It's No Accident

Sofia was once the world capital of anti-imperialist struggle, the place where you could head for some political training -- perhaps before spending a few days vacationing in a Black Sea resort further east -- and then arrange for a Bulgarian freighter to ship some AK-47s in advance of your return to the jungles of Vietnam or the bush of Namibia.

Sofia isn't like that anymore, so I regret to report that I won't be bringing back any special struggle-oriented presents for my comrades. Capitalism has not been kind to Bulgaria -- what land has it ever treated nicely? -- so that it did not recover its pre-1990 standard of living until 2004, and as with all capitalist recoveries it has benefited some and not others. The train station has a group of near-beggars who accost travelers for money in exchange for carrying baggage, and we saw several homeless people. This is juxtaposed to a trendy elite -- small by Western standards, but visible -- and economic development Vegas style (casinos and strip joints).

All of that said, the central city is a compact but lovely visual gem, with Orthodox churches as the centerpiece. Most of these are built on the sites of former mosques, or (like the gigantic church of St. Alexander Nevsky) were constructed in honor of the Russians for taking the country out of the hands of the Ottomans in the late 19th century.

Church of St. Alexander Nevsky, Sofia

Monuments to Bulgaria's enduring friendship with Russia are virtually all of this distasteful Tsarist sort, because the landmarks of the Communist period have been destroyed. I regret to say that this is true of the mausolem of Georgi Dimitrov, which was literally blown up. Dimitrov was the first leader of postwar People's Bulgaria, but he is also famous outside of the country for being the man who defied Hitler after the Reichstag fire, and for formulating the Comintern's Popular Front strategy. Say what you want about Dimitrov's behavior in the period of the Purges; the truth is he had a courageous streak and an intelligent mind, and it is well-known that he was discussing some kind of Balkan Socialist Federation in cooperation with Tito, a possibility quashed by both the Tito-Stalin split and Dimitrov's own death. We'll never know what might have happened with this; perhaps Balkan assistance (in defiance of Stalin's own caution) would have meant victory for the Greek left and the earlier birth of a stronger, multipolar socialist world. Instead we had Tito deftly playing both sides, the Greek partisans drowned in blood, and Bulgaria with an especially stupid and nepotistic nomenklatura even by Eastern Bloc standards. The services it provided the Third World are missed -- just not in Bulgaria itself, where the ex-Communists quickly won the first elections after the collapse, but where the memory of People's Bulgaria is wiped from any official acknowledgement.

Bulgaria joins the EU on January 1, which is the height of ambition for all political parties here, except perhaps the neofascists of Ataka, a nasty new party that directs its ire at the country's Turk and Roma minorities. As for the sights, the best church of all was the remarkable 4th-century St. George, an unassuming stone structure that houses within it some impressive ancient frescoes that were uncovered when the building was converted back to a church after years as a mosque. Understandably, photos were not permitted here, so without that, and with the socialist monuments long gone, I was pleased to snap a photo of the closest thing I could find to a revolutionary site here: the plaque on the front of the embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.