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How the Concept of Totalitarianism Appeared in Late Socialist Bulgaria: The Birth and Life of Zheliu Zhelev's Book Fascism
Abstract
Few would dispute the claim that the most significant political text—and political event—in the history of late socialism in Bulgaria was Zheliu Zhelev’s Fascism. Completed around 1967 and published in 1981, the book was censored immediately after its publication for making implicit analogies between the fascist regimes and the political organization of the socialist states. Yet despite the state’s attempts to limit its circulation, the book captured the political imagination of the generation of the 1980s, reordering political coordinates, eroding the legitimacy of state power, and triggering a political crisis of enormous proportions. Its author, Zheliu Zhelev, trained as a philosopher of Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s but during his graduate studies developed a liberal political perspective and became a harsh critic of the regime. Known as one of the most prominent dissident voices in the country, Zhelev took a trajectory similar to that of Václav Havel, becoming the first democratically elected president of Bulgaria after 1989.
This article traces the trajectory and political life of Zhelev’s book, the only explicitly liberal political critique of state power written and published under Bulgarian socialism. The book presents Europe’s fascist states as totalitarian regimes, reproducing Western Cold War right-wing and liberal frameworks that dominated the analysis of fascist and communist societies and their political institutions for most of the second half of the 20th century. In the socialist context, however, these arguments played out in a unique way, tactically inverting some of the most central tenets of Marxism-Leninism. First, by seeing the state as a determining element of social relations, Zhelev undermined the primary status of economic and material relations with respect to the political “superstructure” and thus attacked the Marxist-Leninist base–superstructure model. Second, by pitting liberal democracy against fascism—and by analogy, against socialism—he radically destabilized the political coordinates of the Marxist-Leninist system, for which fascism constituted the most dangerous enemy, the most stable line of opposition.
The publication of the book triggered a complex political response. On the one hand, it inflamed the repressive apparatus to such an extent that people began speaking of the next wave of re-Stalinization—in a certain way, it called into being or reignited what it aimed to expose. On the other hand, the reactions following its publication reveal a three-dimensional political spectrum that complicates any attempt to paint a picture of total domination, total subordination, and mass complicity in a top-down hierarchy—the very picture Zhelev puts forward in his analysis of the totalitarian state. The complexity of debates around the book calls into question widely accepted arguments about the tangential and inconsequential role of “official ideology” in political life during socialism, as well as arguments about the “apolitical” or “depoliticized” nature of the “official” public sphere, as opposed to the “private” one, in which politics are often presumed to have been lived and experienced.1
After 1989, however, Bulgarian dissident intellectuals were blind to such nuances: they eagerly embraced totalitarianism as their favorite analytical framework, stubbornly resisting any approaches that might provide an alternative to the picture of “total ideologization,” top-down, ubiquitous control, and mass repression.2 Ironically, just as Western scholars of Soviet and socialist history worked to undo the persistent legacy of the totalitarian framework and the way its theoretical and political assumptions influenced our understanding of the modern socialist era, Zhelev’s book introduced totalitarianism into late socialist Bulgaria’s political and scholarly debates and shaped the liberal imaginary of critically minded communities.3
In the last decade, much has been written on the genealogy and use of totalitarianism as an analytical framework in Soviet studies and the way it has structured our notions of socialist subjectivity, struggle, and political agency.4 Yet scholars have mentioned the ubiquity of liberal and right-wing interpretations of the socialist era in postsocialist Eastern Europe only in passing or have ignored them altogether. How did liberal political categories such as totalitarianism, civil society, and civil and human rights appear in the vocabulary of East European intellectual and political discussions? How did they become possible in the particular discursive conditions of post-Stalinist political and intellectual life...
... "Ironically, just as Western scholars of Soviet and socialist history worked to undo the persistent legacy of the totalitarian framework and the way its theoretical and political assumption influenced our understanding of the modern socialist era, Zhelev's book introduced totalitarianism into the late socialist Bulgaria's political and scholarly debates" (Valiavicharska 2014). ...
The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of the concept of totalitarianism in Bulgarian public discourse since the 1980s. The main focus lies on academic and political discourses, started with Zhelyu Zhelev’s book published in 1982, "Fascism. A documentary study on the German, Italian and Spanish fascism", and developed after the fall of the Communist regime (1989). The content of the concept, dynamics and criticism of it are analyzed. It is concluded, that the disputes for and against totalitarianism divide the academic field and public memory. The proponents of the theory of totalitarianism insist on remembering the terror, the camps, deportations, suppression, and non-freedom under Communism. On the other hand, the supporters of the left are reluctant to use the term totalitarianism or relate it only to the period of Stalinism
Cambridge Core - Twentieth Century European History - 1989 - by James Mark
What do we do with the monuments from the socialist past? This question continues to resurface with relentless persistence in Bulgaria’s public life. For the past twenty-five years, socialism’s monuments have suffered severe neglect, yet they have provided open terrains upon which different political forces have taken on grassroots forms to articulate their perspectives against each other and vis-à-vis the country’s socialist history. Thus, while discarded as remnants of a failed political experiment, they have become those peculiar sites without which postsocialist political and everyday life is hard to imagine. This essay focuses on two particularly contested monuments from two distinct periods of Bulgaria’s socialist era, Plovdiv’s Monument to the Soviet Army, or “Aliosha,” from 1957, and Sofia’s Monument to 1300 Years of Bulgaria, from 1981. It offers a historical reconstruction of their creation and a critical interpretation of their political and cultural meanings under socialism, while also chronicling their reconfigured everyday and political uses during the postsocialist years. Studying their intricate governing functions in public space, the essay argues that these open and dynamic microworlds continue to organize community life and leisure in particular ways, while defying the privatization of public space and the normative imperatives of neoliberal urban development in the postsocialist city.
The Soviet mathematical logician Aleksandr Vol'pin is often credited with introducing the post-Stalin dissident strategy of attempting to hold the Soviet government to its own laws. In this article, Benjamin Nathans asks how Vol'pin himself arrived at the deceptively familiar rhetoric of civil rights and rule of law and how that rhetoric functioned in emerging dissident circles in the 1960s. Rather than approaching rights through classic liberal notions of social contract and self-interest, Vol'pin drew on the strikingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary ferment of Soviet intellectual life during the thaw years, putting logic, philosophy of language, and the burgeoning field of cybernetics to unexpected purposes. The result, Nathans suggests, was a counterintuitive blend of idealism and literalism that became an indispensable element of dissident thought and practice within late Soviet culture.
In this article Ann Komaromi examines Soviet samizdat based on recently available materials and fresh critical approaches. Komaromi juxtaposes traditional mythologizing narratives about samizdat and the exposure of such mythology within samizdat and post-samizdat culture. Drawing on recent publications and archival investigations, Komaromi surveys the history of samizdat, its use, reception and resonance. The material form of the samizdat text proves key to understanding samizdat as the lifeblood of a community of Soviet dissenters. That material form, viewed critically through a lens shaped by poststructural concepts, provokes the sense of play between ideal signified and compromised signifier as samizdat's subversive essence. This samizdat text supports both anti-authoritarian playfulness and serious reflection on the threats to the author and the project of culture. Soviet and post-Soviet writers find in the samizdat text an ambivalent marker of their specifically Soviet identity beyond geographical and temporal boundaries of the Soviet empire.
This article proposes a new interdisciplinary model for investigating unofficial culture and dissident social activity in the post-Stalin period. Although binary oppositions like art versus politics and unofficial versus official are recognized today to be ideologically implicated and critically outmoded, Ann Komaromi argues that they have a certain usefulness when reconceived as structural components of an autonomous unofficial field. This critical model is developed with polemical reference to Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of culture. The late Soviet opposition between art and politics is explored through Andrei Siniavskii's struggle with editors over the 1965 edition of Boris Pasternak's poetry and via the organization of the famous 5 December 1965 "Meeting of Openness" coordinated by Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin. The critical model proposed emphasizes the material history of conceptions of autonomy fundamental to the field, profiling dynamic binaries and permeable boundaries as sites of critical interest.
In this article Ann Komaromi proposes a new critical look at the history of Soviet dissidence by way of samizdat and the idea of a private-public sphere. Samizdat is defined in a less familiar way, as a particular mode of existence of the text, rather than in terms of political opposition or a social agenda. This allows for a broader view of dissidence that includes familiar phenomena like the civil rights or democratic movement, along with relatively little known national, cultural, musical, artistic, poetic, and philosophical groups. The multiple perspectives of Soviet dissidence correspond to a decentered view of a mixed private-public sphere that resembles Nancy Fraser’s modification of Jürgen Habermas’s classic public sphere. This model of a private-public sphere provokes new questions about unofficial institutions and structures, the dialectic between private and public impulses in Soviet samizdat, and the relationship of dissidents to foreign individuals and organizations. The empirical basis for this analysis is a survey of Soviet samizdat periodicals from 1956 to 1986.
There is a supreme irony concerning the history of the concept of “totalitarianism”: during the 1970s, many Western social scientists and intellectuals abandoned this concept, arguing that it was too rigid to account for the changes that were occurring in Eastern Europe at the time; one of the developments they cited was the rise of Central European and Soviet dissidents. At precisely this time, however, the dissidents themselves started to apply the adjective totalitarian to the Communist regimes they rebelled against. Focusing on Adam Michnik’s writings, the article assesses this seeming paradox by adopting a transnational perspective. The article’s main thesis is that, for Michnik, the value of “totalitarianism” did not lie in its analytical precision but in the discursive force the term acquired in transnational exchanges in which Michnik tried to mobilize the support of the Western left for the cause of the Polish opposition. The article substantiates this thesis with two case studies. Addressing West German Social Democrats, the concept of totalitarianism seems to have served as a means of convincing them that support for the Polish opposition was not detrimental to reforms in Eastern Europe and to international détente but a necessary precondition for any authentic peace. In addressing French audiences, Michnik seems to have used the adjective totalitarian to convince his interlocutors that human rights advocacy was not any kind of issue but that French and Polish democratic socialists faced a common threat.
Looking around the courtyard I spotted ... a dozen foreign reporters. Foreigners were easy to spot on a Moscow street.1
Key to the attitudes of Moscow human rights defenders toward the U.S. journalists who reported on their activities was the profound isolation of Soviet citizens from the West, indeed from the rest of the world, that was a major component of Stalinism and post-Stalinism. It made those comparatively few foreigners who came to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s stand out vividly among the Soviets even in cosmopolitan Moscow. For reasons closely associated with that isolation, dissident attitudes toward the journalists were distinguished by a peculiar intensity, whatever direction they might take. Some dissident–journalist associations triggered great enthusiasm; some involved a kind of self-conscious and self-interested exchange of professional favors or were straightforwardly instrumental in nature; while yet others led to a distinct personal hostility on the part of certain human rights activists that challenges any simple notion of how those associations worked. This article traces the emergence and meaning of such attitudes, placing them in the context of Soviet history and culture more broadly.
I argue that for us to attempt an understanding of dissident views of Western reporters, we need first to explore the ways in which dissenters saw themselves and one another in relation to Soviet culture and society. For their attitudes toward foreign correspondents were rooted in a highly complex sense of what it meant to be Soviet and what it meant to be part of the dissident movement, of who were insiders and who outsiders in relation to both identities. For the identities of Soviet dissenters as both Soviets and as dissenters were in rapid flux during this period, and visiting Westerners, including U.S. journalists, not fully aware of the cultural dynamics with which they were engaging, could become caught up in that flux as the boundaries between inside and outside both the dissent movement and Soviet society were complicated and blurred.
The historical origins of Soviet isolation are complex, going back at least to the 1920s, both building on and contributing to a many-layered sense of what it meant to be Soviet in relation with the outside world—fascinated by the outside yet defensive, enthusiastic yet suspicious, imbued with a sense of uneasy backwardness and weakness combined with a powerful desire for self-assurance and pride.2 This was a peculiarly Soviet phenomenon, as opposed to Russian imperial; whereas Russians in the empire had traditionally been wary of attack by outsiders for centuries and had long debated the pros and cons of Western influence, concerns about relations with the West were greatly sharpened with the Bolshevik takeover. No longer was Russia ruled by a dynasty with strong royal Western ties. Instead, it was ruled by a revolutionary group that seemed to pose a considerable threat to Western governments and therefore invited their hostility, including invasion by several Western powers during the Civil War. The Bolshevik response was a kind of drawing in, a voluntary isolation on the part of the state that became involuntary isolation for Soviet citizens. Soon after the Bolshevik coup in 1917, it became increasingly difficult for most Soviet citizens to travel abroad freely. By the same token, the entry of foreigners into the Soviet Union was increasingly controlled, as were relations between Soviets and foreigners who were in the country. This simple fact of physical separation had an impact all its own.
Increasing the self-conscious intensity of Soviet reactions to foreigners was a complex sense of insider- and outsiderhood that had been shaped by the difficult and painful permutations in the development of Soviet identity especially under Iosif Stalin. Stalin encouraged a highly defensive sense of Soviet identity in the 1930s and 1940s, as he sought to establish the principle of “Socialism in One Country”: that the Soviet Union could achieve modernity and socialism despite the absence of world revolution, and that this was necessary in the face of outside hostility not just toward the socialist Soviet Union but toward Russia traditionally. “One feature of the history of old Russia...
This article proposes to treat samizdat in terms of a textual culture opposed to modern print culture. The choice to cast samizdat as an “extra-Gutenberg” phenomenon represents a way of extending the observation that samizdat can no longer simply be defined as the mouthpiece of dissident opposition. Beyond binary oppositions of truth vs. falsehood, and dissidents vs. state, on which previous perceptions of samizdat have depended, we might now see the essential quality of samizdat to be its exemplification of epistemic instability, inasmuch as samizdat texts are not automatically invested with authority. From this perspective, new questions about the production, distribution, and reproduction of samizdat texts with varying types of content turn on a central issue: how was the trustworthiness or value of such texts established? This article explores these issues through personal testimony about the production and circulation of samizdat in the USSR and in the West. Juxtaposing the theory of gift giving with new critical approaches to book history, textual culture, and bibliography, the article aims to highlight the interest of personal testimony and material texts in a critical analysis of samizdat history. Finally, as a striking example of an epistemically unstable textual culture, samizdat represents not merely opposition to a defunct political system: it also exemplifies issues relevant to a global Internet culture today.