[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.