Vesela Hristova teaches history at the German Language School in Burgas. Instead of asking her students to memorize boring facts about communism from their history textbooks, she sent them on a mission of discovery—one that involved interviewing relatives, gathering communist memorabilia, and analyzing conflicting views of the communist period in Bulgaria.
To get a grasp of what communist repression was like, the class also simulated a trial against an “enemy of the people,” and for their presentations they wore the uniforms and red neckerchiefs typically worn by communist youth. Their teacher’s goal was for them to “experience the past not only in their minds but also in their hearts and with their hands, as if they themselves had lived it.”
Hristova also applied the “bag method,” which she learned at a Sofia Platform training. Students had to name items in a bag that were not available to people before 1989. The bag method is an extremely effective way to teach history of the recent past in Bulgaria, says Louisa Slavkova, Sofia Platform’s executive director. This is because it lets young people compare their own lives with those of teenagers in the past and decide whether they could live without certain freedoms such as the ability to choose what to wear at school or whether to have a mobile phone and the freedom to travel abroad or speak out against a government decision they find unfair.
Teens are often shocked to learn that, before 1989, people weren’t allowed to express dissatisfaction publicly. Not only that—disagreement was extremely dangerous. There were rules on physical appearance to follow (long nails were a no-no!), and sometimes shoppers could not find even the most basic of commodities like meat, shoes, and toilet paper. To travel abroad, you needed a special permit, which only a tiny minority with close connections to the communist elite was issued.
“A national representative study from 2014 shows that 94 percent of Bulgarian millennials know next to nothing about communism and life before 1989. The little information they have is usually distorted through the lens of personal memory or even nostalgia,” Slavkova says. Students aren’t motivated to study the communist era as it is the last topic in a densely packed high school history curriculum and one that doesn’t even appear on university entrance exams.
Sofia Platform’s mission is to address the lack of objective information on Bulgarian history from 1944 to 1989. Through training sessions, public discussions, school visits, and the publication of teaching guides, the foundation aims to expand students’ knowledge of the communist era and cultivate engaged citizens who won’t repeat the mistakes of the past. With support from the America for Bulgaria Foundation, Sofia Platform has organized over one hundred discussions and workshops across the country over the past five years. In May 2017, it published a collection of historical essays about the communist period and a teacher’s guide focusing on methodology.
Sofia Platform has also organized many meetings between young people and individuals who were repressed by the communist regime. Georgi “Gogo” Saraivanov, who had been a political prisoner for nine years, was one of the foundation’s most cherished partners. He managed to escape to the West but returned to Bulgaria after the fall of communism. Between 2014 and 2016, Gogo visited many schools, where he talked to students and showed them the chain that had bound his arms and legs in prison. He passed away two days before a scheduled meeting with students.
Victims of communism like Gogo may be gone, but we’ll never let them be forgotten, Slavkova says. “Our work with Gogo and other witnesses of communism is an important way to educate young people in Bulgaria and forge the courage to move forward in a country where history divides more than it unites us.”
