Social Mobility in Industrializing Communist Bulgaria: Negotiating Status in Pernik in the 1950s

Abstract

This article is a case study of social mobility in the Bulgarian industrial city of Pernik in the 1950s. Exploring the mechanisms that regulated individuals' social advancement, it argues that the communist state brought about a sort of radical devolution. The system established to control social mobility provided an unprecedented number of recipients with one particular type of power: that over the life paths of their compatriots. The article argues that social status, ascent, and descent in communist society remained guided and controlled by state politics, though subject to continuous negotiations on multiple levels and with multiple players. Control rested in the hands of a network with blurry borders–ever-shifting and connected by virtue of its participants’ closer ties to the Communist Party and, importantly, to one another. In the process of negotiations, those with detrimental political pasts experienced major setbacks. Yet a convincing – and convincingly negotiated–narrative of zealous support for the party-state trumped origin. It became both a tentative survival strategy for outcasts and a lurking peril for those with ideologically flawless profiles. Males of Bulgarian ethnic origin, who were prepared to be demonstratively loyal to the Communist Party, clearly benefited the most from the established social mobility system–and they were its gatekeepers. This case study renders irrelevant the dispute over whether communist society should be studied from above or from below. Instead, it proves fruitful to consider it as a system in which players interact and affect or change one another, one which can regenerate itself over time. It shows how the social mobility system replaced terror as the foundation of the social system's autopoiesis.