Short Shots: A New Soviet Man-Bulgarian Version
C., L.
A New Soviet ManBulgarian Version O N THE WAY to an international convention at Varna, Bulgaria, my wife and I recently stopped in a small town in Bulgaria. The only decent restaurant being...
...We soon SHOR T SHOTS left, but not before she had piled some twenty pounds of fruit into our car...
...Our passenger explained that he was an agronomist and that he had been in Sofia to inspect some chemicals to be used in agriculture...
...Here he lived in rather "petty-bourgeois" fashion with his wife and child...
...These were all private plots: no one mentioned the collective farms to which they must have belonged...
...L.C...
...Conversation proved difficult since we speak no Bulgarian and they spoke no other language...
...He went to some agricultural school, joined the Party, and, after a while, was sent to the Big City as an agronomist...
...But now he was definitely a man of the New Class, and the villa certified this...
...Finally his wife arrived...
...The villa was located on a beautiful hillside overlooking the sea and the house itself-one of about a hundred-was a rather primitive temporary structure...
...After we, had been riding for about three hours, he indicated that we should take a side road, because he wanted to show us the village in which he had been raised...
...We agreed and so proceeded to drive with him through the rich countryside known as the Rose Valley...
...It was a two-room apartment, overstuffed with rather tasteless furniture...
...To him, as he proudly explained, socialism meant industrialization and development...
...A few hours later we came to the man's apartment in one of the larger cities...
...PS: While driving in our car on a Sunday morning with our guest we turned on the car radio...
...The only decent restaurant being crowded, the waiter directed us to a large table where seven or eight men were already seated...
...We then visited the orchards of another sister, and then a brother...
...Coming to the house of one of his sisters, we were treated with peasant hospitality...
...A beautiful lady in a bikini of a rather daring cut...
...The woman's orchard abounded with lush fruits, grapes, peaches, plums, pears, tomatoes...
...When we asked her whether this was collective or private property, she made a most contemptuous gesture at the term collective and made it abundantly clear by raising one finger that this was hers, only hers...
...Knowing most of these, we began to hum them in unison...
...This too meant he had arrived...
...His personal history must have run something like this: Some twenty years ago a peasant boy, son of well-to-do farmers, decided that he was smarter than others in the village...
...Oh yes, when we said goodbye, our man asked us to take a letter to a friend of his in Buffalo, New York, and to post it here...
...In each case we saw similar riches and were again showered with gifts of fruit...
...We soon arrived in a rich agricultural area...
...Instead of church services we were treated to their functional equivalent, a beautifully rendered concert of old revolutionary songs, German, Russian, Bulgarian, French, and Italian...
...Our New Soviet Man was amazed...
...He knew none of these songs...
...There must have been at least 100 fruit trees...
...His wife, it turned out, was at his ''villa'' and so he persuaded us to drive down to the seacoast to see her...
...But he proudly showed us the architectural plans for the villa he was about to build, a sumptuous eight-room affair with modem bathrooms, terrace, and the like...
...And even if he had known the texts, all this business about solidarity and the like would have made no sense to him whatever...
...In some twenty years, he had moved from traditional peasant origins to nearly the top of the new class structure...
...This radio program was about as meaningful to our man as a concert of Gregorian church music to a junior executive of General Motors...
...A New Soviet ManBulgarian Version O N THE WAY to an international convention at Varna, Bulgaria, my wife and I recently stopped in a small town in Bulgaria...
...Suddenly it dawned on us that we had just met the prototype of the New Soviet Man...
...The lady he had married was clearly not of peasant origin but the daughter of professionals...
...The city apartment represented the life style to which he had first aspired...
...He was about 45 years of age...
...His brothers and sisters were still peasants, though well-to-do, while he, basking in the sun of his Black Sea villa, congratulated himself on the fact that, as a New Soviet Man, he could now partake of all the privileges that fall to those who know how to climb the ladder of mobility in "Socialist" society...
...One man stayed on after the others had finished, and, through ingenious sign language and a smattering of German, made us understand that he would like to come along in our car...
Vol. 18 • February 1971 • No. 1
