Zhivka Valiavicharska. Restless History

That the history of socialist Bulgaria is attracting ever more scholarly interest is a welcome development. For far too long, socialist-era Bulgaria has been portrayed as simply a copy of the Soviet model, ignoring important country-specific developments. Kristen Ghodsee, for example, has highlighted the significance of socialist feminism and its international outreach in the context of Bulgaria’s policies toward the “Third World.” Theodora Dragostinova recently emphasized the importance of performances of “Bulgarian” culture abroad for the regime’s efforts to gain international recognition for the county, while producing a legitimizing rhetoric for the domestic audience. The above interpretations were also driven by the question of whether socialist traditions might suggest alternative political imaginaries at a time when Bulgaria seems stuck at the periphery of Europe. Restless History follows this path but adds a new dimension to this flourishing history. Valiavicharska highlights the turn toward “socialist humanism” after the end of Stalinism, claiming that it became a defining framework for new political imaginaries in socialist Bulgaria. Socialist humanism critiqued alienation and sought to achieve the “holistically developed person” (56). Bulgarian sociology, rehabilitated in the 1960s and influenced by the “early” Marx, provided conceptual ideas for a noticeable policy shift. Guided by a vision of social participation beyond labor, and pressured by female party activists, the government invested widely in childcare and cultural facilities (although this was a more gradual departure from Stalinism, at least ideology-wise, than the author claims). Free time was the “true wealth” of a socialist society, wrote a female sociologist in the 1970s (72). The author rightly stresses the accomplishments of these policies especially for enhancing the social role of women. Yet, and this is one of Valiavicharska’s most important arguments, the universalist and heteronormative premises of socialist humanism prompted its degeneration into pronatalist reproductive policies in the 1960s and 1970s, including restrictions on abortion. Showing how emancipatory ideas can morph into instruments of social discipline is the particular strength of this book.

Alienation · Bulgarian · Context (archaeology) · Humanism · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies