site.btaSurvey Reveals Fading Collective Memory, Knowledge about Socialist-time Bulgaria

Survey Reveals Fading Collective Memory,
Knowledge about
Socialist-time Bulgaria

Sofia, November 9 (BTA) - Twenty-five years after the start of
the transition to democracy in Bulgaria, the collective memory
about the Socialist times fades away and the knowledge about the
 period disappears, an opinion poll into the matter showed. The
results of the poll, conducted by Alpha Research among all age
groups above 16 years of age, were presented Sunday at a
BTA-hosted news conference within an initiative entitled, "25
Years Free Bulgaria".

Presenting the survey, Alpha Research's Boryana Dimitrova said
that 94 per cent of the young Bulgarians between 16 and 30 years
 say they know next to nothing about Socialist Bulgaria. Forty
per cent of the respondents in this age bracket could not say
whether the end of Communism was marked by the fall of the
Berlin, Moscow, Sofia or the Chinese wall. Ninety-two per cent
do not know the boundaries, both the actual and the
metaphorical, of the former Communist bloc.

Socialism gets gradually forgotten, while the failures of the
transition to democracy serve as arguments to render those times
 as mythical or idealized, Dimitrova said. The sociologist said
that for a considerable portion of Bulgarians, the major
political figures and events in the late 1990s: Margaret
Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa and the
fall of the Berlin Wall get displaced by ordinary life memories
of the that time.

The assessment of Socialism today is strongly polarized and
almost fully determined by ideological attitudes. Thus,
leftist-minded people and elderly people remember Socialism as a
 time of calm, security, absence of unemployment, free
healthcare, good-quality education and industrialization.
Rightist-minded people assess the period much more critically
and in varying ways: restrictions, injustice, no freedom,
dictatorship, censorship, a time of restricted basic rights and
freedoms, of utopia and public deception.

Alpha Research also compared the assessments of the Bulgarians
about the country's Socialist times between 1944 and 1989 and
Communist-time leader Todor Zhivkov during the 1990s and today.
In 1991, two years after the fall of Communism, when the memory
about the time was still fresh, 76 per cent of adult Bulgarians
assessed Zhivkov negatively, while at the moment 55 per cent
assess him positively. Left to linger in personal memories, in
the nostalgia for the lost security and at the backdrop of
disappearing knowledge about its dark sides, Communism seems to
be losing its political evaluation but to continue to feed old
and new myths.

* * *

The initiative "25 Years Free Bulgaria" takes place under the
auspices of President Rosen Plevneliev. At the news conference
on the eve of the November 10 anniversary, President (1997-2002)
 Peter Stoyanov said that he was convinces that 25 years on,
"freed from the vice of today's superficial and narrow thinking,
 the future generations will appreciate what the Bulgarians are
doing now". Stoyanov described the initiative as "meaningful and
 important because event if it did not teach anything, it would
at least goad the curiosity of the young who do not remember the
 cynical nature of Communism, the lying and mendacity of the
communist-time rulers".

Council of Electronic Media Chairman Georgi Lozanov said that
there is "a purposeful attempt to wipe out the memory about
Communism. The media expert once again raised the question of
creating a museum to Communism in Bulgaria. He argued that the
museum is important for the formation of the identity of today's
 people. SN /ZH/


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