Bulgaria’s Monumental Problem

Bulgaria’s Monumental Problem
© EPA-EFE/BORISLAV TROSHEV   |   A man holds a picture of Georgi Dimitrov who was the first communist leader of Bulgaria, from 1946 to 1949 and led the Communist International from 1934 to 1943, stands in front of the Red Army monument during Victory Day celebrations in Sofia, Bulgaria, 09 May 2019.

The legacy of Communist-era monuments in Bulgaria, glorifying the regime and the occupying Soviet army, became a point of fiery debates and yet another dividing line between pro-West and pro-Moscow voices. On a closer look, chaotic plans for their removal show a society and a political class unable to reach a consensus or put the past in perspective. Erasure has not been followed by vision.

From Red Army hero to Superman

The park around Sofia’s Monument to the Soviet Army usually brings an air of subculture individuality. Youngsters often call it “the Soviet” in short. There are skaters, focused on their tricks, there are punks, often beer-swinging and in Nirvana t-shirts, couples in deep talks around the alley benches or on the stairs of the monument. Sometimes, the homeless find some solace in the area. Those who are a decade or two older are usually walking their dogs or playing ping-pong in the surrounding areas.

Most of the people crossing the park are also aware of it as a spot for graffiti and protest actions – the most famous example being 2011’s work by the art collective Destructive Creation which painted the Red Army figures in the colours of fictional American pop culture icons including Superman, Santa Claus and Ronald McDonald, in a reference to Bulgaria’s changing course. In 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, part of the monument was painted blood red and the plaque was vandalized. The annual Sofia Pride event has used it as a gathering spot since 2012. In the last two years, the Vox Populi theatre collective has been running a small space for music and art performances.

This is not a unique story: the wide spaces around the monuments have been used in similar ways in other towns after the fall of the regime in 1989, sometimes also as a reference point for meetings or sport areas. The curious history, futurist shape and isolated location of the ‘The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party – Buzludzha’ has received particular attention from both local and international photographers, to the point that sometimes travel books with Buzludzha on the cover art might be the only thing connected to Bulgaria in international bookstores. A recently established annual music festival in Buzludzha’s surroundings is one of the latest efforts to preserve it in some way.

 

Memorial house of the party 'Buzludzha'. Photo by Nikola Mihov, part of his photobook Forget Your Past. https://www.nikolamihov.com/

In recent years, some of the monuments have been used as a shooting location for various videos: from Algiers’ “Irony. Utility. Pretext.” to Mø's “Nights with You” and Rita Ora’s “Bang”. The ambitious architecture of Shumen’s 52-metre high “Monument to 1300 Years of Bulgaria” has also been making an imposing presence in Bulgaria’s internationally award-winning drama “Blaga’s Lessons”.

A paradox lies in Bulgaria’s treatment of Communist-era monuments

For something that has been created as politically-charged propaganda, since 1989 these locations feel strangely divorced from their original function. The monuments have been essentially desacralised, with their role changed by the society itself.

If we can take this as a sign of progress, a healthy way to co-exist with the past and an effort to reframe the context, at the curve end of 2023, the debates around Sofia’s Monument to the Soviet Army suddenly returned to the black and white anti-communist rhetoric of the 1990’s.

There’s a clear sense of unfinished business in the air, with the debates over the Soviet legacy in Bulgaria reignited by Russia’s invasion and political meddling.

On December 12, the removal of the monument in Sofia started, with the official reason being safety concerns around the state of the figures. This wa happening exactly 30 years after town councilors in Sofia first voted for the dismantlement in 1993. That was almost 40 years after the monument was erected in 1954 to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Soviet forces occupying Bulgaria, so all in all, the monument dominated the skyline for seven decades. 

 

Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia, 1977. Photo by Panayot Barnev. Source: Bulgarian Visual Archive. https://visualarchive.bg/en

In the days following December the 12th, the skaters, the punks and the weed dealers were replaced by two protesting crowds, each trying to deal with the legacy. One was in favour of the dismantling and supporting the government’s decision; the other against it. This second crowd carried several Russian flags and was made up of voters and representatives of Bulgaria’s main pro-Russia parties: left-wing leaders Bulgarian Socialist Party, far-righters Revival (who as a sign of protest against the removal blocked parliamentary sessions for two days) and the more marginal Stand.Up BG.

To many, the irony was not lost: the events echo the plot of Georgi Gospodinov’s International Booker-winning novel “Time Shelter” in which societies across the world vote in referendums to return to the past, a nod to how different countries self-mythologize their histories.

Aneta Vasileva, longtime architecture critic and founder of NAN [New Architectural Legacy] organisation specialised in architecture from the second part of the XX century, says that monuments are the unhealed wound of every society in some kind of a transition, reopened time after time. She is finishing a book on the subject and sees the topic as part of the wider problem on how memory is preserved and how memory changes.

“Working out the contradictions around us is something that is possible for us to achieve – we can destroy, forget or decide not to know anything at all. I guess there’s a method beyond ignorance, destruction and violence which can allow us to understand different viewpoints and create new understanding of reality. We could try to create a consensus, a compromise, we could give opportunity to pluralistic interpretation – but where that is possible in a painfully divided society is a different question”, Vasileva told Veridica. She recalled the words of Austrian writer Robert Musil from 1936, where he describes monuments as “impregnated with something that repels attention, causing the glance to roll right off, like water droplets off an oilcloth, without even pausing for a moment”; as well American historian Lewis Mumford’s vision from the same era that “the notion of a modern monument is a contradiction in terms; if it is a monument, it is not modern, and if it is modern, it cannot be a monument.”

Vasileva sees some common threads between the conversations and the protests around the monuments of colonialists, slave owners and generals in the US and Europe, and how the Soviet legacy is seen in the region, especially after 2022. “But the topic of the fate of the monuments is only the most visible part of a more global phenomenon – that the heritage we live in is more and more contradictory, and in many different ways”, Vasileva adds.

“Death refused to die”

Although the main composition is now removed, the dismantling of all the surrounding objects was stopped by authorities on December 19 over insufficient paperwork and legal processes. Despite initial promises that the whole action will take just a month, it seems like this will not be the case.

The situation where citizen energy clashes with political bickering bears some resemblance with the demolishing of communist leader and 1946-1949 Prime Minister Georgi Dimitrov’s Mausoleum.

As journalist Dimiter Kenarov noted in his 2020 essay for The Point Magazine, focused on the tedious process in 1999: ”A few more blasts and six days later, the mausoleum was finally gone. It had taken six days to build it, in July 1949, but destruction proved a harder task. Death refused to die. Historical memory was impervious to military solutions. Yet for all that, a desperate hope clung to the iconoclasts in power. If you blew up the past and carted away its ruins, wouldn’t it eventually disappear? If you brought down the temple, wouldn’t the gods flee in terror? If you torched the house of the dead, how could the dead come back?”.

In recent years, the space where the mausoleum in which Dimitrov’s embalmed body was preserved and shown until 1990, has been used twice as a ground for large-scale contemporary art installations by local artists. Although a third project has been approved since 2021, a continuous red tape involving the municipality has delayed the plans – yet another example of the inability to make a sustainable plan around these locations.

  

 Monument of Bulgarian-Soviet Friendship in Varna. Photo by Nikola Mihov, part of his photobook Forget Your Past. https://www.nikolamihov.com/

The tension is bound to increase in the near future. This events in Sofia triggered a wave of reactions in towns like Plovdiv, Burgas and Varna where large communist-era monument ensembles also exist in half-abandonment, also sharing a similar background of being built in the 1950’s and the 1970’s and commemorating the Soviet army, despite that the Soviets suffered no battle casualties in Bulgaria. In the last days of 2023 and first of 2024 municipalities showcased some ambition to kickstart the process of their removal – or at least enough for protests against the demolition to take place in Plovdiv too.

For now, the Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia stays partially removed, behind scaffoldings, with no plans for whether the place will go through any renovation after the process. There’s no transparency over where the monument figures will be stored or which museum’s collection will open its doors for the disgraced soldier, the mother and the child, depicted in the ensemble. Their current location following the removal is unknown.

Plans for whether the monuments in Plovdiv, Burgas and Varna will be in some way removed remain sketchy and more of a source of a surface-level quick political PR.

Skaters and punks have returned to the area, putting another phase of confusion in context, one beer sip at a time.

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