Roberta Koleva
Abstract:
The article delves into the most recent debates around the dismantlement of the Monument of the Soviet Army in Sofia, initiated in December 2023 amidst the Russian-led war in Ukraine. Drawing upon discourse analysis, ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with social actors engaged in this contestation, it analyses how different clusters of arguments surrounding the memorial reflect broader social imaginaries concerning “Europeanness”, “democracy” and the post-socialist “transition”, spurred by the ongoing war in Ukraine. Despite the declaration that “there is nothing to ‘transit’ anymore”, 35 years after 1989 the Monument of the Soviet Army came to be seen by liberal anti-communist activists as the “Bulgarian Berlin Wall” – an imaginary wall, an obstacle to the post-socialist transition, the destruction of which would open the way for the European unification and the desired “normality”. To try to scrutinise this perceived state of being “stuck” in the “post-” the article introduces the term “standby transition” – a teleological mindset, characterised by the perception of the transition as yet to be concluded, and by the simultaneous anticipation for a better future, often linked with the imagined “West” and the state of being truly “European”. This progress-based narrative, however, is challenged by the diverse voices of the monument’s defenders – from the elderly activists’ critique of the post-socialist transition as a dismantling of a valued path to the far-right groups’ unexpected instrumentalization of the anti-fascist discourse, as well as younger generations’ emerging voices that question the binary frames of the “standby” imagination. In this sense, by looking at emic nuances of notions like “transition”, “democracy”, and “communism” widely used by my interlocutors, the paper outlines some of the potential usefulness of advocating for the spatial and temporal relevance of the term “post-socialism” in contemporary anthropological inquiry.
Keywords: post-socialism, standby transition, democracy, Europeanness, anti-communism, Monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia
