For decades Americans imagined life under Communist regimes 
to be grim, frightening, and oppressive. Not so, 
Bulgarian-born Zlatko Anguelov reveals in this eye-opening 
memoir. For the most part, life was just normal.  People 
adjusted; bread had to be earned; families enjoyed each 
other's company. If Communist governments were oppressive, 
that oppression became the norm for most people's lives. 
Yet in the morally ambivalent world of communist Bulgaria 
in which Anguelov grew up, everyone was both victim and 
victimizer. Few dissented; few intended evil. More typical 
were experiences of compliance, complicity, and informing 
on friends and neighbors just to get by.

   In moving but understated prose, Anguelov describes his 
own coming to terms with the harm done by compliance and 
his gradual shift into a more politically active stance. 
Through the stories of his own family and acquaintances, 
he illustrates the kinds of moral choices available to 
ordinary folk. The motives for collaboration ranged from 
those of his grand-uncle, who cooperated with the government 
because he believed fervently in communism, to those of his 
cousin, who cynically embraced the regime in order to 
prosper.

    In this provocative account, Anguelov challenges easy 
assumptions about communism, democracy, and Eastern Europe. 
His chilling insights into the costs of complicity under 
Bulgarian communism raise uncomfortable questions about 
the moral dimensions of "going along" in any system.

_________________________________________________________

ZLATKO ANGUELOV was born in Bulgaria in 1946 and holds 
degrees in medicine and medical sociology. He currently 
edits a professional journal and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.


Number Sixteen: Eastern European Studies


What people are saying about this book


"Life under the Communist Party, in a political coming-of-age memoir by
a Bulgaria native. Born of loyal party members smack in the middle of
the Cold War era, journalist Anguelov had the pedigree and education of
a model communist. And for much of his life, he was, indeed, a compliant
citizen, remaining untainted by capitalist or democratic ideas despite 
attending an elite lycee staffed by a number of Western European 
instructors. He attended medical school, fathered six children by three 
wives, and gradually awakened to the insidious effect of the political 
regime. By the time he emigrated to Canada with his third wife and 
youngest children, he had come to see how every aspect of his life—his 
career, his marital relations, his lack of connections with his father, 
even his luxuriant facial hair—was stained by Bulgaria's political 
system. Even the fact that Anguelov never joined the party was tainted; 
he was able to lead a decent life outside of its confines (eventually 
becoming a political protestor) only because he was protected by the 
model communist status of his parents. 'While by current standards, I 
ought to be regarded as a dissident, a close inspection of my own and 
my peers' behavior reveals that we complied with the system, no matter 
what.'Anguelov went along to get along; he regularly delivered 
handwritten reports on the state of journalism to a local government 
agent, joining the rest of the citizenry in busily keeping tabs on 
itself. His argument for the insidious, ubiquitous effect of communism 
is convincing; jargon and politics is mostly eschewed in favor of 
demonstrating how the system affected the author and his family 
personally. That most valuable of commodities: an eyewitness report 
from behind the Iron Curtain."—Kirkus Reviews

"First person accounts of this quality are rare from behind the 
former Iron Curtain, rarer still from Bulgaria. The broader themes of 
history and politics are skillfully introduced, the turmoil they induced 
in Bulgaria is vividly represented. . . . by far one of the most 
interesting works I've read from contemporary Eastern Europe."
—Frederick Quinn, author, Democracy at Dawn