Bulgaria has love affair with the West

Press, 2 October 1979, Page 27

Bulgaria has love affair with the West

The queue for "Jane Eyre," the classic nine-teenth-century novel by Charlotte Bronte, stretched 100 metres outside the door of one of the main bookshops in Sofia the other day.

As soon as the shop sold out, copies started changing hands on the black market at 820 each, seven times the cover price.

Bulgarians, for years fed the purest Kremlin mixture of Marx and Lenin, are at last getting a little variety, and the taste for things Western is insatiable. Musicians across the little Balkan nation maynow play Western pop music — and they seem to do so exclusively. Dance halls are writhing with the jiving bodies not only of the young but also of the unabashed middleaged. clearly making up for the lost years.

Shoppers gaze, or rather gape, lovingly at the sleeves of pop records in the Sofia shops. And they now have their own homegrown pop star, Lili Ivanova. to buy- and listen to.

But nothing appears to attract more attention than the newly arrived shipments of eye shadow, lipstick, and French perfume.

The West has come to the theatre and television, too. Sofia theatreland is not content with one Shakespeare production — it has three. Television is now showing the inevitable “Peyton Place.” There are occasional Western films in the cinemas.

Cross the border with a handful of Western books, even the dullest technical magazines, and a smiling Customs official is likely to relieve you of a few. His explanation: You have got enough anyway.

Western holidaymakers may also find they are relieved of their radios and tape-recorders, until they put up a fight through their embassy and the disappointed official is forced to return them. The first question a Sofia taxi-driver is likely to ask a visitor is not his destination but whether he

has any music cassette tapes. These are equivalent in value to any fare. And the trendiest intellectuals in Sofia today splatter their writings with Western words — all to the confusion of most ordinary readers brought up since eight on Russian as their main foreign language.

But Bulgaria remains Russia's closest ally, its “loyal smaller brother.” as President Zhivkov puts it. From kindergarten onwards, Bulgarians are indoctrinated with the wonders of the Soviet Union. In the bookshops, children have a choice of colourful books on the life of Lenin, Russian revolution and the struggle for liberation from the Turks — a struggle that was won with Russian help. The Bulgarian child's equivalent of the big bad wolf is a Western capitalist. A socially committed worker is his knight in shining armour. The Soviet hammer and sickle is seen more often than the Bulgarian tricolour. On the news-stands, Bulgarian and Russian publications stand side by side. A million Soviet newspapers are said to be sold annually, but the only Western newspapers available are those published by Communists.

But is Bulgaria, a country of only 9M people, merely a carbon copy of its big Slavic brother across the Black Sea? The Russians who flock to the Bulgarian Black Sea resorts would probably not think so. Their biggest shock is often that Bulgarians appear to be better off than they are. Some foods may be in short supply (visitors soon learn not to look at the menu but to ask what is in the kitchen) and queues may be long. But Bulgarians have all the basic necessities. Even coffee can be bought at a price —sl2 a pound.

Most people are well dressed. The department stores have a good stock of luxuries, although Sofia does not yet quite have the choice found in Britain's Oxford Street. But prices are high for

people on an average wage of about $625 a month. A good off-the-peg man’s suit costs $4BO, a lady's imitation fur coat is $3BO and a spring coat is $3OO.

Despite the prices, there are plenty of buyers. With the shortage of accommodation and families sharing apartments with low' rents, many people have plenty of disposable income.

For all the signs of a relaxation and a bowing to consumer demands President Zhivkov appears to run as tight a ship as his counterpart in the Soviet Union. No challenges to the State are tolerated. There are constant resh-

uffles of top party cadres. President Zhivkov is careful not to appoint people to his inner councils if they show signs of regional loyalties. There are no apparent factions, no potential successors. Intellectual dissent is almost unheard of, except from Bulgarians who flee abroad like the 8.8.C.’s Georgi Markov, the journalist w'ho met his death in London from a poisoned pellet.

Nor is there much reason for intellectuals to speak out. They have been bribed rather than bullied into submission. After top party officials, they are the most privileged members of society. Writers

and artists can qualify for the trovcheski pola dan — the so-called creative half day — enabling them to work half the normal week for full pay. High enough up the creative tree, an intellectual can claim a chauffeur-driven car and the most coveted privilege of all — plenty of foreign travel. It is not unheard of for intellectuals to manage three jobs, although only two are allowed by law, collecting a full salary from each. One member of the Academy of Sciences in Sofia is estimated by his colleagues to be making well over $2OOO a month, more than three times the average wage. For all the hints that Bulgaria is edging towards the West, the movement is very much on the surface. Bulgaria and the Soviet Union are, in the words of President Zhivkov, “two bodies with one bloodstream.” — O.F.N.S. Copyright.