Zlatko Anguelov

I can only wonder how I might deal with living under a repressive government like the one in Bulgaria and the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It would not have been easy.

This book puts a very human face on what, from a western point of view, was simply a country controlled by a monolithic inhuman system. It is more complex than that. This book has much to teach us about how other sorts of political systems work, how difficult change is, and how democracy does not just spring up automatically when repressive governments fall.

Anguelov gives us descriptions of everyday life under a communist dictatorship, along with considerations of the moral choices people in Bulgaria had to make during the years that country was part of the Soviet bloc, as well as how difficult it was to build a democracy after the end of the Cold War.

I learned something about the Balkan people, and how the real economic and political system in the country was not the one defined by Bulgarian law or the one explained by the controlled press. It instead was all about individuals, ordinary people at all levels trying to control their bit of influence over others, or trying to find a way to deal with control from known or unknown sources. No one was quite sure of what was happening, what the government or the secret police were up to, what might be involved in any interaction with official life, the party, or even their neighbors.

Anguelov lives and works in Canada and the U. S. now, and has an excellent grasp of English. His prose is not easy for me, because he writes from a very different perspective from that in which I grew up in the United States. But he does make himself clear with just a bit of careful reading.

He is well worth paying attention to. We need the lessons in this book.… (meer)