The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe by Kristen Ghodsee (review)

Kristen Ghodsee's latest book is her most unique. Following several ethnographic studies of Bulgaria's opening to the capitalist, democratic West after 1989, The Left Side of History is the work of a public intellectual. Ghodsee slips off the cloak of scholarly reserve in favor of a choppy, dynamic narrative that scrutinizes the demonization of the left in historical narratives and political discussions after the Cold War. This reflection on the appeal of communist ideals is steeped in an awareness of a current crisis in capitalism. A Western scholar, Ghodsee does not pine for the "good old communist days," yet her book exudes ambivalent admiration for people who sacrificed all in the name of the communist dream. It is their stories that she tells, for "small histories can reveal grand narratives, and grand narratives can inspire new ideas" (xx).

This political awareness interacts with an introspective exploration of circumstance and serendipity in life. The book, as Ghodsee tells it, came out of chance encounters with past stories that took on a new meaning in light of contemporary economic and social tensions. Her acquaintance with British physicist Freeman Dyson at Princeton led her to Frank Thompson (1920–44), a former friend of Dyson's (and brother of historian E. P. Thompson) killed in Bulgaria. An interest in "state feminism" tied Ghodsee to retired geneticist Elena Lagadinova (b. 1930), who from 1968 to 1990 led the official Bulgarian women's organization but also happened to belong to a family of communists and wartime partisans. And while the Lagadinovs were born in the poverty of interwar rural Bulgaria, and Thompson came from an upper middle-class Oxford family, they shared an opposition to the dominant order and readiness to die in the name of social justice.

The first part of the book reconstructs the lives of Frank Thompson and the three Lagadinov brothers. Their different paths—one through Britain's public school system and wartime admiration for the Soviet people, the others through the Bulgarian communist party, exile to the Soviet Union for the elder Kostadin or sojourn at prison for the younger Assen—brought them to the Bulgarian forests in the early 1940s. Both Frank and Assen did not survive the war. The Englishman was captured and shot summarily in June 1944, while Lagadinov was ambushed and beheaded in August 1944. Ghodsee navigates gingerly the postwar mythologizing of the resistance movement, which legitimized the communist regime's hold on power (chapter 8). Chapter 9, for example, uses the notes of Boris Lagadinov (the third brother) to reveal the precarious existence of his band of partisans, who inflicted no damage on the authorities and much suffering on the civilians. The reader is left wondering if their sacrifice was worthwhile and easily agrees with Ghodsee, who "saw little evidence to show that the early deaths of men like Frank Thompson and Assen Lagadinov had contributed anything to the 'lasting enrichment of the life of mankind'" (98).

It is the second part of the book that defends the choices of Thompson and the Lagadinovs to commit their lives to the promise of a better, more just society. Ghodsee interviews Elena Lagadinova and some of the associates she recruited in the 1970s and 1980s to represent the interests of women before a mostly male party leadership. While Elena, who became a partisan at 14 in 1944, was a believer, others, like Anelia (b. 1942), distrusted communism all along. Yet they all became casualties of the post-1989 market economy that undermined many of the social and economic gains Bulgaria made after the Second World War. Anelia's "epithany" is most unsettling. A successful freelance translator in the 1990s but unemployed and on the brink of losing her home during the recession of the early 2010s, in her 60s she found validity in...