Living Socialism: The Bulgarian Socialist Humanist Experiment

378 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007.This dissertation investigates attempts by Bulgarian Communist Party leaders, bureaucrats and subjects to model, disseminate, and appropriate a local version of the "homo-sovieticus," or new soviet man and woman, during the 1960s and 1970s, a period I have termed socialist humanism. Four sites of investigation frame my work, each linked with the values that socialist humanism sought to instill: the brigadier movement (work); the workings of the brother-city relationship between Haskovo in Bulgaria and Tashkent in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (international socialism); internal tourism (nation); and the exhibition of art in the Haskovo gallery (aesthetics). The socialist system, in these and other programs, invested tremendous resources to direct the movements of its population, at least in part, in order to transform it subjectively. This dissertation is a study of attempts of Bulgarians in Haskovski okrug to navigate the dynamics of their intended transformation from early Bulgarian socialists to socialist humanist Bulgarians.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD