114. Bulgaria Doesn’t Have A Museum of Communism. That Might Be Changing Soon.

Ian Elsner

But it became clear that my friend's dad assumed that this museum glorified Bulgaria's communist past. I asked him if he'd ever been to the museum, knowing the answer. "I've never been there, and I never will," he proudly huffed.

Louisa Slavkova

I recently talked to someone who is a small-d democrat, who said that because of the fact that he did his military during communism in a specific context, which was very traumatic for him, he said, "I am not one of those who willingly tell jokes and remember nostalgically my military times, and hence, there are hardly things related to communism that I like remembering. And so why on earth would I want to go to a museum?"

Ian Elsner

This is Louisa Slavkova, political scientist and founder of the Sofia Platform Foundation.

Louisa Slavkova

Hello, Ian. My name is Louisa Slavkova. I am in my mid-40s. And one day, I would like to be remembered not for the person who I am, but for the person behind the organization that built the first communist history museum in Bulgaria.

Ian Elsner

Slavkova started the Sofia Platform Foundation in 2013. It works to strengthen civic engagement in Bulgaria. The basic idea is that low levels of civic trust and weak democratic participation were inherited from the communist period and reinforced by the absence of accountability for those responsible.

Louisa Slavkova

Very often I would get the question, "What's your personal motivation to do what you're doing?" And so people expect that I have a personal story, that one of my parents or grandparents have been persecuted. The answer that I give is, it would be such a pity for us as a society if the causes we cared about were only the ones we were personally affected by.

Ian Elsner

Slavkova was a child when the communist regime collapsed in 1989.

Louisa Slavkova

And I think '89 arrived just as such a big surprise to so many people in the country that we literally didn't believe it when we saw it on TV. And the '90s were extremely volatile and turbulent with those thousands of percents of inflation, money being worth nothing, people losing their jobs, this rise of criminality and murders on the streets.

Ian Elsner

The Bulgaria that I know, modern Bulgaria, part of the EU, with its frequent elections and full supermarkets, came after this period. But communist Bulgaria and the instability of the 1990s were the Bulgarias of my grandparents. They felt persecuted and locked in during the communist era. And the family lore recounts at least one unsuccessful escape attempt. But as much as they hated living under communism, they found the post-communist years, which began when they were well into their 50s, confusing and unsettling.

Louisa Slavkova

I've never questioned the fact that the '90s were a result of 45 years of communist rule. Whereas I think probably half of Bulgarian society believes that transition to democracy in and of itself and by that democracy is worse than communism because it brought this instability.

Ian Elsner

Then there are the generations younger than my grandparents. I was born in 1989, the same year the regime collapsed. And of course now there are kids one generation removed from remembering anything about the communist era.

Louisa Slavkova

I just keep coming back to the notion of freedom and, you know, the fact that this young generation that is born in a democracy, not just that, but many of them are also born after the accession to the European Union. So you were born in a totally different world compared to my generation or those who were born in the '90s. And last time when we polled attitudes towards communism and level of knowledge and understanding, it was 93% of young people say they know almost nothing about communism.

And so what happens in an environment like this is that there is a phenomenon called secondhand nostalgia. You develop a sense of nostalgia vis-a-vis communism without having a clue what communism was all about. I've always thought this was an opportunity for us because that's like a blank page. You can do a lot with it. The question then is, if you were slower than all the content on social media, how do you actually do that?

Ian Elsner

One way that Slavkova found to do that was by focusing on the biggest and longest-lasting forced labor camp during the communist times: the Belene Concentration Camp. It was situated on an island in the middle of the Danube River, and it was operational until 1987. "Belene," the word, was used by the authorities as a threat. My mom said that she heard whispered rumors about it.

Louisa Slavkova

We started turning the largest former communist camp in Belene on the Danube River on the border to Romania into an actual site of memory and education. We knew that this is... that we can take on something that's considered a taboo, and we can work through that, bring different perspectives together, launch a conversation, and create the space where conflicting memories can meet, but we can still make a difference between the facts and the personal memories and stories, and we can develop one place into an actual place where people no longer feel worried about visiting or consider being too far away to visit.

Ian Elsner

Today, thousands of teachers and other visitors take part in tours and educational activities there. You can watch the oral histories with survivors online at belene.camp. Velichko Velev (archival audio, in Bulgarian): И всеко едно движение вече в последните дни... Velichko Velev (English voiceover): Every single moment in the last days I spent there, in the cell, was accompanied by fainting, loss of consciousness. I just didn't have the energy to even stand upright.

Watching these videos really highlights the lack of an interpretive museum. They raise so many questions and make me hungry for answers. Sofia Platform Foundation wants to start that conversation.

Louisa Slavkova

Teachers are probably the most important element in this whole picture. It's important to have digital campaigns and all of that. But teachers are the ones who have access to young people and who can spend quality time with them and can really develop an idea of historical thinking, critical thinking, and can bring this set of, "This is history. This is our present political moment. What does history have to do with the present political moment? And how does knowing and understanding this history make me a citizen that's more aware of their own role in the here and now?"

Ian Elsner

In addition to providing resources to students and educators, the experience of the Belene project gave Slavkova and her team the confidence to build a museum.

Louisa Slavkova

If we want to build a museum dedicated to communist history of Bulgaria, this is something that we can definitely do.

Ian Elsner

Planning and design are now underway for that museum. It will be built in Sofia, a world away from the Belene camp. The museum will be called Facade.

Louisa Slavkova

The name Facade, on the one hand, to speak about the promises of the regime, because such promises are made today by a bunch of populist leaders around the world, not just in Europe. And on the other hand, the actual human social cost of those promises. This is also a way for us to reconcile these two blocks of society where part of it was impacted by repression, but part of it has good memories of the past. And you cannot tell people that they're... Even if they lived in a sort of a Potemkin village, their memories are their memories. I cannot tell them, "No, don't have your memories, have other memories." This is not how this works.

Because oftentimes you would have the people who are nostalgic about communism tell you a typical thing: "Oh, do you remember banichka cost only five sotinki?" Or, "We all could go and do vacation once a year on the seaside."

Ian Elsner

Facade aims to make room for people's good memories without treating those memories as a verdict on the regime. Somebody who remembers a holiday at the seaside may never have known about Belene. The museum can put those memories alongside each other.

Louisa Slavkova

It's very difficult to imagine what it means to live in a society that is not free, and to live in a society where you don't have the right to choose. You are made to believe that you have a choice, but you actually do not have a choice. Just because you were religious or just because you owned five hectares of land and didn't want to give it to the state, you were sent to a gulag type of a camp. To me, what has value is the human life and human dignity. And this regime did not value any of them.

Ian Elsner

Facade is being developed to show how the regime shaped those different lives: what people were allowed to do, what they were prevented from doing, and the consequences of those choices. For young visitors, who have no personal memories of that time, even imagining those limits can be difficult.

Louisa Slavkova

And so, for a young Bulgarian, it's just unimaginable that you cannot drive across the border and go to Greece for a weekend. It's unimaginable. But it's really about having the freedom to make your own choices about yourself, the way you live, where and how you do that. And none of this was given to Bulgarians.

Ian Elsner

Young people from all across Europe will soon be crossing borders to come to Bulgaria for Eurovision. A Bulgarian song won the Eurovision Song Contest earlier this year, which means that Bulgaria will host the contest in May 2027 in the seaside town of Burgas. Facade is working to have a first version of the museum ready for Eurovision, inside a converted bus parked somewhere close by.

Louisa Slavkova

We will have the museum on wheels on only 30 square meters, on time for Eurovision, when many young people from across Europe and the world are going to come to Bulgaria next year. We're going to test it out. We're going to see if this approach and concept works. And if it does, the physical museum will have a branch on wheels that can go to every corner of this country. It's a bus with 70 seats. We're taking out most of the seats. And the bus's experience is going to be divided into two parts. In the first part, there will be four to five stations where you'll be invited to engage with the content in the stations and make a certain choice there. And after you've made a choice of those stations, you're collecting points.

One of them would be to do a certain dance, which was, by the way, forbidden. Then the other one would be to vote at the elections, which, as we all know, kept being organized, but there was actually no opposition. And so at each station you get a certain point. And then in the middle section of the bus, you see based on those points, what's the characteristic you receive. The characteristic is a certain type of a document. This was the document that determined what's going to happen with you, whether and where you could study, where you could live, where and what you could work or not.

Ian Elsner

The exhibition turns those choices into the regime's assessment of you. The second half of the bus shows what that assessment means for the rest of your life, which might include a camp like Belene.

Louisa Slavkova

To some people, the only place available would be a camp, probably, or a prison. There are going to be also course correction stations where you could decide to work with the State Security and improve a little bit your characteristic, your CV, so to speak. And then at the end of the experience, there is going to be a very short reflection that tells you that we are not here to judge people on how they made their choices and how they decided to live their lives. But we're here to tell you that it was this totalitarian regime that forced people into making those impossible choices. On the one hand, we don't want to remove responsibility from people, but we also don't want to put responsibility on people where it doesn't belong.

Ian Elsner

All regimes need to build their own legitimacy. And if everybody knows that the elections are fake, as was the case in communist Bulgaria, history and the stories that museums tell become part of that legitimacy. During the communist era, museums told a story that helped justify the people in power. I think back to my friend's dad in that car. He won't visit a museum of communism. It's possible to reject the regime completely and yet still inherit its idea of what a museum was for.

Louisa Slavkova

There is that generation for whom museum equals propaganda. When you travel across the country, in many towns and cities you have museums. You have both historical, you have ethnographic museums. But they're trying to glorify sometimes in the most absurd way the grand episodes of our history, which usually is either the Middle Ages or the liberation from the Ottomans.

Ian Elsner

And that gives Facade another task. Alongside telling the history of communism, it has to show that the museum can be a place to question the stories told in museums. Slavkova is aiming to open the permanent museum on November 10, 2028, the 39th anniversary of the beginning of Bulgaria's transition to democracy. You can find more information about the museum at facade.bg. This has been Museum Archipelago.

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