Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria by Zhivka Valiavicharska (review)

Reviewed by: Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria by Zhivka Valiavicharska Victor Petrov Valiavicharska, Zhivka – Restless History: Political Imaginaries and their Discontents in Post-Stalinist Bulgaria. Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. 288 p. In recent years, Bulgarian socialism and its history has been one of the most productive fields for demonstrating ambiguities and independence within the Soviet Bloc's experience. Works in this field are part of a larger attempt to see the productive and constructive parts of the Soviet project, which seems to have been thrown on the rubbish heap of history by the revolutions (and non-revolutions) of 1989. Maria Todorova's Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins (2020) highlighted the pre-1944 history of socialists in Bulgaria, saving them from the narrative annihilation of Communist and post-Communist historiography; Theodora Dragostinova's Cold War from the Margins (2021) investigated the contradictions and achievements of the 1970s global cultural offensive of the mature and self-confident socialist state. Kristen Ghodsee has highlighted the international socialist feminist movement. More works can be cited, but the point stands: Bulgarian socialism is fertile ground for scholarly reevaluation, even if the state never drew such interest from the outside at the time of its existence. Zhivka Valiavicharska's work stems squarely from the same impulse to reconstruct the political imaginaries possible and alternative worlds envisioned in socialist Bulgaria, which is also part of a call to take all such projects throughout the Bloc and the world seriously. The biggest contribution of the book, in this reviewer's view, is to take seriously the intellectual history of the regime, to reject "rigid binaries" (p. 7) that posit these states as "static monoliths … somewhere outside of history" (p. 6). Taking as its methodological starting point the very End Page 230 peripheral nature of these intellectual communities (pp. 12–13), Valiavicharska lets geography lead, so to say, by showing how enmeshed and open to the world—of both ideas and exchange—the country was. The core agent of the book is the locally specific brand of socialist humanism that emerged in the post-Stalinist period, which extended globally—and internally—in a struggle for national, gender, and class liberation. This new humanism was a strong critique of alienation, aiming to create a new and holistically developed person, resurrecting the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. This intellectual force, as the book shows, had impressive achievements—not just intellectually, but politically: the regime responded to calls from women activists for more investment in childcare, maternity, and other facilities, for example. Thus, importantly, these ideas were not necessarily state-managed; in fact, they and the groups that advanced them, were active participants in a constantly shifting political terrain. This constant change eventually revealed the dark side of these universally liberating ideas: an eventual enabling of the nationalistic, pro-natalist, and ultimately ethnically violent policies of the 1970s and 1980s (p. 19). Chapter 1 starts with the change in post-Stalinist discourse, as Soviet, Bulgarian, and Yugoslav writers rediscovered the early Marx of the aforementioned 1844 manuscripts. Situating the Bulgarian experience in context and also dialogue with other countries, the chapter highlights the emergence of praxis, alienation, and the "holistic" person as key concepts for these intellectuals. In fact, these were ideas that seemed more important for the "counter-hegemonic project" (of socialism) than for capitalism, some felt (p. 44). More so, such ideas pushed beyond the Stalinist ideas of labour—the latter was now no longer the primary focus of analysis, or the main aim of society; in fact, it was free time, in which the personality can develop harmoniously (pp. 52–53). The chapter concludes with how such terms became key to a new universalist discourse, bringing in new forms around which to organize the fight for freedom (such as the category of "youth")—domestically, but also globally. Chapter 2 takes up social reproduction, one of these key terms, and traces how ideas became reality in a closely contested political struggle. This is a key chapter, and an important contribution to historiography of the Socialist Bloc, showing how...