This article aims to reveal and rethink the reality of socialism following a new approach based on two specific discourses: the first one which results from the official discourse of the socialist authority/regime and speaks through the documental archive of the Committee for State Security, the second one which is the discourse of the witnesses of that reality, the individuals who lived the socialism. The language used in these two quite different archives – the functioning of the discourse of the State Security and the socio-analytical effects that it produces will be of our main interest. The article is a research on the pseudonyms, with their specific expressiveness and emotionality, used by the State Security in its secret files and for aliasing of its agents. By this naming, an essentially negative, distinctive identity of over-deprivation i.e. they cannot do what they have to, and essentially affirmative distinctive identity of over-gifted (Penkova 2015a, 2015b) are attached to this two diametrically opposite profiles. The text outlines the different ways of producing of what we call specific “negatively stained” speech, based on the multilayered functioning oppositional pair “we” – “them” which dominates the ideological discourse. A discourse, which is focused on the figure of the enemy and alienated from the positively replete figure of the New Socialist man, and thus generates social suffering and profound traumatic experience, constantly confirmed by the retrospective testimonies, as well as by the effects which the shadows of the dossiers reproduced on those who bring themselves to a tardy meeting with them.
Rositsa Lyubenova (Mon,) studied this question.