Практики и стратегии за овладяването на всекидневието в едно село на социалистическа България
Practices and Strategies of Managing Everyday Life in a Village in Socialist Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: Based on research data (archive sources, interview) gained in a Bulgarian mountain village (and, for comparison, a village in the former GDR), this article attempts to outline some of the specific knowledge, skills, practices, and strategies which ordinary people used to cope with everyday life in the socialist period. Subjected to the totalitarian system with its encroachments of the state, its deficit economy, and its specific form of modernisation, the villagers had to acquire two different sets of knowledge and to behave according to two separate "registers" (official vs. unofficial, public vs. private, etc.), an "everyday schizo-phrena" that formed part of the "socialist habitus". The everyday practices and strategies of accommodation to the contradictions of "real socialism" were mostly defensive reactions, ranging from active cooperation to open resistence; the most typical ones, however, were various forms of indirect, clandestine or cunning reaction to the demands of the state, such as circumvention of laws and regulations, the "organising" (or theft) of "socialist property", the skilful management of scarcity, mutual aid in the ingroup (family, friends, neighbours etc.), the "greasing" of the system, fake activities and labour, and withdrawal (through absenteeism, alcoholism, and escape into various niches). In addition, coping with the hardships of socialist life by means of everyday narration played a decisive role. Although most of these everyday practices and strategies became dysfunctional after the end of the system that had produced them, many of them persisted, some of them as a resource, others as a jeopardy to the development of democracy and civil society.

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