The Bulgarian horrors
Tim Garton Ash
Sofia By the last frontier one knew what to expect. The three-hour wait. The laughable machismo of the little men in uniform. The form-filling, useless except to give the clerks the illusion of useful employment. Grubby, badly-printed forms crookedly torn-off at the edges (perforation is an invention scorned by the Soviet bloc clerk). The wooden prefabricated phrases – 'eternal friendship', 'total unanimity', 'invincible solidarity' –on the dilapidated billboards.
Then the wearing journey on narrow, pot-holed roads. Arriving hopefully to find hopeless queues in the offices allocating accommodation. The Interhotel with its inevitable contingent of Arab visitors – the foyer as kasbah. A dimly-lit restaurant with half the lightbulbs removed to save energy (the lights are .going out all over Eastern Europe), The battle to extract a Western newspaper from a reluctant vendor. Loud invocation of the spirit of Helsinki, finally the Medusa behind the desk rises six inches from her chair and offers the English newspaper on which she has been sitting. Hot from the press. It is a six-day-old Morning Star.
From Poznan to Sofia this performance varies little. But behind the uniform mask there is always a distinctive national face. In Sofia you may best find this round the corner from the Grand Hotel, at what is now officially called the 'Krim' restaurant. Most people still know it as the 'Russian Club', Alone among the subject peoples of the Soviet bloc the Bulgars have traditional cause to cleave to the Russians. The first 'liberation' by the Russians, in 1878, was experienced as a genuine liberation after five centuries of Ottoman oppression. Todor Zhii/kov is now the most doggedly loyal of Brezhnev's satraps. In this respect he is starkly opposed to his neighbour, Ceausescu. There is little evidence that he is therefore less popular among his people. On the contrary, my informants suggested that the Zhivkov line has won them a relatively greater degree of domestic peace and prosperity. Criticism of the Russians is exceptionally muted. Generations of Ottoman rule have imbricated the Bulgarians with circumspection and only modest expectations of humanity.
`Let the Turks now carry away their abuses,' Gladstone famously railed in his pamphlet on the Bulgarian Horrors, 'in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves, their Zaptichs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.' And so in the end they did, bearing with them their BashiBazouks, only, at the last, to be replaced by the Russians. Who would today rail in such terms against the new empire? Yet in truth there is scarcely any contemporary BashiBazoukery on Bulgarian soil, The dirty tricks of the Bulgarian secret police are largely perpetrated abroad: in London, for example, with the umbrella murder of Georgi Markov, or in Munich, with the (alleged) poisoning of the salt cellars of Radio Free Europe. This domestic restraint alone distinguishes it sharply from neighbouring Romania.
Indeed it was against their neighbours, in the north, the west and the south, that the Bulgarians to whom I spoke waxed most indignant. I talked to a well-dressed and well-educated couple over lunch at the 'Russian Club'. Both of them were trade representatives of large Western companies. ('We Europeans,' Olga remarked, generously including the English offshore islanders in her generalisation, 'we Europeans have difficulties doing business with the Japanese'.) 'The Romanians,' Khristo declared, 'are either thieves or gypsies or both.' Our great mistake,' he later observed, 'was to hand back Macedonia to the Yugoslays and Greeks,' This vehement, unreconstructed nationalism was by now no surprise. The Bulgars do, after all, have a national tradition which goes back to the glories of the Emperor Simeon in the tenth century.
More surprising was Khristo's prescription for the future improvement of the Soviet Imperium. Ideally, he argued, one would hope for an 'Ottomanisation' of the Soviet empire. By this he certainly did not mean the return of the Turks. He meant, rather, that the bloc should acquire one of the more positive characteristics of Turlsjsh overlordship: the very considerable internal freedom and pluralistic independence gr.anted to its subject territories, provided tribute was paid and certain iron limits never overstepped. This was the best that could be hoped for his country. For himself this would bring greater freedom to travel and good business for his company. He already travels about once a year to West Germany. He is not in principle opposed to the socialist system. What angers him is not any limitations on his intellectual freedom.
It is the simple fact that a colleague with the same qualifications as he has, doing a simi lar job to him in the same firm but in a Western country, has better working conditions and earns four times as much. And the differential is increasing.
Khristo's complaint exemplifies a dilemma which faces all the Soviet bloc regimes. If they are to develop their economies, they need highly educated technocrats and managers. These experts can scarcely be kept in a state of sylvan ignorance about the material conditions prevailing in the West. They cannot be prevented from perceiving the widening gap and measuring the shortcomings of their own economic system. Such measuring, however, can precipitate the most radical kind of ideological criticism – was it not Lenin himself who said that productivity is the measure of the superiority of a social system? To develop an advanced economy, the regimes must educate some people to think. To preserve their ideology they must educate people not to think. Those, very crudely, are the horns of the dilemma. For the faculty of critical thought is not easily confined to one compartment. You cannot expect intelligent men to think critically about problems of industrial management during the day, and simply to suspend their critical faculty at the party meeting in the evening. There is an inner logic which drives the system to create its own critics. Crossing the frontier to Austria after two months in the bloc. I appreciate for the first time the shattering impact which one visit to the West can have on a Bulgarian or a Pole. I am genuinely amazed by the smoothness of the roads, dazzled by the brightness of the lights. I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window, open-mouthed like a schoolboy before the riches on display in the Viennese confectioner's. I wonder at the bewildering variety of services so promiscuously offered: actually to have your car cleaned, your shirt pressed. I wait for an hour for the police to swoop on the demonstrators in the Kaentnerstrasse. (A motley band of barefoot hippies with a poster say ing simply 'Water.' – far-out, map,. cli.r_11 really into water.) Above all I stand in i 10. i delight before the newspaper kiosks and in the bookshops. Why. I even read the New Statesman with such obvious pleasure that the vendor asks if there is anything wrong with me. No, I reply, except that I. have mild dyspepsia from an eight weeks' diet of lies.
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