Andropov didn’t have much time to check if his snitch system worked. At his election, it seemed he was already gravely ill. Of course, this was not communicated and when he was at death’s door nearly one year later the media only reported that the general secretary had a cold. It was already clear to us what this meant, because usually the Russian party leader’s cold would not have made front page news.
Tsjernenko succeeded Andropov and drew his last breath thirteen months later. The Bulgarian people were ready to join in with another mourning circus. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985 we had some hope, because he was only 54 years old and looked healthy and energetic.
The new party leader slowly opened the channels to criticism, but only a few dared to sail through them after having lived in an unquestioning society for years.
The unexpected introduction of glasnost was experienced like a roller coaster in Bulgaria: we didn’t know which way we would be thrown with this new openness. Gorbachev himself seemed uncertain. His speeches were full of euphemisms and double meanings. We felt that he was trying to reckon with the past, but didn’t quite have the courage. Gorbachev didn’t criticize Lenin’s acts of terror or the violent appropriation of farming land. He blamed Stalin for all deviations of party principles. His desire for reformation went hand-in-hand with unambiguous remarks: ‘We are on our way to a new world, the world of communism. We will never deviate from this path.’
This was a sign that we had to be careful with interpreting the new openness. Everyone assumed that the communist system would last for centuries, but there was little left of the enthusiasm that the first generation had shown when building the most perfect society. We didn’t know what to believe, but we knew it was better not to believe what the papers printed or what we saw on television. There was AIDS in the West, airplanes fell out of the skies, there were storms and floods, the economy wasn’t doing well…this didn’t happen in our country. Sporadic incidents were quoted as small news items on the back pages. In 1986 the communist party even managed to cover up the gigantic nuclear disaster in Chernobyl for days on end. An inquiry showed that the reactor had displayed severe problems back in 1979. Seven years later a steam explosion blew away the 1 million kilo lid from the reactor. A radioactive cloud spread over Europe, but the Russians continued to deny that a major disaster had taken place.
The radiation was that bad that we admired mutated crops in Bulgaria, while the media continued to claim that there was nothing wrong. At school, we would regularly watch films about nuclear bombs exploding and read about the dangers of radiation, but following the disaster in Chernobyl we were told that a raised radiation level in the atmosphere was actually good for us. ‘It will make boys grow taller,’ the comrades said. They didn’t add that it could give you cancer, never mind it being the largest nuclear disaster in human history. Almost 9.000 tons of radioactive material had been released, ninety times more than the atom bomb that exploded in Hiroshima.
The party tried its best to serve us ready-made interpretations of reality through guidelines, propaganda and even art. All paintings and statues had to be realistic. Abstract works of art were seen as an attempt to overthrow the communist rule. We were raised with absolute truths and we truly believed in some of the lies because they were more plausible than the truth. The reality we lived in, with all its secret rules and codes, was too complicated to comprehend. When senior party members went somewhere, trees without roots, which were cut down in other unimportant places, were planted along their routes. Our party leader wanted to be immortalized with a monument in his birth place before his death. Foreigners didn’t understand: they put down flowers for him, because they though he was a fallen hero. The police kept on removing the flowers. In the end two soldiers were stationed to prevent these ‘flower’ incidents.
Gorbachev tried to sort out the privileges and misuse of power by the party officials: thousands of bureaucrats were sent home or disappeared in prisons for corruption. The West placed ‘Gorby’ on a pedestal and according to American polls he was more popular than the President of the United States. We wondered if Gorbachev laughed at the jokes that were told at his expense. For example that he was not aware that he has a red coloured birthmark on his forehead, before he saw a picture of himself in a Western paper. The Russian media had always Photoshopped his birthmark.
The photo editors could not grow more hair on his head. This was a shame of course, because hair was extremely important in communist society. Too much hair was not a good thing for any citizen and neither was too little. This was also the case for Gorbachev, who had been turned down in the past for the position of First Secretary to the Alliance of Young Communists. The reason: for a leader of young communists he had too little hair. For the leader of the Soviet Union it seemed he had just enough, even though many people didn’t think he was representative. Some critics even claimed the birthmark on his forehead looked like the contours of the arch-rival America.
Although the Russian leader had no intention of bringing communism to an end, he had involuntarily become the initiator of a rotting process. With glasnost came the striptease of the system. It was carried out by a shy naïve prostitute that only dared to take off one or two items of clothing to start off with and then later show the naked truth.
With all the revelations of cruelty in the camps, the party lost her grip on the past. We wakened from the mass hypnosis. Not that Gorbachev had envisaged this. He hadn’t established glasnost to give the people freedom of speech, but by creating more openness stimulating the economic development. In answer to questions where it was not time to denounce the present system he replied: ‘Why should I? Socialism is my conviction and I will promote this for as long as I can talk and work.’
We hung on his every word and we concluded that he would never change his mind.
Surprise attack
Glasnost changed little to nothing at our school. We learned that the Soviet Union covered one-sixth of the earth and that no one dared to go against this powerful empire. We learned to be proud of all that was Russian, even the fact that Gorbachev had worked his way up from inhabitant of a farming village to the leader of a world power. This was the land of unlimited opportunities and not America.
The teachers always used a tried and tested method. Their questions steered us to the only right answer. No one tried to defend an original theory, since that was not appreciated. In fact: if your opinion deviated too much from the teacher’s then you were downgraded. We therefore tried to predict what kind of answer a teacher wanted to hear to keep them happy.
The school system flowed seamlessly into the social life that was expected of us. In the communist society, self-initiative was not appreciated. Of course, we all had our own opinions, but we pretended we didn’t. We could only be ourselves in our love lives. I only allowed myself to be guided by someone else once. As a result, I met my match. Dimitar was a real ‘ladies man’ and dumped girls with as much ease as I did with boys. I often saw him at school, walking arm-in-arm with the prettiest girls. Milena was his latest conquest and she was very proud of this fact, despite my vocal objections. When Dimitar dumped her after one month for someone else, she was inconsolable.
‘Someone has to make him experience what it feels like to walk around with a broken heart,’ I told her.
‘If you’re planning on trying that, watch out that you don’t fall in love with him, because Dimitar is a real charmer,’ Milena warned me. ‘And how do you know he’s attracted to you?’