Bulgaria arrived on the global cultural scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s with an almost unbelievable series of artistic and historical exchanges. Exhibitions representing 1,000 years of Bulgarian Icon painting and Thracian treasure toured the capitals of the west. Tina Turner and Henry Moore visited Sofia, as did the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gough. Hundreds of children from around the world traveled to Bulgaria as part of the United Nations’ International Assemblies of Peace, where they gathered at a newly constructed monument featuring bells from around the world. Leading up to the gigantic celebration of the 1,300th anniversary of the Bulgaria State (founded, so we are told, in 681), Bulgarian officials were extremely busy promoting Bulgarian culture. As detailed in Theodora Dragostinova's excellent new book, Cold War from the Margins: A Small Socialist State on the Global Cultural Scene, between 1977 and 1981, “small Bulgaria, with a population of 8.7 million in 1975, organized 38,854 cultural events across the world.” Official estimates claim that 25 million people visit these events abroad (47).
Smallness is a key concept in Dragostinova's exploration of Bulgaria's place in the global 1970s—smallness gave Bulgarian elites the freedom and flexibility to puzzle through the contradictions of the long decade (which Dragostinova dates form 1968–1982). Viewing the Cold War from the margins—from the perspective of “small Bulgaria”—allows us to see alternative visions for the socialist future and to see important, previously missed, global connections shaping the modern world. This is an innovative and important book.
The 1970s was a period of increasing globalization in which the limits of socialist and capitalist modernity were becoming all too clear. It was an era of contradictions: between the global and local; between high and low culture; between ideology and practice. Dragostinova approaches Bulgarian cultural programs as an attempt to resolve these contradictions—using the global cultural scene to assert the country's historical place in global civilization and to frame narratives of development. Through culture, Bulgarian elites were drafting their own, somewhat idiosyncratic, vision of a global future. The result was, perhaps, a contradiction of its own—Bulgarians of the period experienced both the “great boredom of monotonous state produced propaganda” and the “golden age of socialism” (60).
Dragostinova makes the connection between culture and politics clear from the beginning. Culture was a means to enhance and solidify the power of the elite, while rekindling and strengthening the enthusiasm of ordinary Bulgarians as they moved into developed socialism. Culture was a way to demonstrate the achievements of the Bulgarian state (socialist or otherwise) while eliding dissatisfaction with some of the failures of socialist modernity. In practice, this meant coming to terms with the contradiction between traditional Marxist conceptions of identity and community (the international working class) and those of national belonging. As Dragostinova notes, the nationwide and highly patriotic (nationalist?) celebration of the 1,300th anniversary of the Bulgarian state caused some consternation with Party officials in Moscow, concerned that Bulgaria was straying towards national deviationism. Smallness and the inroads provided by cultural exchanges allowed Bulgarian elites to pursue a “lively Balkan policy”—making strong connections with the ideological enemy Greece (and interestingly, leading to a level of estrangement with erstwhile friends: Yugoslavia and Romania). Culture was used to connect the Bulgarian diaspora to “Mother Bulgaria,” and to fold potential dissidents into the warm embrace of national belonging and conceptions of history. Bulgarian cultural exchanges with the west laid the foundation for expanded economic connections while positing universal human values and common European heritage. Present Cold War animosities were to be overcome by shared pasts and, presumably, futures.
It is a compelling story, one that expands our understandings of late socialism in important ways: the 1970s as an “era of stagnation” may never recover. Dragostinova's most important contribution, however, rests in her investigation of the connections the Bulgarian elites made with the global south: creating an “east-south axis,” new understandings of the processes of globalization and, potentially, pointing the way to convergence between the capitalist and communist worlds. Dragostinova pays special attention to Bulgaria's cultural exchanges with India, Mexico, and Nigeria—this is a rich space where Bulgarian elites demonstrated their “developed status” (and in so doing reproduced colonial discourses) but also shared stories of colonial control, anti-imperialism, and the glories of ancient kingdoms. The global south was a space where Bulgarian elites posited their own theories of development. These interactions challenge our understandings of modernization as a western phenomenon and narratives of the Cold War as a global struggle between rigidly unified camps. Dragostinova's work stands at the vanguard of new works rewriting stories of globalization through the connections between the second and third worlds. Cold War from the Margins is a masterful example of transnational cultural history—it reshapes how we understand not only socialist modernity and the Cold War, but also the nature of globalization itself.
