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 mary neuburger bonbons over cigarettes and were not ashamed to admit it. Let’s enumerate them: Robespierre, Napoleon, Pasteur, Pavlov, Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky, and many others.”59 Significantly, other items associated with luxury consumption and with pleasure were offered as an alternative. Although both luxury and smoking were theoretically censured after 1976, the regime was not impervious to the population’s continued demand for sources of pleasure and continued to supply them. In the case of youth, the dilemmas of this scenario were equally glaring. Youth,like women,had a special place in the anti-smoking campaigns.Like women, their efforts in tobacco production were recognized. “Voluntary” youth brigades provided large contingents of seasonal labor for tobacco cultivation . Young workers were praised for their “limitless love for the homeland ”as they made personal sacrifices to help sort “not dried lifeless tobacco leaves, but golden valuta, [to buy] machines for our factories, tractors and combines for our native fields.”60 But like women, youth were not encouraged to consume the products of their labor. Instead, Bulgarian authorities were openly concerned that youth were among the fastest-growing smoking segments of the population.61 With this in mind, antitobacco lecturers traveled around to schools leading discussions and delivering lectures on such topics as “Tobacco—The Enemy of the People.”62 Smoking among youth was critically evaluated and, as with adults, analysts emphasized the role of negative phenomena such as “conformism, showmanship, snobbery,” and a “passion for fashion.”63 Other sources explored youth smoking as a result of the need for boys to be “masculine”and fulfill their “internal needs for pleasure.”64 Researchers were also concerned with the misplaced desire among youth who smoked to appear “modern.” As one Bulgarian youth who was interviewed admitted, “I have observed that some of my friends, even though they don’t smoke, will take cigarettes so they don’t look silly or backward in the eyes of their group of friends.”65 For youth, as for adults, smoking was connected with “irrational consumption” and even more so with the “irrational use of free time,” of which they unfortunately had a surplus.The “problem” of free time, as numerous authors asserted, was that youth and adults alike were unable to use it in a “productive” way.66 With this in mind, the Bulgarian state opened a spate of youth clubs, restaurants,and discotheques with the express idea of countering “irrational consumption” among youth as well as adults.67 The intention was for such establishments to provide a place to “satisfy the growing demands of both youth and adults, to appease the need to express social prestige and at the same time exclude the use of alcohol and tobacco products.” The regime clearly recognized the need to appease the population’s longing for leisure consumption, and so wanted to play a role in engineering such pleasures. inhaling luxury  As a result it built and maintained a variety of venues that it claimed would somehow be infused with “refined taste and high culture.”68 As it turned out, such “high culture” was eclipsed by a more vibrant proliferation of popular culture and sociability that was apparently impossible without tobacco and alcohol. As one source on the problems of youth described: They [discotheques] were created for the more effective use of free time for youth. But do they fulfill these functions? In my opinion, categorically “no.”Especially where they are under the control of Balkantourist . . . discotheques have turned into places where young people spend a lot of money and learn how to smoke and drink imported alcoholic drinks. And if there is something that they learned from the propaganda on sobriety [and anti-smoking], then it is lost and forgotten in the atmosphere of these luxurious, smoke-filled venues.69 That these establishments, whose express purpose was supposedly abstinence from tobacco and alcohol, were neither smoke- nor drink-free is telling. Indeed, this fact epitomizes one of the fundamental contradictions behind the luxury “problem” in socialist Bulgaria. The regime both promoted (especially in the 1960s) and berated luxury. It supplied the venues and products for luxury consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and other products and then berated the population for its excess.It felt the need to reward its workers with a higher standard of living and the fruits of its own labors, but also regulated this consumption when it became “irrational.” The closer “mature communism” approached in theory, the more the government...

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