Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 30, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a book talk by Victor Petrov on his recent publication, “Balkan Cyberia,” winner of the 2024 Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize. Moderated by Mark Mazower.
Bulgaria in 1963 was a communist country led by a centralized party trying to navigate a multinational Cold War. The state needed money, and it sought prestige. By cultivating a burgeoning computer industry, Bulgaria achieved both but at great cost to the established order. In “Balkan Cyberia,” Victor Petrov elevates a deeply researched, local story of ambition into an essential history of global innovation, ideological conflict, and exchange.
Granted tremendous freedom by the Politburo and backed by a concerted state secret intelligence effort, a new, privileged class of technical intellectuals and managers rose to prominence in Bulgaria in the 1960s. Plugged in to transnational business and professional networks, they strove to realize the party’s radical dreams of utopian automation, and Bulgaria would come to manufacture up to half of the Eastern Bloc’s electronics. Yet, as Petrov shows, the export-oriented nature of the industry also led to the disruption of party rule. Technicians, now thinking with and through computers, began to recast the dominant intellectual discourse within a framework of reform, while technocratic managers translated their newfound political clout into economic power that served them well before and after the revolutions of 1989.
“Balkan Cyberia” reveals the extension of economic and political networks of influence far past the reputed fall of communism, along with the pivotal role small countries played in geopolitical games at the time. Through the prism of the Bulgarian computer industry, the true nature of the socialist international economy, and indeed the links between capitalism and communism, emerge.
Victor Petrov is an associate professor at the University of Tennessee. He is a historian of the modern Balkans, late 20th century, and the history of technology, and failed utopian projects. He is currently working on projects relating to the explosion of phenomena, UFOs, clairvoyancy, faith healing and other ‘alternative’ forms of knowing the world in the post-socialist Balkans; as well as one on the Interkosmos space co-operation program and the histories of alternative approaches to the space commons above us.
