The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier
Essay by Dimiter Kenarov
All illustrations featured in this essay are part of the Bulgarian Visual Archive, a digital project that curates thousands of found and donated photographs. BVA aims to narrate the history of 20th-century Bulgaria through the visual record of both private and public events that have usually been pushed to the margins of official narratives. As part of its mission, BVA offers all of its photographs for download free of charge, for both personal and commercial purposes.
As the plane began its final approach to the Sofia airport, I leaned to look out the porthole. Gray fields and mangy patches of overgrown post-industrial wasteland lay scattered outside the city.
Next came the monolithic mazes of Communist-era apartment blocks—blocks I had grown up in—followed by older jumbles of red-tiled roofs and, scattered in between, free-standing clusters of freshly built condos and office towers. Downtown, along Sofia’s famed yellow cobblestones (“the yellow-brick road,” as English-language tour guides jauntily refer to it) rested the triangular Stalinist behemoth of “The Party House,” the former headquarters of the Bulgarian Communist Party, now topped by the country’s tricolor instead of its original red star. The spot nearby, where the cube-shaped mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov (“the Great Leader and Teacher of the Bulgarian people”) had once stood, was now a flat, empty lot, an oversize Malevich square. Tsarigradsko shose, previously known as Lenin Boulevard, was choked with traffic. Though everything appeared disorderly from above, it was exactly what I was looking for: a sense of things happening, a sense of time changing, a new frontier.
It was the end of 2010, and I had decided to move back to my native Bulgaria. I’d spent more than a decade in the United States, getting an education and putting a life together, and had never imagined I’d be retracing my steps eastward someday, like a criminal revisiting a crime scene. Some people considered you a failure if you came back; they said you lacked ambition and inner resources to stick it out. If you were lucky enough to get away, why throw your luck to the dogs? Wasn’t it better to settle down in a “normal” place, where buses ran on time and you didn’t need to bribe every traffic cop who pulled you over? It was perfectly fine to visit your relatives for a week over Christmas or to sprawl during the summer on the beaches of the Black Sea, splurging hard-earned cash to make the neighbors envious, but to return home for good, unforced by circumstances, bordered on madness. It was irrational, irresponsible, and possibly suicidal. The imp of the perverse. You never looked over your shoulder, lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
It was, admittedly, a strange decision on my part. I wasn’t unhappy abroad or nostalgic for home. I didn’t have trouble adjusting to the trappings of my adopted country. I was neither a desperate war refugee with only the clothes on my back, nor a political exile constantly complaining about the tastelessness of local cuisine. The concept of “culture shock” that people tended to talk so much about was foreign to me. I’d gone to the States after graduating high school in Sofia to attend on a scholarship a small liberal arts college in Vermont and, later, a graduate program in California, and had never had issues fitting in. Mine was the American dream, I suppose, the one that promised you could be nobody and thus anybody. Like Huck Finn, I felt free to “light out for the Territory,” unburdened by my history and culture, even by my language, and by all the parochial concepts of identity I had been raised on.
As the years wore on, however, I came to make another discovery: I was late to the party. I had traveled to the westernmost frontier of the Western world, but the frontier had long since ceased being one. My dream was dated, even clichéd. The States felt like an old place, weirdly older than Europe, a place where, for all its breathless movement, time seemed to have stopped. There was too much of everything: rules, work, wealth, poverty, guns, art. Somehow, over the years, the machine had become overly complex, the foundations slowly but inexorably sinking under the weight of its ever-growing bulk. Even the road to self-renewal and originality, the road less traveled by, was now well-trodden, part of a tired discourse endlessly advertised and monetized and absorbed within a system of capital. The celebrated American self had become another commodity on the shelf of the cultural supermarket. To go to the woods “to live deliberately,” like Henry David Thoreau had done, now required submitting a twenty-page application for a research grant and at least three recommendations.
That was when an idea occurred to me: What if I moved back? Wasn’t Bulgaria, in all of its dinginess and provincialism and unpredictability, exactly the kind of frontier I was looking to explore, where the clock was still ticking forward toward some unknown horizon? After all, the world is round and if you travel west of “the West” you’d eventually bump into “the East.” To abandon my peaceful but mostly prospectless academic life in the States in order to plunge into the cesspool of my homeland was a bit of a gamble, but also, I thought, the most American thing I could do. I liked what the poet T. S. Eliot had written: “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” It was the classic narrative arc of journeys at least since The Odyssey. Could it be, I mused, that real freedom resided not in the freedom to leave but in the freedom to return?
• • • •
I was born in Sofia, the capital of what was still then the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, in 1981—eight years before the collapse of the country’s Communist regime. My childhood memories of that period are fragmentary and uneventful, nothing outlandishly totalitarian to titillate the imagination. Maybe I wasn’t old enough to serve as a witness or maybe the system was already too exhausted to care about propagating its genes in my generation, the last one to grow up under its tutelage, and my brush with the ideology of the day was rather innocuous, bland even. When I started school, I received my Young Pioneer’s blue neckerchief (the red one was reserved for older kids) and publicly swore allegiance to the organization’s flag; I had to learn a poem by heart about the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (“Yuri Gagarin, how did you fly? / Was it fast, your rocket ship white?”); I read a celebrated Soviet novel Timur and His Squad about a gang of children secretly doing good deeds and another, a Bulgarian one, about Mitko Palaluzov, a young boy in the country’s Communist underground (the partisans) during the Second World War who died tragically. Other than that, nobody cared much about my proper political education. We did visit once on a school field trip the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, where the mummified body of Bulgaria’s first Communist prime minister was laid out in a funeral chamber, yet that seemed more like an adventure than pilgrimage. Lit up by ghostly lights in his glass sarcophagus, Comrade Dimitrov was lying peacefully there, his head slightly propped up on a pillow, like Snow White. Even the idols of the past were now nothing more than characters in a cheap, fairytale diorama.
At that time, in the 1980s, my family and I were residing in a tower block in Student Town, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Sofia designed to function as a large, centralized campus. My parents had arrived in the capital from the provinces to attend university and, after graduating, had married and decided to stay on: my father working as an anesthesiologist at a large hospital and my mother as a computer programmer in Bulgaria’s nascent IT sector. Since neither of them had official Sofia residency yet (a prerequisite to remain in the city), living in a dormitory was their only available option.
Student Town was still in the early stages of development, and its few academic and residential buildings were surrounded by wild fields, where one could still occasionally encounter flocks of sheep. Yet this seemingly pastoral, marginal corner of Sofia was its most cosmopolitan: young men and women from all over the post-colonial socialist world—Vietnam, Syria, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Congo-Brazzaville—had relocated to Bulgaria to get their university degrees and strengthen the bonds of internationalism. Some had brought their kids along, who played with us Bulgarians. It was a glorious time, the way childhood is often glorious, regardless of skin color or political systems. Most days we were busy exploring the meandering footpaths branching out of our respective dorms or doodling in student notebooks left unguarded in one of the common reading rooms. Our favorite activity, however, was sailing on a makeshift raft of Styrofoam in an enormous ditch filled with rainwater close to the Karl Marx Institute of Economics.
We kids had no idea how or when or why that ditch had been dug, but its size—roughly 500 meters long and 20 meters across, if memory serves me right—fascinated us, like the mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Years later, I found out that we’d actually played in what had been part of a defunct Communist-era mega-project informally known as “the Sofia Sea,” which had envisioned a network of navigable canals, connecting to the Danube, 150 kilometers to the north, and from there to the Black Sea and the rest of the world. The plan had been first conceived by Party bureaucrats in the early 1950s, probably drawing inspiration from Stalin’s famous call for “the great transformation of nature,” which encouraged radical human interventions in the form of land management and waterworks construction. Sofia was landlocked and hemmed on all sides by mountains, but so what? Shouldn’t Communism dream big? If Moscow had its Moscow River, why couldn’t Sofia have its Sofia Sea?
With neither sufficient labor force nor adequate machinery for an undertaking on this scale, the Bulgarian regime had decided to look for “volunteers” among Sofia’s own residents. Equipped with only shovels and pickaxes, factory workers and secretaries and doctors and engineers toiled on weekends and holidays in the canals over a period of several years. Jokes abounded about breeding crocodiles there some day and repurposing shovels as oars. If somebody was late to work, they’d explain to their boss with a smile that they had waited for the ship, but it had never arrived and they’d been forced to walk. Finally, in the mid-1960s, a few level-headed experts determined that completing the project could cause mass flooding in the city. A decision was made to discontinue digging… and commence burying. The latter job had never been properly completed either and that was how, two decades later, a few kids from all over the world got to sail on a makeshift raft of Styrofoam in an enormous ditch filled with rainwater. Without ever intending to—strange are the ways of history—we had realized the unfulfilled Communist dream of “the Sofia Sea.”
Seen in retrospect, that dug-and-buried network of canals was perhaps something of a metaphor for the general state of affairs at the time, of what had happened to the system. Like elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, the Communists had taken over the government of my home country in a Soviet-backed coup at the end of the Second World War with the professed idea of radically transforming society and politics on Marxist terms, but following the initial “revolutionary” period, the regime’s grand ambitions had to be methodically scaled down. Certainly, there were still endless bromides about building “the bright future,” when bread would be free (supposedly by the year 2000) and social class would disappear and the means of production would have no single owner (Engels’s “withering away of the state”). There were monumental Party congresses full of mind-numbing speeches about fulfilling in four years the next five-year economic plan, about the higher (always higher) production of wheat and eggs and pork, about the ever-better material conditions of the people and their improving access to consumer goods, but even the staunchest believers were already aware all of that was just a charade, going through the motions. Sailing in Sofia would never be possible, and it was wiser to bury the evidence of the effort.
By the early 1970s, Bulgaria, like Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and the rest of the Soviet Bloc, was stuck in “stagnation”—or “real socialism,” as local ideologues preferred to call it euphemistically. Gradually, the country was transforming into a quiet and somewhat boring totalitarian backwater, drab but not poor, politically oppressive but not excessively bloodthirsty, not anymore. The vast majority of citizens went to work, shopped for whatever scarce items were available at the stores, got married, raised kids, saved money to furnish their modest apartments and houses, went to restaurants on special occasions, to the movies or the theater on weekends, took annual vacations at one of Black Sea resorts or somewhere in the mountains. Marxism continued to be the state religion, and you went along with its rituals, the way people in the West still went to church, but nobody had any faith left. Worse, nobody could see a future, a social horizon, especially after the violent suppression of the Prague Spring, the last genuine revolution in the region. Communism had always relied on teleology for its existence, but now the frontier had been closed. It was as if time itself had stopped moving forward and had entered a cyclical almost medieval agricultural pattern: winter, spring, summer, autumn; winter, spring, summer, autumn; 10th Congress of the Party, 11th Congress of the Party, 12th Congress of the Party, 13th Congress of the Party.
Perhaps that was why the Communist regimes all across Eastern and Central Europe collapsed in the final run. Not so much because of their beleaguered economies, although that was an important factor, but because no one believed anymore. Life is always transitory, a ceaseless metamorphosis, and when the possibility of change disappears, when the frontiers disappear and times turns cyclical, a process of decay inevitably sets in.
• • • •
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, a feast in a time of plague, a carnival ride amid carnage. Even to this day, more than thirty years later, it’s hard for me to explain coherently what happened in Bulgaria immediately after “the changes” of 1989. It seems like something out of a dream, scraps of images and phrases and music and emotions jumbled together, a kind of bottled up energy suddenly released into the open. This wasn’t the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama had suggested, but its opposite, the rusty arms of the clock grinding into gear once again, the train departing its rural station after years of delay. Time sped up so abruptly—a bullet train—it made many of the passengers on board dizzy.
“De-mo-cra-cy,” shouted people everywhere in the squares, waving flags and holding up placards.
I remember the initial joy and hope that the nightmare of the past was over and better times awaited ahead. No more single-party rule with dimwitted men at the helm, no more Soviet control, no more mass surveillance and secret files, no more political prisoners, no more censorship, no more mindless ideological garbage, no more planned and wasteful economy, no more Party privileges and corruption, no more one type of everything (or nothing) in the stores, no more waiting for ten years to buy a car, no more denied passports and closed borders, no more grayness, no more human indignities. It was a naive and idealistic vision perhaps, but no less real for that. For 45 years, Bulgarians had been kept in a huge high-security prison, the size of a country, only occasionally allowed a glimpse through the iron bars, and isolation of that length tends to inflame the imagination. When the mind is not allowed to wander out, it naturally goes in, deeper into fantasy. Overheard stories of life on the other side, in “the free world,” take on the quality of fairy tales, of myth—and myth is always bound to prove a disappointment at the end.
What happened in Bulgaria during the 1990s was what happened in so many other places across Eastern and Central Europe. Prepared and well-positioned, members of the former Communist Party elite managed the whole transformation of the system from the inside, privatizing, so to speak, their own state power. Behind the suave rhetoric of democracy and freedom, they were busily transferring public funds into their personal accounts, creating companies and mafia conglomerates. The highly repressive functions of the totalitarian machinery disappeared, but money was no worse an instrument of control, perhaps even a better one because more refined and insidious.
At the same time, the sudden shift to a market economy tanked the country’s long-suffering industries. Obsolete factories churning out obsolete commodities couldn’t survive the global competition for long, and many of them had to shut down for good, leaving thousands of workers unemployed and unemployable. A large portion of Bulgaria’s residents lost their life savings to hyperinflation or were cheated out of them by pyramid schemes. It was not uncommon to see engineers driving taxis or pensioners with doctorates sifting through battered dumpsters. At night, Sofia was shrouded in sepulchral darkness and the few street lamps that glowed appeared to absorb, rather than give off light. Store shelves were often empty—even emptier than before—and for a while the government had to introduce ration cards for food staples, just like in wartime. I remember how my father would get up at four in the morning to stand in line for bread and milk or how my mother blacked out once waiting to buy a half-pack of detergent. There were constant electric outages, and we’d have dinner by the flicker of candlelight in our new prefab apartment in Sofia’s Nadezhda quarter. We had no central heating installed yet, so in the winter all of us slept with our clothes on.
In spite of all the economic hardship and rampant crime, in my memory the 1990s stand out as a glorious, sublime era. In the immediate wake of “the changes,” Bulgarians felt a rush of excitement for the future: participating in politics, publishing independent newspapers, creating provocative art, starting private businesses. My mother left her state job (she’d had a leading role in developing Bulgaria’s first information system for traffic control) to run the risk-assessment and anti-fraud management system of a large French bank; my father was promoted, at age 38, to medical director of his hospital. My paternal grandparents transformed their garage in a provincial town into a general store, while my maternal ones started a rabbit farm on the premises of their village property. Almost everybody, regardless of age, wanted to do something bold with their newfound freedom, to risk and experiment. It was like living in a frontier settlement, but where the frontier was not defined by the movement across physical borders, but across social and personal ones. There was, to quote the classic theoretician of the American frontier Frederick Jackson Turner, “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.”
As I entered my teenage years, I came to encounter everything that had been previously censored or just in scarce supply: loud music, experimental art, porn, drugs. There were no rules to adhere to anymore. Nobody made boys cut their hair if it was too long or rubber-stamped girls’ thighs if their skirts were too short, as had been common practice in schools. I didn’t care much about long hair, but I dyed mine green, then blue, then purple. I got into freestyle snowboarding and punk rock. You could wear anything you fancied, tight or baggy or skimpy, and get as many piercings and tattoos as your body could possibly hold. Listening to the Beatles—tame, unoffending Beatles—had once been semi-illicit, akin to dissidence, and passing their records around had gotten not a few hot heads into trouble. Under the new system, record stores began to openly pirate and sell any music available, from the Sex Pistols to Cannibal Corpse. Theaters, shaking off the conservative, parochial mores of the Party, would put on radical performances by Beckett and Ionesco, Jean Genet and Heiner Müller, Sarah Kane and Eve Ensler, naked actors sometimes roaming the stage or just ranting in a delirium. Literature followed suit, plunging into postmodern irony and games, throwing off the bondage of the past. It was marvelous.
Even the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, the mummy now removed and safely cremated, took on a life of its own: explicit graffiti covered the limestone walls, the doors swung wide open for staggering drunks who needed a place to relieve themselves; skateboarders rode around, doing kickflips and nose grinds on the decorative curbs; an American evangelical pastor, intent on saving the souls of former commies, organized a revival meeting in the square facing the relic, with thousands of people crowding the viewing stands where members of the Politburo had once greeted the parading masses—“God is healing you now! In the name of Jesus! Hallelujah!” he shouted while laying hands on the faithful to cast out their demons, perhaps the demons of the past; in 1996, when the movie 101 Dalmatians came out, some PR brain made the brilliant decision to rent the mausoleum as advertising space and cover its white exterior in huge black spots; the next year, an impressive production of Verdi’s Aida used the edifice as a set. The mausoleum was eventually—and sadly—removed in 1999 by anti-Communist political crusaders, but even its act of demolition became a sort of artistic performance: it took several attempts to blow it up, spectators laughing and cracking jokes at each unsuccessful blast, until a decision was made to take it apart bit by bit.
