The communist party had created a super state that took care of use from the cradle to the grave. Free education, free healthcare, guaranteed employment, hardly any theft or breakins at all… On the three radio stations we received in Bulgaria, we heard almost on a daily basis how much better the life was in Eastern Europe compared to the West. Everywhere on the streets were signs with propaganda written on them and the portrait of our party leader Todor Zjivkov hung in every school and in all public places. The streets were named after heroes such as Marx and Lenin and we were proud of the achievements of the communist system. Those who could not thrive in such a society could only blame themselves. Such as the old man who usually begged on the steps of the church, probably because he would rather be drunk than sober. I often gave him some of my pocket money, but I never talked to him, because beggars were by definition scary in a country without any unemployed.
A job was created for everyone. The party was a master in creating unnecessary jobs. Not that anyone felt unnecessary, but in Bulgaria, as in other communist countries, the principle was upheld that of three labourers, one worked, the second supervised and the third caused problems. It was more rule than exception that people arranged all sorts of private issues during working hours. ‘Work ennobles man’ was one of the most well-known slogans. Even the school children had to experience this and that is why we were regularly sent to the farmers to help them with their harvest. We all received a personal invitation. On the front the words read ‘voluntary work for the fatherland’. On the inside, it said: ‘attendance compulsory on penalty of sanctions’. We were not sure what the sanctions were, but no one dared not turn up for the compulsory voluntary work.
Each year it was something different: plucking grapes, digging up potatoes, gathering peanuts…I had a particular dislike of the peanuts. My hands would turn pitch black and rough from rooting in the dirt, I got backache from bending down and when it rained, the field turned into a mud pool. The worst things were the high targets, which were practically impossible to achieve if you were doing this work for the first time. If you did not achieve the target you would receive a public reprimand from the comrade who supervised. To prevent this, we used to put a layer of dirt on the bottom of the bucket; that weighed much heavier than peanuts and the kilos quickly added up.
The harvest was an inexhaustible source of stories about how we would fill the bottom of the cherry crates with leaves, how we smeared toothpaste on the doorknobs of the comrades and the modern version of sending a telegram: setting a piece of paper alight between the toes of the biggest sleepyhead and wait until he received the message. The damage from this cruel game was limited: in the worst case, they would have some blisters and the sleepyhead would not be able to achieve their target.
‘We stayed in the farmer’s houses and some class mates were delegated to the man who runs the village shop’, my friend Olga said. ‘The boys came into his store, drank all his booze and pelted each other with the eggs they found there. Then they went to the village square and threw the remaining eggs at a communist monument.’
We laughed out loud. An adult would have landed in jail for many years for such an act, but they could not incarcerate drunk school kids. They were simply expelled from school. And shaven bald. That way everyone could see they were dangerous criminals.
Olga’s parents were labourers, the class that was praised to the heavens. On television, we did not hear anything else other than that our labourers were doing so well. The best workers received medals with the inscription ‘Hero of Labour’ and the departments with the highest production rates won the coveted trophy. Their photos were hung next to the entrance to the factories.
The Bulgarian people passionately built on the communist ideal and did everything the Russian leaders expected from them, such as was expected from a good little satellite state. When the Russians revealed after Stalin’s death that the Great Leader had in fact been a killing machine, we could hardly believe this. We tried to soothe the pain of this discovery with jokes. Otherwise we could not process that the building of communism was at the cost of so many innocent loves. There was a joke about Stalin, who was called by the secret police with the question if he had found his lost pipe.
‘Yes, it was under the couch’, said Stalin.
‘That’s impossible!’ the policeman cried out. ‘Three people have already confessed to stealing your pipe’.
The sexy enemy of the people
The family I grew up in was only half-communist. I did not want to know about my mother’s bourgeois’ upbringing. Of course, she had told us that her father had been a land owner and that the communists had taken everything away when they came to power after the Second World War. She vividly remembered how as a little girl she chased the uninvited guests from the grounds with a stick. They just laughed at her, pushed her to one side and plucked all the fruit from the vegetable garden ‘in the name of the people’. It was a shame about the lovely home, the servants and the horse stables, but she had to share her wealth with the rest of the people.
My sister and I thought it was weird that my grandparents used to be so wealthy. Luckily, we had nothing to fear. Usually everyone from aristocratic or bourgeois origins were declared the ‘enemy of the people’, but our father was a party member with the best communist background one could wish for. That compensated the traces of ‘blue blood’ and we did not have to fear that we would be denied access to good jobs.
We lived in a house at the foot of a hill. On the top a giant granite statue of a Russian solder towered above us. Aljosha could be seen both during the day and at night time, lit up by strong spotlights, and could not be ignored. The granite soldier watched over us and was the symbol of mother Russia who protected us from the imperialist West. Everyone who arrived in Plovdiv could see the colossal statue looming.
Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria, was built on seven hills, but just this one had become the symbol of the city. The attractions on the other hills were in the eyes of outsiders less imposing: an old clock tower, a weather station, an open-air cinema and a 2nd Century Roman amphitheatre. The century old excavations proved that Plovdiv was one of the oldest European cities. Not that there was much to signify this, because most of the monumental buildings had been transformed into advertisements for the communist ideal. They were hung full with slogans and housed exhibitions of carefully selected events in history, which the communists did not have any qualms about. From the viewpoint of the hills, the city looked like a giant beehive. People would cross each other walking, cars, busses and taxis rushed in every direction, school kids with neat uniforms walked in straight lines, labourers went to the factories in the industrial zone. Somewhere in this giant beehive was the queen, the communist party, and the people tried to care for her and make her happy.
Most people instinctively knew who they could trust. I mostly used my pretty neighbour Olga as a sounding block. Olga was a few years older than me and she was my role model on how to handle men. She enjoyed life and did not want to settle down. Olga could permit herself this luxury, because she was very attractive, with pretty brown eyes, and long blond hair that reached to her waist. Even when she had to cut her hair because of the toppled paint pot, with her large breasts and skinny waist she still formed an object of desire for men.