Condemning communism - the Bulgarian example

by Professor Plamen S. Tzvetkov, Ph.D

...Bulgaria was one of those vassal territories of the Soviet Union whose rulers were among the most obsequious to Moscow's will and, therefore, the most ardent supporters of sundry terrorist organizations and rogue regimes around the world. The long-time Moscow proxy Todor Zhivkov openly boasted of his 'close friendship' with strongmen like Fidel Castro, Muammar Gaddhafi and Saddam Hussein. The Bulgarian arm of the KGB, the State Security apparatus, busily armed all kinds of terrorist groups, and in the 1970s and 80s enthusiastically responded to the latest Moscow directive to destabilize and 'Finlandicize' the West by developing and maintaining drug and arms smuggling networks that spanned the globe. It was the illegal arms trade and the long-time direct involvement of Bulgaria in drug trafficking that created the extensive infrastructure and channels which the communist nomenklatura started to use in the mid-1980s to syphon off the country's hard-currency resources, which it later used as the initial capital to set up 'honest private businesses' in the West.

One of the most repulsive features of totalitarianism is the extensive network of police informers instrumental in keeping the regime's tight grip on every individual. The fear that one's unflattering views of the authorities might reach their ears turned out to be an extremely powerful conditioning factor. At the same time, in their capacity as the backbone of the nomenklatura, the units and services of the repressive apparatus were the best informed in a system of tightly cointrolled information, a country that had virtually sealed its borders to any outside press, radio broadcasts or books. To the hapless subject of the Soviet Empire it was easier to get to the Moon than to a Western country. It was exactly its exclusive monopoly over the flow of information that enabled the cadres of the old State Security organization to usurp the powerful economic leverage that would cushion, at least for them, the inevitable collapse of communism. While communism is the mafia in office, the mafia is communism in opposition.

These same circles managed to gain control over most of the media, in order to continue brainwashing nations like Bulgaria. The very word 'democracy' became an obscenity, while the highest circulation daily newspapers are not above rekindling a kind of vague yet insiduous nostalgia for the communist past.

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