"Възход на паметта" в посткомунистическа България?
An "upsurge in memory" in post-communist Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: Sixteen years after the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria, there is yet no national policy on the memory and heritage of the regime in operation. The public discourse on communism and its legacies seems only now to be coming out of the deadlock it had been trapped into for more than a decade. The main thesis of this article is that in terms of mastering the communist past, with all the reservations the term entails, Bulgaria is considerably lagging behind its fellow former Soviet Block countries, most of which have already established specifi c national agencies dealing with the issues of national memory, museums of the history of communism, and national memorials dedicated to the victims of the regime. The article looks into the possible interpretations of the long protracted deadlock in the debate on the politics of memory in Bulgaria, placed in a comparative European perspective. The research focus of my attention is turned particularly towards a number of projects from the recent years that make an explicit attempt to face the ghosts of the communist past that have haunted the society all the way through the years of transition.

• Details
• Contents