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Bulgarians Join the EU with Marxism on Their Minds

21 12 2006  After 17 years of transition, Sofia has distanced itself from communism but, for many, Das Kapital remains their guide to the world.

By Albena Shkodrova in Sofia (Balkan Insight, 21 December 2006)

In 1989 many Bulgarians saw membership of the European Union as a potential guarantee that the break with communism would be irreversible. Seventeen years later, when this goal is at last within reach, many analysts say communism still weighs heavily on Bulgarian minds.

When Bulgaria joins the EU on January 1, it will have completed almost two decades of painful transition from Soviet-style totalitarianism to western-style democracy. After an elaborate project to adapt the country to Europe's political and economic environment, most people believe Bulgaria has developed a liberal democracy.

But while the country looks superficially as if it has thrown off the legacy of its old communist elite, socialist views and behavioral patterns remain deeply entrenched.

Historically, Bulgaria has little experience of democracy. It gained its independence relatively late in the day in 1878, emerging from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire's territories in Europe on a wave of Slavic nationalism.

Though from then until 1914 it developed the outward forms of parliamentary democracy, Bulgaria remained far more preoccupied with its territorial aspirations than with democratic or social questions. Its history in this period was dominated by uprisings and wars with the neighbours.

The period between the two world wars saw little change, except between 1920 and 1935, when weak governments tried to enact democratic and social change in an environment poisoned by loss of territory, poverty and the threat of communist coups.

When communism was imposed on the country after 1944 with Soviet support, there was little opposition to the establishment of a totalitarian system.

For almost half a century, Bulgaria became Moscow's most obedient satellite, showing a genuine loyalty to Russia that no other country in the Socialist bloc shared. There was no equivalent there to the 1953 uprising in East Berlin, the 1956 uprising in Hungary or the Prague Spring of 1968. There was no equivalent, either, to Poland's oppositional intellectual elite or to Romania's independent-minded leadership.

As a result, when the Soviet bloc dissolved in 1989, the popular demand for democracy was weaker in Bulgaria than it was in Central Europe. Bulgaria in the early 1990s provided inhospitable ground for an emerging democracy and indeed, the renamed but barely reformed Communist Party remained in power for several more years. It was only in 1992 that the first opposition government took office.

The slow pace of Bulgaria's transition prevented it from joining the EU together with most former Warsaw Pact states in 2004. And a generation after the end of the socialist regime, many analysts believe communist thought patterns are still deeply rooted.

"Its roots are so deep that it is likely to remain part of the nation's psychology in future," said Michail Gruev, history scientist at Sofia University, of communism.


"As an ideology used to formally explain social developments, Marxism has been rapidly replaced by democratic, liberal economic views," agreed Georgi Ganev, an economist at the think-tank, the Center for Liberal Strategy. "But its remnants still exist in many Bulgarian minds."

Ganev says most people still associate economic growth, for example, with communist-style heavy industry. When they don't see large factories and crowds of workers, they dismiss claims of economic progress as propaganda.

The communist view of the economy as a zero-sum game, in which someone's gain is automatically someone else's loss, also remains deeply entrenched. While private property, for example, has returned to Bulgaria since the 1990s, it is still "often seen as an instrument for exploitation", said Ganev.

One of the landmarks of socialism was the labour system, in which state guaranteed people their employment. As a consequence, employees' job was not dependant on the quality of their professional performance, which resulted in remarkable ineffectiveness and lousy service.

Now business says only part of the Bulgarian society left behind the old socialist
labour practices, while many keep applying them.

"The state administration is the usual suspect [of keeping the labor practices of socialist past], but there are many other examples," said Kuntcho Stoychev, sociologist and executive director of the Association of Bulgarian employers.

"I was recently astonished to see a major Bulgarian bank functioning completely after the old socialist principle that every customer is guilty and needs to be punished."

Stoychev claims similar attitudes can be observed in many companies in Bulgaria, especially when they are of large size.

According to a recent national poll by Alpha Research agency about how Bulgarians account for their poor economic situation, 25 per cent blame the state, 24 per cent politicians, 14 per cent think they are not well enough connected, and 8 per cent blame their bad luck.

A source from the ministry of social care told Balkan Insight one of the most common complaint to be heard from people living on welfare is "the state doesn't give us any job".

And even if these people should be granted help, continued the source, what is "annoying in their position is that they simply do not seek jobs, or at least this is what comes out in our interviews with them. They just wait on the state to take care of their employment as in the past, oblivious to the fact that business does not belong to the state anymore".

"Of course the state should find me a job!" exclaimed Georgi Dachev, 52, who sells hand-woven woolen socks on an improvised stall on the streets of Sofia. "There are
so many positions in the state administration, why can't I occupy one of them? The state finds jobs for Roma minority, why not for me?"

He says he has been jobless since the early 1990s, after the state engineer institute he was working for was closed. At the beginning, he tried to find another
job, but did not succeed, and now he does not believe any private business would be interested in employing him, as they try to employ young people.

It seems many Bulgarians share his views. According to Alpha Research's poll, 86 per cent of them think the state should take care of most of the things in the country.

The economy is not the only area of life in which the ghost of the past remains strong. Sociologists find a number of deficiencies in Bulgarian democracy, which
they say derive from the views and practices, which were dominating in the society during the totalitarian regime.

One of them is many people's disbelief that their political vote or civic activity could make any difference - a conviction, deeply entrenched by the oppressiveness of the former totalitarian system, which was not only discouraging, but systematically punished any independent political or social stance or act.

In Bulgaria, where voting is not obligatory as in other European countries, election turnout rarely exceeds 60 per cent of the voting population.

In this year's presidential elections it hardly reached 43 per cent; and for the general elections in 2005 it was below 56 per cent.

In its national poll, Alpha Research registered that only one per cent of Bulgarians consider undertaking a civic initiative to protect their interests.

"This is clearly a problem of generations," said Stoychev. "The young generation is not affected by these old views, while only part of the older managed to adapt, the rest failed to change their views."


Albena Shkodrova is BIRN's Bulgaria country director. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.