The ambiguities of intellectual dissent in late socialism: the case of Bulgaria

The old totalitarian paradigmFootnote1 – the model still commonly deployed across Central and Eastern Europe and beyond to describe and explain state socialism – painted an image of socialist regimes as autocratic and all-powerful systems of total control imposed on a paralyzed mass of people, where only heroic individuals resisted. The dominant interpretations of intellectual dissidence correspondingly still often overlook internal inconsistencies, tensions, and pluralism which characterize resistance in late socialism. In this contribution, we focus on intellectual work at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1970s and 1980s to trace some of the ways in which the totalitarian narrative and its key binary dissidents-system fails to capture the complexities of political and intellectual life in late state socialism. We show that a peculiar type of anti-totalitarianism – characterized more by pluralism and internal tensions – could be ascribed correctly to critical social science during the period, but rather than as a critique of state socialism, it should be understood as a critique of the alienating aspects of industrial modernity and should be contextualized in the nascent consumer-oriented transformation of actually existing socialism after the shift from heavy to light industries and the processes of destalinization after the 1960s.