Reframing the Post-Communist Transition in Eastern Europe
The end of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a dramatic time of joy, anxiety, and many expectations. Optimism was rampant, and some of the crucial challenges the region would face were largely unforeseen—by those gaining their freedom as well as by Western policymakers eager to expand the global population of market-oriented democracies.
“One by one, countries from the Eastern Bloc said, ‘This is not working for us anymore,’” said Harriman Director Valentina Izmirlieva, in a conversation with Harriman Magazine editors Ann Cooper and Masha Udensiva-Brenner. This was the moment when Western policymakers and academics “could have begun to recognize, contextualize the individual components of this bloc,” Izmirlieva said, “but they were accustomed to thinking about them as a homogeneous mass.”
That thinking still persists in some quarters, though Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has accelerated a reframing, giving greater recognition to the region’s considerable diversity.
The editors asked Izmirlieva to reflect on these changes through the lens of her personal and professional experiences, beginning as a teenager in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1970s. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Izmirlieva: I was part of the generation that grew up in the stale Communism of the Brezhnev era, when nobody really believed in the great Communist future. Nobody believed the empty slogans of the regime’s rhetoric. Being schooled in reading between the lines, our reaction to that was, “Oh, so if they tell us that the West is everything rotten and wrong and cruel and futureless, and we are the great power that brings progress, it must be the other way around. We know that we are not the great power. Ergo they are the epitome of everything great.”
Editors: How much of the outside world did you understand beyond what was happening within Bulgaria?
Izmirlieva: I guess I was raised as apolitical. But then I went to the English language school.
Editors: When you were how old?
Izmirlieva: When I was fourteen. That was a place where children of the Communist elite went, through a special quota. The people who entered through normal examination, I think we were about 20 people for a class of 200. There were quite a few people who were children of diplomats, who had lived in English-speaking countries, who had Western goods, magazines. And all of a sudden, I go to school where people have LP records, and I could listen to rock and roll, underground music from the West, and read novels by American writers.
Editors: So that kind of gave a little window, a distorted window—a curated window—into the West.
Izmirlieva: We didn’t live through the terror, the time when people were imprisoned and sent to camps for just having a particular name or wearing a particular kind of clothes. That was not our political reality. What was most oppressive was the awareness that you were living in a big prison, in which you have certain limited freedoms. But the boundaries of it are clear and very strictly protected. It’s in a way like living in a ghetto, right? And within it you have certain freedoms, like freedom of education. Yes, we were fairly well educated—educated enough to understand the cruelty of the limitations.
Editors: Can you pinpoint a time or an event where you, for the first time, understood that maybe Communism was going to fail?
Izmirlieva: We didn’t believe in anything that they said, certainly didn’t believe in the future. But nobody around me believed that the regime would collapse—let alone on its own—that it would collapse in our lifetime.
Izmirlieva left Bulgaria in the summer of 1989 for her first trip to the West at the invitation of the Free University of Berlin.
Izmirlieva: That was right before everything collapsed. I was in Berlin, in West Berlin. I saw the Wall from the other side. I’d seen it back in 1977, my parents and I went to East Berlin on a trip, and we saw it from afar behind the barbed wire. [But in West Berlin] I saw it from its colorful side in August, ‘89. And I thought this was a part of the planet. It was going to be there forever. And then several months after, it collapsed.
Editors: What did you think when you heard that the Wall was down?
Izmirlieva: Honestly, I was much more preoccupied by what was happening in Bulgaria than by what was happening abroad, because it was so sudden and so unexpected, and so exhilarating. One by one, countries from the Eastern Bloc said, this is not working for us anymore. And that was parallel to processes inside the Soviet Union. [Shedding Communism] was yet another experiment without a precedent. Nobody knew how to do it or what it meant. But the immediate experience of it on the ground in Bulgaria, my experience, was just—things that up until yesterday were unthinkable are happening. And this collapse was at every level. The first one was political. All of a sudden, we could go and protest. And we did.
Editors: How did your thoughts and your expectations begin to change in that period? There’s excitement, but were you also looking ahead like, “Here’s what I hope, here’s what I think will happen?”
Izmirlieva: We had dreams or illusions. The hopes—now I know that they were largely unrealistic, but they were shared, they were prevalent. And I think that the big hope—or the big illusion—was that we really believed all our problems were linked to the Communist government. And once the government is removed, all our problems will be solved. This illusion is linked to the illusion—because we lived in this Cold War world view of polarities—that the West is the epitome of the promise, and even the miraculous recipe for stability, prosperity, justice, and freedom. We didn’t understand freedom very well. I mean, people who have not been free their whole life, how can they understand freedom?
During this period of transition, Izmirlieva worked as researcher for the medieval section of the Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Bulgarian Literature. In 1990 she came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship. Nine years later, she had earned a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in medieval Slavic studies. Her devotion to the field puzzled American colleagues.
Izmirlieva: What I encountered when I came here was that not only was the Bulgarian lev, the currency in Bulgaria, not convertible into American currency, but my knowledge was not convertible into American currency, either. Nobody was interested about my experiences, about the particular point of view toward the history, the culture, the literature from the peripheries of the Eastern bloc.
Editors: Because they were interested in seeing everything through a Russian lens?
Izmirlieva: I had to learn to convert my knowledge, to articulate it, into a language, into a discourse that my Western colleagues, or my Western teachers, are programmed to understand and recognize.
Editors: Can you describe that language?
Izmirlieva: I mean, to put it in very simple terms, there was no justification why American Slavists should care about the classics of Bulgarian literature or about Bulgarian medieval culture. I was told point blank: “That was part of your national project in Bulgaria. But you’re in America now and nobody honestly cares until you can give a rationale why it is important for Americans to know that, why it matters for us.” But what went without saying is the significance of everything Russian, precisely because of this Moscow-focused world view of the Cold War that had valorized knowledge of Russian history, culture, and political life as a priori important for Western, and specifically American, national security and international policies. So, any kind of justification inevitably had to be inflected, triangulated through Russia.
Editors: When we talked to you earlier this summer, you said something that stuck out: “Lots of mistakes were made in the 90s, and now we are paying for them.” Talk about that in terms of academia, in particular. What were those mistakes? Why did they happen?
Izmirlieva: I had in mind bigger mistakes, not just in academia, and mistakes that were made on all sides. There was an inbuilt, a willful blindness for us, in Bulgaria, in the Soviet bloc, not only about the West, but about what to expect, how to go about building freedom—a certain naïveté about the change of regimes, the fact that the siloviki, the security forces in Bulgaria, got fused with organized crime very quickly and redistributed the national wealth, while we were celebrating about freedom, right?
[Meanwhile,] the West had the complacency of the victors who won the Cold War. And that colored the way they not only devised policies, but also the way they thought about themselves. This sense of “We are victors, and we can dictate the rules and the norms,” without much curiosity or interest in understanding this bloc that started falling apart, disintegrated into independent countries. I think between Trieste and the Urals, there were six countries, and all of a sudden there are 23, if I count right. But the Western policymakers and Western academics were accustomed to thinking about this as a homogenous mass. And this was the moment when they could have begun to recognize, contextualize the individual components of this bloc. And I don’t think that really happened.
That bred a lot of resentment, and now we’re paying for it. The rise of the illiberalism and autocracy in Eastern Europe is a direct result from that—the resentment, sense of humiliation even, as Putin would articulate it. The sense of inferiority for Eastern Europeans—who had been already treated not as equal brothers in the Communist brotherhood, but as second-rate citizens within the Soviet bloc—to be treated the same way by the West enhanced old wounds and old resentments.
Then, to come as a scholar to the West and to be told that what you know, and the cultures and histories that you study, are not of the same value as the great Russian culture—reimposing these colonial models, if you will, that the Soviet Union tried to impose on us—is really intellectually offensive, on top of that.
The West should have had more curiosity in us, rather than to assume that all they need to know about us is our willingness to become like them. And to be judged only by whether we check the boxes of compliance.
Editors: What do you think were the most important consequences for Bulgaria of this situation, where the West was kind of blind to the fact that this is an individual country that stands on its own?
Izmirlieva: I wouldn’t go that far to say that they were blind that we are an independent country. But the level of knowledge of who we are, what is our history, how we think about ourselves, there was a widespread indifference. And I can talk more about academia than about the circles of policymaking or lawmaking. Maybe it was different there.
But in academia, that was a fact here in the U.S. in the 90s and in the first couple of decades in the twenty-first century as well. And so, we have bizarre results in literary studies. The fact that we know more about third-rate Russian writers than about first-rate Eastern European writers—it’s paradoxical. And it is bolstered by translation policies, publication policies. What is available valorizes what is important, and this vicious circle is perpetuated.
In the wake of Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine, all of a sudden we began to hear complaints: “Oh, we want to have classes about Ukraine, but we don’t know much about Ukrainian culture. And we don’t have sources about Ukrainian studies.” All of a sudden, these lacunas became very obvious and painfully recognized. But that is true, more or less, about all other former Soviet countries in Eastern and Central Europe. In different degrees for the individual countries, but that’s the general trend.
Editors: Do you see any change there? Do you see any greater awareness now, within academia?
Izmirlieva: I think that there is a momentum right now, with this push to reframe our knowledge about the former Soviet bloc and the possibilities of thinking about its components in different ways, to recontextualize them, to reconfigure our mental maps of not just political zones but also of cultural connections. It is driven mostly by the war in Ukraine right now, and I hope that we will not lose this momentum to make the bigger, the really significant case about Russocentrism in our studies that affects all other countries, and not just Ukraine.
Editors: What more would you like to see Harriman do in this regard?
Izmirlieva: I would like to see institutional structures or sustainable programs established now that will not be contingent on the goodwill of individual leaders. [Structures that] will be there to stay no matter who’s in charge and no matter how the political climate shifts. Because it is not in the name of this particular moment that I’m pushing for changes—I firmly believe that it is to the advantage of U.S. policies, and Western policies, to understand better the intricacies and complexities of this whole area that was under the rule of the Soviet Union. In this way we can understand better not only Russian ambitions toward these parts of the world but also processes inside NATO and the EU that include leaders like [Hungary’s Viktor] Orbán, for example.
Editors: Long before the [full-scale war in Ukraine] you proposed re-examining Slavic study or the former Soviet Union through the region of the Black Sea. Can you talk about that?
Izmirlieva: Slavic studies is a grandchild of German Romanticism and Russian imperialism, to put it crudely. It’s predicated on fraternity of languages. We can see, with the Russian ideology in the making right now, how pernicious it is to push unity of language as a common ground for political unity. So, I think it is time for Slavic studies to rethink the rationale for doing what we’re doing and shift its focus from shared identities toward exploring the territory they shared with other non-Slavs and how it has shaped their history, identity, ideas about the future, and their culture, broadly defined.
I’m not naïve. I understand it is not easy and probably not even possible to change administrative structures in universities. It’s not just the Slavic department that is based on language families. But it is useful for Slavists to recontextualize what they are doing in alternative frameworks. And the Black Sea framework is one such alternative that I find useful for my research and for my own thinking. ◆
Featured photo:
- Left: a childhood photo of Valentina Izmirlieva
- Right: Izmirlieva’s school building in Sofia, the First English Language High School in Sofia
