If you have ever despaired over postsocialist political developments in eastern Europe, or grown cynical over the constriction of political alternatives in the region, this book may help. Not because of the political developments the author recounts, as there are plenty of disappointments and frustrations here, but because of the spirited commitments of her subjects in the face of such difficulty and disappointment. In Maria Todorova's retelling, their lives and actions recuperate the socialist project. Their conviction is inspiring even if you do not share their political objectives.
The book itself is many things: a history of early Bulgarian socialism, a history of Bulgaria at the turn of the century using socialism as a lens, a history of early European socialism from a Bulgarian vantage point, and a biographical microhistory of some ordinary Bulgarian socialists. It operates on a range of scales from the continental to the national to the local, and employs an array of historical approaches from narrative and linguistic to social and quantitative. It also includes theoretical treatises on the value of history from the margins, the idea of utopia, the concept of generation and the role of affect/emotion. While this sounds like a lot, the author weaves these projects and approaches together in a seamless and relatively succinct narrative. She reigns in the expansive project by limiting it to the half century between the 1870s and the 1920s, when the social-democratic movement was at its peak, and socialism, especially the Second International, was the hegemonic utopian vision and emancipatory movement.
It is probably safe to say that this book is unlikely to be picked up by the totally uninitiated, and some basic knowledge of early socialist thinkers in Europe is helpful. Perhaps assuming such, the author begins by destabilizing the reader, making you question what you think you know. She points out that what I had taken to be the definitive history of the Bulgarian Communist Party published in English was wrong on multiple counts. As she inimitably puts it, “Almost everything on the first page of this otherwise important work is untrue, if not entirely false” (26). Canonical history is a general target as her goal is “to fracture and recalibrate the dominant narrative of social democracy which is confined to Western Europe and insists on the exclusive authenticity of industrial environment and working-class milieu” (7). Bulgaria is a good case for this effort because it is the quintessential periphery yet had perhaps the largest and most influential social-democratic movement in eastern Europe, while still a predominantly rural country. At the same time, the movement was divided since 1903 (following an earlier separation that lasted from 1892–94) into two distinct factions commonly referred to as the “broads” and the “narrows,” based primarily on divergent attitudes toward cooperation with bourgeois parties and the political role of the peasantry.
Chapter 1 challenges the established distinction of socialism into two types: western/European and eastern/Russian. She shows that a binary model only makes sense after WWI and the creation of the Third International. The passionate debates of the Second International were not played out on an east-west axis. She also challenges the idea of “transfer” of Marxist or socialist worldviews to Bulgaria (and eastern Europe generally) and instead presents their formation as a collective result of conversations and interactions that included the peripheral actors.
Chapter 2 looks at the contradictions and tension created by the national question, focusing particularly on the idea of a Balkan Federation and the different positions toward the First World War. Todorova makes a compelling case for the vitality of alternatives to the nationalist paradigm. These alternatives do not challenge the standard understanding of socialism as having caved to the force of nationalist ideology, but it nuances how we apprehend that process.
The second part of the book distinguishes two political generations. The first included individuals socialized in the first decades of de facto independence after 1878, when there was “an intense political life dominated by a general feeling of the possibility for progress within an imperfect but still functioning parliamentary institutional system” (85). The other political generation was the one formed by the experience of the Balkan Wars and WWI, and socialized within a more limited and repressive parliamentary system.
Chapter 3 presents a quantitative sociological profile of socialists based on data from about 3500 individuals, most from the first generation, with a bias to the narrow faction. Drawing on encyclopedias, documentary sources, memoirs, archival materials, and historical monographs Todorova culls information on such variables as occupation and education. The occupations were quite varied, with no careers predominant. If combined, rural and urban workers amounted to just over a quarter of those for whom she has occupational data. Teachers accounted for over 19 percent. Much less information was available on education, but among those with higher education, there was a significant preference for legal specializations. While these trends are interesting, the ironic (or intended?) takeaway from this exercise is an appreciation of how varied the profiles and backgrounds of socialists actually were (and how generalizations can skew that appreciation).
The same case is made qualitatively in Chapter 4, which provides a description of the political formation of a selection of socialists, including well-known and lesser-known figures. The objective is to flesh out the different routes and experiences of becoming socialist, and in so doing show that there were multiple socialisms (and Marxisms). Here we get accounts of the concerns and influences that fostered socialist commitment. While too varied to summarize here, one strong correlation is that the attraction to socialism came with an equally strong commitment to science.
Much of the story to this point is about men, as women only account for about four percent of the Chapter 3 database. But socialism was perhaps less male-dominated than other political projects of the era. Chapter 5 highlights the important role and experience of women in the socialist project. Todorova challenges the idea that notable female activists were just doing their husbands’ bidding, excavating their own socialist foundations and motivations. She makes a convincing case that women were more active and visible in socialist projects than the sources reveal by recounting examples of active women who are not mentioned in documentary sources.
Todorova strategically saves the best for the last. Whether you consider it biography, microhistory, life writing, or some combination, the third part of the book recounts the socialist lives of four individuals for whom she discovered rich documentation, much of it self-authored. In an explicit nod to the affective turn in history, she suggests these materials open a window onto the emotional dimensions of the socialist career, or how feelings formed behavior. She taps Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” to suggest that the products of these feelings had enough in common to constitute a shared sense and experience. The stories include the bootstraps saga of village teacher Angelina Boneva from northwest Bulgaria, whose determination to get an education and teach took her to Sofia and then Macedonia, where she was imprisoned by the Ottomans before eventually returning to teach in her native village for over twenty years. Next, we learn about the love-stricken teacher turned lawyer, Todor Tsekov, who like Boneva began as an advocate of the Macedonian cause before embracing socialism, and spent a short time in the United States as a socialist organizer and socialist newspaper editor. He left a diary of ten volumes; his family only provided four of these to the state archives, but these alone numbered over 1000 pages. Finally, we follow the stories of divorced couple Koika Tineva and Nikola Sakarov, she the daughter of a progressive wealthy landowner and banker in Varna, he the son of an artisan merchant in Sofia. Their marriage only lasted four years, so we learn instead of their diverging socialist activities and successful professional lives after their separation, both of which Todorova characterizes as feminist.
From the fascinating and inspiring experiences of these relatively uncelebrated figures, and the more synthetic chapters that precede them, we see the dynamism of socialist thought and political commitments not in the usual form of a chronological history of a party's fortunes, but as a dynamic field of ideas. Individuals came to socialism from different places, and they stayed or left for varied reasons. As we read about people moving from broad to narrow factions, or from one socialist publication to another, one realizes that the distinctions through which the history of Bulgarian socialism is usually told were not so categorical or definitive at the time. Constituencies could shift across seemingly rigid positions.
At a time when the political situation in Bulgaria (and elsewhere in eastern Europe) is commonly described as lacking real alternatives, this book reminds us that there are alternatives and that people's political commitments evolve. Before they can be actualized, however, alternatives must be imagined, and imagination itself seems to have been curtailed recently. Histories like this one encourage us to imagine anew.
