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Introduction
- Cornell University Press
- Chapter
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1 Introduction “People smoke, from the poles to the equator, the civilized and the savage. As one wise observer from the Orient answered to the enigmatic question of why; the sick smoke—to improve their health, the dreamer—to improve his mood, the happy—to heighten his joy in life, the rich man—out of boredom , the poor man—to forget his horrible fate.” —Bŭlgarski tiutiun (Bulgarian Tobacco) July 7, 1935, 2. There is something about tobacco that drew me in;it was as if I were being deeply inhaled. Perhaps it was the picturesque garlands of lush green tobacco leaves that hung drying in the eaves of houses in the Rhodope and Pirin Mountains of southern Bulgaria. These leaves seemed to call me to explore the lives spent gathering them and hanging them to dry, sorting, packing, rolling them into cigarettes, trading them in distant smoke-filled rooms. I wanted to follow tobacco from these mountain plots to the smoky cafés,bars,and restaurants of Sofia—not the ones I inhabited between long days in the archives but the establishments of bygone days. My fascination, though, was also rooted in today’s Sofia, a world of sociability that still requires a cigarette in hand. I wished I could partake, but I felt unequipped—unable, or perhaps simply unwilling, to inhale. Still, I was and am continually seduced by the grace,the repose,the sensual aura of passionate smokers and the era they evoke,an era when people either didn’t know about or didn’t fear the effects of so many things that bring pleasure into our lives. Today tobacco is a bogeyman,most starkly in North America,and perhaps rightfully so, though it was only a generation ago that North Americans smoked in restaurants,café,on planes and buses,and even in classrooms,while our favorite heroes and ingenues puffed away on the silver screen. Smoke’s path from delectable to devilish was a long and complicated one, but for better or worse we have arrived in a new world. The question is, how did 2 INTRODUCTION we get here? And why are Bulgarians, like many others across the globe, still “behind” us in this regard? The global story of tobacco has been told in splendid and enlightening detail.1 It has drawn in historians, who have explored the economic, political , and social implications of the commodity in various national contexts, most notably in the United States.2 But what about other contexts, peripheries , or, more accurately, other centers of the tobacco world? As other work on tobacco production, commerce, and consumption has shown, outside the United States the tobacco narrative is radically different.3 Tobacco was experienced, lived, and filtered in entirely different ways, driving or accompanying different kinds of transformations. This book explores the ways in which the social life of tobacco in Bulgaria was shaped by local mores and experiences and mitigated Bulgaria’s place on the periphery of other centers of political and economic influence. By 1966 Bulgaria had become the largest exporter of cigarettes in the world. I explore the path to that place of preeminence, focusing on the attendant social and cultural transformations, as well as the politics and geopolitics of Bulgarian tobacco. Tobacco provides a valuable lens through which one can gainfully study and even rethink the parameters of Bulgarian history. As Dimitŭr Iadkov, director of the state-run Bulgarian tobacco industry from 1970 to 1991, observed, “I am certain that there is no other economic branch whose history has more analogy and organic connection with the history of Bulgaria than does tobacco. In its ‘biography,’ as in a mirror, one sees Bulgaria’s economic ,social,and political condition.”4 This book is essentially the biography that Iadkov suggests. It traces the commodification, patterns of production and commerce, and modes of consumption of tobacco in Bulgarian history. It illuminates the ways in which tobacco was woven into local social,cultural, and political dynamics as well as into Bulgaria’s shifting relationships to the outside world. Tobacco did not just reflect—like Iadkov’s mirror—changes in Bulgarian society. Its commodification was a critical factor in driving those changes. Pushing further, I maintain that smoking itself was implicated in Bulgarian social change. The pharamacological and sociological impacts of smoking were instrumental in the arrival of modernity to the Bulgarian lands. As elusive as such a prospect may be,smoking seems to have driven transformation, accompanying and even propelling a...