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A review by yanailedit
Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria by Kapka Kassabova
3.0
I invite any Westerner who thinks of Communism positively to read this, not because I want you to denounce your political leanings, but because it is your duty to inform yourself about the history and reality of the society you're clamouring for.
People call this book 'biased' or 'one sided'.
It is both and of course it is: it's an account of the author's personal experiences growing up in a brutally unequal society during a violent regime. Individual life experiences tend to be like that: one-sided and biased. It wasn't Kassabova's goal to balance her life experiences with others' expectations of a balanced or favorable discussion of the finer points of life under the USSR in Bulgaria.
If you want a 'fair' portrayal of the Soviet experiment, go read all 700 pages or Svetlana Alexeivich'ss Second-Hand Time where she painstakingly collects the oral accounts of dozens of Soviet citizens from all sides of the political spectrum and life experience. You'll quickly learn that no one can agree on whether the USSR was good or bad: different people had different experiences and luck, along with the different ways they attached importance, gave attention to, or justified different facts of life (good or bad). Usually, these disagreements stem from people assuming that those with the opposite opinion to theirs are lying, exaggerating, or purposefully ignoring; you aren't the first to think that way and it's a phenomenon that's torn apart hundreds of families across the ex-Soviet world: those who hate and those who miss the USSR. It isn't propaganda, if you are aware of the formal term's definition, but an expression of different experiences.
Perhaps there were many big-picture positives omitted by Kassabova's account. That shouldn't surprise you if you know anything about Soviet history and the fact of its complex inequalities. This is where you should consider how propaganda has informed your perception and expectations of the USSR: when you roundly rejected the COMMUNISM=BAD of the West, did you keep a willingness to recognise the sincerely tragic and perverse realities of the USSR? When you began to accept positive depictions of the USSR, did you consider that most of what was allowed to exist in the USSR and what survives today are heavily-state sanctioned accounts and that you are subject to positive USSR propaganda with no real critical accounts to balance it with?
My main gripe is with how certain paragraphs seemed to jump onto the next thought, as if cut short and dropped. Still, I can sympathise with the hesitation and loss for words that I imagine this stems from. After all, speaking about one's Soviet upbringing to outsiders is a frustrating, perplexing endeavour more than anything else. You don't know what's weird and of interest, not even after a lifetime spent living elsewhere, because you were raised never knowing any differently. As for the rest... well, no one enjoys complaining or overly morbid stories; Westerners have a habit of exaggeration and it's deeply troubling to imagine people receiving your experience and writing it off as poetically maximised.
You won't find the Imagined Communist Sci Fi utopia most young Westerners seem to be consuming nowadays, but you will find an account of how the forcible implementation of vague, undefined ideals favor the corrupt, the violent, and the opportunistic.
That's the story of every extremist idealist social experiment.
People call this book 'biased' or 'one sided'.
It is both and of course it is: it's an account of the author's personal experiences growing up in a brutally unequal society during a violent regime. Individual life experiences tend to be like that: one-sided and biased. It wasn't Kassabova's goal to balance her life experiences with others' expectations of a balanced or favorable discussion of the finer points of life under the USSR in Bulgaria.
If you want a 'fair' portrayal of the Soviet experiment, go read all 700 pages or Svetlana Alexeivich'ss Second-Hand Time where she painstakingly collects the oral accounts of dozens of Soviet citizens from all sides of the political spectrum and life experience. You'll quickly learn that no one can agree on whether the USSR was good or bad: different people had different experiences and luck, along with the different ways they attached importance, gave attention to, or justified different facts of life (good or bad). Usually, these disagreements stem from people assuming that those with the opposite opinion to theirs are lying, exaggerating, or purposefully ignoring; you aren't the first to think that way and it's a phenomenon that's torn apart hundreds of families across the ex-Soviet world: those who hate and those who miss the USSR. It isn't propaganda, if you are aware of the formal term's definition, but an expression of different experiences.
Perhaps there were many big-picture positives omitted by Kassabova's account. That shouldn't surprise you if you know anything about Soviet history and the fact of its complex inequalities. This is where you should consider how propaganda has informed your perception and expectations of the USSR: when you roundly rejected the COMMUNISM=BAD of the West, did you keep a willingness to recognise the sincerely tragic and perverse realities of the USSR? When you began to accept positive depictions of the USSR, did you consider that most of what was allowed to exist in the USSR and what survives today are heavily-state sanctioned accounts and that you are subject to positive USSR propaganda with no real critical accounts to balance it with?
My main gripe is with how certain paragraphs seemed to jump onto the next thought, as if cut short and dropped. Still, I can sympathise with the hesitation and loss for words that I imagine this stems from. After all, speaking about one's Soviet upbringing to outsiders is a frustrating, perplexing endeavour more than anything else. You don't know what's weird and of interest, not even after a lifetime spent living elsewhere, because you were raised never knowing any differently. As for the rest... well, no one enjoys complaining or overly morbid stories; Westerners have a habit of exaggeration and it's deeply troubling to imagine people receiving your experience and writing it off as poetically maximised.
You won't find the Imagined Communist Sci Fi utopia most young Westerners seem to be consuming nowadays, but you will find an account of how the forcible implementation of vague, undefined ideals favor the corrupt, the violent, and the opportunistic.
That's the story of every extremist idealist social experiment.