The death of Bulgaria

National Review, Nov 25, 1996 by Radek Sikorksi

A COUNTRY where a bottle of perfectly decent wine costs a dollar might sound like heaven on earth, but in Bulgaria's case it is just another symptom of decline. Under the former Communists who have continued to rule Bulgaria with only a brief interruption in 1991 -92, the country has descended into a decrepitude already deeper than that of many parts of Latin America. In the course of a weekend-long conference I attended in Sofia, a couple of businessmen were blown up by car bombs and the press revealed that much of the sausage sold at street markets is made of stray cats. Practically all shops, restaurants, street stalls, and even beggars pay protection money to organized crime.

The average monthly wage hovers around $90; the average pension is half that. For lack of seed credit, farmers have planted only 10 per cent of the normal grain-growing area. Vineyards, the country's principal export producer, burn. Their owners set them on fire because a badly drafted restitution law requires them to pay for vines planted on their land since confiscation.

Official inflation will have reached 200 per cent by year's end, which is certainly an underestimate, since most prices are still controlled by the government. The central bank is trying to attract savings through high interest rates -- currently at 25 per cent per month -- but its reputation is against it. When the government recently tried to import grain from the United States, it was told that the guarantee of the central bank of Bulgaria would be insufficient and the grain would flow only if a private bank with good standing agreed to underwrite the contract. If it weren't for its mild climate and the fact that the majority of town dwellers maintain close links with relatives in the countryside, the country would soon be facing famine.

I suspect that most Westerners have heard of Bulgaria mainly in connection with plots to kill the Pope. An umbrella-launched poison pellet probably springs to their minds as Bulgaria's contribution to modern technology. Collapse in Bulgaria may seem to them as natural as civil war in Afghanistan. But to those of us who spent our youth inside the camp of progress, "holidays in Bulgaria" still has more the ring of "holidays in Florida" than of "holidays in Cambodia."

The strange fact is, Bulgaria had it good under Communism. Poles, Czechs, East Germans, and Hungarians flocked by the millions to its unspoiled beaches and mountains. In the summer of 1976, I drove with my parents from my home city in northern Poland past Radom in the southeast, where workers were busy setting a Communist Party regional headquarters ablaze in an outburst of anger against food shortages and price increases. We drove toward our holiday destination trading chewing gum, wigs, nail polish, condoms, and similar luxuries for Soviet gasoline, tools, and cameras. We Poles were the envy of all other inmates of the socialist camp because we were allowed to travel beyond Bulgaria to the West -- that is, to Turkey and Greece. There, we could trade our socialist wares for gold trinkets and dollars and thus hope that the entire holiday would turn out budget-neutral -- a top priority at a time when my parents' professional salaries amounted to $20 per month.

But Bulgaria was a poor man's Riviera, where the food was excellent, plentiful, and cheap. During decades when an orange was a Christmas-grade luxury and one took photographs in the West of butchers' shops full of meat to prove the superiority of capitalism to friends back home, meat and tropical fruit were abundant in Bulgaria. Even apartments -- a perennial scarcity in most planned economies -- were relatively easy to obtain. At a time when young couples in Poland could only hope that their children might live in an apartment of their own (waiting lists stretched to 15 years and more), a friend of mine in Bulgaria was housed in less than a year without paying a bribe.

It was all, of course, something of an illusion. Bulgarians prospered by comparison to the rest of us not because they found a way of making socialism work, but thanks to huge subsidies from the Soviets to their most faithful ally. Formally neutral in the Second World War, Bulgaria was occupied by the Red Army, and Sovietized without much opposition. Bulgarian Communists drew on the nation's genuine Russophilia, unique in Eastern Europe. To this day, the finest church in Sofia, indeed the largest Orthodox basilica in the Balkans, is the Aleksandr Nevsky -- erected at the turn of the century in gratitude for the many Russians who gave their lives liberating Bulgaria from the Turks.

Like Belarus today, Communist Bulgaria kept applying to become a republic of the Soviet Union. It was rebuffed, probably because it suited the Soviets to have a country formally independent but totally pliable. It was through Bulgaria that the dodgier Soviet arms contracts were laundered. Bulgaria earned further billions of dollars reselling Soviet raw materials on the world market. Strange to recall, Bulgaria once specialized in high technology, building computers and other electronic apparatuses according to plans stolen in the West by the KGB.