How the Late Socialist Intelligentsia Swapped Ideology

The article by Zhivka Valiavicharska contributes to an important discussion about the cultural and intellectual history of “mature socialism.” This history, as the article makes clear, pertains to problems associated with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and what followed thereafter. The questions that this article brings to mind include the following: Why did the public intellectual and cultural space, funded and monitored by the communist regime, become so receptive to the “totalitarian” paradigm from the West? Was there a common pattern of ideological realignment among intellectuals not only in Bulgaria but also in other countries of the Soviet bloc, including the Soviet Union? How important was this realignment for the collapse of communism and subsequent radical economic reforms? These questions deserve a substantial conversation, and my comments below are just sketchy notes for it. In them, I argue that the porous boundaries between official and dissident thinking in Bulgaria did not mean the erosion of ideology but rather its substitution: the discredited schema of the communist “progress of humanity” gave way to a liberal schema of the same teleological power. Furthermore, I suggest that there was a common pattern of this intellectual substitution in Bulgaria and among Moscow intellectuals in the Soviet Union. Finally, I support the agenda of investigating continuity and change of political ideologies in Bulgaria and other countries in the post-Soviet space on either side of the political rupture of 1989–91.

Valiavicharska’s case study of Zheliu Zhelev and his book Fascism speaks to the new literature on the intellectual and cultural space under late communism—a literature that questions the traditional dichotomy between public and private, dissent and officialdom, samizdat discussions and the official press. Zhelev was a remarkable figure, linking and transcending all of the above. Expelled from the Party in 1965, he was exiled to the countryside, which provided him with time and space to finish his magnum opus. In 1981, the manuscript was published, possibly with the assistance of Liudmila Zhivkova, daughter of the communist head of the Bulgarian party-state. The Bulgarian secret police immediately declared the book an ideological diversion, while party apparatchiks eagerly snatched rare copies of Fascism, read it, and probably passed it to their relatives and friends. Among the most perceptive readers of Zhelev’s book were established party philosophers, who acknowledged Fascism as a fundamental denunciation of the communist system. It is not possible to classify Zhelev as a classic dissident, yet the impact of his book on the Bulgarian public was perhaps uniquely great.

To understand the success of Zhelev’s provocation, it is important to discuss the specific nature of the socialist intelligentsia and the cultural–intellectual space it created. The monopoly of the communist party-state on publishing, printing, and even the distribution of paper remained virtually absolute. Just as money in contemporary capitalism is supposed to be in banks, in neo-Stalinist countries intellectual and cultural production was supposed to be in state-funded “creative unions,” state-owned universities, and so on. Stalin bribed intellectuals into the Soviet intelligentsia, and this bribery achieved what ideology often could not.¹ Philosophers in Bulgaria and other socialist countries were supposed to be people who worked at the Institute of Philosophy, on the state payroll. Future Nobel Prize-winner Iosif Brodskii (Joseph Brodsky) learned in 1964 that an unemployed genius outside the Writers Union could not be considered a poet. The communist regime organized cultural and intellectual space so effectively that a truly deadly intellectual challenge to this regime could come only from within this space.

Valiavicharska mentions the Bulgarian “cultural renaissance” of the 1970s and 1980s, which was probably linked to the patronage of Zhivkov’s daughter Liudmila. “Cultural renaissance” meant a growing number of state-paid cultural and intellectual activities, and stable jobs associated with these activities. It meant a record number of state institutions where intellectuals could congregate and interact among themselves: museums, libraries, academic institutes, and research labs. It meant the significant growth of an economic, cultural, and intellectual “gray zone” between organized public structures and the tolerated forms...