The last decade—shaped by global recession, populist politicians and rightwing extremism—has seen scholarly efforts to salvage the left from the scrapyard of post-communist transition as a viable intellectual and political alternative. Bulgarian studies have seen a fair share of these attempts. In 2015, anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee's The Left Side of History admired the selfless dedication of interwar individuals who fought for a better world in Nazi-dominated and postwar Europe. Historian Maria Todorova's Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins (2020) resurrected leftwing men and women from the decades before the Great European War, marginalized or forgotten with the Bolshevization and Stalinization of east European socialism. Professor of political and social theory Zhivka Valiavicharska continues this quest with Restless History. Her investigation of socialist humanism of the 1960s and 70s explores a Marxism freed of Leninist-Stalinist garb and pushing globally for personal and national liberation on anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-racist principles. While the left's state socialist experiment crashed between 1989 and 1991, this book argues that the ideas and policies of the bygone “Second World” deserve rediscovery and consideration.
The book's six chapters evaluate both the liberating and dark facets of socialist humanism in the post-Stalinist Soviet bloc. The first chapter explores the global context of Marxist revival, as many strands of thought (the New Left, Yugoslavia's Praxis School, anti-colonial critics, and US civil rights advocates) converged and clashed. Walking readers through the collection and work of Moscow's Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Valiavicharska traces how this body—which in the 1930s served the coagulation of doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism—after Stalin's death enabled the rediscovery of early Marx and the subsequent revival of alienation, dialectical analysis, and human agency as analytical concepts across Cold War borders. Still, Valiavicharska sees a crucial difference between western Marxist humanism and ideas coming out of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. Thinkers in non-capitalist states had to transcend traditional Marxist focus on productivity and class conflict and offer solutions for the new realities in eastern Europe of the 1960s and 70s.
Chapter 2 illustrates this transition by analyzing eastern Europe's theoretical and political attention to “social reproduction.” In Bulgaria championed by feminist sociologists, the concept criticized Stalinist ideas of gender equality as production- and male-centered. It inspired women in the 1970s and 80s to demand policies of socialized care, leisure, and a healthy work-life balance. Here, as in the other chapters, Valiavicharska points to the double-edge of socialist humanism. While feminist theorists spoke of “social reproduction” in tandem with another core concept of late or “developed socialism”—the “holistically developed person”—to extract unprecedented social services for working women, the state used theory and practice to solidify motherhood as central to the identity and role of women. Pro-nativist policies aimed to both increase declining birth rates and reduce reproduction among minority populations, a move toward ethnonationalist social engineering that women activists and scholars willingly supported.
Valiavicharska deepens the analysis of interactions between the Bulgarian socialist state and its Muslim (Turkish, Pomak, and Roma) minorities in the next three chapters. She demonstrates how Marxist humanism's tripartite interest in de-Stalinization (and de-Sovietization), continued modernization, and all-rounded citizens “helped construct a continuous historical narrative of a unified ‘Bulgarian people’ throughout the ages” (21). This narrative framed religious and ethnic pluralism as threatening to the socialist state. It rejected traditional views of Bulgarian Turks as ethnically different, cast all Muslims as ethnic Bulgarians forcibly Islamized under the Ottoman “yoke,” and thus justified radical policies of assimilation in the 1970s and 80s. Furthermore, as Bulgarian socialist humanists never articulated a non-statist vision of socialist community, they contributed to the birth of “ethno-statism” (24, 118–20). The very same institutions of population management that extended social welfare, schooling, and healthcare to Bulgarian (Christian) citizens mobilized in the forceful renaming of Pomaks, Roma, and Turks in the name of national unity.
The tension between emancipatory socialist humanist claims and oppressive state policies is especially jarring when one considers Bulgaria's international engagements (Chapter 6). In the 1960s and 70s, the country actively participated in the Cold War east-south exchange. It professed solidarity with countries from the Global South based on Bulgaria's nineteenth-century struggles against Ottoman control, opposition to western imperialist capitalism, and tangible achievements under socialism. These claims sounded hollow by the late 1980s as ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of some 350,000 Bulgarian Turks to Turkey marred the country's international reputation.
Restless History is an ambitious intellectual project that seeks to explore Second World Marxist humanism on its own terms and with its multiple, ambivalent legacies. The book's 200 pages do not always fulfil the promises and aspirations laid out in the excellent introduction. While Valiavicharska's conceptual framework in comparative, the chapters on gender and minority politics begs for assessment of the Bulgarian case next to other countries in the Soviet bloc. Yet the author succeeds in her goal of taking state socialism seriously and integrating it—with its achievements and flaws—into the history of the twentieth century.
