Communism and the Remorse of an Innocent Victimizer (review)

When studying the mechanics of Soviet-style societies, Western scholars and journalists have focused far too often on police terror and dissidents, Zlatko Anguelov rightly argues. Plus the ubiquitous shortages of goods, we might add.

In Communism and the Remorse of an Innocent Victimizer, Anguelov, a Bulgarian-born medical writer now living in the United States, paints life under socialism as rather carefree though morally corrupted and himself as a cheerful, self-centered, and naïve subject of his native Soviet-dominated country. It took him a long time to realize "my own contamination with communism, which I am exposing throughout this book" (p. 153).

Anguelov's Bulgaria under Communism is the dull, provincial place typical of Soviet-style socialist societies. The village penetrated the universities, not the other way round, as propaganda would have it. Bulgarians were neither heroes nor villains but compliant citizens ignoring politics and ignorant of any alternative system or the outside world. Their party's ideology was irrelevant to them, as well as to the party itself. Communism "did not consist only or mostly of conventional cruelty, abuse of human rights, and political violence. It was, in fact, a most ordinary lie" (p. 63). As long as the system seemed stable, Bulgarians perceived their lives as normal.

Anguelov, who was the son of a privileged family, was born in 1946 and became "a spoiled brat" (p. 80). He attended a school for children of the privileged elite and went on to study medicine. At the age of 28, he became a professor of anatomy. Later, he moved on to work as a medical journalist. When Communism collapsed, he briefly engaged in the pro-democracy movement but soon lost interest because "politics is practical action, not theory or wishful thinking" (p. 172). He "retreated into [his] former apathy and applied for immigration to Canada" (p. 172) and now lives in Iowa City.

Anguelov never joined the Communist Party—not because of a "conscious rejection of communism as a social program" (p. 104) but because he was reluctant "to be in the same pot with the people [emphasis in original] who embodied the Communist Party" (p. 104).

Communism and the Remorse of an Innocent Victimizer tells the epic story of Anguelov's family, reaching as far back as his great-grandparents. We learn minute details about his three marriages, his divorces, his love for his six children, and his experience of living in a cottage. Almost as an aside, he mentions that he cooperated for some years with the Bulgarian secret police (the notorious DS) as an informer. "The truth is," he insists, "I reported nonsense" (p. 127) and never caused harm to anybody. Or so he wishes us to believe. He claims that "no report was ever based on a true story or had even a remote association with the real activities of the people mentioned" (p. 127), though it would be interesting to check this assertion against the documentary record.

Anguelov sketches a realistic picture of everyday life in a Soviet-style society with himself as the book's leading opportunist. Having lived in Communist-era Poland and in the Soviet Union myself, I met many of his likes: journalists, professors, writers who operated smoothly in the official power structures but did not become fawning acolytes of the regime and therefore considered themselves morally superior. With the cracks in the system widening, they began to present themselves as the critical intelligentsia—Anguelov eventually started to work as a freelancer for Radio Free Europe—and when this became fashionable, they recast themselves as former dissidents, especially when speaking to Western journalists.

Students of Communist societies will not learn anything new from this narcissistic insider's narrative. It is full of sentimentality but short on insights. Readers who are unfamiliar with the Communist dictatorship's effect on the individual would be better served by an analytical text, or else a true novel. With a host of colorful family stories, Anguelov had the material...