Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag does not just tell the story of Bulgaria’s reckoning with its communist past: it is part of that story. As such, it is testimony to the broader, societal impact that engaged scholarship can have, when conducted in a collaborative and generous spirit combined with intellectual curiosity and rigor. Author Lilia Topouzova draws on more than a decade of multi-method research, including collecting published but barely-read biographies and memoirs, analysis of fiction and documentary film, participant observation (including her earlier documentary film work, as well as ongoing political protests), and a range of recorded oral history interviews. She assembles this material into a compelling narrative account of the period in which Bulgaria’s communist regime operated prison camps to criminalize and thus punish or deter acts of dissidence and nonconformity. Tracking down communist-era state security employees as well as former prisoners—while also contending with a culture of denial among contemporary politicians, historians, and archivists—Topouzova skillfully creates a work that simultaneously makes an important intervention in twentieth and twenty-first century Bulgaria, and engages with broader theoretical and methodological issues in contemporary history.

Framed by introductory and concluding chapters, the body of the book is organized into two major parts, the first of which takes the reader chronologically from the establishment of forced-labor camps in Bulgaria after World War II, through societal forgetting, to the protracted process of recovering truth after 1990. The second part explores the complex processes of memory-work around two key camp locations, Belene and Lovech. The conclusion is followed by a valuable and discrete postscript tracing one high-profile outcome from Topouzova’s long-term commitment to collaboration and taking knowledge public: her participation as co-creator and curator of The Neighbours, an installation that represented Bulgaria at the 60^th Venice Biennale.

The writing throughout is fluid and engaging, and the text effectively cuts between direct personal experience—like the encounter with the bookstore clerk (80) who in their dogmatic unhelpfulness illuminates the value of Dr. Topouzova’s project, as well as its subversive quality—and theoretically illuminating reflection. The framing of the public representation of the female camp guard Julia Ruzhgeva, her own testimony shared with the researcher and her suicide (164–75), astutely captures the differential experience and fate of men and women involved in the systematic intimidation of prisoners. One of the book’s strong contributions is its debunking of easy stereotypes, and acknowledgement of the diversity of experience, and the ways of recounting trauma. This is a key takeaway from the section that parsed out three modes of remembering among victims (84–109), including rehearsed, grooved story-telling that engages those who care to listen, as well as efforts at recall that are broken and fractured to the point of incoherence, that—in Topouzova’s humane, urgent telling—are also trauma narratives in that they directly reflect the damage wrought on the tellers.

The book engages with a wide range of literature, extending beyond the post-socialist and east European context. The extensive notes and bibliography are not rigor-signaling, giant-killing, or name-checking; they reflect close and generous engagement with the history of gulag culture in Russia; interdisciplinary works on truth, reconciliation and lustration; and classic works in anthropology on memory, place, and power. Topouzova also finds interlocutors among authors working in other contexts and addressing issues of form in counteracting the effects of power structures to silence marginalized or hidden voices. These include, for example, Eleftheria Thanouli, Saidiya Hartman, and Steven High.

Overall, Unsilencing is a compelling and revelatory journey, in the company of an erudite, passionate, yet unassuming guide through a number of related fields, including the politics of post-communist transition; the ethnography of totalitarianism; and the oral history of trauma. Richly fulfilling the trust placed in her by those who shared their stories, and filling out the areas of knowledge she has been mapping in film, pedagogy, and exhibit design and curation, Topouzova has made a significant contribution to discussions, both in Bulgaria and in the broader community of oral historians, on the legacies of trauma and the techniques of resilience and reckoning.