itself because of its unnaturalness. That is why it is so shocking to the collective sensibility. The symbolism of the bodies, dug up from their graves and carried off by the current or torn apart by animals is obscene and threatening—as if nature itself has condemned these bodies and refuses to accept them. They are subjected to ultimate exclusion. They are denied a return to the requisite human solidarity, they are denied the protection of that sacred expanse (Aries, 2004, I: 62) which death constructs around itself. Graveyards are a space shared by the dead and the living, where not just the memory of the deceased is maintained, but also where a collective memory, into which the dead are reintegrated, is created. In this instance, however, the bones are missing, which eliminates the possibility of a series of symbolic acts of justice, such as reinterrment, practiced in other countries (Verdery, 1999). Although rehabilitated from a legal point of view, the deceased continue to lie in unmarked graves (or have even disappeared from those), which traditionally is the fate of rejects. In this regard, their rehabilitation cannot be complete. Nonetheless, while the lack of a grave deprives the judiciary of valuable evidence, and the bereaved of a final solace, the unknown grave is likewise as much of an unassailable historical fact, as the extant remains (Rév, 1995: 36). Moreover, anonymous graves suggest a much broader commiseration than just that of the families and close ones—they are a public matter. In this regard, anonymity presupposes that those who partake in this constructed community are not discrete individuals, but entire categories of people: “the politicals”, “the denounced”, “kulaks”, anarchists, etc. In contrast to abstract notions like democracy or freedom of speech, dead bodies have the privilege of being material precisely when they are absent. When Katherine Verdery points out that the anonymous dead are a legitimization of the new post-socialist governments, she thinks of legitimization more in “cosmic” rather than in rational terms, i.e. not as a result of calculated choice, but as an emotional and moral

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commitment. (Verdery, 1999: 107–111). The politics of dead bodies thus reconfigures post-communist moral communities in accordance with new criteria for participation and exclusion, connected, on the one hand, with questions of martyrdom (of one’s community), and on the other, with questions about the guilt (of others). Solidarity with the victims is consequently a part of the post-communist moral re-ordering. The restoration of names and identities, erased by the regime, is a symbolic erasure of the entire communist epoch. The time between their burial and their recognition is symbolically bracketed. The memory of life and death in the camp illustrates Agamben’s (1998) thesis of “bare life” (reduced to biological existence, zoe) as a “primordial” political element and the foundation of contemporary politics, which transforms it into human life, bios. The allegorical example of a bare life is homo sacer, defined by Roman law as an individual deprived of all rights, expunged from the society, and left to the mercy of the gods; as an outlaw, his life could be taken with impunity. The camp, according to Agamben, is the paradigmatic domain of the homo sacer—here human beings are reduced to bare life, whose chief characteristic is the sheer “killability”, i.e. the possibility to have it taken away with impunity. Agamben’s reasoning concerns Nazi death camps, but is applicable as well to communist forced labor camps. The interned are also stripped of their human dignity, the murdered and those who died from illnesses and exhaustion are denied the return of this dignity. Their death is not a sacrifice, because it is not mediated by any concrete meaning or cause, which justifies every sacrifice. For them, Mikhail Geller’s words from the foreword to Valram Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales, applies: they “died perplexed” without knowing why (Geller, 1985). The politics of memory about the camps contests precisely this bareness of life and death in the camp. Memorial constructions impart meaning to the nefariousness of violent death via the notion of martyrdom, which delivers, if not salvation, then at least a message for their descendants. In comparison to the war heroes, the deceased internees are martyred victims. As such, they have no antagonists. Simultaneously to the idea of victimhood, like to that of the homo sacer, two semantic sets are applied—that of consecration and that of desecration. This semantic pliability enables the jump between high and low, pure and impure, heroism and victimhood in a gesture of granting meaning. In tales about the burial of internees, the people of Belene display gestures of sympathy aimed in different directions: by glossing over the question of guilt, they demonstrate solidarity with their fellow townspeople,

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who worked at the camp as guards and militiamen; when they express empathy with the inmates, they become members of the broader mnemonic community. The simultaneous membership in these groups leads to interference across the differing semantic sets and mutually-conflicting interpretations. Conducive to their contortion appears to be religious symbolism, where the ideas of guilt and responsibility dissipate into notions of curse, delayed retribution, redemption. Thus, it is God who delivers moral certitude, and to whom Beleners readily delegate the condemnation and the punishment of the perpetrators. The dynamic of local memory in Belene is proof that individuals are active participants in its formation, not its passive carriers. By slipping away from the irreconcilable interpretations without even noticing it, they navigate betwixt different, at times contradictory schematic narrative templates, culling and collating their personal memories with an “effort after meaning” (Bartlett). Inherited interpretive repertoires clash with new public narratives, provoking conflict, reticence, and gestures in opposing directions.43 The Politics of Pity and Local Public Life If, up until this point, I have characterized Belene’s local memory as traumatic, at this junction I reach the stage of the processing of trauma. I borrow Luc Boltanski’s (Boltanski, 2004) idea about the politics of pity (la politique de la pitié), in order to pursue further the dynamics of local memory regarding the Belene camp. Boltanski concerns himself with the perception of suffering “from a distance,” that is, conditioned by mass media, but his reasoning is applicable, to an extent, in instances where the distance is temporal. The very notion of the politics of pity comes across as an oxymoron, given that pity is directed at someone in particular, whereas politics aspires to leave beyond locality and specifics, and to generalize by relying on categories. I find this tension productive in deliberating the layers of memory about the camp in Belene. On the one hand, this memory does have its own concrete topoi, articulating suffering in an immediate and emotionally engaging manner; at the same time, it is 43  This situation is not in any way abnormal or unexpected. Analogous contradictory mnemonic landscapes are registered in different locales with similar circumstances, for example in cities adjacent to Nazi concentration camps (Luchterhand, 1981; Kropf & Baumgartner, 2002; Leo, 2007).

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political, insofar as it bears generalized messages and does not suggest a personal connection (family/kin/community) with those suffering. A connection of this sort would have transformed the attitude towards them from humanitarian to communitarian, where empathy towards “one’s own” is owed axiomatically, and has a different status. The politics of empathy implies a purely moral attitude, wherein those suffering are “hyper-singularised through an accummulation of the details of suffering and, at the same time, under-qualified: it is he, but it could be someone else” (Boltanski, 2004:  12) There is one other condition, according to Boltanski, which converts pity from an individual act into politics—public speaking about the suffering of others, which does not personally affect oneself. It is different from the fact-based description of the events: the latter is part of a representational system, based on the subject-object relationship, whereas empathetic public speaking presupposes a subject-­ subject relationship, grounded in the shared “humanness” of those suffering, and the witnesses to said suffering. Moreover, it introduces two types of shared emotions in the sphere of the political: compassion with the victims as victims (that is, regardless of their actions prior to becoming such) and indignation at the acts of the perpetrators (Boltanski, 2004: 48). The victims and their empathizers thus form one community, from which the perpetrators are excluded (Giesen, 2004: 114). According to Boltanski, public speaking about suffering is made possible due to the presence of a public sphere, which is constructed alongside the politics of pity (Boltanski, 2004: 24)—a notion which dovetails with Rothberg’s understanding about the role of multidirectional memory in the construction of the public sphere, and of the subjects, individual and collective, which act and speak within it (Rothberg, 2009: 202). This thesis appears to be directly applicable to discourse about the communist camps at the very beginning of the Bulgarian transition. The ‘awakening’ of the memory of the camps during the 1990s can be conceptualized precisely as politics of pity. As was demonstrated, this memory has its own particular agents and topoi, which captivate the audience, and is simultaneously in a position to delineate the specific individuals from the systemic roles they took, and which could have been filled by others. On top of that, there is evidence of a critical mass, transforming these memories into a memory, around which and in the name of which social actors coalesce and operate. On hand is the subject-subject relation, characteristic of the moral witness, for whom those suffering are “neither friend nor foe”. Thus suffering is politicized, in the sense that it engenders a cause: to extricate

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the victims from oblivion, and to honor them. The political is further present in that it suggests the selection of victims worthy of being commemorated—a problem which begets fierce debates on multiple levels.44 By morphing into politics, however, the empathy is partially redirected from the victims to the perpetrators, by transforming into indignation, which in turn is enunciated by way of stigmatization (Boltanski, 2004: 57). This last reaction befell the local Belene community in the 1990s, at least according to the views of its residents. What ‘on the inside’, with regard to the local community, comes across as structural amnesia (Connerton, 2008)—a natural process of forgetting those elements of the past, which no-longer have a coherent connection to the present—seen from the outside, ends up being a collective rejection of the past (Giesen, 2004:  127–130), induced by an unreflected feeling of guilt. Such an intense conceptualization of the camp as a site of traumatic memory, imposed from the outside on the local community, has provoked defensive reactions: denial, distancing, intentional ignorance. They emerged precisely at the level termed communitarian by Boltanski—that of the local community. The collective amnesia, which we observed in 2008–2009 was likely such a defensive reaction. Empathy, that is, the moral subject-­ subject approach which we discovered in the personal narratives of Belene’s older residents, could not have yet morphed into politics of pity owing to the lack of the second mandatory condition: public talk about it within the local community. Commemorative practices and memorials are an important aspect of public memory, which at the same time disciplines it, by imparting its interpretive repertoire. Since 1990, annual commemorations have been held on the island (Fig. 5.4), initiated by the organizations of the repressed by the communist regime. At the very first one, in June 1990, thousands of people gathered. Since then, the number of participants has dwindled, and the commemorations no longer attract the attention of the media or society, including at the local level. Not surprisingly, the symbolism and the scenography are co-opted from religion. After the service for the deceased, camp survivors speak. On the wall of the building, which still exists at the campsite, a commemorative plaque was placed in 2005 by the regional organization of the Agrarian Union. In 2009, a concrete plinth was erected for a future memorial. The impression sets in of a lack of a 44  For the disputes between the different factions of the repressed, represented by their respective organizations, see Luleva et al. (2012: 81–86).

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Fig. 5.4  Commemoration at the campsite on the island, May 2018. (Author’s archive)

commemorative aesthetic, which could secure the symbolic and narrative forms of public memory of this period.45 Starting in 2010, however, changes have taken place in Belene, which enable the “homeopathic socialization” (LaCapra) of memory about the camp and the formation of a local politics of pity, which does not mimic the one ‘on the outside’. Its originator was local Catholic Passionist priest Paolo Cortesi, serving in Belene since the fall of 2010. His efforts to stir the memory of the camp and to provide a way of coping with the collective trauma have prompted changes in both the practices and the actors of the local memory.46 Remarkable is first and foremost the emergence of two new local organizations. In April 2014, an initiative committee for the erection of a monument on the island was chartered, later transformed into the Belene Island Foundation, whose mission is the preservation of the memory of the camp, the development of an educational program, the creation of a museum, and the conversion of the campsite into a memorial park. The 45  For the religious symbolism in memorial tributes to the Gulag, and the problems it spurs, see also Etkind (2004). 46  For more detail see Luleva (2015). Father Cortesi was awarded the Honorary Seal of the President of the Republic of Bulgaria in December 2016 for his “devoted effort to honoring the memory of the victims of the communist regime”.

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preservation and promotion of the memory of the camp and the martyrs of faith, victims of the repressions of the communist regime, are among the main activities of the “Evgeniy Bosilkov” cultural center, established at the beginning of 2015. These organizations have introduced new commemorative practices, inspired by European exemplars, and characterized by openness, inclusiveness and a focus on the local community. One such event was the roundtable “Witnesses of faith during the communist regime,” held in 2014, with the participation of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox priests. In 2015, Father Cortesi, along with Belene’s amateur youth theater staged a docu-drama “Like Lambs Among Wolves” for Bishop Evgeniy Bosilkov and three catholic priests sentenced to death in a contrived trial in 1952. The traveling exhibition “Witnesses: Memory of the Belene Concentration Camp” opened at the end of 2017, for whose realization Belene organizations partnered with the state archives. Educational trips to the island have been organized, which nowadays is one of the standing activities of the foundation. Another impressive change is the institutional participation in commemorative activities. In the 2015 pilgrimage, both the Speaker of the National Assembly and the Minister of Defense took part, and in 2016 the President attended as well. Unsurprisingly, the attitude of these institutions is somewhat ambivalent, and is to a large degree dependent on party and personal influence. While in the end of 2016 the Cabinet of Ministers transferred ownership of the land and the buildings of the campsite over to the municipality of Belene for the construction of a memorial park, the National Assembly rejected its financing. Institutional engagement, inconsistent though it may be, no doubt affirms, officializes and grants sustainability to the commemorative practices. Particularly important is the switchover in the position of the local authorities from deafening silence to a commitment to organize the commemorations (since 2018) and the materialization of the idea for a commemorative institution. The conviction is evident that the memory of the camp has carved out a place in a broader European context and could potentially contribute to the town’s development. Thus, the camp is no longer an unwanted legacy imposed vehemently and admonishingly on the local community from the outside. The coalition of silence is shattered, forgetting is no longer a “condition for belonging” (Delich, 2004: 69), as it was a few years ago. Although ambivalent, this legacy is recognized and appropriated by many in Belene.

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How it will be realized, what messages it will bear, and to what extent the memorial park project will be successful has yet to be seen: the earnest understanding of the camp, and more importantly, the stabilization of this understanding and its conversion into a “normative past” (Assmann, 2016: 191) lie ahead. More important, from the vantage point of my project, is to track down the conditions which have made possible this new local culture of memory. My hypothesis is that this success is due, in the first place, to the selected approach, which is modeled on the European template for commemorating victims of Nazism and Stalinism. Focusing upon the victims in the context of a European cultural memory, underscored by Christian ethics, this time construes Beleners not as perpetrators, but as moral witnesses to this martyrdom. As Ana Luleva (2015: 84) observes, Father Cortesi has lifted the weight from the shoulders of Belene’s townsfolk: he does not blame them, nor judge them, but aims to understand them. Second, the victims are perceived in an inclusive manner, without categorization or hierarchization. At times, it is alluded to the victims of “totalitarian regimes”47 and “totalitarianisms,” not only of communism. Evidently, a depoliticization of the topic is sought after: “The work of memory is not political, but first and foremost spiritual, and after that cultural. … Repentance, forgiveness, sacrifice, conciliation, violence and hatred, reverence for the dead and martyrdom are spiritual, not political topics”, says Father Cortesi (2016) in an interview (Fig. 5.5). Third, in accordance with the above-outlined model of the politics of pity, victims have faces and names, which presuppose an emotional identification. Most importantly, a selection has been made from among the victims, along which the politics of pity is to be coalesced. They are consensus choices: rather than political figures, martyrs of faith are highlighted. But they too are presented more as Bulgarians who suffered for their country, rather than as Catholic Christians who suffered for their faith. Thus, the lowest consensus-denominator seems to have been found: The objective is not to shed light on the crimes of communism, that’s the work of historians, researchers, journalists. Our intention is to demonstrate to Bulgarian society the dignity of these innocent Bulgarians …, who loved the motherland greatly, and suffered for freedom and faith. (Cortesi, 2015)

47  The local newspaper Danubian News published reports from the commemorations in 2016 and 2017 with the same headline: “Victims of totalitarian regimes honored”.

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Fig. 5.5  A corner in one of the derelict buildings at the campsite has been turned into a chapel of sorts to imply that “the work of memory is not political but … spiritual”. (Author’s archive)

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This storyline about Belene, which grasps Christian ethic as a part of European cultural memory and circumvents the question of the ideology and policy, which necessitated the camp’s entire existence, to a large extent manages to strike a compromise between the duty to remember and the risk of political confrontation. Such is the task taken up by local institutions with the construction of a memorial park. In as far as a memorial is concerned, the expectation is that it will serve first and foremost as a stage for commemorative rituals, which invoke an emotional response, and only then—to offer a more in-depth reading of the past. Aside from the formulation of the narrative, of likely importance as well are the actors themselves, local and external. The generational change gives grounds to think of post-memory (Hirsch), whose activists are now not the immediate participants or witnesses, but younger people, whose compassion is the product of the politics of pity. They are witnesses to the testimonies, not to the events themselves. This generation does not reference any personal memories of the camp, even ones suppressed or shared within just a tight trustworthy circle. It can thus distance itself from the presumed collective guilt of their predecessors. It is easier for members of this generation to take the humanitarian, rather than the communitarian position, to practice mnemonic activism, based on universal principles, not on political identity. That aside, the contradiction between the ‘cultural tools’ imposed by the previous regime (hooligans, contras, criminals) and the ones created by the new commemorative practices (victims, martyrs, sufferers) does not exist for them. In the absence of institutional control, this generation’s narrative is cobbled together from various sources, which are hard to track down, as they are to a large extent informal: media, pop culture products, social media, discussions at home and within peer groups, etc. The DIY-nature of this narrative suggests many more callbacks from public discourse than from local/vernacular memory. On hand, therefore, is the conveyance of memory between generations not within the confines of the family, but in the much broader sociocultural sense of the idea of generations and generational distinctions. Local memory in Belene is a complex and dynamic conglomerate, made up of disparate, often contradictory elements. It rests upon various resources, each of which sprouted from a particular social and historical context: internalized communist rhetoric, revived religious culture, post-­ communist public discourses, including those of the victims, as well as local traditions, struggles and alliances. More importantly, it takes on its own dynamic through the years. From the start (the 1990s), Beleners

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reacted to the resurrection of the camp’s memory as an unjust accusation of complicity—a reaction which Ivaylo Znepolski (2004: 35) attributes, and not without reason, to the “post-communist man” who “does not have the feeling that people were slaughtered while he looked on with indifference. He refuses to recognize himself in the slogan ‘It’s your fault too!’.” Because of the continuity of the camp and the prison, Belene’s younger residents were not even aware of the existence of the camp as a separate institution. The following period, unsurprisingly, was a period of traumatic rejection. As Aleida Assmann explains, “traumatic experiences of suffering and shame enter the realms of memory only with much difficulty, because they cannot be integrated into a positive individual or collective self-image. This is why it may happen that such a traumatic experience can find societal acceptance and symbolic articulation only much later” (Assmann, 2004: 75–76). Precisely this is now occurring in Belene. After a period of moral numbness, only in the last few years, with the generational shift and the emergence of new local actors, does a reassessment of the past and a reevaluation of the camp’s memory become possible, leading to the objectification of trauma via commemorative sites and practices. The ritual construction of a community shared between locals and outsiders contributes to the overcoming of these contradictions. Interestingly, this happens in a period of relative silence about the camp in the broader publicity (Topouzova, 2021), where the topic is no longer ‘hot’. Thus, the memory of the camp takes on the role of a distinctive symbolic boundary (Lazar & Litvak-Hirsch, 2009), which no longer runs between the local community and broader society, but rather depends on the relationship with the trauma. This boundary divides those who suffered from or commiserated with the trauma, from those who deny its very existence, as well as from those who supplant its memory by attempting to introduce differing socio-cultural codes (e.g. placing the blame on the victims). The Belene case fits quite neatly within the theory outlined at the beginning of this chapter about cultural trauma and its processing. On hand is the creation of a new narrative, initially by (in the name of) one group, former camp internees, and subsequently the formation of a broader mnemonic community around it. The central significance of this narrative’s creation bears restorative justice in the narrow sense of the word (restorative legislature), insofar as it identifies the protagonists and their roles, and sets up the categories to be used when thinking about the past. One cannot understate the significance of the transitional

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justice in the broader sense, encompassing the politics of memory, memorial practices and commemorative rituals, often co-opted from the transnational culture of memory with regard to World War II and the Holocaust. At the onset, this culture of memory excluded the local community, diagnosed with “structural amnesia” concerning the camp. To the people of Belene, the public narrative about the camp from the 1990s was imposed externally: it was admonishing and moralizing. This is why it was met with defensive reactions like externalization and denial. The persuasiveness of this narrative for the local community was achieved only later, when it was possible to process the trauma via the politics of pity. It is the one that gives answers to the questions about who the victims were, what they suffered, and why those who haven’t lived through the trauma ought to stand in solidarity with those who bear it. The answers to these questions are mediated by historical research, by institutions (including religious), mass media, etc. Decisive as well has been the contribution of several persons, first and foremost Father Paolo Cortesi, for the origination of a local mnemonic activism. At the same time, the Belene case can also to an extent contradict said theory, by demonstrating a complexity which it does not explicitly predict. The brawl around the significance of Belene is an example, first, of the disputed character of the “memory of communism”, wherein differing perspectives contend with each other, instead of mutually affirming one-­ another. The traumatic narrative (as, likely, all others) is not fully accepted: alongside the memory activists and their sympathizers, there are also observers, distancing themselves from the “homeopathic socialization”. Thus, the community which processes trauma turns out to be more fragmented than the theory would suggest. Second, the Belene case provides the opportunity to observe how collective memory merges into cultural memory, appropriated by individuals, groups, societies and generations. The memory of the camp becomes universalized, without engulfing particular memories about it. This process desaturates the initial mnemonic community in such a way that only the ‘substance’ of memory is left, forming a collage of topoi, plots, imagery, schematic narrative templates. By recalling Wertsch’s thesis about the role of textual knowledge and narrative form, we may concede that their presence not only facilitates, but generates acts of remembering. As Ann Rigney (2016:  70) notes, the capacity “to deal with certain painful topics is not the straightforward outcome of a willingness to address such topics, but goes hand in glove with

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the development of an expressive ability to do so”, that is, with the creation of such forms of public memory which make certain recollections ‘tellable’.

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Luchterhand, E. (1981). Das KZ in der Kleinstadt. Erinnerungen einer Gemeinde an den unsystematischen Völkermord. In D. Peukert & J. Reulecke (Hrsg.), Die Reihen fast geschlossen: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags unterm Nationalsozialismus (S. 435–54). Peter Hammer Verlag. Luleva, A. (2015). Commemorating the Communist Labour Camps. Is a New Memory Culture Possible? In A.  Luleva, I.  Petrova, & S.  Barlieva (Eds.), Contested Heritage and Identities in Post-Socialist Bulgaria (pp.  60–89). Gutenberg. Luleva, A., Troeva, E., & Petrov, P. (2012). Prinuditelniat trud v Bulgaria (1941–1962). Spomeni na svideteli. Akademichno izdatelstvo “Prof. Marin Drinov”. Mark, J. (2010). The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe. Yale University Press. Merridale, C. (2010). Soviet Memories: Patriotism and Trauma. In S. Radstone & B.  Schwarz (Eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (pp.  376–389). Fordham University Press. Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of Social Remembering. Open University Press. Pillemer, D. B. (2004). Can the Psychology of Memory Enrich Historical Analyses of Trauma? History and Memory, 16(2), 140–154. Radstone, S., & Hodgkin, K. (Eds.). (2003). Regimes of Memory. Routledge. Radstone, S., & Schwarz, B. (Eds.). (2010). Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. Fordham University Press. Rév, I. (1995). Parallel Autopsies. Representations, 49, 15–39. Rigney, A. (2016). Cultural Memory Studies: Mediation, Narrative, and the Aesthetic. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies (pp. 65–76). Routledge. Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press. Shenker, N. (2016). Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies. History and Memory, 28(1), 141–175. https://doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.28.1.141 Siebert, R. (1992). Don’t Forget: Fragments of a Negative Tradition. In L. Passerini (Ed.), Memory and Totalitarianism. International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories (Vol. 1, pp. 165–177). Oxford University Press. Skotchev, B. (2017). Konzlagerat “Belene” 1949–1987. Ciella. Smelser, N. (2004). Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma. In J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser, & P. Sztompka (Eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 31–59). University of California Press. Stoyanova, P., & Iliev, E. (1991). “Politicheski opasni litsa”: vadvoryavania, trudova mobilizatsia, izselvania v Bulgaria sled 1944. Universitetsko izdatelstvo Sv. Kliment Ohridski.

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Sztompka, P. (2004). The Trauma of Social Change: The Case of Postcommunist Societies. In J.  C. Alexander, R.  Eyerman, B.  Giesen, N.  J. Smelser, & P. Sztompka (Eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (pp. 155–195). University of California Press. Topouzova, L. (2021). On Silence and History. American Historical Review, 126(2), 685–699. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab191 Tschuggnall, K., & Welzer, H. (2002). Rewriting Memories: Family Recollections of the National Socialist Past in Germany. Culture & Psychology, 8(1), 130–145. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1177/1354067X02008001625 Vachkov, D. (2018). Avarii i katastrofi: hronika na sotsialisticheskata industrializatsia. ISRP/Ciela. Verdery, K. (1999). The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. Columbia University Press. W.  J. (1894). [William James] Ueber den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene. J.  Breuer und S.  Freud. [Mendel’s] Neurol. Centralbl. 1893, pp.  4, 43. Psychological Review, 1, 199. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://archive.org/details/psychologicalrev01ameruoft/page/198 Walker, J. (2003). The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentary and the Psychology of Memory. In K. Hodgkin & S. Radstone (Eds.), Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory (pp. 104–119). Routledge. Welzer, H. (2008). Communicative Memory. In A.  Erll & A.  Nünning (Eds.), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (pp. 285–298). Walter de Gruyter. Znepolski, I. (2004). Le communisme – un lieu de mémoire sans point d’appui consensuel. Divinatio, 19, 29–40.

Memories

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Baychev, P. (2014). Spomeni ot lagerite. Portreti na lageristi ot Belene. Zhivotyt i risunkite na Petar Baychev, predstaveni ot Veselin Baychev. ISRP/Ciela. Bochev, S. (1990). Belene. Skazanie za konzlagerna Bulgaria. Fondatsia “Bulgarska nauka I izkustvo”. Boncheva, E., Sugarev, E., Pytov, S., & Solomon, Z. (Eds.). (1991). Bulgarskiat GULAG: Svideteli (Sbornik ot dokumentalni razkazi za konzlagerite v Bulgaria. Izdanie na v. Demokratsia. Genchev, E. (Ed.). (2003). Gorchivi istini. Svidetelstva za komunisticheskite represii. Centar za podpomagane na hora prezhiveli iztezanie ACET. Geshev, N. (1992). Belene – ostrovat na zabravenite. Robinzon. Horozov, K. (1999). Ozarenieto. Skorpion. Momerin, A. (2005). Ot Diarbekir do Belene i po-natatyk. Izdatelska kashta “Delova sedmitsa Konsult”. Moskov, A. (1997). Spomeni. Chast 1. Rob se vryshta. SPS-Print.

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Nedyalkov, M. (2003). Prezhivelitsi. Karlovo. Ognyanov, B. (2013). A biah samo na 17 godini. Iztok-Zapad. Ogoyski, P. (1995). Zapiski po bulgarskite stradania 1944–1989. Kniga pyrva. Fenomen. Stanilov, V. (Ed.). (2007). Pisahme da se znae. T. 3: Adyt: lagerite i zatvorite. Rabotilnitsa za knizhnina “Vasil Stanilov”. Tutev, I. (2018). Ot bezdynnata bezdna. Dnevnik ot zatvora i Belene. Riva. Vasilev, G. (1995). Ostrov Persin. Pozorat na Bulgaria. Universitetsko izdatelstvo Sv. Kliment Ohridski. Yanev, G. (1998). Persin, Belene – ostrovyt na smyrtta. Plovdiv. Znepolski, I. (Ed.). (2010). Tova e moeto minalo. T. 1 & 2. ISRP/Ciela.

CHAPTER 6

‘Sorrow, Almost Hope’: Nostalgic Narratives

The traumatic narrative, highlighting the repressions, the crimes of the regime and the suffering caused, has often been made manifest with the active participation of the post-communist political Right, both within individual CEE countries, and in the broader transnational European public space. As was indicated in Part I, its anti-communist slant has recurrently been instrumentalized by right-wing political actors. The nostalgic narrative, although it also lends itself to easy political instrumentalization, was not devised by the post-communist Left as a mnemopolitical alternative. It is first and foremost the offspring of popular culture and everyday memory—that is, it is exclusively vernacular. The nostalgic narrative appears as a mirror image of the traumatic narrative, insofar as it idealizes the past, rather than seeing it as radically unjust. But this is only at first glance. In reality, there is an important shared trait between the two, namely—the sentiment of dissatisfaction with the present.

The Concept—From Medicine to Cultural Critique “Nostalgia” is one of those words which are said to carry the spirit of their time. It is paradoxical that for more than three centuries already, it successfully flows out of one time and into another, yet still bringing the spirit of the time with it, and from one area of knowledge to another, retrofitting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_6

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its meaning to the context of each one respectively. In the broadest sense, nostalgia can be defined, with regard to the individual, as a sense of loss and a longing for an idealized past, and with regard to society—as an idealized version of a given period of history, present in the public consciousness. Most conceptualizations of nostalgia within recent years have drawn a connection to collective or cultural memory. These links, however, are constructed in drastically differing ways. In certain contexts, nostalgic memory is placed counter to critical memory (Spitzer, 1999) or to “authentic memory,” or to historical objectivity (Pickering & Keightley, 2006). Historian Charles Maier believed that “Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art” (quoted in Boym, 2001: xiv), and ethicist Avishai Margalit, that it “takes a free ride on memory”, and it often is like “bad cholesterol,” (Margalit, 2011: 280, 274). In other theorizations, the distinction between memory and nostalgia has been set with regard to identity: whereas memory dispenses a fundamental uncertainty with regard to identity, nostalgia never calls it into question (Megill, 1998: 45). According to Christopher Lasch, nostalgia “does not entail the exercise of memory at all” (Lasch, 1990: 18), and according to Raymond Williams, it acts as an obstacle to social change (quoted in Spitzer, 1999: 91). At the opposite end of the spectrum, nostalgia is seen as “memory with the pain removed” (Lowenthal, 1985: 8), or as a version of memory, widespread throughout subaltern and marginalized communities (Atia & Davies, 2010:  181). Certain theorists interpret nostalgia, much like trauma, as an intermediary between collective and individual memory (Boym, 2001:  54), between the “inside” and the “outside”, the subjective and the objective, the psychological and social dimensions of temporality (Radstone, 2010: 187, 189). This one word invokes so many, and so different notions, that we are prone to forget its all-too modest origin as a specialized medical term. The concept was introduced in 1688 by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, as a translation of the German term Heimweh1, used to denote the sickness, widespread among Swiss mercenaries spending a long time away from home. The diagnosis rapidly creeped its way up the social ladder. Thus, nostalgia became one of those illnesses whose “contagiousness” was predominantly a function of people talking about it (Starobinski, 1966: 85). Medics debated its etiology, seeking it at the level of “mechanical” or organic factors (only in isolated instances did they allow room for 1  For the origins of the term and its expropriation from the medical context, see Starobinski (1966), Roth (1992), Hutcheon (1998), Boym (2001), O’Sullivan (2010).

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e­ motional causes), as well as the difficulties to its treatment, prompted by the fact that nostalgic longing, in and of itself, brought more pleasure to the “sufferer” than any kind of therapeutic treatment (Roth, 1992: 278). At around 1900, the medical community, with the exception of psychiatry, abandoned this diagnosis. Nostalgia was no longer conceptualized as a physical, but as a psychic condition, difficult to influence. The therapy— returning home—appeared simple only at a first glance because, as it turned out, nostalgics longed for the home which existed only in their memories of the past. This longing was directed not as much in physical space (towards home) but in time—towards the past. Precisely this element in the symptomatic set, indicating an atypical of medicine (including psychiatry) expansion of the semantic scope, evidently contributed to the subsequent complete de-medicalization of the term, and its development in a direction relevant also to the post-communist context in which I here take an interest. In parallel to these developments, the word nostalgia took on a broader usage, to designate occurences spawned by urbanization as the new context for a longing after one’s birthplace or childhood. The paradigmatic example was no longer soldiers and traveling aristocrats, but rather migrants and ‘urbanized’ villagers. Thus, nostalgia quickly fell away from the focus of scientific interest. After its demilitarization and de-­ medicalization, the term was also to a large extent de-psychologized, owing to its widespread, popular usage. But, while nostalgia the illness was left behind in the past, the phenomenon of nostalgia was not. Now writers and artists2 began to involve themselves with it. The metaphorical use generated new semantics—longing, a sadness for the past—which exposed the link between nostalgia and memory. The kernel of such a reconceptualization can be found as far back as Kant. According to him, homesickness was caused by a yearning for the places of one’s youth. When they returned, however, nostalgics felt deceived in their expectations because everything had changed while they were gone; but the real cause of their disappointment was the impossibility to bring back their youth (Kant, 1992:  82). That is to say, nostalgics do not aim to acquire something which they can ever get back—they mourn for a time which has irreversibly passed. Precisely this irrecoverability of the past is what explains the enchantment and the power of nostalgia as a modern phenomenon—a longing for an unattainable return to the past, the flip side of the new 2  For the broadening of the meaning of the term “nostalgia” in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, see O’Sullivan (2010: 193).

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grand narrative, that of progress. And one more factor, which will have an impact on later conceptualizations: nostalgia was likely to befall predominantly the passive and the marginalized, not the active and goal-oriented. Thus, the notion of nostalgia has migrated into cultural critique, turning into a conceptual counter-point to progress. Svetlana Boym, using Kosellek’s categories, defines nostalgia as a “longing for that shrinking ‘space of experience’ that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations” (Boym, 2001: 10). It thus comes across as a compensatory phenomenon, filling the void left behind from all that was lost, destroyed or abandoned in the name of progress. Seen in a negative light as “the other” to progress, as inauthentic, reactionary, ersatz—it has been trivialized as a protest against this progress, but an escapist, conservative, sentimental and melancholic protest, devoid of creativity. As one of the very first nostalgia researchers, sociologist Fred Davis notes, it “thrives on transition, on the subjective discontinuities that engender our yearning for continuity” (Davis, 1979:  49). This fundamentally constructivist understanding, developed for the very first time by him, corresponds to the approach adopted here. Just like memory is reconstructive, so too is nostalgia not something which comes to us from the past, or is intrinsic to that past. As with memory, it too is something which is forged in the present. It is a ‘dialogue’ between past and present, albeit in no sense a commensurate one. It is the past that always holds a priority in this dialogue, and at that— a past saturated with a particular charm, and which earned its significance in the context of its contraposition to the present. One of the influential versions of criticism towards nostalgia as a distancing from the present by way of abnegating responsibility for it is anthropologist Renato Rosaldo’s thesis of “imperialist nostalgia”: the sorrow of colonial actors for a world which they themselves changed beyond recognition. This paradoxical grief takes on the shape of innocuous yearning, so as to conceal one’s own entanglement in the destruction of the previous world. The “benign” character of nostalgia cloaks responsibility, and makes out of the agent a witness, thus obscuring guilt. By assessing nostalgia as mystification, its critics associate it with ideology as a form of “false consciousness”, which either intentionally covers up particular interests, or unintentionally expresses social tensions. This approach, however, takes away any and all attention from the analysis of its persuasiveness, and at the same time, its contradiction. Rosaldo offers to uncover the internal inconsistency of those ideologies, which are never as coherent as they portend to be, so as to allow them to “fall under their own weight” (Rosaldo,

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1989: 110). He describes a missionary, who nostalgically recalls the life of the Ilongot prior to her own successful mission—she seemingly resents the changes which she personally imposed upon the native population, and not without continuous effort either (Rosaldo, 1989: 115). The local culture is presented, in her story, as two still-life pictures—the ‘before’ and the ‘after’, the pastoral past and the (not-yet-fully) civilized present. Although her feelings are personal and authentic, they are not purely ‘subjective’ insofar as they are modeled by ideologies and cultural norms. This approach seems applicable to the nostalgic memories of communism as well: sincere and authentic, in their disorderly multiplicity, they do, when all is said and done, decode the ideology which they (supposedly) mystify. Just as valid is Rosaldo’s warning about the risk that nostalgia can present an image of the past isolated from the present-day situation, glossing over the connection between ‘then’ and ‘now’ and over the fact that ‘now’ is, by and large, a consequence of ‘then’. In contrast to the unambiguously critical interpretations, no small number of attempts to rationalize nostalgia have ended up with different political and moral classifications, hierarchically ranking the varying types of nostalgia. One of the most influential figures in this tradition is the literary theorist Svetlana Boym. She differentiates between two forms of nostalgia: restorative and reflexive. The former is utopian, it underscores nostos and offers to restore the lost home and to fill the vacant spaces inside our memory. It presents an idealized version of the past, within which inconsistencies are ironed out. This form of nostalgia is collective, and characteristic of all national/ist revivals.3 The latter form, the ironic or reflexive nostalgia, resides in the algia—in loss and longing, in the incomplete and imperfect process of remembering, without focusing in particular on the object itself. It has more of a connection to time, historic or biographical, to individual and collective memory. Reflexive nostalgia does not counterpose, but rather consolidates yearning and criticism. This is why the author deems it “ironic” (Boym, 1996: 512). In her effort to delineate the two forms of nostalgia, however, Boym seems to fail to notice that restorative and reflexive nostalgia overlap, feed off of, and build upon one-another, in order to sustain particular societal narratives. As other authors point out, restorative nostalgia, manifested in celebrations, memory sites, etc., is also maintained by the individual reflexive practices (Hogan & Pursell, 2008: 70) and in turn influences them. 3

 See Boym (1995) for an analysis of the Zhirinovsky case in Russia.

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On the other hand, in as far as it recognizes the distance from something desired, and in this manner places the subject in a conscious relationship with historical time, every nostalgia is in a certain sense reflexive. Recent attempts to conceptualize nostalgia, which I shall here take into account, sidestep the evaluative hierarchy of such classifications with its inherent moralizing. They view the attachment to the past as a cultural practice, encompassing significant cultural-critical and counter-cultural potential, including as demystifying oppositionary thought (Bonnett, 2006, 2009) and politically valid strategy (McDermott, 2002: 389). But the sense of loss, which lies at the very foundation of nostalgic stances, turns out to be intrinsic not just in the resistance against (predominantly) late-stage capitalism, but for capitalism itself, particularly in the phase of globalization—it is a force which influences the shaping of the contemporary world, and is therefore active and critical (Bonnett, 2012:  7). Particularly interesting about this theory is the ingrained linkage of the nostalgic imaginary with the market and globalization (instead of the usual findings about the commodification of products and relationships). The very emergence of local, “authentic”, “non-commercial” cultural (and also political) products is a significant part of the contemporary market system, which binds capitalism with anti-capitalism and globalization with anti-globalization, and in this manner “destabilizes the meaning of the two pairs of concepts” (Bonnett, 2012: 21). Valuable in this instance is that the perspective offered here allows for nostalgia to be envisioned simultaneously as cultural critique, and as an aspect of mass culture, and also allows us to grasp its potential to provoke historical awareness. This analytical view makes it possible to overcome the singular interpretations of nostalgia from the point of view of cultural elitism or cultural populism. With regard to the post-communist nostalgia, it enables us to capture both the biographical and the vernacular aspects of nostalgic memory, which I will attempt to do further on down. I will be sure to return to the critical potential of nostalgia later on, in an effort to interpret the recollections of our interlocutors—people from the first socialist generation—about their lives during the period of the communist regime. In as far as these stories find a place within the nostalgic meta-narrative, surviving in popular, everyday culture, here I will first attempt to frame nostalgia as a mass culture phenomenon.

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Nostalgia and Neostalgia in the Post-socialist4 Context As Kathleen Stewart (1988) has pointed out, nostalgia is a cultural practice, not a content. Its forms, meanings and outcomes are not predetermined by the historical realities, but are instead created situationally, and change depending on the context. Nostalgia is by no means innate only to the post-socialist condition. David Lowenthal, for example, has described this phenomenon in the Anglo-American context at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, insisting that it can be observed in other European countries at the same time, as well as in earlier eras (Lowenthal, 1985: 8–12). Definitive is the sense of a break with the past. However, while this characteristics denotes nostalgia as a universal occurrence, Lowenthal hints at a more auspicious approach towards it, namely from the viewpoint of its historical conditioning and specificity. It is reasonable to ask ourselves, therefore, what “sots-nostalgia” is, and what (if anything) distinguishes it form all other iterations of this phenomenon. The multifariousness and the ambiguity of sots-nostalgia present serious obstacles to its conceptualization, regardless of whether it is preconceived as an aspect of memory (e.g. Brunnbaner & Troebst, 2007) or explicitly thematized (Sarkisova & Apor, 2008; Todorova & Gille, 2010). The latter is an indicative example of these difficulties: alongside personal memories of service in the Yugoslav People’s Army and of the early brigadier movement in Bulgaria, the panorama of post-communist nostalgia includes also cultural products from the realms of film, music and literature. Other incidents are also clustered under the umbrella term “nostalgia”: something that is not always convincingly justified, and can hardly be attributed to its mere “heteroglossia” (Todorova & Gille, 2010: 279). When discussing post-socialist nostalgia, we often label disparate concepts using identical terminology.5 First and foremost, in the narrow and 4  I adhere to the prevailing terminology, namely “post-socialist,” and in a few exceptions— with the terminology used by the respective source. In biographical narratives, upon which I will rely in the next section, the preferred term is once again “socialism”. 5   In investigating different manifestations of nostalgia for the GDR, Katya Neller (2006: 44–49) has singled out several distinct varieties of nostalgia: the almost non-existent total or “pure” GDR-nostalgia as wholesale system, including political aspects; partial nostalgia, which envisions only particular aspects of life in the GDR and underscores certain successes; the much more widespread “irrational partial nostalgia,” yearning for only some aspects of the old everyday, such as lower prices, without giving much thought to the eco-

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literal sense, post-socialist nostalgia is a “structure of feeling” (Williams), that is—an affective disposition, a general sense of loss after the period of radical change during the 1990s. Understood in this manner, nostalgia can be an individual sentiment, a collective propensity, or a more diffuse notion, permeating the broader public arena. Further, the same term can be used to describe the populist flirtation with such attitudes attempted by political subjects in pursuit of easy popularity. In other contexts, however, “sots-nostalgia” can also be a label given to criticisms of the present voiced from positions privileging the past, so as to marginalize and belittle such potentially valid criticisms. Particularly poignant in this regard is the “Yugonostalgia” example, contemptuously ejected from the national ideologies of former Yugoslavia’s successor states (Velikonja, 2008; Pogacar, 2011). Finally, sots-nostalgia is also a contemporary form of cultural production, a part of the popular culture of the former East Bloc. Nostalgic traces can easily be found in the recycling of “sots” material culture, in retrospectives of socialist cinema, in remakes and covers of pop-music hits from the same periods, websites cataloguing memories, museums dedicated to socialism which portray everyday life, and so forth. With respect to these meanings, the approaches towards studying post-socialist nostalgia tend to privilege, according to circumstances, either the social deficits, or the unrealized utopia, or the cultural industry, or the existential exhaustion brought by the transition.6 In all likelihood, the existential nostalgia, i.e. the feeling of loss and a yearning for the past, is in some way connected to “pop-nostalgia,” or the sentimental, feel-good portrayal of the past in popular culture. It can be inferred that the former is conditioned, although not fully engendered, by cultural depictions delivered by the latter. Certainly, the mythology of socialism is nourished by the individual and collective memories about that period. This reshuffling of personal and collective memories is facilitated by the ubiquitous presence of media, and in particular by the popularity of confessional genres, which blur the line between public and private. As a result, even the most intimate of nostalgic memories are not as idiosyncratic as one might expect. They have acquired a more general, transferable and multiplicable quality.

nomic problems connected to them; “pseudo-nostalgia,” which, in reality, isn’t a true longing for the past, but an expression of one’s dissatisfaction with the present. 6  For a more detailed account of these approaches, see Bartmanski (2011: 216–219).

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The re-enchantment of the recent past in Central and Eastern Europe does not occur at the start of the reforms, but only at the ‘point of no return’. Precisely the awareness that going back is no longer possible, is the very first condition for the emergence of nostalgia. That is why the initial version of post-socialist nostalgia is the so-called Ostalgie (from the German Ost-, meaning ‘east’ and Nostalgie—nostalgia) in the former GDR, which, fastest among these countries, has distanced itself from its socialist past.7 Later on, Yugonostalgia has emerged only after the civil wars in former Yugoslavia, most quickly and most noticeably in Slovenia, where the irreversibility of these processes became evident much sooner than in other post-Yugoslav countries. The reintroduction of consumer brands from the (predominantly) late socialist period (for example, fruit juices “Fruktal” in former Yugoslavia, carbonated beverages “Bambi” and “Traubi” in Hungary, “Zlatna esen” cookies in Bulgaria), the return of celebrated pop-culture stars from the period (Karel Gott and Helena Vondráčková in Czechia, Lili Ivanova and the “Tonika” band in Bulgaria, Czechoslovak TV shows from the 1970s and 1980s, etc.) the use of Ceaușescu’s image in adverts in Romania, the booming market for medals, badges, military paraphernalia and other artifacts from that period, as well as decorating bars and restaurants in the “sots” style (at times bordering on kitsch) in Central- and East-European capitals—all of these phenomena, and the trendiness of “historical rubbish” as a whole (Fig. 6.1), can likely be interpreted as testimony that the democratic reforms are irreversible, which is why the symbolic rigidity of the early transition is no longer relevant. Otherwise, this imagery from the past would not have been acceptable, to the contrary—they would provoke tensions, or at the very least, concerns.8 It could be therefore concluded that sots-nostalgia signals the end of the post-communist transition, and cannot be assumed to indicate approval or support of socialism as a political system, even less—a desire for its restoration. 7  In German media, GDR-nostalgia is brought up as early as the first half of the 1990s. See Pieper (1993). Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl distinguishes the earlier forms of Ostalgie, with its characteristic rediscovery, reproduction, commodification, musealization and cataloguing of products from the GDR, from its later manifestations, marked by irony and parody, and even a certain cynicism. (Berdahl, 2010: 186). 8  Concerns and debates of this sort do ultimately still exist: for those swirling around the TV show Thirty Cases of Major Zeman, as well as about the broader “politics of nostalgia” in Czechia, see Roberts (2002); for discussions concerning Ceaușescu-nostalgia, see Georgescu (2010); for those aroung the Estonian play “The Blue Wagon”, Grünberg (2009).

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Fig. 6.1  The lobby of this spa-hotel, former vacation residence for high-level party nomenklatura, features in 2010 the portraits of Politburo members, award flags and plaques. (Author’s archive)

According to certain researchers, important as well to the rise of post-­ socialist nostalgia is the inheritance left behind by the communist regime in the cultural sphere, particularly the easy-to-digest, consumer-oriented popular culture created in the 1970s and 1980s, which lends itself particularly well to ‘nostalgization’. This thesis is advanced by Andrew Roberts (2002) with regard to the “normalization” in Czechoslovakia after 1968, when the neo-Stalinist leadership of the country restricted serious art replacing it with abundant and esthetically unpretentious “anti-political” cultural production. Roberts definitively demonstrates that post-­ communist nostalgia in the Czechia of today is a nostalgia for the popular culture of this time period, and not for the regime itself. The other important factor for the emergence of post-socialist nostalgia is no doubt the market development in former communist countries, and more specifically—that of cultural industries, including media, tourism

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and others related to leisure and lifestyle. After the collapse of the regime, media outlets, for example, not only proliferated, but they also readily responded to different attitudes and interests among the population. (In a digital space, these proclivities can be expressed directly as well, because consumers can at the same time themselves be authors, ‘prosumers’.) With a never-before-seen flexibility, popular culture generates appealing images, by commercializing even the very symbols of anti-consumerism: case-in-­ point—Che Guevara (Jing, 2006: 362). This mandates me to turn some of my attention to the sentimental representations of the past in popular culture, which are most often construed as sots-nostalgia, even though I am interested in the first place not in them directly, but in nostalgia as a biographical and life-worldly phenomenon, characteristic of the first socialist generation. Among the most widespread ‘genres’ of sots-nostalgia, we might highlight the attempts to recycle, and at times to reassign meanings to the public personas of famous individuals from the past (incl. political figures), to symbolic locales (e.g. Tito’s birthplace—Kumrovec, and Zhivkov’s— Pravetz), to products and brands from popular culture and pedestrian consumption (cinema, music, media figures, consumer brands),9 and to certain aspects of the everyday (excursions, vacations, health). Imagining them comes across as ideologically mundane, depoliticized, “naturalized” (in Roland Barthes’ sense). But, to further Barthes’ argument, a naturalization of this type, with its inherent “political insignificance” (Barthes, 1991: 144) is namely innate in mythologization: the myth converts history into nature, randomness into eternity. It provides us with a given outcome outside of its context—precisely as a given, without inquiring into its circumstances, the processes which led to it, nor the expense at which it was achieved. By virtue of this decontextualization, propaganda images and slogans now “migrate down” to advertising, marketing and media noise, instrumentalized for those purposes, hovering “between melancholy and melodrama” (Velikonja, 2008:  28). According to Baudrillard, a transition of this sort from historical space into the sphere of advertising, with “the media becoming the site of a temporal strategy of prestige,” is a form of forgetting, not of remembering (Baudrillard,

9  For an amusing, and at the same time illuminating example—the rediscovery of the East Berlin Ampelmann (the stylized human figure from crosswalk lights) and his conversion into an icon of the Ostalgie—see Bartmanski (2011: 223–224).

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1994:  23).10 The marketing potential of commodified nostalgia stems from the fact that it presents a domesticated and weakened version of the socialist past, which unproblematically morphs into an element of the capitalist present. Here, the past becomes amusing with its remoteness from contemporary standards and inadequacy in comparison to today’s consumer practices. As Mila Mineva (2014: 161) notes, although historical topics are no rarity in commercials and in popular culture as a whole, communism appears to be the only period of Bulgaria’s history towards which an ironic, facetious approach is indeed permissible. Slovenian sociologist Mitja Velinkonja has carried out one of the most in-depth and ethnographically thick studies into nostalgia, which directly relates to the topics discussed here. He looks at the so-called “Titostalgia,” that is, the nostalgia for Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), president for life of Yugoslavia. The most valuable aspect of Velikonja’s approach is that he captures simultaneously both the commercial/touristy nostalgia on one side—or, according to his terminology, “the culture of nostalgia”—and on the other, the “nostalgic culture,” that is, nostalgia “from below”. This becomes possible as a result of a four-dimensional methodological demarcation between (1) personal and collective nostalgia; (2) “materialized” (e.g. in souvenirs) and experienced (as a feeling or an idea) nostalgia; (3) instrumental and non-instrumental nostalgia; (4) mimetic and satirical nostalgia (Velikonja, 2008: 29). Conceptualizing the latter is possible as a result of the de-essentialization and deontologization of the phenomenon: nostalgia is not inadvertently tied to a certain past, experienced by the individual. It can be the result of adopting and identifying with the pleasant memories of others. Velikonja coins a new term, “neostalgia”,11 to denote particularly this playful, exuberant and eclectic, at times ironic, but most often superficial usage of elements of the past in contemporary popular culture. Its creators are experts in marketing and advertising, members of business-, and political organizations, artists, subcultural groups, and mere enthusiasts. Most importantly, the majority of them are people who have not personally experienced the past towards which they express this nostalgic yearning. Their affective disposition is grounded not in memories, but in mediated imagery, and in this sense, it is truly 10  In several instances, the re-signification of communist memorials and memory sites after the fall of the regime has operated in much the same way. 11  In a later text, he refers to it as second-hand nostalgia, in contrast to the authentic, i.e. first-hand, non-instrumentalized nostalgia (Velikonja, 2009).

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second-­hand, repackaged, ludic. The very term implies both a connection, and a dissociation from the primary, ‘authentic’ nostalgia, that of the older generation. In their comparative study of this phenomenon in Hungary and Russia, Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko characterize this type of nostalgia in accordance with its interpretive relationship to the object, not according to the object itself: it is more a “historical citation rather than a metonymic slide into personal memory; ironic distance rather than longing” (Nadkarni & Shevchenko, 2014: 77). The practices which this relationship constructs are both “neostalgic” and fashionable, although they exclude the older generations—this is not “their” nostalgia. Thus, neostalgia borders on (or manifests itself as a form of) a generalized retro-disposition, which creatively reworks, or simply leeches off symbolic ‘material’ from the socialist era. This is a postmodern nostalgia of sorts, in contrast with the modernist variant, which dwells within memory and longs for the past and the native. But, as Velikonja emphasizes, the essential components of the two nostalgic discourses—cultural production and individual/group attitudes—are the same (Velikonja, 2008: 34–35). Indeed, Velikonja runs into difficulties in his effort to maintain the empirical level of the differentiation he suggests: the lion’s share of his material illustrates public nostalgia, which is articulated visually and materially, while only conjectures can be made with regard to individual and experienced nostalgia. This shortcoming does not, however, diminish the value of his analysis, assessment and calibration of the explanations behind Titonostalgia: political, commercial, generational, counter-­ cultural, etc. (Velikonja, 2008: 94–116). It might be conceded that some of the cultural practices listed above are not nostalgic in and of themselves, but rather that they enable nostalgia, by establishing a rift between the present and the past. Velikonja allows, for example, that sheer provocation might be a motive behind the production of many artifacts celebrating Tito (Velikonja, 2008:  19), whereas Nadkarni and Shevchenko, in their example, cite the nesting dolls with images of communist leaders, which mock the ideological symbolism of the recent past. These quasi-nostalgic (ironic, in fact) practices could be seen as a continuation and reworking of the subversive comic folklore of late socialism. Quite sensibly, the two authors quoted conclude that the transformation of political icons into kitsch “enabled post-socialist subjects to look back at the past with no fear of its return” (Nadkarni & Shevchenko, 2014: 71). Ironic distancing from “the kitsch of official state culture” (Nadkarni, 2010: 192) does, however, alter the value regime on

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a deeper level than these authors could have presumed: to an extent, it flattens the past, depriving it not only of its malevolent aura, but also of a problematic depth. On top of this factor, one must undoubtedly add the marketing potential of products of this kind, especially among tourists. Thus, these ‘relics’ are subdued to the contemporary logic of the market (Fig. 6.2). As can be seen, n(e)ostalgia is a complex relationship with the past, which, paradoxically at a first glance, oftentimes includes the apparent

Fig. 6.2  Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin. Thematic merchandize. (Photo courtesy of Svetla Kazalarska)

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opposite of nostalgia—that is, it ends up being ironically mediated.12 This situation is analyzed by Linda Hutcheon (1998) in the context of postmodernist theory, which sees parallels between nostalgia and irony in terms of their double-coding, the intentional return to history, and its aestheticization, artifactization, and commodification. As Hutcheon asserts, exactly the same artifacts can appear to be both ironic and nostalgic—an occurrence which is not-too-infrequently observed in the post-­ socialist contexts herein discussed. This is possible because neither irony nor nostalgia are inherent to the objects themselves, but to their perception in the context of a specific cultural competence. While with irony two meanings can “rub together”, the “said” and the “unsaid”, with nostalgia, two temporal moments converge: an idealized past, and an inadequate present. From this encounter emerges, in the first instance, a critical distancing, and in the second—a considerable emotional load. In both cases, precisely the reception and the response are what begets strength, intellectual or emotional. Hence why cultural competence is so important: the ironic or nostalgic significance is imparted by the audiences. This is exactly why identical artifacts can be seen in drastically different lights. Nostalgia and irony are both “trans-ideological”, and can therefore be utilized by anyone and everyone in different ways. Given this understanding, irony is not merely a counterpoint to nostalgia, which is there to expose its appeals and risks; Hutcheon draws the attention to the fact that nostalgia is not only summoned up in a quest for authenticity; it is also ironized, i.e. “invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is—a comment on the present as much as on the past”. Such an ironized, subversive nostalgia can be discovered as well in a subsection of post-socialist cultural production, which offers commentary on the not-too-distant past. As an example, we can once again turn to some articulations of Titostalgia, or to the artifacts analyzed by Nadkarni and Shevchenko. Some of these endeavors are ironically conceived by their creators, but end up being embraced nostalgically by audiences (Kazalarska, 2010; Nadkarni & Shevchenko, 2014: 79). In this regard, there is an exemplary Bulgarian specimen: Inventory Book of Socialism (Genova & Gospodinov, 2006) and the exhibition connected to it, “The Inventory Repository of Socialism” in Sofia (2006). The exhibit 12  From this perspective, Diana Georgescu (2010) explains the use of the image of Romanian dictator Ceaușescu in commercials and other popular genres—a phenomenon which is ordinarily interpreted as an unhealthy expression of nostalgia.

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displayed more than 500 intentionally mundane objects from the socialist everyday: toys, candy/cookie/cigarette/detergent wrappers, a kitchen grater, a pepper mill, an old TV set, etc. As with the book, this was in its core an ironic project, in as far as it shed light on the rift with the past, and the distance in relation to it. The intention of the creators was to juxtapose the “silent objects” with the ideological noise of the era, to demonstrate the “banality of evil” (Arendt) via the banality of the everyday, and to oppose to a return to a past “covered in chocolate, but with a suspicious taste” (Genova & Gospodinov, 2006:  11). By demonstrating the laughably-­pitiful, from today’s perspective, materiality of the socialist living, this project took on a hermeneutic distance relative to it, bordering on parody, and perfectly illustrating Hutcheon’s thesis about ironized nostalgia. The triviality of the objects displayed was its “said” meaning, which ought to direct us to the “unsaid” one. The audience’s response, however, differed drastically from the conception, as well as from person to person: while some of the nearly 80 visitor comments13 critiqued the “sugarcoated” portrayal of the past, which turned a blind eye to totalitarian repressions, most left behind affectionate gratitudes, because the exhibition revitalized their own childhood memories. They construed it as an ally in some sort of a defense of their own past from the attempts to reevaluate it. Thus, contrary to the ironic intentions, the perception of the exhibition took place mostly through the filter of nostalgia, the normalization of the past and its ‘privatization’ via the connection to one’s own childhood. The transformation of models and myths from the socialist period into ideologically neutral, though extremely popular forms of mass culture is subject to different interpretations. On the one hand, post-socialist nostalgia can be construed as “memory with the pain removed,” and on the other—as amnesia, the opposite of remembering, because it presupposes selective forgetting. On one hand, it is a meticulous rearrangement of select fragments from the past, while on the other—a rupture from it and its othering, owing to the lack of the affective intensity of an active engagement. From a certain viewpoint, sots-nostalgia is a winning strategy for (some, at least) cultural industries, and from another—a backwards-facing utopia, and in this sense—a counter-memory, albeit tethered to the emotional, the sensual, the intimate. It is likely that after the collapse of every ‘old world’, a space for new utopias is opened. Post-socialist utopias, as it  Thanks to Svetla Kazalarska, who granted me access to the guest book.

13

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appears, are shortlived and unconvincing. This is why nostalgia has been able to lodge itself permanently in both the public arena, and in personal consociation with the past. Therefore, we can agree with sociologists Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering that “nostalgia” is no monolith, but rather, there exist multiple nostalgias (Pickering & Keightley, 2006:  928–929). The plural in this assertion of theirs is certainly valid when it comes to post-socialist nostalgias as well. In the next section, I shall take a more in-depth look into one of them.

Retrospective Mirages: Nostalgia as a Biographical Phenomenon It must have become clear up to this point that the theorizations of nostalgia—and in particular the efforts for its detoxication and creative political appropriation—capture, above all, its public dimensions and rarely touch on its existence in the emotional and biographical universes of individuals. In this regard, nostalgia is often perceived as ‘mistaken’ memory (that is, the kind which does not depict the past ‘as it was’, but rather embellishes it) or as a crisis of memory (i.e. a form of anxiety linked to the break of semantic connections). In this section’s title, I adopt Halbwachs’ conceptualization of nostalgia as “une sorte de mirage rétrospectif” (Halbwachs, 1952: 82), which I find to be directly applicable to the situation at hand. I shall turn towards the dimensions of nostalgia which fall through the cracks in most of the studies mentioned so far. According to the classifications introduced by Velikonja, these are the personal (and not the collective,) the experienced (and not the materialized,) and the noninstrumental nostalgia, which is also mimetic, that is, it is missing the distancing gesture of irony. It is the primal, non-mediated, life-world nostalgia grounded in personal experience. I shall utilize the very same analytical schematic which were applied to traumatic narratives in the previous chapter, i.e. to discover the tropes, topoi and plot lines of nostalgic memory. In essence, I shall look for answers to these questions: which are the objects of nostalgic longing, how is it expressed, and what narratives is it woven into, in order to acquire meaning? I shall start with the last point, because here we observe something peculiar—the lack of a plot binding the fragments into a temporally-­ structured semantic whole, which is to ‘sustain’ the biographical construction. Rather than being based on a plot, nostalgic narratives are organized

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around a schematic template, which statically contrasts two pictures: of the past, and of the present, ‘then’ and ‘now’ (as with the story of the missionary, analyzed by Rosaldo). Instead of threading a link between past, present and future, connecting them in a coherent, meaningful whole, these narratives are captive to discontinuity, and replicate it further. From the point of view of a successful biographization as a struggle against contingency, i.e. an effort towards a narrative taming of ambivalence and the construction of a self-identity, this is a problem. The effort to unearth or create semantic connections seems to have been abandoned, while the focus is on the rift between the times. In the then–now comparisons, the past invariably ends up valuated positively, and contrasted with the negatively-­construed present. Although they contend to represent a rational comparison between certain achievements of the socialist system (employment, security, equality, social and material gains) and their analogues in the present, an affective idealization of the past lurks within the then–now constructions of the purportedly rational juxtapositions. Life is divided up into real, in the past, and ‘unreal’ in the present. In their microscopic scale, such narratives reproduce the mythological plot of the “golden age,” seized by the post-communist reforms. In this plot line, it comes across as entirely unthinkable that the stylized ‘then’ could in any way contain the causes for the dissatisfactory ‘now’. More to the point: the discontinuity, the cessation, operates at a structural level within the narrative, by tabulating events and dramatizing them. The very postulation of ‘then’ and ‘now’ sets forth a semantic framework, within which aspects of an ever-more-fluid social life are withheld. It presupposes two worlds, rhetorically opposed to one-another, and separated one from another by the feeling of loss. Once this framework has been put into place, the narrative could be literally anything: factual, dramatic, polemic, etc. In all cases, however, the temporality is inverted: the present is not an anticipation of the future, but a loss of the past. By following the proposed analytical model, the topoi of post-socialist nostalgia can be encapsulated, as Nadkarni and Shevchenko suggest, within two fundamental groups: “Proustian” (a nostalgia for elements of everyday material culture) and the habitus of later socialism (real and metaphorical spaces of sociality from that period). In contrast to the “political kitsch” described above, these two nostalgic topoi are grounded in “cultural belonging”, knowing and acknowledging from “within” the socialist heritage (Nadkarni & Shevchenko, 2014: 76), that is to say, in the biographical experiences shared by the older interviewees. Without disputing

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this grouping, I will offer a more detailed ‘catalogue’ of nostalgic topoi, sourced directly from the life stories of men and women born between 1920 and the start of the 1940s.14 Placing the focus explicitly on life under socialism has been crucial, because—in contrast to written autobiographies and memoirs—the conversation topics, and the manner in which our subjects construed this project and the researcher(s), established the frame of relevance and the directions of the associations of the oral narratives, and hence the ‘topography’ of existential nostalgia. Everyday Socialism In this yearning for the past, socialism exists not as a political system, but through its everyday aspects undoubtedly attesting to what anthropologist Gerald Creed has labeled the “domestication of revolution” (Creed, 1997)—a consensus between authorities and the populace, grounded in the silent renegotiation of the social contract. One of the younger interlocutors, a woman born in 1941 provides us with a glimpse into this silent contract: The important thing was that we were doing well, more or less, of course, that we could buy cars, build houses, and live our everyday lives joyfully and serenely. This was important to us, as a small provincial town, here, you know, away from the ruckus. That’s why it was important whether things were going well, calm… There was enough for the people, and the people didn’t care what they were doing up there.

Imperative to this limited viewpoint, likely, is the fact that this interviewee had no distinct personal memories from the first years after the establishment of the regime and the repressions inflicted in those days, including in her hometown. Such declarations attest to a cultural intimacy of sorts (Herzfeld, 1997): mutual concessions, which brought about a perturbing compatibility. Perturbing, because both the regime and the population sinned against the principles of the very communist ideology

14  I utilize, first and foremost, the archive of the Institute for the Study of the Recent Past, collected over the course of several projects between 2007 and 2014, which included oral history. Unless stated otherwise, all citations in the remainder of this chapter are from this archive. The nostalgic topoi discovered within this archive overlap, to a large extent, with the conclusions reached in the works of other colleagues, e.g. Velikonja (2009).

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which they purportedly preached. Here is how another participant conceived this situation: That was our life—we realized that socialism was no good, but we lived with the feeling of doom, that it would never be ousted. And we had to adapt to that. That’s why we created our own milieu, our own way of living.

This statement summarizes the prevailing attitudes, particularly under the conditions of late socialism: the system was seen as a given, as the only accessible reality. That was why for most people, the question was not how to oppose it, but how to adapt to it. A technology of power of this sort can be described using Bourdieu’s notion of euphemization (Bourdieu, 1977: 191): subtle ways of exercising power, which are not seen as such, and are therefore socially endorsed. Ironically, however, in attempting to adapt, people did succeed—within a very limited scope, of course—in influencing the conditions which were otherwise outside of their control. Precisely this “domesticated” and pedestrianized socialism is what present-­ day nostalgics long for. The picture of the past, which they compose is without too many nuances. The nostalgic discourse is blunt and transparent, ahistorical, metonymic, built upon dichotomy and contrast. The broad strokes of the narratives of the past pop up from direct and decisive comparisons with the present. Among the most widely-spread tropes is satisfactory consumption (comparable with the “Proustiana” in Nadkarni and Shevchenko’s work). Our interviewees contrasted the decline in their welfare nowadays with what they pictured as material contentedness and a higher standard of living, tied in once more with the socialist past. The humble prosperity of days past is contrasted with today’s poverty, or at least—with the subjective assessment of poverty. The shared memory of the shortages during the last years of the regime is repackaged, whereby not the actual lack of goods is highlighted, but rather their potential accessibility, that is, the possibility of getting to buy them due to their low prices. It turns out, that under “domesticated” socialism, as an oft-repeated anecdote asserts, nothing was allowed, but everything was possible; nowadays, everything is allowed, though nothing is possible. You have no idea what affluence means. People waited in line, their refrigerators were full. Today’s stores have everything, but refrigerators are empty.

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We didn’t receive enormous salaries, but our refrigerator had everything, and now… With every salary, I bought one wheel of cheese, salami, horseshoe-­ shaped sausages. And now… …when you walked in [a shop] with two leva, you could fill your bag, now you can’t. And how much it all cost back then, meat, salami, bread, everything… we’d buy one sausage for 20 stotinki, and the bread was 15 stotinki. In the store I’d spend 5 leva, and barely be able to bring the goods back to my kids: salami, tomatoes, peppers, all sorts of different things to eat. Whereas now, when I go visit my kids, they complain: we can’t earn enough, mother, for our bread. Cheap. The cheapest—food. Food was the cheapest. A year would pass, give or take, and they’d lower [prices] again. And now, every day they’re raising them. But we had everything, we even clothed ourselves for cheap, now there isn’t anything that we can get from anywhere. Despite the critiques, life was cheaper. You could even set aside money to go to the store and buy something—fabrics, clothing, everything. Back then we could indulge ourselves and go on excursions, go on holidays. …it was beyond welcome, you know—for the table to have food on it, to be decent. For there to be enough for everyone, everyone to have a car, to have… And that’s what it was like. Everyone had a car, everyone had a house, and that’s that! During communism, truly everyone could buy a car, and to build an apartment. Nowadays—difficult to accomplish. …back then each house had 2–3 cars, there were houses, apartments, and now only the rich buy, now you can’t buy neither an apartment nor a car… We were content. And money—we were well off, we built houses, everything. But nowadays, there’s nothing from nowhere. And I put together a wedding during communism, and bought and decorated an apartment, and my kids lived [well]. Now I can’t, I can’t. And we went to work, and we built a house, and I educated my kids, and weddings, and conscription parties… Now we can’t even feed ourselves.

According to the convincing hypothesis of anthropologist Anton Angelov (2013: 17), the significance of consumption in nostalgics’ stories is likely the result of their feelings of marginalization: not just nowadays, but even ‘before’ they were not a factor in public life. Hence the occlusion

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into consumption and personal life. The cheap food, the holiday destination, the car and the home mark the limits of consumer ambition for many representatives of this generation, which grew up during the war, and with the scarcity of the post-war years. Their consumer behavior supports the observation of author Slavenka Drakulic about her mother, who, for decades on end, saved and stocked up as if the war had never ended. At a rhetorical level, as we can see from most of the quotes, our interlocutors utilize these temporal leaps, entangling the time which is being discussed, with that in which the discussion is taking place. The transition in grammatical tense (“there was … now there isn’t”) produces a grammatical tension, which in turn connotes a semantic tension. The memories are steered rhetorically by the comparison to the ‘now’ and are subservient to its reasoning. There is no mention in any of them of the shortages, for example, the queues, the ingenuity needed to find goods in short supply, or the years-long wait times for an apartment or an automobile. One interlocutor informed us that with her husband, they put a deposit down on a car in 1964, but were only able to purchase it in 1984. In the meanwhile, their two children grew up and left the home. Her regret, distinguishable in this episode, was not, however, about the missed opportunities of family trips and vacations while the kids were young—she did not even allude to this in her story. Its context is entirely different: But now we can’t save up. Earlier, we did save up and bought ourselves a car, a Zhiguli, that we’ve still got. We can neither sell it, nor buy another one. With this one. Whoever wants a different one ought to buy it themselves. … We can’t save up anything anymore, nothing, nothing.

As we have observed, the link between past and present is not just a question of memory, but also of attitude. Nostalgic memories have the utility not so much of describing the past, as of sketching a monochromatic picture of the present. They are, in fact, “memories” of the past not as it was, but as it should have been. In this context, even the disturbing displays of cultural intimacy, expressed in maxims like “we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us” come across not just as non-­ scandalous, but also turn out to be an object of nostalgic endearment.

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Serenity and Security The other cherished dimension of the socialist past is the serenity and security, understood in two different ways: on the one hand, order and organization, lack of crime which could pose a threat to persons or property,15 on the other—wage and employment security (in contrast to the unemployment ‘now’), the predictability of the everyday life and the life course, the potential for biographical planning. Of course, the other side of security and predictability is control, but that does not appear as a theme in biographical narratives, and does not appear to be perceived, retroactively, as a problem. It was a calm life, and as such, more joyful. The population is more despondent nowadays. And you heard songs being sung, people going, women would get on the cart and go to work with a song, and they worked for a pittance—a calmer life, but now… It was all pretty good under communism. It was free too… And you didn’t have these robberies. A calm life too. There were no murders. Now that’s what I can say, that before ‘89, life was more peaceful. Well look here, the times of communism were such a period for us— good. … That was a life, how can I say, maybe some didn’t enjoy it, but it was such a calm life, such a rich life. “Calm” in the sense that you’re not thinking what you’re going to eat the next day.

What nostalgics long for, are in fact the past’s promises, not its realities. As does utopia, nostalgia leapfrogs over the present in an unrelenting quest for a better world—hence, too, its culturally-critical potential. In contrast with utopia, however, it does not offer a coherent image of this other universe. Nostalgia does not have its own project. That is why it needs the crutch of a comparison to the present. Its power flows, to restate Hutcheon’s thesis, from the “structural doubling-up of two different times, an inadequate present and an idealized past”. Our interlocutors appraised particularly highly what they perceived as security ‘before’, against the backdrop of their impressions about criminality today. One of 15  According to a nationally representative poll in 2007, security and serenity were “very important” to 79% of the respondents (Sastoyanie na obshtestvoto, 2008:  225–226). For a more systematic juxtaposition of the attitudes expressed in the poll and in the narrative interviews see Koleva (2011).

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the tropes most frequently used to express their apprehension was the locking of front doors: Earlier we weren’t afraid, we didn’t lock up, and now… I’ve got a house in the village, right…. Now I go there, and I’m afraid to stay in there. I stay, but I stay with dread. I lock myself in. Little do I know what kinds of people… There wasn’t anything like that earlier. Before, I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid at all before. We didn’t lock up, no one robbed us, and now there’s Gypsies, they steal, and not just the Gypsies. There were good jobs as well—we lived more-peacefully. I told you, no one here locked up. Doors were open round the clock. There wasn’t any worry that a thief would come. Because when they caught a thief and they tossed him in jail, he was forgotten. Well, this insecurity concerns me, it concerns everyone. That thing, that’s going on. We didn’t know what it meant to lock the door at home. The house was unlocked, the one entrance and the other, you come in, you go out—there was no issue. And now, now as they say, we don’t leave it unlocked. You don’t leave it unlocked, because it’s dangerous. So that’s that, otherwise before that no, there wasn’t any such thing.

The last interviewee, a man born in the late 1930s, continued with a story about a robbery in their family home. At the end it became clear that this took place in the 1980s, that is, ‘before’ and not ‘now’. But when narrating their lives, people do not put a particular effort in separating out facts from feelings. Although they speak from the point of view of eyewitnesses, their nostalgic statements reference the past not as testimony, to be used to establish facts about given aspects of it, but as literature, which cobbles together an ideal past out of selected fragments of their lived experience. The stories of serenity then and criminality now can be interpreted as a metonymy of the condition of marginalization and alienation, with which the interviewees associate post-socialist transformations, which coincided with their slump into old age. The other commonly observed rhetorical figure, which portrays the contrast between past and present, is the nighttime safety on the streets. This is brought up, for the most part, by women. One of our interviewees recalled working in shifts: And I’m getting home, night shift, at work until 10. By the time I catch the bus, it’s after midnight that I get home. Calmly. But now I’m scared.

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… there were no thieves, there were no killers, and now you’re afraid to stay out past dark. It was very calm at school, there was security in the street; all told, I liked those times.

At a rhetorical level, as with many other similar testimonies too, nostalgia works through de-particularization: it was not particular incidents that were retold, as much as generic statement were made. These generalizations trivialize and habituate, following the so-called mechanism of “narrative seduction” (Brunner). Whatever is recalled in this way comes across as normal, conventional, excluding any possible alternative. In other words, it turns into a narrative necessity. Historian Joan Sangster (Sangster, 1998: 90–91) noticed a similar rhetorical strategy in her research among female workers in Chicago: while they insisted that in the 1930s women could return home at night without the slightest fear, archival sources and press publications from the same period proved exactly the opposite. Her take, which appears to be applicable to the episodes discussed herein, is that by being reticent about abuse and idealizing the past, the respondents verbalized their present fear of abuse.16 More generally, security is depicted as the predictability of life over a longer timescale, possible, according to the interviewees, because of the guaranteed employment and income. A lack of security, nowadays, was often projected upon the younger generations, to which the interviewers belonged. Thus, the prioritization of the past was expressed in the context of well-meaning concern for younger generations: We lived, somehow more at ease about the coming day—you know, that when 15  days have passed, you’ll get an advance payment, and after that you’d get your salary. Life was somehow more organized, and you could give more of yourself. While now, the energy you’ve got, you’re spending on something else entirely—in fearing for what the next day will be like, and what you’re doing tomorrow. Just like now, for you, the young ones: you study, you make an effort, you spend your parents’ money, and maybe the state’s too, those who are supported by the state, you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, whether you’ll succeed in life … Once upon a time, if you didn’t like it here, you’d go to the TKZS, if you didn’t like it at the TKZS, you’d go to the factory … you’ll find a job. But 16  We must also keep in mind the prevailing media censorship before the 1990s, as a result of which instances of crime and abuse were intentionally left unspoken.

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then now they closed down the factory, they closed down the TKZS, I don’t know what else they closed, people have nothing, and they’re forcing young people to go and work abroad… There were always jobs, there always were. What that was like, and after that what happened, I say: how come, there were so many jobs back in the day, and now there aren’t any? That’s why my son went and became a migrant worker. No jobs here. Now, life earlier was better than it is nowadays. Life isn’t good for the youth now, because you haven’t got money, nor job, nor… Earlier, there were jobs everywhere.

In these comparisons, the socialist past appears to have been a period of relatively orderly and easily-manageable life, with regard to financial well-­ being, security and stability. Because of that, quite naturally, our interlocutors find it to be more understandable and more appealing. To paraphrase Lowenthal’s title, for many of them it is not the past that is a foreign country, but the present. Again and again, the questions about ‘before’ turn into an occasion to assess the state of affairs today. The insecurity and instability of the present encourage a nostalgic longing for the past—a past lovingly reassembled from selected, idealized fragments. At the same time, the accomplishments of democracy do not come across as all too valuable—something which can be interpreted as an indicator of how quickly people have become accustomed to them and have started taking them for granted. For example, in recognizing freedom of speech, some of the respondents quickly tack on that “there’s no one to hear” them. Also commonplace is the allegation that liberty has morphed into “lubricity,” understood as criminality, non-adherence to the rules, corruption, new inequalities, etc. It can be asserted that nostalgic statements are provoked no less by the perceived deficiencies of the present, than by the imagined advantages of the past, and that post-socialist nostalgia says more about the present, than about the socialist past. Solidarity in the Micro-community: One’s Own, Not the Regime The micro-scale and the perspective of the individual are central to nostalgic narratives. The immediate ‘warm’ community (Gemeinschaft, according to Ferdinand Tönnies’ terminology) or so-called informal publicity—families, friends, neighborhood and kin communities—set in place their context. The ‘system’, the regime, and the ideology are wholly

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absent from these descriptions. These are memories of everyday life, which used to flow through the crevices, in between political and labor mobilisations, independent of the regime’s social engineering efforts. This narrow focus illustrates the pragmatism of biographical knowledge (Gardner, 2001:  194) as knowledge directed towards coping with the specifics of lived reality. People know, they understand, they remember, and they value the most that which they rely on, to cope with everyday life. The interviewees underlined the mutual aid, the close communication and solidarity of the beforetimes, contrasting them with the isolation of today. This is how a woman born in 1937, and who spent many years working in the village’s collective, described the advantages of socialism—actually, the ways in which people took advantage of the collective for personal gains: So these people, may their souls rest in peace, they died—but their kindness was nowhere to be found. Using the baler we were making [hay] bales, we would load them on, then I’d bake up a casserole of food and something to drink—they don’t charge me a single stotinka, they just bring over the hay…. And now—the guy plows nine furrows, and he asks you for 20 leva.

Recalling wistfully the authentic, unblemished and unabridged reciprocity and the bygone togetherness, our interlocutor neglects to mention the context for the “kindness” of these people—the driver of the truck and the hauler—who delivered the hay in exchange for only a casserole of food and a bottle of drink. She shuts her mind to the fact that her hay was delivered with the collective’s truck, filled up with the collective’s fuel, and during the workday, when the truck was supposed to be transporting hay to the collective’s warehouses. In other words, this is a matter of personal gain at the expense of the collective. As Creed (1997) points out, the rural populace used to see personal enrichment of this sort as their “natural right”. According to him, practices of this kind expose a particular mentality, inherited perhaps from the pre-socialist period, when villagers could, under certain conditions, legitimately use communal grazing lands and grasslands. Not to be ignored, either, is the inverse hypothesis—that these practices were rooted in the alienation from the regime, with its constant mobilisations and inability to fulfil its social promises. The statement by an 80-year-old interviewee from a small mountain town at the end of his narrative encapsulates this ethos of solidarity with one’s own, and the alienation from the state and its institutions:

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All my life, I’ve only done good deeds. I’ve never insulted anyone. I’ve never argued with anyone. I don’t owe anyone anything, nor does anyone owe me…. I’ve never done a bad thing to anyone… If I’ve stolen [firewood] from the forest?—I’ve stolen, but other than that from no one else.

While theft “from someone else” is considered condemnable, because it upends the us-community (neighborly, local), theft from the public forests is completely acceptable, as it is seen as a component of the very same “natural right”. Another type of such small communities, where moments of unity and solidarity are usually highlighted, is the workplace. The respondents are prone to value the unmediated and friendly relations with their workmates. As a rule of thumb, positive recollections about work during those days all refer precisely to the aspect of interpersonal relations. Oftentimes, this aspect is central to stories about the workplace, particularly in the memories of people who worked in unskilled, mundane and often undesirable positions, who did not otherwise get much satisfaction out of their labor: I lived such a life with them—like sisters. Better than a relative, I said to myself. We got along very well. There’s only one of them left, the rest passed away. In the laboratory we were only women. We baked pogača, we had a fun time. Poor, but hardworking people. Kind to one-another…

A retrospective glance through the lenses of nostalgia even paints clientelism as mutual assistance, concern and attention on behalf of one’s superiors. In this context, the communal celebration of namedays and birthdays, of local and national holidays, is often cited as proof positive of the warm, collegial vibe at the workplace. Within nostalgic memories of the past, holidays take on a peculiar role. Here is how a blue-collar worker at an industrial plant describes this aspect of her work life: It was perfect. Holidays at the plant were very good. The entire brigade would celebrate birthdays. We’d get together, set the table, we’d bring food and drinks. Because we weren’t a military supply factory, drinking was almost allowed—not to get drunk, but to have a toast. We’d make salads, bring them in, we’d buy a gift, we’d greet each-other—and that’s for every birthday. Other than that, on St. Tryphon’s Day [patron saint of

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­ inegrowers] we’d go up to the villas, trim the vines, put together lunches, w dinners. It was a very fun time. The brigade would organize to go to the dam. The men played football, we were doing handicrafts, keeping ourselves busy with whatever we could think of. (oral archive, Department for History and Theory of Culture)

A saleswoman from a big city recalls fondly: Back then the 8th of March was celebrated quite glamorously, there was an inspection of trade-union groups, how well each group would perform… But we did culinary exhibitions, fashion shows, what have you, and I was at the center of it all…

It is worth noting that even the memories about official state holidays are told within the context of the informal publicity. The interviewees would normally neglect their symbolic and ideological aspects, but gladly tell us about the social and recreational ones: … how can I tell you, the most important moments: when some holiday comes up, to go somewhere and have fun, I was always the first one in line. For songs. And we had a good time, and it was pleasant no matter where we went. So holidays would come, the 9th of September, and here—just a simple village, but we had music, that kind, folk. A brass band. And they hop out, we circle the entire village, a parade in front of the school. All day long, they were playing, dancing… Now everyone is kooked-out, everyone trying to make ends meet.

The nostalgic note in stories of this kind comes from the feeling of having lost these “warmhearted connections”, of societal collapse, of isolation. These phenomena are not recent; they have been developing since the 1960s as a result of the depopulation of rural areas, and were not left unnoticed by literature, film, and visual arts in the 1970s and 1980s. However, as with other nostalgic topoi, the ‘before–now’ contrast semantically regiments the narrative of the past and dominates over referentiality. The feeling of loss is expressed by a villager born in 1933, who longs not for the collective or socialism, but for the days when his village was full of life: “We had parades over here, in the first few years after the TKZS came together, we had them. Then they died down, ‘cause there weren’t any people either. There were no holidays at all.” (oral archive, Department

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for History and Theory of Culture). Of particular importance too is the biographical point in time at which these stories are recorded, namely when the majority of the interviewees had withdrawn from active social life, and had limited interaction with the world. It might be asserted that what today’s elderly are missing is not so much the past as such, but rather a “potential space of cultural experience that one has shared with one’s friends and compatriots that is based … on elective affinities” (Boym, 2001: 53). The notion of “elective affinities” is subject to a somewhat different interpretation as well. Isolation and the severing of old social ties is not necessarily caused by aging and retirement alone. As sociological studies have determined, the ‘warm’ communities of socialism were, to a large extent, “communities of necessity” (Kupferberg, 1998:  258), created because of the need for informal exchanges, which could facilitate access to goods and services in conditions of scarcity. That is to say, what on the surface resembles warm, friendly communities and mutual-aid relationships, were in reality clientelistic networks and reciprocal-gain relationships. The prosperity which the interviewees remember, actually came to be thanks to the maintenance of informal relationships. The tight-knit and intensely personalized social bonds did not have only a directly utilitarian reason for existence, however, they combined pragmatism and sentiment: the practical exchange of goods and services created friendships, and friendship suggested mutual assistance and favors. Thus, a substantial part of the prestige and comfort under socialism was not tied to money (at least not directly) but to the social capital guaranteed by belonging to such networks, and the privileges that accompanied it. Nowadays, the products and services in question are readily available against payment, as a result of which these communities of necessity have lost their very reason for existing, and the feeling of solidarity fostered by them has withered up. The social capital amassed within these communities is not perceived as such, in retrospect; what is seen and remembered is their ‘emotional capital’. Lost Values As we have observed, socialism in retrospective narratives is most often grasped through the prism of everyday life—the home and well-being, work and close ones—and not a word is to be said about the effectiveness of the system, or the socio-political problems which accompanied it. On the flip side, with regard to the present day, many interlocutors

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demonstrate an impassioned interest and share personal opinions about social and political matters: unemployment, social inequality, corruption, crime, etc. These statements make up the fourth topos of post-socialist nostalgia—a feeling of the loss of certain values. Despite being ordinarily seen as an escapist approach, nostalgia, as mentioned above, holds critical potential. I do not mean here intellectual critique, but rather expressions of a dissatisfaction with the present loaded with moralistic overtones. The nostalgic statements of the interviewees can be interpreted as a criticism of the predominating ‘materialist individualism’ from the standpoint of a moral and emotional collectivism, associated with the past, i.e. values (perceived as lost) like solidarity, equality, justice. The interlocutors react thusly not only in regard to their material circumstance as pensioners, but also to the social isolation in which they find themselves. More important still, this is the manner in which they take a moral stance in relation to the present. Their notion of equality, borrowed from communist ideology (and perhaps rooted even deeper in egalitarian traditions) is adapted to the new conditions as a criticism of income inequality and low living standards. The interviewees apparently do not notice, or do not wish to notice the erstwhile inequalities—those, which socialism’s cultural intimacy successfully covered up—but display a sensitivity towards the new ones. An oft-repeated turn of phrase used to vocalize this sensitivity is “there was enough for us too”: There were both positive and negative things, but back then there was enough for them [communist nomenklatura], but also for us, lots of things. But now, only for the rich—a handful of people have taken everything while the others forage in the dumpster. … there was plenty for those at the top, but there was enough for us too. But I’m telling you, back then there was enough for us too. Free education, free healthcare, rest homes, whatever else there was, kindergartens weren’t expensive either, accessible to everyone, there were lots of things, the people were taken care of. And now no one thinks about the people.

The feeling of a historic loss—whether of order, morals or solidarity—is the most fundamental dimension of nostalgia. Indeed, the conditions which are seemingly to blame for the loss, offer at the same time new opportunities, which the interviewees could not, however, take advantage of, because of the point in their life courses at which they became available. But they did bear witness to how the competition for employment,

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social prestige and material goods fragmented communities and fostered suspicion, mistrust and envy. Perhaps the most widespread motif in stories of the post-socialist transition is the one that “some people” became wealthy in a “dishonest way”. Certainly, in many cases these stories are truthful in the literal sense, but they also deliver a deeper and more general message: that the social fabric has been torn and that the redistribution of power and material assets has brought about new inequalities, absorbed in agony by the interviewees. The nostalgic discourse articulates the experience of these inequalities as a longing for the solidarity and justice of the past’s promises. As representatives of the first socialist generation, the interviewees identify with the “people,” “the poor,” “ordinary folk” holding the short end of the stick.17 They appraise highly the employment and income security also because they associate them with their conception of social justice. That’s what was taken away from the workers. There was justice, to a greater degree than now, there was security. You know, there was something that was very well-sustained… that you don’t have any longer. That was typical. There was collectivism. Socialism was for us… for poor folks, who didn’t own any property. Back then, for the poor there were camps, and free education, and free healthcare, isn’t that what the whole population needs? Noone thinks about the honest man, the clever man. Values are gone altogether. There were morals and discipline back then. Now there’s no morals, no discipline, murders, there’s no security—that I don’t like. I… so that’s what I liked about communism, that there was discipline. That I could never disparage. The discipline, they couldn’t do whatever anyone and everyone felt like doing. There was morality. But now, that’s something archaic. Abstractions! Morals, valor, honor, conscience—oh, what’s that!? We lived a more meager life, but you didn’t have those, or this malice which has now floated to the surface. Once upon a time we had national values, ideals… Now…

17  In the 2007 study, cited above, respondents designated the “losers” of the transition to have been “ordinary people” (23%), workers (11%), pensioners (20%), while the winners were the politicians (34%) and the criminals (25%). 19% of them identified themselves as losers of the transition (Sastoyanie na obshtestvoto, 2008: 232–233).

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Nowadays those military values, the soldiers’ valor, they don’t exist. Contemporary soldiers are just after the money. For us, in the first place it was about defending the border. The motherland. The brigadier movement was what the youth dreamed of! You had ideals, you had a dream! Young people nowadays don’t have any ideals, nor dreams. Nowadays the slogans “Man is man’s brother” or “One for all and all for one” are no longer in effect. No, the dominant ideology now is “Homo homini lupus est,” a Latin proverb. And in only 20 years we reeducated our young people just like that, that now our youth doesn’t have morals, they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have any goals, everything is valued in cash. A human being is also valued in cash. The good things were spoiled very easily. People’s morality was destroyed. Spirituality was destroyed. Our values are absent. And I noticed the headmistress of the school… she comes and goes. I’m not desperate for her “Good day”. But how can you expect the children to greet you, when she never says “Good day”?! So the ordinary people lost out, and the tricksters, they won.

The fusing together of notions of morality, collectivism, order and discipline within these statements is indicative in and of itself. They can be interpreted, however, not just as an expression of the erstwhile mindset, but also as a vision of the failure of the transition, and the alienation from political processes following the optimistic expectations of the first few years of democratic reforms. But, as Creed (2010) points out, nostalgia robs the past of its potential to be a resource for resistance by trivializing it. Although it is a natural and understandable reaction given the deficits of the present, the very format of this reaction—that it manifests itself as nostalgia—delegitimizes the dissatisfaction which is at its core, and in this manner reaffirms the neoliberal project. Thus, nostalgia fails as criticism, reaffirming the status quo and turning into a facet of the hegemonic discourse. It seems to me, however, that there is more to the very nature of nostalgic criticism. The communist regime undertook great efforts to regulate thought and behavior not just in the political sphere, but in everyday life as well. To a great extent, it succeeded, despite the fact that the outcomes did not correspond to the design. On the other hand, the shared traits of memory of the recent past are formed as well by the hardships of the transition era: against this backdrop, socialism sticks out as a period of relative order, predictability, and security. The present day undoubtedly finds an outlet in assessments of the past, in as far as they’re always “an

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intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present” (Raymond Williams, cited in Dawisha, 2005: 467–468). That is to say, in this past–present pairing, the latter does not provoke any questions, as if it’s self-evident and communally shared, it is exactly as described by the narrator, while the past is, at the very least, discussed. In that regard, political scientist Karen Dawisha (Dawisha, 2005) offers up a seminal partition between formal and informal ideas of socialism. The formal ones are those which are sourced directly from the ideology, and they have been, by and large, forgotten. The official communist ideology crumbled with the fall of the regime, but had evidently been hollowed out long before that because of the meaninglessness of its key postulates (e.g. about socialist democracy, democratic centralism, the governing role of the party) under the conditions of the cultural intimacy mentioned above. Many of the informal ideas, however, those which imparted legitimacy upon the regime in the eyes of its subjects, are still a component of everyday habitus, especially among the elderly. These are the ideas of (at least apparent) equality or, more precisely, an equalization, as it also refers to the results, not merely the opportunities; for social security, tied to guaranteed employment; for justice, welfare, order, and the ‘strong arm’ of governance; the high expectations maintained for the redistributory role of the state; the adherence to collectivism and prioritization of collective interests, at least on paper; nixing blatant expressions of individualism. Such informal notions, articulated more or less within the life stories of the first socialist generation, comprise a sizeable part, it could be said, of the political culture of the everyday. They set forth the frames for the interpretation and valuation of contemporary social processes. The evident individualism of post-socialist society compares unfavorably to the ideals of equality, collectivism and solidarity proclaimed by communist ideology. The viewpoint of the everyday, particularly from a retrospective stance, cannot always capture their culturally-intimate (according to Herzfeld) character, that is, that they served to auto-­ ideologize clientelistic relationships. Chris Hann’s conclusion that “[t]he everyday moral communities of socialism have been undermined but not replaced” (Hann, 2002: 10, emphasis in the original) likely remains true for the first socialist generation. These communities were formed under the influence of an ideology of exceptionalism (Velikonja, 2009:  13), which never abandoned its claims to moral superiority, while the free market and liberal democracy “have not, at the level of everyday practices, ushered in new moral forces, comparable to those that have been

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displaced” (Hann, 2002:  11). In truth, the “solitude of collectivism” (Kideckel) presupposes individualism, but merely as a tool for coping, without being elevated to the status of a socio-cultural value. On the other hand, the fact that a “post-socialist society is so much more openly governed by individualism and subject to narcissistic, greedy, and corrupt behavior leaves it vulnerable open both to widespread negative comparison with the more noble overt objectives of socialism and to condemnation on moral grounds among the population” (Dawisha, 2005:  483, emphasis in the original). This is why the interviewees, who belong to the first socialist generation and were socialised under the weighty influence of precisely this ideology, embrace nostalgia as a moral position, from which they appraise the present and find it devoid of moral values. I am tempted to label this self-distancing stance ethical nostalgia. From the position of the moral superiority of an idealized past, ethical nostalgia serves as an alibi for withdrawing from the chaos of the constantly changing present. Homo Nostalgicus without a Stigma To understand nostalgia as a biographical and existential phenomenon it is important to keep in mind that biographical narratives are guided by a struggle against contingency, by the striving to clear, reify and miniaturize the social world in order to create an aggrandized Self. Hence, nostalgia can be considered a function of biographical memory: it filters, censors, renegotiates meanings and smooths out contradictions in order to make possible the congruence between memories of one’s own life, and a desired identity asserted in the present. In singular edge cases, this narrative strategy produces deliberately interventionist narratives, whose entire objective is solely to bolster the position of the speaker, not to chronicle the past. Contrasting the negatively perceived present with an idealized past begets meanings within the bounds of a “dichotomous contrast, rather than in terms of the more ambiguous, unsettled and contested relations between past and present” (Pickering & Keightley, 2006: 925) enabling a deeper understanding of the past. By erasing the complexity of the past, as well as of the present, nostalgia can belittle, or even obscure traumas from the past, crowning it with a positive halo. Displays of biographical nostalgia, like the ones I discussed here, expose its complex and ambivalent character. They serve as a ground for a few conclusions about post-socialist nostalgia as a longing for the socialist past

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in the life narratives of elderly people, whose active lives overlap for the most part with this very period. 1. Nostalgia shows up when a return to the past is no longer possible. This thesis was stated above in regard to nostalgia as a component of popular culture (neostalgia, second-hand nostalgia). It is valid as well when it comes to existential (first-hand) nostalgia. Gerald Creed detects it in his fieldwork in Northwest Bulgaria only in 2006—a timestamp which coincides with my own experience in several other locations. This gives him cause to insist that nostalgia is connected with memory stemming from lived experience and which therefore does not reach too far back into the past. Despite the relative proximity of this past, there exists nonetheless a distinct recognition of the impossibility of reinstating it. The other condition for the emergence of nostalgia, according to Creed, is that there is evidence on hand of an improvement to the situation. When they are no longer afraid of the restoration of socialism, people can afford to remember it nostalgically. Thus, nostalgia ends up being intrinsic not just to memories of the recent past (which was personally experienced) but also to a past which, albeit recent, is already irretrievable. It “signals a rupture between past and present” (Creed, 2010: 37). It might be presumed that the sensation of rupture is not necessarily always tied to a temporal distance. That is why researchers draw a line between consecutive waves of post-socialist nostalgia, allocating the earliest ones in the popular culture of the mid-1990s. 2. Nostalgia is a backwards-facing utopia. It sees the past not as what it was, but as what it promised to be. Nostalgia, according to Edward Simpson’s apt formulation, is the paradoxical desire for its own absence: “The nostalgic recalls or imagines a time when the burden of hindsight was not so heavy, and when the individual concerned was unaware of which things they would subsequently yearn for” (Simpson, 2005: 245). Just like utopia, nostalgia presupposes a negation of the present, albeit in a different temporality. Its temporality is time-as-loss, and not time-as-hope. It can be thought of as “uchronia” (Portelli), non-time, a yearning for an imagined past—the past as it should have been, not as it actually was. What nostalgics long for are the promises, dreams and expectations of the past, not its realities. Post-­socialist nostalgia in particular, according to Velikonja’s insightful expression, “looks back for the times that looked forward—it praises the past that praised the future” (Velikonja, 2009:  546). Like utopia, nostalgia sidesteps the present in an emphatic search for a better world. Unlike utopia,

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it does not offer a coherent image of this other world. Nostalgia has no project of its own. Its power is in the specificity, the quasi-physical presence of elements of the past. Thus the past comes across as concrete and emotionally nuanced. 3. By privileging an idealized past, nostalgia pinpoints the deficits of the present. Once it has been identified as merely a sentimental view of the past, however, nostalgia can hardly be thought of as socially productive, that is, from the point of view of its potentially transformative role in the present. It might be assumed that it is partly at least the result of a certain feeling of disorientation under the conditions of rapid and substantial change: as Karen Dawisha writes about post-Soviet Russia, “in the absence of governing narratives after communism collapsed, even knowing what one should be against was suddenly quite problematic…. The result was that when the socialist state no longer was there to tell people how to think, there was initial euphoria but also subsequently a whole host of reactions associated with trauma and loss, such as confusion, anger, mourning, nostalgia, and amnesia.” (Dawisha, 2005: 483, emphasis in the original). The key to understanding nostalgia is therefore not as much in the past, as it is in the present. It is not just a matter of remembering but also—of complex projections: referencing an idealized history merges forcefully with a dissatisfaction with the present. Nostalgics are not striving for a restoration of the past, but utilize the past to call the present into question (cf. McDermott, 2002: 403). When they insist that it was better ‘before’, interviewees are implicitly criticizing the shortcomings they see in the present. But this critique is not resolute, nor pragmatic. It merely points to those aspects of the past, which are seen as positive, as a model to be emulated. Because of this undefined, diffuse and inarticulate desire to step out beyond the present, which might still be envisaged as a possible alternative, worldview nostalgia can be thought of as ‘almost hope’. 4. Nostalgia is a way of adapting and coping with the changes, when other resources are lacking. Biographical nostalgia can be interpreted as a process of transference, wherein current emotions are projected elsewhere: in another time, to another place, under other conditions. Its positive significance in such an interpretation is connected to the foundational, according to psycho-­ analysis, relationship between identity and the past revealed by memory. Nostalgic longing is a response, a reaction to loss and deprivation: “Disenchantment with today impels us to try to recover yesterday.” And

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further: “…the past offers alternatives to an unacceptable present. In yesterday we find what we miss today” (Lowenthal, 1985: 82, 110). As much as it seems like a passive and escapist disposition, the nostalgia of the elderly interviewees actually presumes participation—not so much social or public, as emotional and intellectual. Even though it attests to the loss of moral certainty, at the same time it also offers them a way to lay claim to the past on behalf of their generation, which feels (and to a large extent is) marginalized. The interviewees are witnesses to the massive transformations of the mid-twentieth century, and see themselves as a part of history—an attitude nourished by decades of commemorative practices. The experience of “building socialism” has been integrated into their biographies. To them, nostalgia is also a reaction against the quasi-­ orientalizing treatment, which aims to retell their own lives in the ‘correct’ manner. The high self-appraisal of their accomplishments (in the Komsomol, the Party, workplace emulations) has been injured. They tend to think of themselves as a generation under “moral siege” (Coleman & Podolskij, 2007) in the sense that those values which had guided them during their entire lives, had now lost their meaning. Therefore, their nostalgia conveys an important message: that they do not consent to having their memories molded by others. It has got emancipatory potential, albeit in quite a contradictory way. If it is so, then questions emerge about the role of post-socialist nostalgia and about the social mechanisms through which it is precipitated and utilized. In this biographical and existential sense, nostalgia testifies to the lack of accessible ways of incorporating the past into the present (cf. Kiossev & Koleva, 2017). In a post-socialist setting, it turns out once again to be an alternative to the linear historical narrative. 5. By renegotiating the past ‘from below’, post-socialist nostalgia takes a stance against the rejection of the past as a threat to the present. If nostalgia is “memory with the pain removed,” it can be acknowledged as a way of coping with the schism between past and present on multiple levels. The notion of biography (at least the European one) presupposes continuity; the latter is essential to making sense of a life. The rupture between past and present, the discrepancies between the biographical and the historical narratives make this task inconceivably difficult—not just on a personal level, but for entire generations as well. Nostalgia appears to offer a possible way for its resolution: it helps to forge semantic links between the past and the present, albeit negative ones, injecting discontinuity into the foundation of this constructed meaning.

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Further still, it can be viewed as a manner of fostering intimacy and a generational community on the basis of a shared space of experience. If what people remember can be manipulated, politicized and ideologically loaded, then post-socialist nostalgia can be viewed as an attempt to synchronize individual and collective memory, to construct memory ‘from below’ and to create informal mnemonic communities. It thus points to a certain level of cultural continuity (of the everyday moral communities which Hann talks about) where it is impossible to reject the past. Having been anchored in values, practices and relationships which no longer exist, nostalgia may well be interpreted as a form of everyday cultural creativity ‘from below’. With their nostalgic tales from the socialist period, elderly people are seeking out their new axis mundi, taking part in a cultural DIY, in much the same way their grandchildren do when working their way through the subcultural scenes of urban life. Indeed, nostalgic resistance appears to be somewhat compatible with the subcultural one, with its idiosyncratic modus, vernacular ideologies and apolitical (or—politically inverted) nature. In biographical narratives, which are an active self-construction and self-presentation, nostalgia is likewise active, insofar as it (re)negotiates discontinuity and succession. Looking into these personal stories has to a large extent restated and reaffirmed the parameters of the ‘nostalgic paradigm’ outlined above. Its dimensions—the sense of historic loss, of decay of social ties, of the shattering of moral certainty—allow post-socialist nostalgia to be viewed from this generalizing perspective. It is thus situated within a theoretical frame of reference, which encompasses different forms of nostalgia as universally valid existential or cultural phenomena. Further on down, I shall triangulate post-socialist nostalgia within its more concrete historical context, and I’ll search for its justifications and its specifics from this very point of view.

On the Normality of Post-communist Nostalgia Maintaining the focus on nostalgia as an existential phenomenon, researchers have coalesced around the conclusion that it is most characteristic of those advancing in age. Fred Davis associates it with the truncated biographical horizons of the elderly: it alleviates fears of the future by highlighting the virtues of the past (Davis, 1979: 64–71). Therefore, nostalgia can be made sense of in the context of its generational distinctiveness. But if the cause behind it is the social isolation of old age, what then is the specificity of post-socialist nostalgia?

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Facing the Challenges of Transition Social gerontologists focusing on the adaptation of the elderly to the reforms in post-communist societies, have asserted the advantages of a stable cultural arena, and the challenges of a changing one (Coleman & Podolskij, 2007). Although the post-communist transition is not the only instance of rapid and far-reaching change (twentieth-century Europe has known wars, expulsions, rural-urban and transnational migrations, etc.), it distinguishes itself in terms of scale of transformation affecting the very system of values and guideposts within which the entire life journeys of its contemporaries take place. Aside from the loss of social cohesion and moral support, aside from the impoverishment and insecurity, the interiorized future-facing disposition inherited from communist ideology now further burdens the lives of the elderly: in many cases, they are unable to achieve a positive life review, nor to pass on their experience to subsequent generations, recognizing that it is no longer relevant. Thus, one of the most important positive chores of old age—accumulating and passing one’s own knowledge down to children and grandchildren—now appears pointless. In the broader social sciences context, there are different explanations for the emergence and propagation of post-socialist nostalgia. Here, I shall lean quite heavily on a fairly exhaustive overview, which sets its sights on nostalgia for the GDR among residents of the eastern provinces of a united Germany (Neller, 2006), although the hypotheses assessed are very much valid for the remaining CEE countries as well. According to the hypothesis of “spite-resistance” (Trotzhypothese), GDR-nostalgia is merely an expression of frustrations at the German unification, i.e. a reaction to the problems of today. This hypothesis can be accepted as a special case of the so-called “colonization” hypothesis, which concentrates on the West’s domination, and envisions nostalgia as a reaction to it. The colonization motif can be observed in other countries as well, as a distinctive protest against Western influences, perceived as excessive and threatening—particularly when contrasted with the prior isolation of the communist states. Such are for example, the conspiracy theories of the intentional liquidation of one industry or another, so as to guarantee a market for imported consumer goods. Another hypothesis places the onus on coping with the past, more precisely on the cognitive dissonance which sets in when attempting to rationalize one’s positive personal life experiences in the context of a critical treatment of the former regime. This is the hypothesis of

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“depreciation” (Entwertungshypothese). Representatives of the first socialist generation identify with the accomplishments and procurements18 of the years of their youth, without putting any thought about their actual cost, or into the fact that they were achieved not necessarily thanks to, but oftentimes independent of, or maybe even despite the regime. The narrower psychological reading of this occurrence lies at the base of the “compensatory” hypothesis (Kompensationshypothese): in order to impart after-the-fact a positive valuation to life’s negative episodes, unpleasant aspects are systematically discarded from consciousness, while the positive ones are accented in a process of retrospective reinterpretation. (As mentioned above, interviewees recall not the shortages of consumer goods, but their low prices.) Certain authors have found, however, that all of these attempts at an explanation are lacking historical depth. As an alternative, they offer up the so-called “socialization” hypothesis (Sozialisationshypothese), which explains nostalgia with the previous regime’s influence over the course of decades, particularly in the years of the older generation’s youth. This influence couldn’t have had zero effect on the convictions and worldviews of the first socialist generation—a perspective which concurs with Mannheim’s theory about the formative years of the generations (see below). As far as the Bulgarian case is concerned, it must be added that given the predominantly rural, predominantly small-scale and non-­market-­ oriented economy at the end of WWII, the new leadership truly did offer a never-before seen stable increase in living standards over a relatively long period of time—from mid-1950s to late 1970s. With the active participation of the erstwhile propaganda, the emblematic images of this progress were burned into people’s memories, while the price they paid remained invisible to them. 18  Quite often, the interviewees share that they were able to take advantage of holiday vouchers at sensible prices. If, and to what extent, they actually took advantage does not always become clear. At the same time, the leadership of labor unions, who would distribute vouchers among their members, often complained about the shortage of vacation stations. For example, the 21st congress of the Union of Bulgarian Teachers (1967) reported that 8397 union members vacationed during the summer break at stations belonging to the unions. At that moment, UBT counted 143 952 members among its ranks, i.e. 5.8% of them were able to take advantage of this doubtlessly valuable asset (Boyadjieva & Kabakchieva, 2019:  308). During the 1970s, this fraction fell to about 4%, as UBT grew to over 160 thousand members, while the vacation opportunities remained unchanged (ibid.:  326). Presuming a stochastically equitable distribution of vouchers, each teacher could receive a vacation once every 25 years, or 1–2 times in their entire professional careers.

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Another influential hypothesis, which attempts a complex approach to the post-communist situation in explaining nostalgia, is the “situational” one (Situationshypothese). According to it, the reasons for post-socialist nostalgia must be sought after at the confluence of the impoverishment, disenchantment and negative experiences with the new political and economic system, the non-materialization of all-too-high (perhaps unrealistic) expectations. Thus, nostalgia carves out a place in the context of an entire aggregate of situational outcomes. One can point to the peculiarities of the Bulgarian transition in support of this hypothesis, which ends up depleted before it has even come to an end. This nostalgia is also an expression (at least to some extent) of the disillusionment with the bait-­ and-­switch transition. One version of this hypothesis is the suggestion that nostalgia is the direct result of the betrayed aspirations for some sort of a “third way,” for reformed socialism with a “human face,” which maintains the promises of the ideology, while also being freed from the system’s shortcomings. The interviewees sometimes express this disenchantment by distinguishing between ‘communism’, i.e. the ideology, and ‘socialism’, i.e. its deficient implementation. In contrast with the last two explanatory compositions, which take as a given at least some attitudes critical of the present, according to the so-­ called “distancing” hypothesis (Distanzhypothese) nostalgia is exclusively the result of temporal distancing, whereby the past simply begins to appear more appealing. Along with this, some authors see the positive attitudes towards the communist past as a sign of normalization (Normalisierungshypothese), that is, of the overcoming of historical trauma and the formulation of a calmer, consensus-based relation to the past. These assumptions seem probable in the context of biographical memory, where retrospective positive valuations, as was shown above, apply not to the system as a whole, but are based on the positive relationship with one’s own past, and the immediate community. The explanations listed are not necessarily alternative: each of them privileges one factor or another in the constellation of nostalgia prerequisites. Out of the ones listed, the “socializational” and “situational” hypotheses are best developed and most influential, including in efforts to empirically ascertain and ‘measure’ nostalgia. While some of them grant an advantage to socialization in the conditions of the communist regime, which may well include the internalization of undemocratic values as a vital precondition for positive views of socialism (Gherghina & Klymenko, 2012), others insist on the importance of “the situation”, i.e.

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dissatisfaction with the present, due chiefly to the absence of a paternalistic welfare state, but also to the deficits of non-consolidated democracies (Ekman & Linde, 2005; Prusik & Lewicka, 2016). As probable as it may be, this explanation for nostalgia shrouds a certain paradox, which in turn elicits new questions: people seem to react to the failures of the transition by longing for an equally failed reality (Bartmanski, 2011: 215). No doubt, the efforts of the communist regime to discipline the “new socialist man” did not remain inconsequential. Although their results oftentimes veered off the project’s intentions, the values systems and vital strategies of those people who grew up under “the care of the Party” could not, after all, be left unaffected by the large-scale policies and programs for communist inculcation. They are not necessarily internalized, nor do they serve as actual guiding beacons in everyday life. Their practical circumvention in daily practices does not, however, exclude their principal acceptance as something abstractly good and just. We must keep in mind not only the fact that the ideals of communist ideology, as well as its moral interpellation, are appealing, but also that these ideals were never seen as an alternative to democracy. Fixating on the “socialization” or the “situation” would, however, lead to a one-sided understanding of post-socialist nostalgia, and to the omission of the complexity and ambiguity of this phenomenon. The interpretation which I offer in the next section does not exclude any of the explanations listed above. Maintaining the focus on “socialization” (cultural codes) and “situation” (their reevaluation), it connects nostalgia to memory and to ‘memory work’, beyond the purely personal dispositions, but outside of political crusades. Nostalgic Generation? I double-back to the notion of the culture of memory, and therefore of the mnemonic community, this time as a potential key to understanding post-­ socialist nostalgia as a biographical phenomenon. My thesis is that the first socialist generation can be perceived as such a mnemonic community. To the extent that its representatives turn to the very same grand narratives, the latter “become instruments for producing social … cohesion; subjects then unite as a generation, and they demarcate themselves from other groups” (Borneman, 1992:  46). The jointly-inhabited and jointly-­ experienced past binds contemporaries in a generation, guaranteeing, by way of shared memory, a feeling of culturally-conditioned belonging (in

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contrast to the local, familial, or, for example, economically-­ conditioned one). A generation can be identified on the basis of shared experience and common sites of memory. The grounds for such an understanding are provided by Karl Mannheim’s (1952) now-classic theory, built upon the thesis about the link between biographical and historical time, namely the defining role of one’s younger years in forming their worldview. The ways in which people think and act are conditional upon the experience amassed during their youth, and are influenced by the cultural settings and historical events of those years. Mannheim looks into the social location of the generation (Generationslagerung) in the historical process as an analogue of that of class structure: it sets up the objectively feasible parameters of experience, but is not sociologically relevant in and of itself. Shared social location is passive and unconscious, in contrast with the generation as actuality (Generationszusammenhang). The latter is formed when a generation is exposed to important historical events and takes an active part in them, achieving a relatively high level of collective mobilization. Here, the role of the shared horizon of interpretation is evident: not only does the shared experience actualize the generation, but so too does contemplating upon this experience. People from the same generation go through the same stages and events in their life courses, imparting them along the way with approximately identical meanings. For Mannheim, a generation is defined not so much by the objective conditions of its maturation (war, a shift in the political regime), as by its responses to them. Because different groups from the same generation react differently to the same events, he separates out generational units (Generationseinheiten) in order to demonstrate the boundaries of solidarity based on shared experience, and how it is formed. Thus, this notion enables the linkage between objective conditions and their subjective interpretations, between personal experience and social context, biography and history. In dialogue with Mannheim’s classic work, contemporary researchers turn their attention to the formulation of generational consciousness and identity, which is articulated by way of contradistinction with the previous and/or the subsequent generation (Eyerman & Turner, 1998; Edmunds & Turner, 2002; Erll, 2014). In other words, people from the same generation are equipped not just with shared experience, nor merely with a shared understanding of it, but also with an awareness of the commonality of this understanding within the generational bounds. In contrast with a cohort or an age group, a generation is only present if it has got a

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retrospectively concocted system of reference points, which differentiates this precise generation from the previous ones and the subsequent ones. Thus, the generation creates its own “semantic order” tying together knowledge and the social conditions within which it is generated and shared (Corsten, 1999: 260ff). But this semantic order is articulated only after-the-fact, i.e. retrospectively. That is why a generation can be seen as a community with its own collective memory, fixed in collective narratives and rituals, which articulates the control over a certain cultural capital. It might even be said that a generation is the collective biographical experience of historical change. Sociologist Bernhard Giesen places at the very core of a generation’s collective memory, triumph or trauma—an event of such scale and significance, that it nullifies the value of the previous generation’s experience. This event establishes a semantic horizon inaccessible to others: “The others cannot understand that they even should not be able to understand.” (Giesen, 2004:  33; see also Eyerman & Turner, 1998). A generation accustomed to thinking of itself as heroic is seen by their descendants as traitorous; those who considered themselves revolutionaries turn out to be extremists or terrorists in the eyes of subsequent generations. The new horizons of experience and meaning, and the new interpretations of the collective identities which are put forth, become grounds for the marginalization of the older generations: “They are not only unable to tell their stories to the younger ones, but… are denied a chance to present their own memories in public, are removed from the core group that embodies the nation at its best. Their own generational memories do not fit into the public construction of national identity anymore.” (Giesen, 2004: 37). Thus, a given generation withdraws from society’s center to its periphery. This model is directly applicable to the post-socialist situation, where the “triumph” of the post-war generation turns out to be a historical trauma. Similar instances of “non-contemporaneity” (Giesen) are particularly clearly visible during periods of accelerated, radical societal changes, when the generations become acutely distinguishable. Such are the two World Wars, 1968 (in Western Europe) and—particularly for Central and Eastern Europe—1989. These historical events serve as pillars for generational identities. More to the point—as Pierre Nora argues, horizontal ties within generational boundaries are the ideal image of an “egalitarian democracy” on account of which a generation’s identification with its classificational potential takes priority over all forms of “vertical” or other traditional social identification (Nora, 1992: 940–943).

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On the other hand, totalitarian regimes are particularly effective at shaping generations, because they accomplish this intentionally, and to an extent, in an “artificial” way (Cavalli, 2004: 161), through indoctrination and mandatory membership in mass youth organizations. These regimes cannot rely on the continuity of political culture. On the contrary—their elites take it upon themselves to create a new political culture (or at least to dismantle the old one), a “new man” and so forth. This is why they accentuate not the continuity, but the differences and even the conflicts between the ‘old’ and the ‘young’. The generation to which our interlocutors belong is precisely of this type. With the better part of them having been born in the second half of 1920s and in 1930s, they found themselves at the beginning of their life course towards the end of World War II. The drastic societal transformations marked this beginning with a radical change to the very norms governing interpersonal and institutional relations: serious shockwaves, violence, the upending of social statuses and traditional power dynamics, independence from family and local community, which allowed a certain degree of autonomy, and inconceivable before opportunities for social mobility. This first socialist generation was formed as such to a large extent because of the regime’s focus on the youth. Because of a lack of a sufficiently broad class base, the communist regime carried out mobilization on a generational basis. It “seduced” (Znepolski) the youth, conveying new meaning to the traditional conflict between generations: not just between children and parents, but between ‘young’ and ‘old’ in the context of political and social programs. With the mighty ideological and institutional support of the regime, the potential outcomes of this conflict were, to a large extent, predestined in favor of the ‘young’. Age hierarchies were turned on their head: the prestige and actual power within the family, which the elders traditionally enjoyed, was about to be surrendered. The significance of generational distinctions grew, which ended up being conducive to the formation of political generations. Generational consciousness and confidence is documented in biographical narratives as well. In retrospections about their lives, the interviewees have a tendency to underscore first and foremost the continuity between generations, and to declare their gratitude towards their parents. There aren’t all too many thematizations of intergenerational conflict, but when they do show up, they are telling, because they illustrate the regime’s interference in intergenerational relations in the household and familial

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setting. One of the few such topics is the ideological contraposition between the youths of the day (the interviewees) and their parents: Maybe from the position of being a priest’s daughter, from the position of my own ideology—I didn’t understand it, but I lived with the new ideology. I abandoned the ideas of my parents, and fought with them. You want to be able to prove your rights and your thoughts, your understanding. How could they with these icons! I took down the icons from the walls! My father didn’t say a thing, I hanged up Stalin and I hanged up Georgi Dimitrov. Good thing I didn’t throw away the icons! Perhaps my father understood, because he wasn’t a dull man. I lived with everything new. And it was so interesting to me, so interesting. (oral archive, Department for History and Theory of Culture) Nikola Petkov was a member of the opposition—I remember the elections for the People’s Assembly. Nikola Petkov arrives, his white ballots everywhere, and we, the youth, we walk around, collect them, we campaign to our parents, huge campaigning, huge thing. Things, it seems, had started advancing, and we, the naive ones, I’ll never forgive myself, when the two of us were persuading his father, who went through Belene, what a great thing socialism was, and how without a doubt by 1970 we would have built socialism and it would now be communism. And we believed that nonsense, and were rabidly persuading his father how grand that would be.

The other frequent thematization of intergenerational conflict is connected to the collectivization of agricultural land. The day’s youths often exerted pressure on their hesitant parents, and sometimes took matters into their own hands: And immediately—I didn’t stay in the town at all…. we organized, we built up the TKZSs! In the year 1950! Cooperating… There were a lot of difficulties. We, the youth, talked our parents into it, and that was that. I was an active lad. When they made the co-ops, all the people in the village became cooperators—TKZSs, at the time. It’s natural that my father wouldn’t go into these things with gusto, because he lived through… lived through a lot of hardship. It wasn’t compulsory… To be more accurate, I compelled him, because we were falling behind everyone else…. I have always been, it might sound immodest, but… at the center of that youth life, as far as there was any…. And (laughs) young-young, but the ultimatum, that I wouldn’t go back to school if we didn’t get in there. We became cooperators.

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I was in the army in ‘49, in ‘50 I came back on leave, and I took the cows, the oxen, the plows, the plough, whatever we were using, instruments, everything you need, and I put them in the cart and went to the co-op with my father, the TKZS, by then it’d been renamed TKZS. I go there, I leave the oxen there, the cart, everything there, and he goes and signs my name on everything, all the fields, because I’ll be the one working. He says: “I’m not going to work”—“Come, they say, your son can kick you out of the home, you won’t have a place to eat…”—“Gives or not, he’ll be working the agriculture, I won’t be doing it”. And he signed everything over to my name.

The last excerpt is illuminating as to how collectivization—the de facto disposession of agricultural land and inventory from families—violated the traditional models of inheritance, care for elderly parents, and the age division of labor in rural regions, by radically undermining the power of the elders. In this instance, the father appears acquiescent and prepared to withdraw. Other stories, however, attest to fierce conflicts between a family’s generations, and an intense resistance on the part of the elders against the new social practices of the youth, encouraged (or required) by the regime. A participant in a youth brigade in 1949 recalls a 63-year-old member of his detachment, comprised of youths from his village: fearing for his daughter’s reputation, the father abandoned his work and his family for three months, to join the brigade in her place: He—we wanted his daughter to come. He [said] no! I’ll go in her place. [Interviewee: And why did he not want his daughter to go serve in the brigade?] Wellll, he’s an older man, he says, “This young girl is now going to go there… I’ll go instead.”

Even a superficial glimpse at the biographical trajectories of the first socialist generation demonstrates a tendency towards upward social mobility: as a rule, the interviewees have attained a higher educational level than their parents, many of them hold careers or qualifications that were inaccessible or altogether unthinkable for their parents, the better part of whom were farmers. The rural-urban migration denotes, in many instances, not just spacial, but also social mobility. This unique social experience

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proved impossible for the subsequent generation.19 For them, the reality was that of actual socialism as a given, to which they pragmatically adapted. The two socialist generations can be distinguished from one-another in a different aspect as well: while the first one—people whose maturation coincided with the post-war period—identified with socialist reformations as a participant, the second socialist generation did not discern such prospects in its path, and developed different values. When people saw that the future could hardly be better than the present, they walled themselves off in their private lives, they lost interest in societal goals, and trust in public institutions. Thus, if we invoke Edmunds and Turner’s classification (Edmunds & Turner, 2002: 16–18), the first socialist generation will turn out to be the active one, the bearer of innovation and change, and the second—the passive one, which runs on extant social and cultural capital. The post-communist transition has contributed further to the self-­ awareness of the first socialist generation as a “generation for itself” (Mannheim), that is, for the development of generational consciousness. This now occurs through the retrospective deliberation of shared experience, and the creation of a generational mnemonic narrative. The construction of a collective memory and the self-affirmation of a generation are, in Pierre Nora’s words, “two facets of the very same phenomenon” (Nora, 1992: 932). By exiting history, the first socialist generation ‘enters’ memory. It is this reflection, the consideration of the historical depth of experience, with its interruptions and its continuities, which forms the foundation of generational consciousness. This process is not, however, spontaneous and automatic. A generation develops awareness “for itself” in response to external pressure. Perceiving oneself as a part of the ‘we’, as ‘one of us’ becomes a much more acute sentiment when they find themselves in a confrontation with others, and when they recognize the intergenerational (or more broadly, cross-group) dissonances. In this instance, the external pressure takes the form of casting doubt upon the generation’s mainstays. The lasting loyalty to socialism by some of its larger groups (“units” per Mannheim) can be explained from the perspective of Mannheim’s theory about the formative years: convictions and sentiments 19  The authors of a large-scale study in an industrial center in the GDR have arrived at a similar conclusion (Niethammer et al., 1991). They explain the expedited social mobility of the first generation with mass emigration, as a result of which an acute demand for low-, and mid-tier industrial managers arose. This was the chief prerequisite for many workers to be elevated to managerial positions during the first post-war years—something which ended up being a lot more challenging for the generation(s) to follow.

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formed during adolescence and youth are rarely subject to drastic modifications later in life. This hypothesis can also be phrased in a different manner, from the viewpoint of memory: a generation creates its own memory sites, to which it anchors its collective memory and identity. From this point of view, alluding to socialism is an allusion to a shared cultural text, and nostalgia is an expression of the incomprehension of (or disagreement with) contemporary ‘redactions’ and rewrites of this text. It “mediates the selection, distillation, refinement and integration of those scenes, events, personas, attitudes and practices from the past that make an identifiable generation of what would otherwise have remained a featureless demographic cohort” (Davis, 1979: 111, emphasis in the original). Thus, by imparting meaning and aim to the facts at hand, nostalgia creates the sense of history; it is a memory, which shapes a generation as a community. Stronger still is Nora’s thesis: under the conditions of today’s “democratic atomization” of society, the generation is “the only way to not be alone” (Nora, 1992: 944). In this particular case, the interviewees “are not alone” insofar as the legitimacy of their stories is assured within the boundaries of a mnemonic community. On the one hand, this is accomplished by way of claiming a position—they identify with their generational community and speak on its behalf (at times, those communities can have a broader reach: pensioners, ordinary folks, “the people”). Thus, their position acquires weight and representativeness, ascending beyond the sphere of private opinions. Personal memories are often authenticated with those of others, and through this ‘knitting’ of biographical fragments into shared narratives, they are revised so as “to fit the collectively remembered past” (Lowenthal, 1985: 196). The hypothesis about nostalgia as a component of the collective memory and the identity of the first socialist generation comes into conflict with the reality that not all of its “units” are comprised of nostalgics. Although less frequently observed, non-nostalgic predilections are not the exception. But even when the relationship to this past is uniquely negative or more nuanced and ambivalent, memory sites do to a large extent overlap with the sites of nostalgia outlined above. What could I be missing? Should I miss queuing? Or should I miss that everything was obtained under the counter? What should I be missing? We would beg for a kilogram of cheese, while the chieftains got it delivered to their homes by the pallet. Or the oranges—they would have them brought

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to their homes, while for our children there were only some at New Year’s, and in the alternative way too. Is that what I should be missing? Back then it was a heaven for morons and deadbeats! Heaven, because work or no work, you got your salary. When we were still kids, this damned famine occurred right, and when the regime change took place, we used to say: “Under Tzar Boris it was nice, we ate meat with rice, then Dimitroff arrived with a thud, and now we’ll die for a spud.” …out of all of communism’s shortcomings, the fact that they didn’t expect us to show initiative … they decided instead of us what we would be doing. That killed, on the one hand, private and personal initiatives, and to a certain degree demoralized people, because they expected everything to be handed to them, and they keep expecting for someone to solve all their problems… That was our life—we realized that socialism was no good, but we lived with the feeling of doom, that it would never be ousted. And we had to adapt to that.

In as far as memory tugs at the past, in order to employ it in service of the present, the nostalgia of the first socialist generation can also be explained as a newly invented form of adaptation (Burawoy & Verdery, 1999: 4) through the symbolic mastering of change, and hence—as a way of claiming ownership over the past. In this sense, categorical to the nostalgia in the interviewees’ life stories is the individual experience and reappropriation of the past, this time under the weight of new, different values. Their more-or-less prosperous past is now stigmatized as altogether erroneous. Discussed and criticized, analyzed and rewritten, denounced and overcome, their past ceases to be theirs. It spirals out of control, they lose the power to contain it. In this situation, asserting the right to nostalgia is a way of validating one’s own past, and defense of one besieged identity. Because nostalgia, as Lowenthal notes, can “shore up self-esteem, reminding us that however sad our present lot we were once happy and worthwhile” (Lowenthal, 1985: 8). The generational sense of nostalgia does not just conserve, however, but also creates, to the extent that the past is not just waiting to be discovered. Remembering, as clarified above, includes filtration, selection, rearrangement, construction and reconstruction from the collective experience, and this means the opportunity for a narrative fabrication of a world, alternative to the current one, and selective with respect to the former one. In this sense, nostalgia is not the passive acceptance and reproduction of a

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given narrative about the past, but an active engaging with it: a narrative based on the personally experienced and recollected past, and also one which has an affirmative emotional value, and wrangles with attempts to expropriate the interpretation of one’s own life. Seen from this perspective, the socialist past does have something to offer to almost everyone: for some, it is relative prosperity, for others—equality, for others still, security. Thus nostalgia in biographical narratives is not merely an escape into the past, but also a manner of coping with the past from the perspective of the present, a form of critique and the recognition of alternatives. It does not boil down to trivial notions or metonymical shorthands like “stores empty, fridges full” or “we didn’t lock our homes”. The inclusion of the past into a narrative, its renegotiation, allows room for a positive, if not transformative role for it in the present: “Nostalgia as retreat from the present and nostalgia as retrieval for the future are not mutually exclusive… Nostalgia is a term that enables the relationship between past and present to be conceived of as fragile and corruptible, inherently dependent on how the resources of the past are made available, how those traces of what has been are mediated and circulated, and how they are employed and deployed in the development of a relationship between past and present.” (Pickering & Keightley, 2006: 937–938). Nostalgia is not a static, once-and-for-all granted system of notions; it constitutes the relationship to the past as falsifiable, contingent on the ways in which the traces of this past are discovered, discussed, and deliberated. Consequently, it can be perceived as a mnemonic bridge, providing a semantic continuity between present and past in the post-optimistic phase of post-­communism, rather than just as a yearning for the past, and even less-so as a desire for its restitution.

On the Abnormality of Post-communist Nostalgia By this point it should have become clear that post-socialist nostalgia, in its existential dimensions, is connected more to the poetics of a former lifeworld, than to politics in its contemporary shape. Despite this, circumventing the question about its potential political implications would be “nostalgic” in Rosaldo’s sense of the word, that is, benevolently-­ irresponsible. At the very least, to the extent that it is a discourse, which creates and maintains social divisions between groups and individuals, post-socialist nostalgia cannot be completely isolated from politics.

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Nostalgia as a dangerous form of selective amnesia, which idealizes the past, is first noticed by detractors of the Ostalgie in Germany.20 This anxiety is exacerbated by public opinion research in CEE countries, which points to growing reservations to post-communist transformations,21 an increase in life dissatisfaction over the past few years, and waves of nostalgia for the Soviet Union in Russia22 and other former Soviet republics, as well as the invariably present, at times proportionally significant valuations of different aspects of pre-1989 life as “better than now”. Beyond mere statistics, in terms of content, sots-nostalgia as a de-ideologized relationship with the past signals a normalizing, if not aestheticizing disposition, calling to mind stylized images of the past, which insinuate that it “wasn’t all that bad”. As Boym forewarns, nostalgia “seems to be an emotional antidote to politics and thus remains the best political tool” (Boym, 2001: 58). This is why it often, and not without good reason, is perceived as a dangerous tendency of ignoring the truth about the nature of the regime, and the substitution of this truth with multifarious and relativizing “personal”/private truths, lovingly guarded and enunciated with affection. A similar sentimentalization of the past is equivalent to its normalization. Thus, nostalgia not only covers up complicity, but it also presents to subsequent generations a dolled-up picture of the past.23

20  Anthropologist Dominic Boyer (2010) has advanced a hypothesis for the fabrication of East-European nostalgia as western “postimperial symptom”, that is, characterizing Eastern Europe as “allochronic”, “past-fixated”. Thus, it ends up as the ‘other’ of the West, from which it propels itself in its orientation towards the future. Intriguing and provocative, this criticism of potential mnemonic orientalism would likely find a place in the deliberation on the regions of memory in Europe; here I am interested in the East-European context, and the local anxiety, provoked by the political potential of post-socialist nostalgia. 21  “End of communism cheered but now with more reservations”, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered-but-now-with-more-­ reservations/ last accessed 27 January 2022. For Bulgaria, see the nationally-representative study The Transition: myths and memories, 25 years later (2014). https://alpharesearch.bg/ userfiles/file/Prehod_press_release__091114.pdf, last accessed 27 January 2022. 22  The Levada center for analysis goes as far as to calculate a USSR nostalgia index. Expectedly, it is highest among the oldest demographic. The interesting thing is that while the share of respondents who express regret for the “economic system” is highest, but wavers through the years and ultimately falls, the fraction of those who mourn the loss of the “sense of being at home” grows. See: https://www.levada.ru/en/2017/12/25/nostalgia-for-the-­ ussr/, last accessed 27 January 2022. 23  See Roberts (2002: 773–784) for debates of this nature in Czechia. For similar debates in Bulgaria, see Gruev and Mishkova (2013).

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These convictions place nostalgic treatment of the past in a direct conflict with historical objectivity, applying criteria such as trustworthiness, authenticity, etc. What is more, some analysts discern a connection between the waves of nostalgia in ex-socialist societies and the electoral support for the communist and the anti-systemic successor parties, which is why they are prone to affix particular significance to the political connotations of post-socialist nostalgia. Although they conclude that it does not pose an imminent threat to democracy, political scientists Joachim Ekman and Jonas Linde (2005: 371–372) find it “disturbing” and warn that it must not be understated as a potential threat and a substantial challenge to the legitimacy of democracy in post-communist Europe. In the same spirit and not all too long ago—in its Resolution of 19 September 2019—the European Parliament expressed concern with the presence of symbols of totalitarian regimes in public spaces, and their usage for commercial objectives, i.e. in the context of the ‘neostalgia’ described above.24 It must not be forgotten, however, that in nostalgically-idealized images of the past, it is not perceived as a regime, nor as an ideology, but as a lifeworld. As demonstrated above, post-socialist nostalgia is more of a longing for the comfort of domesticated socialism, seen as everyday life, or mass culture (cf. Volcic, 2007: 75), and not as a political system. This is how, for example, nostalgia for the GDR, as a rule of thumb, is easily coupled with positive regards for both the socialist idea and democracy (Neller, 2006: 300). On the other hand, even while supporting free market, the citizens of former socialist states view, with pleasure, films and television series, and listen to hits from the 1970s and 1980s, and not (just) dissident works at that, but also mainstream products of a centralized national cultural industry. The fact that popular films from socialist mass culture are enjoyed even today proves that their contingent ideological messages can easily be neglected, or that these are altogether absent (Roberts, 2002:  786). This is why the hypothesis that post-communist nostalgia is not directly tied to particular political convictions, (cf. Neller, 2006: 49) but more likely to a shared culture from youth and childhood, looks so compelling. It is a symbolic return to that biographical period, the aspiration to rediscover life as it was in those days: innocent, tranquil, secure, intelligible. The problem with this type of nostalgia emerges only when the adult narrator does not manage to distance themself from their 24  http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0021_EN.pdf, accessed 27 January 2022.

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childhood memory, when this childhood memory impedes other memories and conditions, which impart an entirely different significance to the past. Hence, too, the potential threat of twisting “private nostalgia” into a political tool (Boym, 2001: 64). Political applications of nostalgia are therefore possible when this domesticated, idyllic, selectively-positive image of the past, which has transcended beyond time and space, is transformed into a vindication of political programs, and is incorporated into political slogans. In politics, as in marketing, nostalgic sentiment is disassociated from the personally-­ experienced past. Severing the ties between experience and emotion increases the likelihood of manipulations and falsifications. Nostalgic images and identities are reified, and take on a life of their own. Thus, in the absence of politically astute projects, nostalgia becomes primed for easy deployment. Deflecting politics through the prism of the everyday does not require a great deal of ingenuity. As is to be expected, political subjects take advantage of their opportunity to utilize nostalgic—as well as all other—inclinations in their favor. This can be illustrated by the reexaminations of Todor Zhivkov’s image in Bulgaria: from stigmatizing “Zhivkovism” to Zhivkov’s re-habilitation, and the commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of his birth—all of this in the context of the “pulverization” of memory, given the lack of a universally-accepted reference point for appraising the former regime (Gruev, 2013). But one can hardly speak of a “sots-nostalgic electorate”.25 The trepidations provoked by the popularity of nostalgia are the result of its literal interpretation as a desire to return to the past. But, by extrapolating its usage as a narrative strategy in life stories, it can be seen in a more positive light, as a bridge between present and past, as a form of cultural survival at the everyday level. This makes it neither dysfunctional, nor reactionary, on the contrary—it enables a dialogue, albeit scarred by sorrow, between past and present. From this perspective, the critical (and political, in the broadest sense) potential of nostalgia is that it puts an end to the rejection of the past as a threat to the present. Peering into the past can offer clues as to how what is presently lacking can become possible in the future. Observed from this angle, nostalgia comes closer to action 25  Even though the correlation between age and electoral support for certain political parties has been well-established and, on the other hand, it is obvious that nostalgics are predominantly elderly people, it would be difficult to prove a causal relationship between nostalgia and electoral behavior.

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than to a passive longing. As I attempted to demonstrate above, it is the adoption of a position with respect to the present, a self-positioning in the contemporary world. Despite its critical potential, however, existential nostalgia lingers at an infra-political level, unable to make the jump to operative criticism. According to Creed, the reason behind this is that the very repackaging of criticism as nostalgia trivializes it, and its commodification drags it into the workings of the market. Thus, “the very concept delegitimizes the discontent that inspires it” (Creed, 2010: 43; see also Roberts, 2002: 790). From this point of view, nostalgia is fatigued utopia, enclosing criticism within a vicious circle: for as long as they are disgruntled, people have lost the impetus to participate; because they abstain from taking part, their voices will not be heard, and there is no chance of their situation improving. So, as far as we can talk about the real political impacts of existential nostalgia, they, it seems to me, ought to be foraged for not in a conceivable mobilizing potential of sorts, but quite the opposite—in the self-isolation from political and civil participation. In this sense, it is justified to see nostalgia as an onerous legacy of the former regime, the result of a distrust in institutions, politics, and the public sphere as a whole that it has engendered. (cf. Nadkarni, 2010). Despite all this, the very existence of nostalgia in post-communist countries is, in a certain sense, a good sign. Its presence can be thought of as an indicator for the depth of society’s democratization. Communist ideology treats nostalgia with suspicion and contempt, and censors it as counter-revolutionary, even as sabotage. With its conviction in the inevitability of progress and its own identification with it, this ideology delivers an anti-nostalgic message: the regime’s desire to create a new world inadvertently mandates the destruction of the old one. Communism’s progressivist stance as a modernizing project does not produce methods for coping with the feeling of loss, nor for integrating the past into the present. The central temporal category of the communist project was the future. The past was appraised exclusively negatively, and the challenge was to overcome it. The joyous destructiveness of the endeavor to build anew, and on a clean slate, is not merely an expression of radical ideology. It is an assertion of power over the past. In the post-communist situation, however, where an intriguing and alarming mixture of freedom and doubt creates a particular discomfort, nostalgia can be not just a simplifying, but also a democratic relationship with the past, to the extent that it presents a form of its renegotiation ‘from below’ and uncovers opportunities for alternative takes. With its heteroglossia, it can contribute to the formation

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of an everyday historical consciousness, different from the dominant renderings of a national past. It can, however, be exploited in such a way that in facilitating the adaptation to quick societal changes, it hinders the development of critical historical consciousness, when, for example, the mediatized notions of the past stray further from historical realities. Precisely here is where the potential abnormality of nostalgia lies. To clarify it, I turn to Avishai Margalit’s (2002, 2011) critique mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Collective nostalgia can be vicarious: this takes place when we enter into the personal memory (and therefore primary nostalgia) of different times and events, which we ourselves have not experienced, or the cultural memory (literature, cinema, monuments, celebrations) of those times and events (Margalit, 2011: 273). Margalit acknowledges nostalgia as a component of collective memory, but perceives it as a sentimentally stylized and idealized image of the past. Although it approaches the past with a great deal of tenderness, in reality it twists it in a morally-disturbing way, insofar as it positions its object in a time of purity and innocence, eliminating the filth of the past (Margalit, 2011:  273–274, cf. Rosaldo, 1989). Precisely here is where the danger lurks: whenever this pristine past (pastoral communities, brigadiers’ enthusiasm or the nation’s history) is called into question by anyone, it must be defended, even at the cost of brutality towards the “vilifier”. Margalit bases his contemplations on his analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the nostalgias of both communities, which justify (if not stoke) it. His arguments with regard to this situation seem convincing. What he fails to take into account are the scale and the character of the communities of memory and nostalgia, and how they determine the extent to which the past is distorted, and the possible consequences of this action. National communities (like the ones envisioned by him) are “imagined,” though not arbitrarily, but through a shared memory and mythology. They are “thick” communities, based on shared memory and on the common human need for this memory to be preserved. Thus, nationalism offers “thick relations” substituting the religious community in a secular world. (Margalit, 2011: 279). Generations, however, form a different type of mnemonic community. In the first place, they are united by primary nostalgia, stemming from their personal experience. The opportunities to “delegate” are much more limited, than with a national mnemonic community, which relies on the boundless repertoire of cultural memory. Second, even when they are exclusionary, these communities are

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constrained and dependant on trans-communal (in the given case, trans-­ generational) relations for the verification and recognition of their shared memory. It must transcend the borders of a mnemonic community in order to be endorsed and preserved. This presupposes a great deal of tolerance, which in turn egresses into a post-nostalgic, deeper and more complex treatment of the past, which becomes possible only after, and to a degree maybe on the basis of, nostalgia. This type of treatment, however, to return to Margalit’s thesis, is hard to cultivate within the boundaries of a thick community, like the national one tends to be, and within the context of restorative nostalgia, as Svetlana Boym describes it: the nationalism, which does not recognize itself (and is usually not identified) as nostalgia. Fixating on the glorious past or the “golden age” of a nation sharpens the feeling of loss, making every version of the present appear miserable and pathetic, unworthy of effort of any kind. Further still, this fixation in one’s own thick community reduces history to a simple, but definitive plotline: the struggle between the good (us) and the bad (them), and thus justifies the exclusion of every cultural Other. It overlooks the condition that any restoration is in fact interpretation, and not an ahistorical return to some incipient roots, or authentic purity. Not the primary post-socialist nostalgia, but the vicarious restorative “nostalgia” of nationalism is actually a cause for alarm. It is likewise a burdensome legacy from the former regime, in as far as it was nurtured by it during the latter decades of its existence, when it turned to nationalism.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Is There Hope for Memory?

For the past few years, the “Sots” has seemingly turned more and more into a cultural shorthand, a political trope, whose figurative use organizes semantically certain views of the past and certain positions in the present. In his analysis of the naturalizing effect of tropes, Hayden White (1978) suggests that their authority stems from their claim to veracity, even though in reality they are historically-situated social products. The naturalising effect is achieved via a shift from the literal meaning to another meaning, which is normatively institutionalized with the passage of time. White studies the way in which tropes capture the meaning and keep it in suspense. This is a ‘moral’ tension, in as far as the reader or the listener anticipates the literal meaning, and acquires instead the metaphorical, the indexed, and the inverted one. In a similar manner, ‘the Sots’ is on its way to becoming a trope, behind which a story is hidden, and perhaps not just one. These stories can vary enormously: the glorious tale of socialist construction, the mortifying story of the repressions; of the disillusionment with the grandiose project, or of a miniscule personal project, realized within it. Condensing these types of stories into a tropified meaning of ‘the Sots’ annihilates potential conflicts across viewpoints on the communist regime through the implicit allowance that all of this ‘is known’. Thus, as Lilia Topouzova has powerfully argued, a “culture of silence” is being established, which “rests on a present absence—that which is known in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2_7

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some general sense and could be spoken about but is not” (Topouzova, 2021: 696). The pluralistic, contested moral, political and historical connotations of ‘the Sots’ are submerged. In stories and discussions about it, ‘the Sots’ is on its way to transforming into a black hole, swallowing up all meaning and snuffing out dialogue. This book was motivated by the desire to unmask the trope, in order for the conversation to go on. The key inquiry was how communism constitutes itself as cultural/ public and vernacular/biographical memory. The question of memory and its social dimensions was framed as a question of interpretative optics, through which social actors see the past. I attempted to prove that there is no such thing as authentic, ‘from the source’ memory of it; that the institutional and the vernacular, the public and the personal seep into one-­ another; that social actors ceaselessly make choices between different narratives and their versions; that experiences and subjectivities ascribe dramatically different points of view towards the very same historical reality. This is why a critical contemplation of ‘the Sots’ will have to start from the awareness of its contested mnemonic constructedness. From this perspective, memory is a set of cultural practices, which offer opportunities for understanding the past. They are dynamic, and oftentimes inconsistent, in much the same way that mnemonic communities themselves tend to be dynamic. The social-constructivist perspective, which I have embraced, assumes that collective narratives about the past are forged in a politically-loaded discursive space, where some memories are ‘tellable’ while others are not, and that these designations change with the passage of time and with respect to circumstances. In addition, most narratives are contested, and hence polemically tense. Therefore, memory is not a receptacle for truth (as in essentialist approaches), nor a mirror for interests (according to instrumentalist views), but a process of meaning-making. This necessitates turning to concepts, which allow for memory to be understood in its plurality and processuality: memory sites, cultures of memory, memory politics. It also allows to raise the question of agency: who are the social actors in these processes, and what are their stakes? The other starting hypothesis was that the links between biographical memory and the different levels of collective memory become possible though narratives: at a communicative level (sharing, renegotiating and maintaining the shared version within familial, local, generational and other communities); at a symbolic level (through memory sites and other forms of cultural memory); at the level of politics (acknowledging and upholding identities and interests, which maintain different cultures of memory). This becomes possible, because biographical experience is

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deliberated and shared through narrative genres and forms created within a particular cultural context. Memory does not materialize organically after an event, but is constructed—often intentionally and with certain interests in mind, sometimes by virtue of control over historiography. Aside from that, it is not handed down through the generations untouched, but rather it is the multitude of memories of individuals and groups that interact in different ways—they interpret, rearrange and enter in dialogue with, rather than merely reproduce—the ‘grand narratives’. The biographical narrative not only testifies to what happened, but also positions the narrator within one memory culture or another. The question about the construction of the memory of communism requires this process to be taken on at a broader scale, namely as the formation of so-called official memory, to the extent that the ‘grand narrative’ of the present seems to be the coping with the past. Interest towards different forms of this coping is prescribed by the hypothesis that at least some of them have some sort of an impact upon public, cultural, vernacular and even personal memory. This is why I chose to inspect the processes of forming and maintaining the memory of communism, shifting between different scales. First and foremost, the shared European context makes transnational memory of communism possible, and traces out its shared sites. Post-communist member-states have succeeded in provoking a debate, in building coalitions within European institutions, and in achieving some success in gradually shifting from the anti-fascist narrative, created after World War II as the basis for a pan-European consensus, towards a broader anti-totalitarian narrative of European history during the twentieth century. By framing their claims in the universal terms of human rights, they have succeeded, to some extent, in de-particularizing their own historical experience, and imbuing it with a European dimension and humanitarian significance. These efforts, and their results, provide a basis for subsequent conclusions. First, the politics of memory are not dependent only on the moral imperative for truth and justice, because they do not materialize in a political vacuum. On the contrary—at the national, as well as the European level, they are tightly interwoven with ongoing processes, and mediated by current showdowns on the political stage. Second, the processes in the countries undergoing a transition are influenced by the European context, and make use of the templates conceived in Europe to cope with the Nazi past. These templates are the main normative milepost. This condition is not without significance for the aggravation at certain moments of ‘the competition of victims’ and the perception of the memory of communism as an attempt to trivialize the Holocaust.

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Ultimately, as long as memory from the 1990s onward takes an eminent spot in European identity politics, for Eastern-European citizens and member-states of a united Europe, the mnemo-politics dealing with the communist past turn out to be, in Charles Taylor’s words, politics of recognition. As all post-communist states tackle analogous tasks for coping with the past in the same situation—their accession to the European Union—the comparative approach turns out to be particularly appropriate. Comparisons of the transitional-justice measures in other CEE countries demonstrate, that although Bulgaria has been working through these tasks quite hesitantly, it has not fallen behind the shared trends. For example, the problems with lustration have been tantamount to those in the majority of CEE states, with the exception of Germany and Czechia, while the country’s restitutional legislature (despite the problems that arise when applying it) is more consistent than in some other countries. The policy of avoidance on the part of Bulgaria’s institutions is more clearly visible in the sphere of memory cultures: in contrast with other post-communist countries, the Bulgarian state has far too quickly and readily abandoned the politics of memory, leaving them entirely in the hands of civil society activists and organizations, often in cooperation with local authorities. A demonstrative example is this period’s inclusion into the high-school history syllabus: it was adequately accomplished only in 2018, following pressure from civil organizations and the expert community. Further still, official memory is operationalized at a national scale through the elements of transitional justice in the post-communist context: condemnation of the regime, truth seeking (access to the archives of the communist secret services), acknowledging the victims (rehabilitation and restitution laws, commemorative practices and institutions of memory), retribution for the perpetrators (punitive prosecution). Most of these challenges are resolved by the institutions of the state, at a legislative level first, and after that—by the judiciary. This is why I examined, in the first place, the legislative instruments in place for the dispensation of justice to victims and perpetrators. In broad strokes, they follow tendencies common to all post-communist countries. First, attention is directed, above all else, at the victims, their rehabilitation and compensation, while the successes of in-court action against the perpetrators are more than modest. Second, the juridical toolbox has turned out to be better suited for resolving problems connected to restoring property, than those which require the restoration of the dignity of the affected parties. Subsequently, I outlined the second component of transitional justice, namely the broader

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“politics of truth”, i.e. the institutional provision of archival and research activities. The question of accessing state-security archives has been particularly salient, because of the regime’s prolonged existence, and the complete control over information access which it exerted. This is why it would not be an exaggeration to speak of an archival revolution. It can be asserted that it occurs only when the task of preserving and granting access to the archives of the secret services is separated from that of lustriation procedures. At the end, I sketched out the broadest context—that of cultures of memory, and specifically the memorialization and musealization, as well as representations of the past in public spaces: memoirs, media, films, urban topoi, memorials and the commemorative calendar. This is a field inhabited not just by institutions and professional researchers, but by a multitude of other social actors as well, with their often contradictory interests. In comparison to the first two elements of transitional justice, this is the stage for much more zealous and long-lasting symbolic battles for the past and its meanings, which are fought on many different terrains with all available tactical means. If I might be allowed to compare the legislative debates with conventional positional warfare, here it is often guerrilla. In contrast to the narrow juridical definition, transitional justice in the broader sense is the ‘softer’ side of the universal regime of truth, justice and reconciliation. Although they do not enjoy a global codification (as for example the Declaration of Human Rights, or the International Criminal Law), these moral norms are accepted as a global memory of sorts, which is constituted under the spotlight of publicity (media, debates, commemorations) and in cultural productions (literature, cinema, etc.). Thus, the creation, shaping and maintenance of memory about the recent past gradually wanders away from the sphere of politics and into the sphere of culture, turning into a type of cultural output, and in so doing, risks remaining in a relatively more restricted and elitist sphere. This is certainly not an anomaly, but rather the cultural (artistic, scientific) discourse, when it is not sustained by public and political debate, could remain outside the reach of broad swaths of the population. In and of itself, cultural production can hardly fill the void of a collective coming to terms with the past. The question remains how and to what extent the official memory, created through the varying forms of transitional justice influences cultures of memory in Bulgaria’s post-communist society. It is not all too difficult to trace this impact on the culture of memory built around the traumatic narrative. In the first place, the communist regime was condemned, and the breadth of its criminal practices was outlined. Even without real

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juridical consequences, this has been important in the wake of inherited propagandistic monoglossia. Aside from this legislation, international documents have also introduced terminology used to refer to communist regimes: “totalitarianism,” “Stalinism,” “totalitarian crimes” or “the crimes of communist regimes,” “the victims of communist crimes,” “the repressed,” “convicted on political grounds,” “anti-communist/antitotalitarian resistance” and so forth. Rehabilitational legislation has made clear who the regime’s victims were, and what the nature of the injustices committed against them was. This recognition is at the very foundation of the new narrative of the communist past, which was previously not possible in the public sphere. On the other hand, however, the legal discourse relies on categories, which convert the many ‘shades of gray’ into a contrasting black-and-white picture of guilt and innocence. To a significant extent, this dichotomy has been reproduced in commemorative practices and museum narratives. This engenders the risk of blunting sensitivity towards other, more subtle forms of totalitarian control, which have made the colonization of the lifeworld by the system more complex, contradictory and all-pervasive. The nostalgic narrative, and the culture of memory which has formed around it, indirectly reference official memory, by demonstrating the insufficiency of binary oppositions in a black-and-white setting: official–non-official, primary networks–secondary networks, state–society, public–private, repression–resistance. What ends up getting lost in them, is the significance of many of the advocated values of ‘the Sots’ for its citizens. Values like equality, security, stability, predictability, solidarity and community, around which, to some degree or other, nostalgic narratives are orchestrated, not only were accepted back in their time, but also remain undisputed to this day. Having been endorsed in principle, in reality they were distorted, falsified, twisted, and violated, but they remained in place as starting points. In the coordinate system set forth by them, socialism is not an ideology, a system or a state, but the everyday, ‘normal life’. Its moral communities are united around precisely these kinds of semantic displacement. Through the traumatic and nostalgic narratives, different mnemonic communities position themselves in relation to the past, and simultaneously express their attitudes towards the present. Seemingly, it is the traumatic narrative that more frequently offers a pathway to collective action (like the ‘politics of pity’ in Belene), while the nostalgic one proves that people are perhaps uninterested in collective action—whether because they prefer coping on their own, or because their social networks are

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fragmented. Thus, the newly-emerged social and semantic structures are layered on top of the old ones, without replacing them altogether. For example, the contraposition of various cultures of memory imparts new substance to the quite enervated commemorations from the end of the regime. Now, they have been rediscovered, reinvented and revitalized by way of challenging the other narrative, and reaffirming one’s own (Koleva, 2021). The dynamic of memory cultures has temporal dimensions as well. Communicative (shared) memory morphs considerably with generational change. With the passing of the generation of eyewitnesses, mnemonic communities increasingly become interpretive communities. The traumatic narrative, as the Belene case demonstrates, is ‘carried’ and reproduced ever more by witnesses to the testimonies, than witnesses to the events. The generational shift transforms the nostalgic narrative also, revealing opportunities for ironic distancing—predominantly, but not exclusively, in artistic practices. It may be presumed that secondary, or “ironized” (Hutcheon) nostalgia will acquire an ever-growing presence not just in popular culture, but in everyday life as well. When we further zoom-in on the analyzed cases, memory turns out to be a multi-dimensional relationship with the past, comprising emotional as well as moral and practical aspects, but contemplating itself primarily cognitively, as knowledge. And here is where the question of the ‘truth of memory’ stems from. Every narrative about the past legitimizes itself, based on the notion of the referentiality of truth, i.e. the extent to which the story corresponds to a past reality. As it became clear, however, these narratives are not replete with congruence. Insist though they may on their referentiality, they convince otherwise, namely through their intelligibility, plausibility, reliability, acceptability, and sharedness. Therefore, the truth of memory is no less rhetorical than it is referential. It leans on coherence (the internal logic of the narrative, which delivers the meaning) and consensus (the acceptance of a given narrative by a particular mnemonic community). This is why, as Louisa Passerini contends, every biographical memory is truthful; the question lies in establishing for whom, and in what sense. But this is, in reality, a query about the cultural production of knowledge about the recent past, and how it ties into biographical experience. I hope to have demonstrated how personal memory is molded around (claims to) knowing and witnessing. As Margalit points out, “I remember” to an individual is the same as “I know”. There may well be a dispute about who remembers/knows more, or better. These claims,

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however, hang on the assumption that a certain type of knowing is possible. Individual knowledges, which can mutually reinforce or contradict one-another, are situated in broader shared notions about good and evil, truth and deception, justice and injustice. This shared knowledge is closer to conviction than it is to factuality. And thus, every individual “I know” has got a spot somewhere inside of a shared “we believe”, upon which it leans, and whence it harvests its legitimacy. Therefore, while personal memory is, to a great extent, spontaneous, unintentional and therefore immaterial to any kind of an ethical propensity, shared memory is voluntary, and encompasses an ethical disposition. (Margalit, 2002: 5). Today’s memory, however, is not only shared, but also dramatically partitioned. The memory of wars, resistance and collaborationism is divided (Portelli, 2003: 206). Divided as well is the memory of communism. It is dispersed not just among individuals, groups and positions; the division actually cuts across individuals, positions and texts. The narratives cannot be easily rewritten or abandoned. A great deal has been invested in them already—worldviews, identities, authority, meaning. But the disagreements are not necessarily counterproductive; they have the advantage of offering up a multitude of viewpoints, thereby providing an opportunity for deeper understanding. Such a pluralist context is the best to enable memory work. Ann Rigney takes her thesis a step further, in stating that consensus is ultimately the road to amnesia and “it is ironically a lack of unanimity that keeps some memory sites alive” (Rigney, 2008: 346).1 Paradoxical though it may seem, the appeals to consensus around one version of the past also simultaneously clear the path to oblivion, because a narrative which has been accepted as a given, which has morphed into something ‘authentic’ and self-evident, ceases to generate new versions of itself, which could tie it into the commotions and anxieties of the present. Sacralising memory “is another way of making it sterile”, Tzvetan Todorov has warned (Todorov, 1996: 15). The appeals to “turn the page” and to “close the book” of the past are calls to disremembrance, for memory is maintained through repeating acts of recalling and actualizing the past. Memory is not merely preservation, and even less so the preserved ‘product’. The preserved is, in reality, forgotten, “culturally insignificant,” because it no longer excites, nor does it provoke or “produce responses” (Rigney, 2016: 68). 1  See also the theory and research on agonistic memory: Bull & Hansen, 2016; Berger & Kansteiner, 2021.

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There will likely always be border lines. Including those between communities with different memories and differing ethics. It is also probable, however, that these boundaries will not be rigid. By reasoning within the genre of utopian realism, which characterizes one possible reality (but only one of the possible ones!) the plurality and malleability of memory can be conceived of as a condition for a tolerance, which can restore the social fabric and make possible the co-existence in the present while assembling a future. To put it in other words, instead of reading through, and shutting closed once and for all the book of the past, we need to carry it around with us. And so, yes—there is hope. What else, if not hope?

References Berger, S., & Kansteiner, W. (Eds.). (2021). Agonistic memory and the legacy of 20th century wars in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. Bull, A. C., & Hansen, H. L. (2016). On agonistic memory. Memory Studies, 9(4), 390–404. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F1750698015615935 Koleva, D. (2021). The immortal regiment and its glocalisation: Reformatting victory day in Bulgaria. Memory Studies. Advance online publication, https:// doi.org/10.1177/2F17506980211037280 Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Harvard University Press. Portelli, A. (2003). The order has been carried out: History, memory, and meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome. Palgrave Macmillan. Rigney, A. (2008). The dynamics of remembrance: Texts between monumentality and morphing. In A. Erll & A. Nünning (Eds.), Cultural memory studies. An international and interdisciplinary handbook (pp. 345–353). Walter de Gruyter. Rigney, A. (2016). Cultural memory studies: Mediation, narrative, and the aesthetic. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 65–76). Routledge. Todorov, T. (1996). The abuses of memory. Common Knowledge, 5, 6–26. Topouzova, L. (2021). On silence and history. American Historical Review, 126(2), 685–699. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab191 White, H. (1978). Tropics of discourse. Essays in cultural criticism. The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Index1

A Albania Authority for Access to Information on Ex-Sigurimi Files, 100 Bunkart museum, 120 Institute for the Studies of Communist Crimes and Consequences, 98 Law on the Communist Genocide, 80 memory culture in, 46 Pavillion of Communist Terror in the National History Museum, 119 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 30, 143, 144, 144n6, 148 Archival revolution, 20, 87–91, 281 See also State security archives Arendt, Hannah, 10, 13, 21, 228 Assmann, Aleida, 7–9, 14, 30, 40, 42, 77, 202, 205

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12–14 Baltic state, 22, 41n14, 42n15, 42n16, 45, 47n17, 54, 82, 88n2, 92, 94 See also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania Belene archipelago, 165, 167, 190 Catholic, 155–157, 201, 202 island of, 117 (see also Persin island) local communities, 199 local memory, 154–167, 197, 204 memory activism, 154, 204, 206 Belene forced-labor camp bare life, 183–197 commemorations, 184, 199, 200, 202n47 deaths in, 151, 189–192, 196 documentaries, 150, 152 internees, attitudes to, 177–182 memoirs, 150, 151, 183, 192 public memory of, 150–154 Boltanski, Luc, 154, 197–199

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 D. Koleva, Memory Archipelago of the Communist Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04658-2

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288 

INDEX

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 88 Boym, Svetlana, 105, 214, 216, 217, 242, 265, 267, 270 Brockmeier, Jens, 14 C Carr, David, 11 Closa, Carlos, 31, 36, 54, 64, 72, 74, 77, 79n50 ComDos, 81, 82, 90, 99 Communicative memory, 7, 8, 17 Communism vs. Socialism (terminology), 20–22 Communities generational, 4, 19, 251, 262 of memory (see Mnemonic communities) of necessity, 242 Condemnation of the communist regime Bulgaria, 54, 56 Czechia, 55 Estonia, 54 Hungary, 54 Lithuania, 54, 55 Poland, 54 Romania, 54, 55 Slovakia, 55 Criminal prosecution Bulgaria, 74, 77 Germany, 77 Lithuania, 74 Poland, 73, 77 Romania, 72–74 and shaping of memory, 75 See also Penal Codes, post-1989 amendments Croatia, 45, 57 memory culture of, 45–46 Cultural intimacy, 231, 234, 243, 246

Cultural memory, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 84, 117, 202, 204, 206, 214, 269, 278 Culture of impunity, 83 of memory (see Memory culture) popular, 8, 22, 119, 121, 213, 220, 222–224, 248, 283 of silence, 277 Czechia declassification of state security archives, 89 Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, 97 law on the unlawful character of the communist regime, 55 lustration, 79 memory culture of, 45–47 nostalgia in popular culture, 222 Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of the Communist Police, 97 D Davis, Fred, 216, 251, 262 Duty to remember, 43, 53, 103, 123, 144, 145, 204 See also Memory, moral aspects of E EC, see European Commission ECHR, see European Court of Human Rights EP, see European Parliament Estonia condemnation of the regime, 54 declassification of state security archives, 89 Institute of Historical Memory, 96

 INDEX 

International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, 93 law for persons repressed by occupational (Nazi and Soviet) forces, 58 law on the reform of property, 64 lustration, 79 memorials to the victims of communism, 107 Museum of Occupations, 119 State Commission on Examination of the Policies of Repression, 93 See also Baltic state EU, see European Union European Commission (EC), 31, 36–38, 55 European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), 43, 74, 74n44, 75n45 European Network for Remembrance and Solidarity, 38 European Network of official Authorities in Charge of the Secret Police files, 99 European Parliament (EP), 32–34, 33n4, 36, 37, 266 Declaration on the proclamation of 23 August as European Day of Remembrance for victims of Stalinism and Nazism (2008), 34 Resolution on “European Conscience and Totalitarianism” (2009), 33 Resolution on “The future of Europe sixty years after the Second World War” (2005), 32 European Union (EU), 3, 9, 32, 38, 39, 42, 42n15, 53–55, 73, 82, 90, 93, 130, 280

289

F Freud, Sigmund, 137–139, 141 G GDR, 75n45, 82, 102, 219n5, 221, 221n7, 252, 261n19, 266 Generation first socialist, 18, 140, 218, 223, 244, 246, 247, 253, 255, 258, 260–263 nostalgic, 255–264 theories of, 256–257 Genocide, 36, 37, 56, 72, 73, 74n45, 93 broad definitions of, 72 Germany Commission for the “Study of the history and consequences of the communist dictatorship in Eastern Germany”, 92 court trials, 77 DDR Museum (Berlin), 121–123 Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship, 92 law on Stasi archives, 89 law on the settlement of unresolved property issues (GDR), 64 lustration, 53, 79 model for coping with the past, 9, 53, 89, 96, 102 Ostalgie, 221, 221n7, 223n9, 265 Stasi Records Archive (BStU), 96 Giesen, Bernhard, 30, 198, 199, 257 Grosescu, Raluca, 57n10, 73 H Halbwachs, Maurice, 5, 7, 12, 229 Herzfeld, Michael, 231, 246

290 

INDEX

Historians’ commissions Estonia, 93 Germany, 92 Latvia, 94 Lithuania, 94 Romania, 92, 93 Holocaust, 9, 11n8, 30, 31, 31n1, 33, 36n10, 38–40, 40n13, 43, 54, 56, 92–94, 103, 105, 106, 109–112, 110n22, 116, 119, 120n31, 141, 141n4, 144n6, 172, 206, 279 as cultural trauma, 142n5, 144n6 and modeling the memory of communism, 31 universalization of, 40 Human rights, 9, 30, 31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 51, 52, 55, 55n4, 73, 74n45, 80, 87, 93, 96, 111, 116, 279 as paradigm to approach historical injustices, 71 Hungary, 22, 38, 45, 47, 55, 57, 58, 64, 72, 74, 80, 82, 89, 95, 98, 100, 102, 221, 225 declassification of state security archives, 89 Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, 98 House of Terror, 120 Institute of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 98 law classifying the suppression of the 1956 revolution as a war crime, 72 law for partial compensation of damages unjustly caused by the state in 1939–1949, 64 legislature criminalizing the denial or denigration of the crimes of totalitarian regimes, 55 lustration, 80, 102 Memento park, 104

memory culture of, 46 VERITAS Research Institute for History and Archives, 98 Hutcheon, Linda, 227, 228, 235, 283 Huyssen, Andreas, 30 I Institute for the Study of the Recent Past (Bulgaria), 99, 154n15, 231n14 Institute for the Study of the Recent Past, Sofia, 18 Institutes of memory (state-­ established/supported), 20, 38, 92, 95–103 as agents of memory, 95, 100–102 Center for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism (Lithuania), 96 Committee for Disclosing the Documents and Announcing Affiliation of Bulgaria Citizens to the State, 99 Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 96 Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security, 98 Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in, 97n11 Institute for the Studies of Communist Crimes and Consequences in Albania, 98 Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Czechia), 97 Institute of Historical Memory (Estonia), 96 Institute of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, 98 Institute of National Remembrance (Poland), 73, 96

 INDEX 

National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (Romania), 97 National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism (Romania), 97 Nation’s Memory Institute (Slovakia), 97 Office for the Documentation and the Investigation of the Crimes of the Communist Police (Czechia), 97 Security and Intelligence Services of the Bulgarian, 99 (see also ComDos) Stasi Records Archive (Germany), 96 Study Center for National Reconciliation (Slovenia), 98 VERITAS Research Institute for History and Archives (Hungary), 98 Irony, 104, 221n7, 227, 229 and nostalgia, 227, 229 K Kazalarska, Svetla, 117, 119, 119n28, 122, 226, 227, 228n13 Kiossev, Alexandar, 128, 250 L LaCapra, Dominick, 142, 143, 146, 200 Latvia, 38, 64, 73, 74, 79, 89, 94, 100, 102 Commission of Historians, 94 declassification of state security archives, 89 Kononov v. Latvia, 74 law on land reform in rural regions, 64

291

lustration, 79 memory culture in, 45–46 Museum of Occupation of Latvia, 119 See also Baltic state Law on the Ownership and Use of Agricultural Land, 65, 67, 68 Levi, Giovanni, 172, 176 Life stories, 231, 246, 263, 267 Lim, Jie-Hyum, 41 Limited rationality, 167–177, 193 Lithuania, 33n4, 38, 54, 55, 57, 58, 74, 77, 79, 89, 94–96, 100, 104 Centre for the Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism, 96 declassification of state security archives, 89 Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 96 Grutas park, 104 International commission for the evaluation of crimes of Nazi and Soviet regimes, 94 legislature criminalizing the denial or denigration of the crimes of totalitarian regimes, 55 lustration, 89, 100 memory culture in, 45–46 Museum of Genocide Victims, 96 See also Baltic state Lowenthal, David, 214, 219, 238, 250, 262, 263 Luleva, Ana, 62, 83, 202 Lustration, 32, 35n7, 53, 72, 78–84, 79n48, 79n49, 79n50, 88, 90, 97, 280 Albania, 80 Bulgaria, 53, 72, 81, 90, 280 Czechia, 79, 102, 280 Estonia, 102 Germany, 53, 79, 280

292 

INDEX

Lustration (cont.) Hungary, 80, 102 Latvia, 102 Lithuania, 79, 89 Poland, 53, 80 Romania, 53, 72, 80 Slovakia, 89, 100 Luthar, Oto, 41, 101 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 12 Mälksoo, Maria, 40, 41n14, 42, 43 Mannheim, Karl, 253, 256, 261 Marcuse, Harold, 106 Margalit, Avishai, 214, 269, 270, 283, 284 Mark, James, 39, 77, 95, 107, 111, 147 Markovits, Inga, 102, 103 Memorials, 2, 4, 6, 37, 54, 87, 103, 105–117, 105n20, 110n22, 119, 121, 123, 126, 128, 142, 145, 146, 154, 196, 199–202, 200n45, 204, 206, 224n10, 281 ambivalent, 201 countermonumentality of, 106 Holocaust, 105, 106, 109–112, 110n22, 206 religious symbolism, 112, 114 See also Monuments Memorials to victims of communism, 2, 107–109, 112, 114, 115 Bulgaria, 113n23, 128 Estonia, 107 Lithuania, 107 Poland, 108 Romania, 109 Memory biographical, 5, 8, 17, 131, 150, 157, 164, 247, 254, 278, 283

communicative (see Communicative memory) communities of, 269 (see also Mnemonic communities) cultural (see Cultural memory) cultures of (see Memory culture) europeanization of, 31n1, 40, 44 local, 4, 137, 154–176, 194, 197, 200, 204 moral aspects of (see also Duty to remember) multidirectional, 43, 198 official, 3, 29, 131, 279–282 politics of, 8, 9, 19, 20, 29, 31–39, 43, 44, 53, 83, 129–131, 196, 206, 279, 280 (see also Mnemopolitics) public, 3–5, 75, 94, 103, 104, 150–154, 161, 172, 183–185, 188, 189, 192, 199, 200, 207 regions of (see Mnemonic regions) transnational, 6, 44, 279 vernacular, 3, 4, 10, 19, 20, 29, 129, 131, 192, 204 Memory culture, 13, 20, 22, 31, 39–47, 78, 95, 128, 131, 137, 145, 183, 187, 188, 194, 202, 206, 255, 278, 281–283 Memory laws, 56, 56n5 Memory politics, 9, 39, 91, 130, 148, 278 Memory site(s), 6, 6n4, 17, 36, 106, 131, 142, 217, 224n10, 262, 278 Mink, Georges, 89, 95, 97, 100 Misztal, Barbara, 16, 87, 138 Mnemonic communities, 5, 6, 15, 16, 20, 41, 131, 144, 150, 154, 197, 205, 206, 251, 255, 262, 269, 270, 278, 282, 283 Mnemonic cultures, 146, 188 Mnemonic cultures, see Memory culture

 INDEX 

Mnemonic regions, 44, 47n17, 265n20 Mnemopolitics, see Memory politics Monuments communist, 104, 112 countermonumentality of, 106, 109 Museum of Socialist Art (Sofia), 123, 127 Museums of communism demonizing, 119 disneyfying, 119n28 normalising, 119, 121, 123 virtual, 127, 128 N Nadkarni, Maya, 225, 227, 230, 232, 268 Narrative as ‘bridge’ between personal and collective memory, 12 as cultural practice, 10 as cultural tool, 13, 14 grand, 14, 16–22, 29–47, 94, 126, 130, 216, 255, 279 ironic, 283 (see also Irony) little, 14, 14n11, 17, 29 (see also Life stories) and the production of meaning, 10 public, 117, 137, 142, 164, 166, 197, 206 shared, 42, 262 subaltern, 42 template, 13, 13n10, 149, 150, 197, 206 and temporality, 11 understanding, 10, 15 (see also Ricœur, Paul) Neller, Katja, 219n5, 252, 266 Neostalgia, 219–229, 248, 266 Nora, Pierre, 6, 6n3, 36, 56, 257, 261, 262

293

Nostalgia as cultural critique, 213–218 existential, 220, 231, 247, 248, 250, 251, 264, 268 and popular culture, 22, 222, 248, 270 (see also Neostalgia) primary, 225, 269, 270 reflexive, 217, 218 restorative, 217, 270 secondary, 283 Nostalgic narrative topoi, 230, 231, 231n14, 241 tropes, 229, 232, 236 See also Nostalgia O Oral history, 3, 8, 10, 14n11, 15, 17, 18, 149–150, 231n14 P PACE, see Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Resolution No.1481 (2006) on the “Need for international condemnation of crimes of totalitarian communist regimes”, 35 Resolution No.1096 (1996), on the “Measures to dismantle the heritage of former communist totalitarian systems”, 35 Resolution No. 1652 (2009) on the “Attitude to memorials exposed to different historical interpretations in Council of Europe member states”, 105n20

294 

INDEX

Penal Codes, post-1989 amendments Bulgaria, 74 Czechia, 73 Hungary, 72 Latvia, 73 Lithuania, 72 Poland, 73 Romania, 73 Slovakia, 73 “People’s Court” (Bulgaria), 61, 62, 62n22, 71, 82, 83, 114 Persin island, 113, 149, 152, 154, 165, 167, 168, 192, 193 See also Belene, island of Platform of European Memory and Conscience, 38 Poland condemnation of the Katyn Massacre, 54 court trials, 77 declassification of state security archives, 89 Institute of National Remembrance, 73, 96 legislature criminalizing the denial or denigration of the crimes of totalitarian regimes, 55 lustration, 80, 100 memory culture in, 45–46 monuments to the victims, 108 Politics of memory (see Memory politics) of pity, 197–207, 282 of recognition, 9, 36, 42, 87–131, 280 of regret, 9, 41 of truth, 9, 41, 47, 91–103, 281 Post-communist nostalgia, 219–221, 223, 265 as adapting to change, 249 as biographical phenomenon, 229–251, 255

as critique, 218, 243–246, 249 as generational phenomenon, 255, 258–263 and irony, 227 political implications, 265–270 as political kitsch, 230 in popular culture, 222 theories of, 252–254 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, 33 R Rehabilitation, 32, 35n7, 55, 58–63, 65, 70, 82, 89, 147, 181, 182, 195, 280 Restitution of property Bulgaria, 82 (see also Law on the Ownership and Use of Agricultural Land) as catalyst of memory, 70 Estonia, 64 Germany, 64 Hungary, 64 Latvia, 64 Poland, 64 Romania, 64 Slovakia, 64–65 Slovenia, 65 Restorative justice, 58, 63, 205 See also Penal Codes, post-1989 amendments; Rehabilitation; Restitution of property Retributive justice, 71–73, 83, 148 See also Criminal prosecution; Penal Codes, post-1989 amendments Ricœur, Paul, 11, 15 See also Narrative, understanding Rigney, Ann, 206, 284 Romania condemnation of the regime: Băsescu’s speech, 93

 INDEX 

court trials, 73–74 declassification of state security archives, 89 Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes, 97 lustration, 80 Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance (Sighet), 109, 119 memory culture in, 45–46 monuments to the victims, 109 National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives, 97 National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism, 97 restitution, 64 Tismaneanu Commission, 93 use of Ceaușescu’s image in comercials, 221 Wiesel Commission, 92 Rosaldo, Renato, 216, 217, 230, 264, 269 Rothberg, Michael, 43, 198 S Schematic narrative template, 13, 13n10, 149, 150, 197, 206 Screening, see Lustration Shevchenko, Olga, 225, 227, 230, 232 Skotchev, Borislav, 167, 168, 173, 174, 180, 189 Slovakia declassification of state security archives, 97 law on the compensation of property and other injustices, 65 law on the immoral and illegal character of the communist regime, 55 lustration, 79 memory culture in, 45–46

295

Nation’s Memory Institute, 97 reparations scheme to compensate persons victimized by Warsaw Pact armies in 1968, 58 Slovenia law on denationalization, 65 memory culture in, 45–46 public hearing on crimes commited by totalitarian regimes, 37 Study Center for National Reconciliation, 98 Yugonostalgia, 221 Socialism vs. Communism (terminology), 20–22 Sots-nostalgia, see Post-communist nostalgia Stan, Lavinia, 72, 82 State security archives declassification of, 97 problems of storage and use, 89–91 See also Archival revolution T Todorov, Tzvetan, 30, 32, 284 Totalitarianism in international documents, 282 as paradigm, 21, 22, 101 Transitional justice criminal prosecution, 72–78 lustration, 78–84 and shaping of memory (see Condemnation of the communist regime; Rehabilitation; Restitution of property) Trauma as bond between personal and collective memories, 140–142 cultural, 142n5, 143–150, 144n6, 154, 205 and homeopathic socialization, 142

296 

INDEX

Traumatic narrative topoi, 154–167 tropes, 154–167 See also Trauma Troebst, Stefan, 36, 36n10, 45–47, 47n17, 219 Truth politics of, 9, 47, 91–103, 281 seeking, 88, 280 V Velikonja, Mitja, 220, 223–225, 224n11, 229, 231n14, 246, 248 Verdery, Katherine, 195, 196, 263 Vetting, see Lustration Victimhood nationalism, 41, 130

Victims ambivalence, 115–116 definitions and terminology, 57 memorials to, 105–111 recognition of, 34 rehabilitation of, 32 Vukov, Nikolai, 112, 113, 124 W Welzer, Harald, 8, 186, 188 Wertsch, James, 13, 13n10, 14, 129, 149, 185, 206 White, Hayden, 11, 277 Z Znepolski, Ivaylo, 151, 205, 258