[gostsamo]

Bulgarian is phonetic to a large degree so if you know the sound associated to a letter, you can understandably pronounce it as well.

Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind. If you search in the HN archives, you might find even more stories about the bulgarian computer industry with a MIT publication in the mix. There could've been even more, but a combination of distrust towards the new capitalist science and later unwillingness for those pesky machines to show the real state of the USSR economy meant that this was not developed with the full backing of the eastern block.

[summa_tech]

You know, I never thought about it that way. But you're making a lot of sense here. And in older sci-fi literature, after a very early period of distrust of the concept, cybernetics as a component / enabler of perfect collectivist society did show up, before - as you said - the West advanced too far away from the local state of the art.

Also, as a broader view of your point, perhaps technocratic communism degenerates by giving way to bureaucratic communism.

[gostsamo]

One thing to understand about communism is that lots of people believed in it, but for the most part the communist elites considered it a feudal system where one's access to resources made them valuable and gave them power. Anything that would provide the higher ups transparency and accountability would be ruinous for the balance of power and therefore met significant pushback. There was never a technocratic communism because idealists would be either defanged to act as specialist executor clas or outright removed as unreliable players.

Regarding computer usage, it was increasing to the very end, but the desolution of the USSR stopped it and the industry was destroyed in the following crises. The elites tried to modernize the economies, but it was too little too late.

[anovikov]

Was there "communist mind" in Bulgaria? Which is same as asking - did you guys perceive Communism as something homegrown, something of your own - "your take on how it is best to develop a country", or something forcibly imposed on you by the Soviets? Bulgaria was seen with disdain in the Soviet Union as seen as a country where little but tomatoes were made (even if we knew it wasn't really the case), so in our Soviet mental map of the world there was no particular image of what a Bulgarian thought about Communism. We knew Serbs liked it and we knew Czechs and Poles didn't, for instance. What about Bulgarians?

[bojan]

Serbs liked it because our implementation was different (albeit also unsustainable), and we were not forcefully dependent on the Soviet Union.

For example, my father was able to buy a Beta VCR in the late 80s on his engineer's salary, it took him three months of intense saving.

[anovikov]

I think the latter was the main reason why. Serbs were not Soviet puppets, USSR could not control them, they didn't feel occupied by foreign power. So even if Communism kinda sucked, it was more like "dumbass politician we elected who keeps mismanaging things" rather than "foreign enemy who's yoke we must get off our butts".

[gostsamo]

I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it.

Regarding your question, I cannot talk on behalf of everyone. Many who didn't like communism were killed or crushed otherwise in the early years, many who accepted communism did it because of the association with Russia and the historical connection there, many who had their best years in the booming years of the regime until 1970 approx remember it fondly, many who had their worst years in the nineties have a nostalgia avoiding to talk about the bad aspects of it, many didn't give a damn and lived in the system while undermining it, and many of those who would formulate intellectual criticism of it were actually well incorporated in the system to give a damn about what is good or bad. Overall, there were lots of people who disliked both the party and its dependence on the USSR, but there was not a mass movement until the very last years when things started to break down.

[anovikov]

My question wasn't about liking the 'socialism' or not as much, more about seeing it as something of your own - no matter if good or bad, or something that your enemies imposed on you by force?

[gostsamo]

Again, depends whom you are asking. When the party includes Moscow in the national anthem, you realise that the party sees itself coupled with the USSR. The official line is that the brotherly russian nation helped the forces of good win against the faschists and it would work due to the associations with the liberation war. Many would strongly disagree. The scandals are ongoing even today.

[adrian_b]

Bulgaria was somewhat shielded from the direct force of the Soviet Union, unlike the Baltic countries, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and East Germany, which were invaded and conquered by the Soviet army.

Moreover, the Baltic countries were then incorporated into the Soviet Union, together with big parts from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania, while the remaining parts of those countries became vassal states, from which Russia continued to steal vast amounts of resources during the fifties, under the cover of some mixed companies established with the locals. In some of these countries armed resistance in the mountains has continued to fight against the Russians for a few years, until eventually all opponents were defeated. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia the Russians made large-scale military interventions in 1956 and 1968.

East Germany has also been occupied by the direct invasion of the Soviet Army, which have also plundered everything that they could, like they also did in the other directly invaded countries. From East Germany, the Russians have stolen entire factories, piece by piece and tool by tool, transporting them in Russia and reassembling them there.

So in such Eastern European countries, the Russians were much more clearly identified as the invading enemies, since WWII until 1990.

Bulgaria had been too far away from the Soviet Union, so unlike most East European countries it has not lost territory after WWII. If you compare pre-WWII and post-WWII maps, you can see that the Soviet Union has moved tremendously towards the West. While other countries have lost much territory, Poland has not lost much area, but the country has moved to the West as a whole, because the Eastern Polish territory occupied by the Soviet Union has been somewhat compensated with territory taken from East Germany.

In Bulgaria, like everywhere else, most of those who had been rich before WWII have been robbed or killed by the communists, but overall Bulgaria has suffered much less during the transition to communism, so I expect that much fewer of them were seeing the communists as external enemies imposed by force.

In all Eastern European countries only falsified histories were taught about the Soviet Union, Russians, WWII and communism, but nevertheless in the countries that had been directly invaded by the Soviet Union there was a large fraction of the population which were aware of the histories of their own families, which typically included the loss of property stolen by communists and relatives detained, deported and/or murdered either by the Russians or by the authorities installed by the Russians. So despite the public brainwashing, it was hard to completely erase the memories of these facts.

[unmole]

> We knew Serbs liked it

I wouldn't have thought that was the perception given Yugoslavia was explicitly non-aligned and the economy was more market oriented.

[unmole]

> Regarding communism and computing, deterministic systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible have certain appeal for the communist mind.

Francis Spufford explores this idea in Red Plenty, which I highly recommend. More broadly, I think the book would appeal to many HN readers.

[NitpickLawyer]

Some explorations with an AI overlord also in LeGuin's "The Dispossessed"

[WaxProlix]

Hard to talk about favorites in books, but there was a solid decade of my life where I'd have probably said this was my favorite sci fi book. Highly recommend to anyone reading this.

[keybored]

The incredible things I read on this site. The communist mind? Oh right, there’s a book for that, and it’s probably agreeable to people on this site.

What the heck is this psycho-mysticism.

[gostsamo]

As I commented elsewhere:

I used "communist mind" as a collective term for the ideological framework in which computers were discussed. The state had a party and the party had an ideology and the ideology legitimized the other two, hence all actions of the state and the party had to be justified through it. It does not mean some other kind of consciousness that allowed one to be closer to the ghost of Marx or whatever some people seem to ascribe to it.

[keybored]

I know where you’re coming from.

[unmole]

Ponting out that communist regimes tried to implement planned economies with the help of computation is a statement of fact, not psycho-mysticism.

Red Plenty features Leonid Kantorovich trying to build a computer powerful enough to model the entire Soviet economy. It absolutely is something HN readers would find interesting, your uninformed, middle-brow dismissal notwithstanding.

[keybored]

This focus on the X Mind has a certain legitimacy in literature and biographies, where there is a focus on characters and persons/personas. Because they can certainly have an X Mind. I’ll grant it that. But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism, and this is the context where I was commenting on it.

This and that type having such and such mindset always needs to, in a serious treatment about real things and across more than a handful of people, play a very secondary role. Because it can only ever be speculative narrative that does not enter into any real argumentation. Seeing Like a State does it well. It discusses state projects and their outcomes. What people did given their positions and limitations (the limitations of what they could see). Any narrative about how The State Seer Mind works is just speculative narrative; the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

But this infantile treatment of Communism is treated as okay/normal, even celebrated. On that subject you can start with the supposed ideology and work backwards from that.

[unmole]

> But in the context of discussing the Eastern Bloc it does become psycho-mysticism

The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime and explained what he meant. The psycho-mysticism is entirely in your head.

> the real meat is in the discussions on the grand projects like the pitfalls of monocultural forestry.

You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?

Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.

[keybored]

> The comment was made by a Bulgarian who actually lived under the regime

I’ll listen to the regime sufferers on the topic of breadlines. I don’t put any more weight to their opinions alone on topics like how the communist mind is drawn to the determinism of computers. Tsk tsk.

> and explained what he meant.

After I made my own comment.

> You mean like, I dunno, Gosplan? Which was the point of the comment that you so strenuously objected to?

Huh? That you think that it is an own to point out that the “State Planning Committee” (according to Wikipedia) was a state-seer is not obvious to me.

Yes of course the book Seeing Like a State discusses, among other places, seeing-like-a-state in Communist states. What kind of a rejoinder is that?

The reason why I brought up the book is because it is a non-infantile treatment on “seeing like a state”/totalitarian thinking seems to work (precisely by not making it the focal point). Yes, of course it is relevant to Soviet state planning.

> Communism deservedly lies on the ash heap of history. Attempts to rehabilitate it by feigning nuance should be met with derision and contempt.

Like you did with user vidarh you seem to be ascribing an ulterior motive where you have no evidence or reason to. Be careful about that.

[vidarh]

One of the most interesting little nuggets on this is Reagans notes on Able Archer 83, where he for the first time seems to have realised that the Soviet leaders weren't cartoon villains, but actually were just as scared of the US as the US was of them.

That doesn't make the authoritarian nature of the regime any better, nor does it excuse any of the brutality, but it demonstrated how reductive it had been to try to interpret how they were thinking based on an outsider view that generalised all of them into some archetype without understanding individual motivations.

The irony is that so much of Western thinking of this assumes a ridiculous level of collectivism that never existed because it's fundamentally at odds with human nature.

If anything a lot of people have adopted what they deem a "communist mind" in their own analysis of these regimes - and ideologies - and treat large groups of people as if they are carbon copies.

[vidarh]

It's a fascinating exercise in antrhopology to see otherwise smart people confidently discuss the mind of people most of them have had no exposure to in person. Having spoken to a variety of people across the very broad spectrum of left-wing thought, ranging from libertarian marxists opposing the very existence of a state, to hardline marxism-leninists who thought the former group belonged in labour camps, I find the idea of a singular "communist mind" as ridiculous as you.

[flohofwoe]

...or as the post-'68 West-German joke goes: "When two leftists meet, 3 splinter groups are formed", doesn't quite roll off the tounge like the German version "Treffen sich zwei Linke: bilden sich 3 Splittergruppen."

[vidarh]

Indeed. It is quite fascinating how that is simultaneously a wide-spread view of the left, while at the same time the left is regularly accused of being all collectivist. Some left wing ideologies are decidedly collectivist. Some are going equally far in the other direction...

[IAmBroom]

No one but you and the poster above you is discussing "the left" as a single group.

"Communism" is being discussed, and implicitly Soviet communism, which ruled a gigantic portion of both Europe and northern Asia for several decades, producing a very definable system of rewards and disincentives, both legal and otherwise.

[mike_hearn]

All actual communist societies work the same way, so it's clearly possible to generalize.

[vidarh]

All "actual communist societies", have been run by marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it, which is a couple from dozens of ideologies within the umbrella. So, sure, you can generalize about those regimes. That still does not speak to any unified "communist mind". Those regimes have collectively murdered vast numbers of proponents of other communist ideologies.

[unmole]

> All "actual communist societies", have been run marxist-leninists or regimes supporting derivations of it,

In other words, real communism has never been tried.

[unmole]

Yeah, real communism has never been tried. /s

[vidarh]

Strawman - at no point did I make that claim. It has no relevance to my comment.

[unmole]

It's a variation of the same tired argument that's proffered up when communist praxis is criticised: That communist regimes they don't represent real communism unlike the all the other hippy versions.

[keybored]

Here we see the standard intellectual repertoire on Communism.

- Communist Totalitarian Thinking

- “Never been tried” quips as a retort to, um, no one even claiming that here

[unmole]

Tell me more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776635

[unmole]

I just want to point out how absurd this is. A Bulgarian says communist mind. People from the former Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, and other planned economies immediately understand what he means. But we have an American and a Brit complaining about how the good name of communism is being sullied.

[keybored]

I know I know, Standpoint Epistemology is being desecrated. I wouldn’t put much weight in Three Off The Streets of Hamburg when it comes to how liberal democratic state planning works either.

I don’t know where these Anglos are.

[unj]

"systems where the entire state is knowable and predictible " was exactly what got computer systems killed in Communist Poland.

WEKTOR system was killed because it would made deputy minister of innovation at that time (Jan Mitręga) the best informed person in the Communist Party.

INFOSTRADA/KSI (Krajowy System Informatyczny - National IT System) systems were killed because they would disrupt the falsified and controlled information flow within the Communist Party.