Negotiating Socialist Lives after the Fall. Narrative Resources and Strategies of the First Socialist Generation in Bulgaria

Abstract

This article is based on the life stories of about 100 women and men born in the 1920s and 1930s in Bulgaria. The stories were elicited in oral history interviews enquiring into their lives under the communist regime. The starting hypothesis was that, in the absence of a shared public narrative about the socialist past, as is the case in present-day Bulgaria, people would struggle to make sense of their lives during the time of socialism and have difficulty producing meaningful autobiographical accounts. The article explores the narrative strategies the interviewees adopted to let them present their lives as meaningfully seamless and coherent, despite the change in frame of reference. Four such strategies are discussed: sameness (unbroken loyalty to the former regime); biographical revisionism (distancing the self from the regime but retaining loyalty to the ideology); reversed temporality (privileging the past); and steering away (focusing on private life while ignoring its context).

The autobiographical archive in post-communist Romania: “True” heroes and collective victimization

“…Different discourses of memory, which form part of the politics of memory and function as a top-down performance of the collective memory, were adopted in the East Central European post-communist countries, ranging from the denial of the communist past to the moderate preservation of continuity with the communist past, or even to a consolidation of the national identity based on it (Jõesalu, 2020; Kosmos, 2020). In some countries, the researchers observed the absence of “a shared public narrative about the socialist past” (Koleva, 2016), while the rejection and condemnation of the communist past (Reifová, 2018: 589), which forms part of the official memory discourse, was perceived as being in contradiction with the autobiographical accounts of the past, including the nostalgic views (Marin, 2016; Mihelj, 2017).…”

Expensive Health: Health-seeking Behaviours in Diversified Medical Markets

“…There were other areas of course, in which the past was less than idyllic in many respects (see Koleva 2016). On the margins of the proclaimed universal and free healthcare during socialism, other informal costs were readily present in many Central and Eastern European countries as well as in the former member states of the Soviet Union.…”