Daniela Koleva
What Do You Remember Of 9th September 1944?
Remembering Communism: Official and Unofficial Discourses
According to a tradition starting from Maurice Halbwachs (1996 [1950], esp. pp. 92-102) history and memory stand in opposition in a number of ways: history is an “objective” and abstract relation to the past, while memory is a personal and intimate relation to it; history follows a cognitive interest in the past, while memory is motivated by a quest for identity or a political will and refers to the “lessons of history”, i. e. the uses of history. Memory is thus about the truth of the present, and history – about the reality of the past. While memory is spontaneous, unmediated, actual, history is a reconstruction of what is no longer there. That is why memory is interested in continuity, in how identity is preserved over time, while history gives “a picture of the changes” and accentuates discontinuity. Memory exists where the “warmth of tradition” is still felt, while in our contemporary society it is “sequestered” by history and only “places of memory” are left. Memory being partial in the sense of both incomplete and biased, history has to “enlighten it and help it out of its mistakes”; it has to find and dismantle the power over memory. On the other hand, both being relations to the past, history draws on memory and feeds it in its turn. History and memory retain different segments of experience; they have different modalities of relating to reality (designation and description respectively), different modes of analysis (conceptual in history and based on examples and details – in memory). Accordingly, history and memory achieve different kinds of truth: referential, about facts and intersubjective, about experiences. On the other hand, memory is apologetic, or at least, vulnerable to manipulations, while history is critical; the discourse of memory pertains to sacralization and that of history – to disenchantment. (cf. Halbwachs 1996 [1950], Nora 1997 [1978], Le Goff 1997 [1988], Todorov 1995, Lavabre 1998).
In the following I am going to show the play of history and memory in personal recollections of only one historical event: the communist coup d’état on the 9th of September 1944, which is considered the beginning of the period of state socialism in Bulgaria. The memories were recorded in the course of life-history interviews conducted between 1995 and 1999 with persons above the age of 60, whose active life coincided with the period mentioned. Two things struck me about these stories. At the start of the life-history project in 1995, it was expected that memories of important political events and processes would pop up spontaneously in the narratives. However, this was not the case, with two exceptions: WWII in the stories of men who took part in it and the collectivization of the farming land in the stories of persons who had been affected by it. Thus all of the testimonies cited here are answers to the question: What do you remember of 9th September 1944? The other striking thing was the banality of the accounts, which I will try to explain in what follows. First I will review what seem to be three types of accounts and then will compare them with some examples of a normative historical discourse, the one of the school textbooks in history.
I. The aftermath of 9th September 1944: loyalty to the plot
When asked to tell what they remember of that particular day, a few of the interviewees tell of its aftermath and of the impact it had on their lives, thus following the logic of a “plot” implied by the perceived causal or meaningful connections between the events. Mrs. Doneva’s memories are of this kind: “When I was in my second year at the university, the 9th of September came and I was suspended from the university because I had to produce a special certificate [of trustworthiness] issued by the Otechestven Front1. My father was – they called him ‘koulak’ – a well-to-do land owner and they did not give me such a certificate.” After some time, she nevertheless managed to obtain a certificate, not from her place of birth but from the regional centre, with the help of a cousin who worked there. She graduated successfully from the university and her life career developed without any further impediments because of her “koulak” origin.
In a similar way Mr. Murad, a Turk born 1915, when asked of the 9th Sept. 1944, told of his activities as secretary of the newly established party organization:
“The 9th of September came. I was on my way round the villages, founding the party organization. I was not present at the first meeting – I wasn’t at home. But when they [the party functionaries who came from town] founded the party organization, they said [to the villagers]: Look here now, this is something brand new for you. Now you need a party secretary. He may be absent at the moment, but think well. For the village will be in his hands from now on. Think of a sharp-witted man, a smart man…”
D. K.: “But that was after the 9th of September, wasn’t it?”
Mr. M.: “Yes, afterwards.”
D. K.: “What about the very day? Do you remember it?”
Mr. M.: “I do, I do.”
D. K.: “What happened exactly? Did people understand what was going on?”
Mr. M.: “No one understood anything. Anything. At that time it was… the party was in town and here [in the village] the 9th of September was, so to say, normal. The people here didn’t take part in the struggle for liberation.”
It is interesting here to note some details of the speaker’s style as well as the “micropolitics” of the interview (i. e. the tacit negotiation of who he was, why he had the right to speak and why I should believe him). First, the contrast between the colloquial style of most of his story, and the last phrase, which is a shortcut for the formula “the struggle for liberation from fascism and capitalism”, omnipresent for decades in speeches on official commemorative occasions, as title of textbook sections, etc. In 1995, Mr. Murad does not question if what had been going on in Bulgaria between 1941 and 1944 was precisely that. Although he did not take part himself in “the struggle”, by using the shortcut and by putting colloquial expressions in the mouths of the party functionaries, he claims familiarity, even a kind of “intimacy” with it. In addition to the mixture of styles, this aspect of familiarity with the events of September 1944 is reinforced by his readiness to tell of “the very day” although, as it turns out, there is nothing to tell. No mention is ever made of what “the struggle” had been for, which was the party in question and what communism was all about. For Mr. Murad the 9th September 1944 was significant because it marked a change in his life career: he was the one elected party secretary at that first meeting.
The chronological displacement in such stories can easily be explained with the so-called telescopic effect of memory – the condensation, merging together of temporally or meaningfully related events. But there is also something more to it. Rather than being just inaccurate, these accounts are very telling of their authors’ interests: of how the event immediately affected their lives. Furthermore, they tell of a kind of “cultural code” or cultural consensus as to the meaning of the date 9th September, the establishment and reproduction of which was largely due to official propaganda and historiography.
II. Personal recollections referring to public discourses: loyalty to the facts
Most of the interviewees stick to (or, at least, begin with) what they have witnessed or felt themselves. Thus, for Mr. Philipov, born 1923, that day was very important; in some respects it determined his future life:
“I remember this: my cousin Todor Monov, early on the 9th of September, between 6:30 and 7 in the morning, when I got up, he was standing in the garden and he said: Congratulations, we are already in power. He told me that he had listened to the radio and heard Kimon Gueorgiev’s2 address to the Bulgarian people between 6 and 6:30 in the morning. […] That same day the news spread all over the village. We went to Berkovitsa [the regional centre]. They had already taken the power there. Todor Monov and I came back to our village and began to look for somebody to take the lead and establish the new power in the village and we couldn’t find three people to establish the trichlenka [a commitee of three members] to represent the new authority. At last a relative of ours agreed, a second or third cousin, and he became the first mayor of the village after the 9th of September.”
Thus Mr. Philipov’s association with the communist party began, which resulted in a successful administrative career. In an unintended way, his account, like Mr. Murad’s story, undermines the officially sanctioned discourse of 9th Sept. as a “revolution”, a “mass uprising”, where “the whole people” followed the lead of the communist party.
Other personal accounts do not seem to claim any relation to the “big” history or to the communist “master narrative”. Thus, Mrs. Donkova, 11 years old at the time, remembers her fascination with the tanks and soldiers she had never seen before:
“The 9th of September? You know, I didn’t know then that it was 9th of September. The weather was warm, it was autumn, I heard everybody say: ‘God, let it stop, let the war be over!’ – for we were in the war already at that time. […] I remember I saw a tank for the first time in my life, a tank coming along the road and dust, clouds of dust… and I remember the soldiers – exactly as the ones I’ve seen so many times since then on movies, photos, everywhere. […] Can you imagine what it was for me to see a tank stopping in front of us and all the children climbing on, and me too, with a bunch of flowers in my hand. And they opened the top and more young guys came out: in helmets, smiling, laughing. And the gesture, when he took the flowers – he shook them like this and destroyed the bunch […] I was offended – how can that be, such a good-looking young man and he destroyed my flowers.”
Mrs. Borissova, born 1932, remembers:
“The 9th of September began precisely in the morning. […] My mother woke us up early in the morning and told us: ‘I only want to tell you not to be scared when you look through the window.’ And when we looked through the window, we saw 5 or 6 men in drab clothes, standing in front of the police office… but the policemen were no longer there. These are my first memories… That is, I want to say, we just weren’t let out in the street, that’s why I don’t remember. There was, as they say and as was later described, something like a small meeting, a demonstration in the centre [of the town]. I didn’t see that. […] Nothing… at least, I didn’t realize. It is now a question, what happened where. I remember the blockades, but that was afterwards.”
Even when telling of their personal experiences on 9th Sept. 1944, most of the interviewees refer to a more general framework: their testimonies seem to add to some already familiar picture – the one seen “on photos and movies” – or, on the contrary, to contest it (“It is now a question, what happened where”). In each case, striving for loyalty to whatever did happen is demonstrated. But the very definition of “what happened” seems to be a problem: the question is not put at all, implying that what happened is already known and beyond any doubt. Indeed, it had been defined and explained, officially and unequivocally; had taken a stable shape and established a stable presence in people’s minds blocking out what was not thus defined and explained.
In contrast to this most viable “script” (consisting of both explanations and images), a number of accounts demonstrate loyalty to the “bare” facts and the minute details of personal experience rather than loyalty to the ideologically sanctioned script. They seem to pay attention to the external aspects of the events, rather than to their meaning, or to their “private” meaning rather than to the overall framework. This can also be seen as a tacit refusal to accept the “script”, which was most readily available and indeed, used to be officially imposed till recently.
The same effect is sometimes achieved with the anecdotal rendering of the stories. For instance, an interviewee remembers that, when he (aged 8 in 1944) heard from his parents that the Red Army was coming, he climbed on the roof of their house to see if the troops were already in view – he was eager to see the tanks – and got “a nice whipping” for that. The disappointment of the 11-year-old girl with the good-looking young soldier who destroyed her flowers also carries a sense of the comic aspect of the situation. Such anecdotal stories can sometimes also be prompted by a desire to debunk the official political myths.
III. Generalized images instead of recollections: loyalty to the meanings
Generalized images instead of personal recollections are by no means infrequent. Mrs. Milanova, born 1923, former partisan, did not even mention her personal situation at that moment:
“The 9th of September is what we fought for. Bulgaria was liberated for the second time by the Soviet Army. After the liberation, with the help of the whole Bulgarian people, everybody began to live better – calm and free. The villages in the country transformed, they began to look like towns. Jobs were secured for everyone. And this made people feel secure – medical care was free, education was free as well. We used to live like normal people.”
In these statements, it seems that the memories worked out years ago and referring one’s own life story to the “big” history, have remained intact despite the revision and the re-writing of the latter. Reiterating phrases from old textbooks, recalling previously imposed images, instead of their personal experience, they reproduce the “script” of the ideological constructions.
Mrs. Staneva, born 1920, widowed for more than 40 years does not speak in the language of the official communist propaganda, but chooses another “script”:
“When 9th of September came, they cooked food in cauldrons and everybody went with their bowls to be served and they said: ‘So it will be from now on, the land will be cultivated in common, nobody will be in trouble, there will be no rich and poor, no tax-collectors to take away one’s cow or sewing machine.’ There were many demonstrations, trucks passing with people dressed in national costumes…”
The dubious reliability of this story enhances its symbolic quality. The meaning of this naive utopian vision becomes clear only against the backdrop of Mrs. Staneva’s story of being forced with her children out of her own house by the local party “apparatchiks”: the house was to become a museum of her cousin, a partisan who perished in the eve of 9th September 1944.
In a more pathetic style the oppositional version is expressed by Mr. Anguelov, born 1914, formerly an active member of the Agrarian Party and supporter of its right wing, which stood in opposition to the communists in the first years after 1944. His story combines all three modes of telling:
“On 9th of September I was at the railway station [bar]. And some communists came (most of them were communists). They wanted wine, they wanted to lynch me – one of them was particularly keen – for they wanted me to give them drinks free. […] I know of 1918, when the proletariat came [to power] in Russia, I remember the events. They uprooted everything, destroyed everything, the tsar’s palace, just to come to power. They destroyed everything, all political parties. I kept this in mind. And when 9th September came, I remembered it. […] As 9th of September 44 came, they carried the equipment out,3 two cousins of mine; they carried everything out, the seed-drill, the reaping machine… They said: In the Soviet Union they sow with airplanes – and then I remembered the events in Russia and I realized that it was going to be hard…”
Comparing the 9th September 1944 with the Russian revolution is quite in compliance with the communist “master narrative”: however, in the interviewee’s assessment it has negative connotations. They are emphasized by another parallel, a tacit one – with the Ku-Klux Klan – suggested by the word “lynch”. His pointing at the destruction of “all political parties” in Soviet Russia hints that Mr. Anguelov is talking as a member of a party and not just as a private person. This position seems to entitle him to some generalizations, such as the remark of the collectivization as a consequence of 9th September 1944 and to put his account in the broader framework of violence and repression.
Offering propaganda clichés, utopian images and historical generalizations instead of their personal experience, the narrators from this group seem to make statements about their positions, about where they “speak from”. Thus they demonstrate more of a loyalty to the meanings than to the facts.
One’s own memories of them are mediated by the versions of history. A persistent, accepted notion of the event serves as a corrective for the individual’s memories. The “pattern”, “matrix” has been borrowed from the official discourse or, as in the last case, from an oppositional one, only to be reproduced and, sometimes, to be filled in with the individual’s own experiences. Thus individual memory becomes subject to certain rectifications reconciling it with some (more or less) accepted version. The private experience is subject to normalization and a coherence between biographical and historical narrative is ensured. This coherence sanctions the right of the teller to tell.
It turns out, however, that one’s ability to tell depends on (and is restricted by) the available rhetoric and symbolic devices for the construction of a narrative structure, which could best “represent” the past. As Marsha Siefert has shown, in a totally different context indeed, “style” can hardly be irrelevant to “substance” (Siefert 1989). What is being said is not independent of the way of expressing it. The content is moulded by the rhetoric. Thus “style” works back upon “substance”. But if so, then the thesis of the philosophy of science that there is no theory-neutral language, applies to the stories of the 9th September as well. Simply naming it a revolution or a coup d’etat means embedding it in a different narrative and is already taking side in a contest. Symptomatically, no one tries to subsume the event under a category. It is never referred to in any other way but by the date. So the date becomes reified, turns into a separate kind in itself. Mrs. Donkova’s remark: “I didn’t know then that it was 9th of September”, does not mean that she did not know the date; rather, it means that she had no idea of the importance of the event and of the meanings that were to be attached to it later. Mrs. Borissova’s statement: “The 9th of September began precisely in the morning”, does not refer to the day as a phenomenon of nature, but to the developments she witnessed. On the other hand, in all stories, 9th of September always “came” – as if no one did anything about that, it just “came” with the regularity and imminence of a natural phenomenon or of “the wheel of history”4. This is in conformity with (or, to advance the stronger thesis, could be the result of) one of the primary justifications of the communist rule, legitimizing state socialism on the grounds of its inevitability (see Watson 1994).
It is true that in the past decade new meaningful frameworks have been created to accommodate previously dissident memories. In spite of the transformation of the rhetorical environment from that of communism to that of democracy, there seems to be no readily available understandable set of codes, whereby “tacitly dissident experience” can be communicated.
As far as the 9th Sept. 1944 is concerned, no new dominant narrative has been worked out yet. Debates started in Bulgarian historiography since the early 1990s as to whether there had been fascism in Bulgaria or not. The answer to this question would be instrumental for the reinterpretation and the reassessment of the “9th Sept. 1944”. No consensus seems possible at present.5 The textbooks in history published in the first years after 1989 do not, as a rule, tackle the question at all. The current ones contain a paragraph on the event and its situation, providing more of a chronology and less interpretation. However, the latter is present in the very terms used by the authors. I looked at the four current textbooks in Bulgarian history approved by the Ministry of Education for the last year of secondary school (which means that teachers are free to choose any of them). The one published in 1993 as well as the one published in 1999 do not mention “anti-fascist struggle” at all; the authors use the phrases “communist resistance” and “civil war” respectively. They define the developments on 9 Sept. 1944 as a coup d’état and stress more explicitly the role of the Soviet army. The two other textbooks, published in 1996, contain sections on the anti-fascist struggle. The authors contend that an armed uprising took place on 8-9 Sept. 1944 and put it in the broader context of the anti-Nazi struggle in WWII.6
The commemoration is also split:7 the sympathizers with the political Left accentuate the anti-Fascist character of “the struggle” and hold meetings in front of the monument to the Soviet Army; those who were repressed in the years of socialism and the descendants of the victims organize memorial services
As K. Verdery points out, the socialist production of culture was a self-consciously constructed one, produced more through discourse and language than practice (Verdery 1995, 87-97), so control over the discursive realm and over the rhetoric was fundamental. That is why the production and survival of unsanctioned memories has been problematical.
In conclusion: the oral history of 9th Sept. 1944 failed to extract counter-narratives, “hidden transcripts” (Scott) or “evocative transcripts” (Scott’s concept adapted to Soviet-type systems by Humphrey 1994, 23) awaiting decoding. They rather proved the absence of shared alternative “scripts”: most stories of the event either resort to the old symbolic and rhetoric framework, aided by “photos and movies”, by monuments and ritual (though rendered suspect by the changing reality8) or stick to personal memory as more reliable (though partial and “private”). The latter seem to speak “past” rather than “back to” the official idiom. The oral history of 9th Sept. 1944 rendered once again problematic any simplistic conclusions of both the “monopolizing force” of official knowledge and the resources for resistance to it.
References:
Deyanova, L. (ed.) 1997. The Spirit of Annales. Reader. Sofia: Critique and Humanism (in Bulg.).
Halbwachs, M. 1996 [1950]. Mémoire Collective. (Bulgarian edition). Sofia: Critique and Humanism.
Humphrey, C. 1994. “Remembering an “Enemy”: The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century Mongolia”, in Watson 1994.
Lavabre, M.-Cl. 1998. “History and Memory: Some Starting Points”, Sotsiologicheski Problemi, 1-2, pp. 7-15 (in Bulgarian).
Le Goff, J. 1997 [1988]. “Histoire”, in id.: Histoire et Mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, pp. 179-186, 194-200, 297-325. Bulgarian edition: Deyanova, L. 1997., pp. 100-129.
Le Goff, J. 1997 [1988]. “Mémoire”, in id.: Histoire et Mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, pp. 163-177. Bulgarian edition: Deyanova, L. 1997., pp. 130-139.
Nora, P. 1984. “Entre Mémoire et Histoire”, in: Nora, P. (ed.) Les lieux de mémoire. I. La République. Paris: Gallimard.
Nora, P. 1997 [1978]. “Mémoire Collective “, in: La Nouvelle Histoire, Paris, pp. 398-401. Bulgarian edition: Deyanova, L. 1997., pp. 233-237.
Siefert, M. 1989. “Style as Substance: Dorson as an Author of Folklore Scholarship”, Journal of Folklore Research, 26 (1), January-April, pp. 61-79.
Todorov, T. 1995. “La mémoire devant l’histoire”, Terrain, 25, septembre, pp. 101-112.
Verdery, K. 1995 [1991]. National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. University of California Press.
Watson, R. 1994. “Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism. An Introduction”, in: Watson, R. (ed.), Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico, pp. 1-20.
Notes:
1 Fatherland Front – the anti-fascist coalition, dominated by the Communist party, which overtook the power on the 9th Sept. 1944.
2 Prime Minister in the first government of the Otechestven Front.
3 He refers to his joining the collective, which happened in the late 1940s. Answering to my specific question, Mr. Anguelov acknowledged that the collective was not established in 1944 but later. The exact year he could not remember.
4 “The wheel of history is turning and will be turning until the final victory of communism” – a much quoted sentence from G. Dimitrov’s speech at the trial, organized by the Nazis after the Reichstag fire in 1933.
5 The changes and the continuities in post-communist historiography are the focus of the international research project “Historiography in Southeast Europe after the Fall of Communism” funded by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and lead by the Centre for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures (CSBSC), University of Graz. The project started in the spring of 2001. My colleague Ivan Elenkov and I are to trace the changes in paradigms, themes, institutions, etc. as well as the current debates in Bulgarian historiography and related disciplines.
6 To the best of my knowledge the textbook published by Prosveta (a publishing house specialized for educational books, the oldest among the four mentioned) is the one most widely used. Colleagues who have a closer look at school education of history tend to explain that with inertia among teachers to rely on the oldest and most established publisher
7 A brief look at several central newspapers from around 9 Sept. 1999 will prove this: Demokratsia, the paper of the then ruling Union of Democratic Forces, only announces the promotion of The Black Book of Communism in Bulgarian; on 12 Sept. the paper publishes a photo of the new monument to the victims of communism in the centre of Sofia with a short note, none of them is on the first page. Douma, the paper of the socialist party (ex-communist): 8 Sept. – whole-page article by historian and member of the Central Committee of the communist party Prof. Ilcho Dimitrov against the “new readings” of the 9th September; 9 Sept. – interview with “the only living participant in the commandment of the people’s uprising on the 9th September” and reports of the inauguration of a memorial tablet to Todor Zhivkov (general secretary of the communist party and head of the state for 30 years till 1989) in his native town and a monument to Ivan Todorov-Gorunia who “first dared criticize Zhivkov’s monocracy”, both written in a respectful manner; 10 and 11 Sept. – reports of the commemorative meetings in different places. Two of the biggest dailies, Troud and 24 Chasa, publish photos of the monument to the victims of communism and brief reports of the commemoration in Sofia, bringing forth details of leading politicians’ reactions. Under the title The Hero and the Victim 24 chasa puts side by side interviews with a partisan commander and a political prisoner and Troud publishes an article by a leading journalist entitled Uprising, Revolution, Coup d’état or National Illusion and tracing the different appraisals, and another one by a left historian who argues that an impartial appraisal will be possible in 100 years.
8 That this officially managed imagery was devoid of its original meanings becomes clear from the accounts of the annual commemorations of 9th September: for most people it was an opportunity to visit friends and kin or catch up with domestic work, or simply another day off. A few city dwellers complain of having to take part in the demonstrations; others found it fun to meet colleagues in a different setting or demonstrate their new clothes.