Nurie Muratova. Women Beyond the Archive: The Invisible Stories of Women in Bulgaria

Bulgarian archives can be difficult to navigate, particularly if one is looking for resources about women. Women Beyond the Archive: The Invisible Stories of Women in Bulgaria is an informative and helpful guide. Nurie Muratova lists the public institutions whose archival fonds include relevant documents (pp. 93–102), with an emphasis on the resources about Roma and Muslim women (p. 146), and explains that such fonds are more accessible and often richer at the regional rather than at the central archives (p. 90). The author also gives a detailed account of the personal and family collections containing documents by women and summarizes the findings of a statistical analysis. The book is also an important contribution to women's history because Muratova, building on her expertise on archival resources, reconstructs five life stories. Historians will find particularly interesting the stories of Raina Lapardova, Tsvetana Tsacheva, and Nevena Elmazova, an activist, a teacher and a journalist, respectively, all of them strong supporters of Nikola Petkov, one of the leaders of the Bulgarian Agrarian Popular Union. Hopeful of British and American support, Nikola Petkov mounted an opposition against the communists and, in 1947, he was convicted of treason and executed. Raina Lapardova, Tsvetana Tsacheva, and Nevena Elmazova were also punished: Lapardova was sent to a labor camp and later monitored by State Security; Tsacheva spent about three years in different labor camps; the state pension of Elmazova was revoked, and she was under the constant surveillance by state security. Muratova also tells the stories of two Muslim intellectuals whose academic careers were derailed because they belonged to religious and ethnic minorities: Mefkure Mollova, dismissed in 1961 from the department of turkology at the Sofia University for unclear reasons; and Hayrie Memova-Suleimanova, a lecturer in the same department, dismissed in 1981, at the height of the nationalist enthusiasm about the thirteen-hundredth anniversary of the Bulgarian state, and closely monitored by the state security in the 1980s.Yet Women Beyond the Archive is not merely a guide to the resources about women in the Bulgarian archives. It also has a conceptual plane. Muratova describes the emergence of collections of documents by women in Europe and the United States as well as the transformations in the functions and in the milieu of the archives that made such collections possible. Muratova's argument is based on the normative standard that women should be equally represented. Because the Bulgarian archives fall short of that normative standard, Muratova explains the unequal representation of women by a version of the repressive hypothesis: the archives have been shaped by the policies of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), and the communists valued only the documents about women that had the potential for legitimizing their rule (for example, documents about political activists or udarniks), they neglected the stories of ordinary women, and they tried to erase the memory of the women who opposed their regime. The suppression of memory was particularly intense in the case of women whose social status was determined by the intersection of gender, ethnic, and religious inequalities (pp. 17–18). The hypothesis that women are underrepresented because of communist oppression brings a series of problems, however.Muratova identifies state socialism with colonialism. She defines colonialism as any suppression of the "original" culture of a community, thus creating an inferiority complex (p. 24). That poses a problem because it abstracts colonialism from any historically specific content and turns it into a general idea of oppressive power. Building on that abstract concept, Muratova describes as forms of colonial oppression practices as heterogeneous as the violent uncovering of the faces of the Muslim women during the process of passportization (p. 132) and the so-called summer schools for activists where Muslim women were "forced" to go to a bath and a cinema (p. 136). If all that is colonization, then what is the difference between colonialism and modernization? Muratova tries to avoid that problem by assuming that modernization, colonization, and oppression merge only in the Bulgarian case, not because modernization is in itself oppressive but rather because it has been only rhetoric, a beautiful façade hiding communist violence against political opposition and minorities (p. 135). But doesn't such an argument amount to a conspiracy theory of modernization?Because the book treats modernization as a façade, it neglects the effects of modernization that are not tantamount to violence. Thus, Muratova claims that the communists tried to "enslave women by emancipation" (p. 27) because they forced the Muslim girls "to undress their traditional costumes, to put on coats in the non-Asian style of the city, detached those new women from the everyday life in the family home and sent them to school, to work, to elections" (p. 28). Yet if one describes the opportunities to study, work, vote (or the unprecedentedly extensive social rights that the socialist state provided to the women) as masked violence, could there be a risk to portray feminism itself inadvertently as oppression, perhaps even a surreptitious form of colonialism? Could one risk neglecting, obliterating, and silencing the women who longed for emancipation, embraced modernization, and perhaps even naively believed in communism? Muratova declares that the stories of such women hold no interest to her because they legitimized the oppressive regime (p. 12), and she seems to suggest that the Muslim women who tried to implement the communist policies of modernization in their local communities were agents of the colonial power (p. 139).The problems outlined above are not shortcomings of Women Beyond the Archive. They are advantages offered by Muratova's meticulous research on the Bulgarian archival resources about women. It is precisely because of such problems that her book is an invitation to rethink the limits of any repressive hypothesis about the underrepresentation of women in the archives; to search for tools for criticizing the discursive economy that devalues the documents by women; and to invent regimes of historical knowledge capable not only of telling the stories of women who resisted or who were victims of oppression but also of women who lived through history, who made history by living.