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2. Bulgarian Socialism Early Bulgarian socialism is a neglected subject.43 This remissness is mainly due to the fact that Bulgarian historiography has concentrated overwhelmingly on the establishment of the Marxist paradigm, considering the preceding period “non-scientific,” and thus uninteresting. This unfortunate circumstance has created a distorted picture of the early period, which is regarded as a juvenile episode, coming of age only in the establishment of the Marxist paradigm.44 The early period, extending from the 1880s to the early 1890s was extremely colorful, eclectic and syncretistic. Diverse ideas from various paradigms (Proudhon , Lassalle, Blanc, Bakunin as well as Marx, Lavrov, etc.) coexisted, while the passage from the predominantly populist-orientated socialism to Marxism was slow. The Gabrovski of Nravstvennata Zadacha na Inteligentsiiata (1889), the Blagoev of Sŭvremeniy Pokazatel (1885),45 the Dabev of Siromashka Pravdina (1890) and the Boinikov of Svobodi Misli (1889) were not formed Marxists, if Marxists at all. The 1880s represent the formative period of a whole generation of intellectuals who later developed almost en masse into Social Democrats. Acquaintance with populism in its Russian, but also in its Bulgarian version, as formulated in the movement of Spiro Gulapchev,46 left a long-lasting imprint on this first generation. This was manifest in the first place in the ideological sphere, in the way socialist intellectuals selectively resorted to this earlier ideological arsenal and made use of populist rhetoric in framing a laic understanding of socialism, predominantly for propagandistic purposes. Populism was equally catalytic for the self-understanding of these intellectuals as engaged, political human beings. The populist claim for immediacy, of the intellectual “going to the people,” remained a thin, but determining, element in the background , even when Marxism gained the upper hand. Also residual was its equivalent, that is, the belief in the self-directive role of the people towards emancipation, in other words, the practical tendency of populism . Last, but not least, as we will observe below, the Bulgarian Social Democrats found themselves in the precarious position of resorting 176 IV. Caught up in the Contradictions of Modernity to populist themes, almost by default, that is, because they were constrained by the egalitarian structure of Bulgarian society. The change of the dominant paradigm (from populism to Marxism) also signified a change in the usage of analytical categories. The intellectualized and thus abstract passage from “the people” to “class” posed less of a problem for Bulgarian intellectuals, who managed to fathom the Marxist narrative by the mid-1890s. The problem consisted rather in constructing meaningful political subjects with the help of these same analytical categories. What proved equally challenging was the change in the description of time, represented by the two different paradigms. Populism represented an “elliptic” future, that is, a condensed and accelerated passage to the future by means of a strong leaning on a paradigmatic past. It was precisely this “speedy” passage that raised the horizon of expectations and constituted the strength of the populist revolutionary imaginary with respect to apocalyptic revolutionary time. Marxism represented a “syntactic” future, that is, a linear law-abiding conception of time sequences, following strictly upon each other, determined not by individual voluntarism as in the case of populism, but by the “objective” axioms of historical inevitability. For the Social Democrats, revolutionary time could not be sublimated but only anticipated. The voluntaristic revolutionary aspect was to be reintegrated in Marxism with the amendment of Leninism. The gestation of the Bulgarian socialists took place at a significant turning point in the international socialist world. At the ebbing of the 1880s the populist paradigm was in decline, and by turning to Marxism the Russian socialist émigrés group around Plekhanov dropped the previous persevering motif of a “particular Russian road to socialism.” The establishment of Marxism in Bulgaria developed to a great extent through the Russian connection, and Plekhanov’s polemics with the home populists served as a model for Blagoev’s rebuttal of the Russian populist émigrés in Bulgaria.47 More significantly, the successes of the German Social Democrats established a wholly new international example and it was their program that the Bulgarian Socialists adopted as a blueprint for their movement.48 Germany served not only as a model for a successful socialist party, but also as an example for speedy and efficient industrialization. The initiative for the founding of the Social Democratic Party is dated around 1890. By that time several local circles of socialist intel- [3.145.156.250] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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