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).