За комунистическите пространства на изключението: лагерът срещу затвора
About the Communist Spaces of Exception: The Camp versus the Prison

Summary/Abstract: This article is a comparative sociological analysis of two communist institutions: the camp versus the prison. On the one hand, the prison is a totalitarian space of exception and a power mechanism of reformation; the penal detention encompasses both the imprisonment decreed by legal sentencing and the ideological conversion of the convicted persons into the communist spirit. There are seven constitutive principles that mirror the modern institution of detention, but they are reworked and reintegrated to ensure the social efficacy of communist imprisonment; there is also a generalized meta-principle that coordinates, subordinates and subjects them: ideological-educational political work permeates every cell of the prisoner’s time, space, activity, communication, bodies and strengths. On the other hand, the camp is a totalitarian space of exception whose social organization is historically unique: neither in the punitive colony, penal servitude or mass deportation, nor in forced displacement or compulsory resettlement, nor in torture or correctional punishment are human beings rendered absolutely killable as in this experimental laboratory of total domination. The complete totalitarian society imposes a perfect camp system that will not only replace the penal system of prisons, correction houses and reform schools, but will detain forcibly the entire population in. And this was no utopia – the state border of communist Bulgaria was ringed from beginning to end with barbed wire; an enclosed camp territory from which no one – without the permission of political, military and administrative power – was to (even think of) leave.

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