Living after the Fall. Contingent Biographies in Postsocialist Space

Abstract

I spent my sabbatical year at the American Research Center in Sofia during the 25th anniversary of what Bulgarians call ‘the changes’ of 1989. In the time since 2014, Bulgarians have been actively questioning the political, economic, and social systems that emerged from the wreckage of the communist experiment. In 2014, political protests were omnipresent as I walked to the central state archives on Moskovska Street, eating banitsa and drinking strong coffee. Some of my favourite moments of the year were spent talking to these protesters about the nature of the liberal democratic capitalist project—bought and sold as a new and improved form of modernity. Generally, the people I spoke with were displeased (they were protesters after all). Toward the end of my time in Bulgaria, one of these protesters accompanied my family to the ‘picnic of freedom’, held in Borisova gradina in Sofia to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the collapse of communism. As Zheliu Zhelev, the first postsocialist president of Bulgaria (for whom I have a great deal of respect), continued to hold forth about the transition and the arrival of freedom in the face of tyranny, my friend leaned over and hissed, ‘What kind of freedom is this?’ The specter of communism (the literal, afterlife specter) continues to haunt Southeastern Europe. The papers in this special section of Südosteuropa all explore the experiences of people living after the collapse of communism—the ways in which matters of identity and place can be constructed and understood in a world transformed. At their root, these questions—of how space is claimed, how life is explained, and how meaning is to be found—are historiographical. They seek to trace beginnings and identify a direction for the future. In the stories of life in Bulgaria after the changes, the absence of communism is overwhelmingly present. The authors of the essays presented here ultimately ask: how do we live after the fall? Südosteuropa 64 (2016), no. 3, pp. 277-283