Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria

Conclusion

229 Conclusion As the world gradually pushes tobacco smokers out into the cold, in Bulgaria they are still welcome inside. Smoking is still central to leisure culture;the gleaming new postcommunist café,cocktail bar, pizzeria, and even McDonald’s are still smoker-friendly. As of 2005, a law limiting smoking in public buildings did go into effect, though its enforcement has been sporadic. Having visited Bulgaria every year from 2005 to 2010, I do remember watching as the female staff members at the national archive moved their smoke breaks from the reading room to the hallway and eventually to the women’s bathroom. There they camped out,leaving behind their smoke and ash. A quick visit to the small stall-like bathroom meant that the smell of smoke would linger in your clothes and hair as if you had been out clubbing. A 2010 bill to prohibit all smoking in restaurants, bars, and other leisure establishments failed to pass through the Bulgarian parliament. Smokers are digging in deep in order to maintain what one Bulgarian friend told me is their way of life. For many, smoking is still a beloved activity. The 2009 memoir of Ivan Pitekov, a longtime interpreter for Bulgartabak, is nothing short of a treatise on the joys of tobacco. His essays,lumped under the provocative title S aromat na tiutiun (With the Aroma of Tobacco), celebrate the smells and the aura of the 230 CONCLUSION industry and the leaf in titillating detail. Pitekov’s writings are also full of open disdain for the opponents of the smoking habit: What does this plant represent in and of itself? This is an agricultural genus that is teeming with poisons and bitter substances and has an unpleasant smell and taste! This is what nonsmokers say. But offer a smoker (or even better a female smoker) a box of aromatized cigarettes and a bag of potatoes. He (or she) will pass over with contempt the blessing of the potato and will open the box and slowly light up. And a miracle will inevitably occur. Their mood will get better, their pulse will increase, their outlook will become kind and gracious. It is no accident that wise people say that one can’t live on bread alone. Bread and potatoes are food for the body, and tobacco is food for the soul.1 Like so many Bulgarians today, Pitekov embraces smoking with abandon from a personal and a philosophical standpoint. Though the country has an increasing number of nonsmokers and even antismokers, the smokers, it seems, still have the upper hand. It remains to be seen whether new definitions of “Western” and “modern”—which seem to require snuffing out the global cigarette—will resonate in postcommunist Bulgaria. Although it has been under the umbrella of the European Union since 2008,conformity to norms of severely restricting public smoking is controversial at best. While Bulgaria fought long and hard to get into the EU, it is also among the most forthright Euro-skeptics in the union. It fights to maintain independent policies in as many areas as possible. Given the country’s history of ambivalence toward the West,it is not surprising that many see antismoking as a Western import. For others,antismoking messages may be too reminiscent of abstinence propaganda from the communist period. Yet for all their efforts to curtail smoking, the communist authorities never actually banned it. Thus there is a certain irony in the fact that smoking restrictions and proposed bans have been introduced by postcommunist governments. Many smokers surely see this heightened interference in leisure activity and curtailment of freedoms as onerous. Whatever the reason, Bulgaria ’s antismoking lobby is weak,and antismoking bans will meet with opposition for many years to come. For many,such bans openly threaten Bulgarian autonomy and entrenched modes of leisure. It might also be argued that the introduction of Western fast food, automobile culture, and other by-products of the transition to capitalism is as harmful to public health as smoking. Postcommunist Bulgaria—like the rest of the Eastern Bloc and China— continues to maintain some of the highest smoking rates in the world. As I CONCLUSION 231 have argued in this book, smoking accompanied and even drove Bulgaria’s political and cultural coming of age since the nineteenth century. Bulgarian modernity was infused with smoke as ever-larger segments of the population entered a new world of public sociability, cultural production, and political interaction. Smoking had a chemical and social...