Housing in Socialist Bulgaria: Appropriating Tradition

HOME CULTURES VOLUME 7, ISSUE 2 PP 197–216 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY © BERG 2010 PRINTED IN THE UK DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA, PHD, IS A RESEARCH ASSOCIATE AT THE INSTITUTE OF BALKAN STUDIES IN SOFIA. HER MAIN FIELD OF INTEREST IS SOCIAL HISTORY OF SOUTH-EAST EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES. ILIYANA MARCHEVA, PHD, IS A SENIOR RESEARCH ASSOCIATE AT THE INSTITUTE OF HISTORY, THE BULGARIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES IN SOFIA, BULGARIA. SHE IS INTERESTED IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF BULGARIA IN THE POST SECOND WORLD WAR PERIOD. ABSTRACT The analysis of how Bulgaria coped with socialist modernization in the field of housing takes the concept of “consumption regime” as its point of departure. Applying the lens of “regulated consumption” (as opposed to a laissezfaire regime) allows a differentiation between state care and state control. Bulgarian housing policy relied on the notion of the state as the main actor. The article argues that this state did not contradict traditional values in Bulgarian society but made concerted efforts to meet the essential wishes of the people for their own home. During the late 1940s and 1950s this tradition was reflected in the way construction was organized as well as in 197 197 HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION HOME CULTURES DOI 10.2752/175174210X12663437526214 DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA and ILIYANA MARCHEVA DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA the types of housing provided. By contrast, in the time of socialist large-scale slab building (from the 1960s to 1980s) this tradition was reinterpreted to cover favorable conditions of loans for housing—in the first place for building second houses (villas). It is exactly the regulation of housing supply by the use of tradition that explains the phenomenon of the very high percentage of private housing in Bulgaria after the fall of socialism. Housing in socialist Bulgaria corroborates the argument that the appropriation of tradition is an important factor in the domestication of socialist modernization. KEYWORDS: socialism, housing, modernity, tradition COPING WITH MODERNITY THE BULGARIAN WAY Similarly to the rest of Europe in the 1950s and 1960s socialist countries were confronted with a housing short­ age, resulting from war and urbanization. Like many of its Western European counterparts, the socialist regime in Bulgaria did not prioritize the housing problems of its people, since almost all inancial and labor resources were used for the development of heavy industry. The state therefore coped with “socialist modernity” the only possible way, namely by keeping close to tradition. The need for exploitation of the tradition in socialist Bulgaria resulted from the demographic and economic structure. In the years immediately after the Second World War the rural population still dominated: by the end of 1944 only 24% of the Bulgarian population lived in urban settlements; moreover, by the end of 1946 just 8% lived in big cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants (Ikonomika na Bulgaria 1974: 652). With the end of the war Bulgaria became a part of the Soviet block and subject to a totalitarian regime like other East European states. In virtually all ields a huge project of modernization was begun that aimed at establishing “the socialist (that is, egalitarian) well-being of the population in the generally poor East Central European counties” by means of industrialization and urbanization (Enyedi 1996: 105). Salient features of this socialist totalitarian regime were the total state ownership of all means of production and consumption and the claim that the state took care of everybody and everything. This care was accompanied by state control transcending the area of inance and applying it to all spheres of life. The Soviet model had developed before the Second World War and in the area of housing policy it was a means for controlling and disciplining people (punishment and award) (Meerovich 2008). Slowly but surely, it was applied in all socialist countries. 198 HOME CULTURES > HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION Building on our expertise in the social and economic history of Bulgaria and South­East Europe, we focus on how the Bulgarian state sought to ind a compromise between tradition and the Soviet housing model. It seems appropriate to approach the topic through the notion of the “consumption regime” (see Hård, this issue). In the Swedish case, a social democratic consumption regime—as opposed to a laissez-faire regime—did not regard consumption as an individual act only. Needless to say, the way regulation is embedded in authoritarian socialist economies differs substantially from a social democratic consumption regime. A consumption regime of regulation matches well the characterization of socialism as a society of constant deicit (Kornai 1992), on the one hand, and as a society of secondary net­ works, on the other (Raychev 2003; Tchalakov 2003). By applying the lens of “consumption regimes” in the ield of housing we can differentiate between state care and state control in an attempt to analyze the mechanisms of coping with (socialist) modernity in Bulgaria after the Second World War. 199 In Bulgaria, state1 care of the people was laid down in the Constitu­ tion of 1947, after the Communist party had been assured full control over political, economic, social, and ideological life. From that moment on, state care should be regarded as an implementation of the main party and state documents starting with the irst Five-year Plan (1949–53). In these documents the Bulgarian state demonstrated its involvement in the provision of all kinds of goods and services to its people, housing included. To secure this policy of state care and ensure the implementation of the theory into practice, several groups and institutions acted as “mediators” between state and people (see Introduction, this issue). The original concept of mediation derives from capitalist consumer regimes and focuses on the process of mutual articulation and alignment between production and consumption. In this process the interaction between the state, the market, and civil society is considered to be of great importance (Oldenziel et al. 2005; Schot and de la Bruhèze 2003). In a socialist context, mediating actors are more explicitly related to the party state, and institutional foci of mediation point at the need to legitimize and concretize party initiatives. Since market and civil society per se do not exist the most powerful actor remains the (party­) state. At the political center, the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the Council of Ministers, and the State Planning Commission exercised control. A few ministries and state committees provided the vertical structures of the state apparatus relevant for the planning of housing provisions: the Ministry of the Public Buildings, Roads and Public Works (until 1947), the Ministry of Construction and Roads (1947–53), the Ministry of Construction and Building Materials (1953–9), and the Ministry (or Committee) of Architecture and Construction (1959–86). HOME CULTURES STATE CARE AND STATE CONTROL 200 HOME CULTURES DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA The political center, however, could function only with the assistance of the oficial social and political organizations. In Bulgaria these were the trade unions, local organizations of the Communist party, youth organization of the Communist party (Komsomol), and the country’s mass organization (Fatherland Front). Among these, the latter deserves special attention as an important mediator between the oficial state policy and people’s needs in the ield of housing. It relied on more than 30,000 local neighborhood organizations and had more than 350,000 members. We are inclined to argue that the Fatherland Front in Bulgaria and, generally speaking, the mass organizations in socialist societies played the role of civil society’s institutions—in Marx’s understanding of mass organizations as a continuation of the state, whose vocation was also to be its corrective (because of the lack of other correctives in the socialist state), but in contrast to civil society institutions in democracies they do not play such a counterbalancing role.2 This ambiguity is the reason for Ulf Brunnbauer to use a question mark in the title of the concluding paragraph of his chapter about the Fatherland Front in Bulgaria: “eine sozialistische Zivilgesellschaft?” (“a socialist civil society?”) (Brunnbauer 2007: 420). The state which had declared to be a People’s state needed to take care of and to secure all necessary consumption items such as clothes, food, etc. This was not an easy task: a rationing system existed in Bulgaria up to 1952, a fact that explains to a large degree why the administrative means, that is state control, was needed. It is not easy to differentiate between state care and state control since the actors were identical: state institutions (ministries and com­ mittees), municipalities, enterprises, and mass organizations. Their rationale was based on one single purpose, as Meerovich (2008) also points out, and this was the total control of the ongoing social engineering process that aimed at the creation of a new society. To some extent individuals were also involved in accomplishing the control, by complaining to various institutions—which should not come as a surprise, particularly for the period of Stalinism, when people were encouraged to perform criticism and self­criticism as a norm of public behavior. The iles of the Soia municipality illuminate this process: different parties (owners, cooperatives, constructors) complained to the mayor who, in turn, informed the local political leadership, with the result that the party and state leadership had plenty of information at all levels. Such practices facilitated the control of Bulgarian citizenry. In 1962 this total control resulted in the establishment of a special institution, the so­called Committee of Party and State Control. Despite the fact that this Committee changed its name at least twice (in 1966 and after 1976), its tasks hardly changed. As far as housing ield was concerned, it tried to make sure that the rules of housing policy were followed and dwellings were constructed for citizens. THE USE OF TRADITION FOR THE SAKE OF CONTROL In Bulgaria the socialist consumption regime of regulation resulted not only from the economic and political organization but also from the fact that the country was relatively poor. Limited resources required state­regulated consumption. On the other hand, the small­holders’ mentality and tradition were powerful and extremely dificult to overcome. In 1939, an Italian foundation carried out a survey about the 201 State control may be observed, irst, in the sociopolitical sphere. There, it mainly concerned the control of demographic trends and social stratiication. Providing housing turned into a powerful instrument for the control of political opponents and the former elite; moreover, it helped to keep the new political and intellectual elite under control, too. For example, Elena Lagadinova, who served as a leader of the Committee of Bulgarian Women for many years (1968–89), was awarded with a dwelling in a prestigious block of lats in 1980, without having a right to receive one in that building (Elena Lagadinova personal communication in interview with Iliyana Marcheva, May 15, 2008.). This way she was corrupted in order to be obedient to the power. Her case illustrates the impossibility—even for high-ranking oficials—to buy dwellings freely. Second, in economic terms, state control was closely related to the policy of distribution of dwellings, the main aim of which was to avoid using housing units as a means to gain proit. This measure was a way to deprive the former elite and bourgeoisie of some of their possessions, in this case their city dwellings.3 The state aimed at removing housing from the market, as the sociologist Iskra Dandolova insists: “The housing market was to be replaced by centralized planning; according to the principles of the latter, all was to be planned and produced by the state and by society according to its needs” (Dandolova 2002: 238-239). State control can be discussed as an immanent feature of mod­ ernization if one analyzes modernity as a totalitarian project, as Boris Groys does in his book The Total Art of Stalinism (1992). He claims that both the avant-garde and the Stalinist regime were based on the premise that society (and its built environment) should be highly controlled. This idea could be extended to post-Stalinist Eastern Europe where hard-core modern concepts such as “prefabrication,” “standardization,” and “urban control” became very successful from 1954 onward (Ioan and Marcu­Lapadat 1999: 7). At the same time, one may interpret the standardization as state care, since it could enable a rapid increase of housing construction activities. As suggested by Adrian Forty (2005: 38), the possible use of one single industrial standard (or typiied) project applied in the USSR and other socialist countries would have had enormous economic effects. However, socialist economies operated differently in real life. With more than forty different standards employed in Bulgaria, the housing crisis persisted until the end of the socialist period.4 HOME CULTURES HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA homeless people in Soia. In the answers of the municipal oficials one reads that the building of social (municipal) dwellings for rent was out of the question (“unthinkable”), for Bulgarian people were “fanatically attached to their home and to the private property.” This explained the lack of public housing in Soia; the creation of a housing complex to the west of Soia city center in 1935–7 appears as a happy exception in this context (Stoyanov 1977: 169). By and large, the city center was instead surrounded by districts of small ramshackle houses on municipality terrains of which people had taken hold.5 Hence, there was no other way for the socialist state to be successful but to use all existing traditional practices for its political ends. The existence of tradition and its appropriation by the state became a main characteristic of the development in all socialist countries, particularly in the ield of urbanization and city planning. Thomas Bohn speaks about “Synkretismus von Tradition und Moderne” (“syncretism of tradition and modernity”) in the socialist cities (Bohn 2009: 1). How did the Bulgarian state use the legacy of the small­holders’ traditional society, which regarded home ownership as the highest value? 202 HOME CULTURES SOCIALIST MODERNITY: CHARACTERISTIC HOUSING TYPES The inluence of the Soviet model and traditional Bulgarian living habits undoubtedly had their impact on the dimensions and plans of all dwellings—be they state, cooperative, or private in nature. Dwellings for workers provided by the state, sometimes called “dormitories” were low buildings, on two loors, densely populated. Until the mid-1950s a small number of such dormitories were built. The municipalities offered these cheaper and smaller dwellings to people on lower income or to newcomers to cities. With these houses the so­called corridor scheme entered the Bulgarian construction area, despite the fact that it contradicted the Bulgarian traditional way of housing (where no corridors had existed). The new scheme supported a multi-family way of living (so-called komunalka) but it did not manage to take roots in Bulgaria, as architects and users both rejected it (Arhitekturata 1975: 109-116; Gaytandzhiev 1957: 6). Cooperatives represented another type of housing. These small blocks of lats were built by a group of relatives or friends frequently including also the owner of the land. Due to limited inancial resources, the cooperative blocks in the 1940s and 1950s had just one entrance (i.e. no sections); they were predominantly three loors high and each apartment consisted of no more than two rooms. For instance, in the 1950s a cooperative association in the Lozenets district of Soia built three three-loor blocks containing a total of twenty-seven lats; the association’s members were so many that there were not enough lats available to compensate the terrain’s owners. Another “cooperative story” circulated about a lot in the downtown area whose owner claimed a three­room apartment, yet it turned out that 203 such an apartment did not exist at all. According to the architectural and construction plans all apartments only had two rooms.6 In the cooperative buildings the so-called living room scheme established itself as dominant. Housing units which followed this scheme were more spacious and quickly got an upper hand in the competition with the corridor scheme (Arhitekturata 1975: 120). In addition, people went for bigger kitchens in order to use them not only for cooking but for additional purposes too, e.g. as living space for older family members. The same style was characteristic also for individual houses, privately owned and built by families with their own money or loans. These were popular with people in small towns and villages and their existence was a result of the slower industrialization and urbanization in the former while in the latter they had always belonged to their tradi­ tional way of life. The Bulgarian state continued to encourage peoples’ initiative to build houses by various means, such as accessible bank loans with low rates of interest (2%). The purpose was to supply every family with one house and to prevent inlation by using up people’s savings. The regime in Bulgaria coped with the contradiction between oficial ideology and the existence of private housing by introducing, already in 1951, a new term, personal property.7 It was coined for socialist propaganda purposes and aimed to legitimize the allowed possession of house, villa, and car, while avoiding the term private in oficial discourse. Apart from the family house, there also existed a second type of individual housing, the country house (or so-called villa), which became widespread particularly from the 1970s onwards (Krasteva-Blagoeva 2005), exemplifying the way to overcome the rule “one family—one dwelling,” which dominated the socialist housing policy. The two types of individual housing—family house and villa—were similar in their construction and their appearance. The ways they were built were also alike: the tradition of turning to relatives or friends for help and modern market practices mixed in a strange quasi­market amalgam, expressive of a kind of tinkering with the state that also included the cheating of state companies: many people would get hold of building materials or required machinery at their workplaces, without paying for them (Dobreva 2003). Such an attitude was part of the so-called “secondary networks” (Raychev 2003; Tchalakov 2003), which facilitated surviving in the conditions of an economy of shortages. Such “informal response to public policies,” as György Enyedi called it, was not uniquely present in Bulgaria: all over Eastern Europe people created similar mechanisms to defend their interests by rejecting some of the “socialist” values and using particular “bourgeois” practices (Enyedi 1996: 105). In other words, acting in a non­market economy, they in fact used their social capital in such a way as they would have used real capital (money) in a market economy. HOME CULTURES HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA The typical socialist panelka buildings appeared in Bulgaria as a result of the state efforts to meet the needs of the rapid urbanization: by 1970, 53% of the Bulgarian population lived in urban settlements and 17.4% lived in the seven largest cities of more than 100,000 people (Ikonomika na Bulgaria 1974: 652). Industrialized housing building had started in the beginning of the 1960s when the irst housing complex, Tolstoy, consisting of nine blocks of lats, of no more than four loors and two to three sections each was built in Soia, which provided 216 dwellings.8 At the same time, in Russe (one of the four biggest cities in Bulgaria) twelve two- and three-loor buildings containing 150 apartments were constructed as well. THE SOCIALIST APPROPRIATION OF BOURGEOIS PROPERTY The strong inclination of Bulgarian citizens to possess a home was widely used for the purposes of both state care and state control. Cities do generate ambivalence not only among scholars but also among the general public. They are considered as breeding grounds for modernity but they are also connected to housing problems, disease, and crime. Planning and other attempts to improve the situation were closely related to this darker side of city living. In the context of the transformation of Bulgaria into a socialist society the concept of appropriation cannot easily be taken too literally. According to the Law for the Expropriation of Large­scale Urban Property (1948), the Bulgarian prewar bourgeoisie and the former political elite were dispossessed of their second dwellings. Iskra Dandolova points out that 25% of all nationalized property was housing, and in Soia this amounted to 41% (Dandolova 2002: 238). In addition, the owners were obliged to accommodate in their single remaining house or lat either some of the workers migrating to the cities or members of the new political and state elite who came from the countryside. In this way, changing the social stratiication of the big cities could go hand in hand with attempts at resolving the housing crisis (this held true particularly for the capital city which had been most damaged by bombardments in the war). 204 HOME CULTURES HOUSING COMMITTEES AND HOUSING DISTRIBUTION Created before the Second World War (Venedikov 1993: 11) but turning out to be useful in the new social environment, too, many housing committees continued to exist. These bodies helped solving housing problems and from 1945 on the Fatherland’s Front with its local structures started taking part in them as well. This organization was of great help to municipalities and they relied on its structures for providing information on all changes going on in the sphere of housing conditions and construction.9 Many people turned to the mass organizations, seeking their help in acquiring dwellings.10 HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION The housing committees acted on an operative basis, assessing and distributing dwellings on a case-by-case basis. They were breaking the rules of rent very often (allocating tenants to live in doctors’ or lawyers’ ofices, artists’ studios, etc.) and hence provoking social dissatisfaction, sometimes even the intervention of the prosecutor’s ofice, which looked for the assistance of the local administration or party structures.11 Apart from operative housing committees there were also so-called “permanent housing commissions” along with the local municipality administration, in which some specialists were involved. As for the economic means of control, the system of residence permits (irst introduced in 1942) remained in power and these were required not only for Soia but also for other big cities. This system existed up to 1990 as a way of regulating the provision of housing.12 Restrictions of the freedom of choosing where to live was one of the most salient features of totalitarian socialism. It resulted from the wish of the state to plan and control the entire economic and social life and was closely connected to its attempts to solve social problems by use of administrative means. 205 Such systems to regulate urban populations were necessary because of the limited inancial means available for dealing with the housing problem, while central planning assigned major capital investments to state recovery and the development of heavy industry. According to the irst two years’ economic plan (1947–8) only 18% of the entire amount of durable investments was reserved for housing and the construction of public utilities. Moreover, during this initial period of the socialist regime living space for only about 18,000 workers’ families was constructed with state investments and enterprises’ inancial funds; at the same time the private sector produced about two times more housing units (Krastanova 1947: 13). In 1949 capital investments in housing building started to grow, but it was only from the 1970s onwards that a real increase of money for housing construction could be observed. Per capita living space, however, grew at a slower pace and still only reached 9.7 m2 in 1970 compared to 7.3 m2 in 1956 (Ikonomika na Bulgaria 1974: 652). The Bulgarian government legitimated housing shortages by pointing at the lack of inancial resources—not only due to the predominance of heavy industry but also because of the high costs of the state housing construction, which required not just dwellings but also the necessary infrastructure, as elementary power and water networks were not available in most Bulgarian cities and towns, not to mention villages. To illustrate the general situation: per annual capita consumption of electric power in Bulgaria in 1952 was 18.6 KWh; the heating network at the same time was only 14 km long (Ikonomika na Bulgaria 1974: 653). HOME CULTURES RELIANCE ON SOCIALIST SELF-HELP 206 HOME CULTURES DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA All in all, dealing with housing shortages was a task for Bulgarian citizens themselves until the 1950s. According to the Law for Housing Construction (1949) the responsibility for people’s housing was shifted to enterprises, factories, and mass organizations. Still, Bulgarian citizens could build houses, individually or in a cooperative way as well. All dwellings constructed these ways, together with the nationalized ones, created the so-called “State Housing Stock,” which was allocated to the municipalities for distribution and use.13 Bulgaria was not the only socialist state where private house building was allowed. Mark Pittaway presented the case of Hungary’s mining areas where similar developments took place in 1950–4: despite the actual (in)ability of miners to built their homes—due mainly to inancial reasons—he stressed the importance of the motives of both the state and working­class house builders, thereby counterbalancing the view that “Stalinism was highly collectivist and that the state aimed to destroy or at least to undermine traditional institutions” (Pittaway 2000: 60). Hana Pelikánová, in her brief account, also mentions “owner-occupied family houses” when enumerating types of tenure in Czechoslovakia in 1969–89 (Pelikánová 2008) and one may assume that such dwellings could be found in previous periods too. In Bulgaria the results in terms of newly built apartments were not very exciting, as with other socialist countries: with the exception of Yugoslavia and USSR, at the beginning of the 1950s less than four dwellings per 1,000 people per year were ready for use (Mikulski 1978: 278). That was why the authorities started encouraging people to buy dwellings that belonged to the state housing stock.14 In an interpretation of an issued Instruction, Alexy Gaytandzhiev, the head of the department of housing and state property at the Soia municipality, explained the principles and rules of this policy as follows: “the incentive of the Government and the Party to stimulate this desire of the working people [to acquire their own dwellings] in order to use the accumulated money for construction of new state housing.” In the process of its application priority was given—apart from the present tenants—to former partisans, political prisoners, and other “ighters against fascism,” heroes of socialist labor, famous people in the cultural sphere, and last but not least, to families with many children (three and more).15 By allowing the purchase of housing units, the Council of Ministers also hoped to resolve some of the problems caused by the existence of diverse types of property in some places. Sometimes these were related to the fact that the owners were still living together with the people who rented parts of their dwellings—a compulsory arrangement because their dwellings’ dimensions exceeded the allowed limits. Buyers had to pay at least 40% of the total price, the money being stored in a special “Housing Construction Fund” held by the Bulgarian Investment Bank (one of the two state banks that remained after the nationalization in 1947. 207 Apart from the possibility to purchase a dwelling from the state, there was another way to deal with the housing shortage. In 1954 a Decree was issued, which stimulated and supported cooperative and individual housing construction,16 together with a Regulation about its application. According to the latter, the local authorities were allowed to let people obtain land belonging to the state free of charge in order to build housing in both individual and cooperative ways (Alexandriyski and Handzhieva 1959: 3). Similar in its character was the Decree of January 23, 1957, which also concerned the encouragement and support of the cooperative, group, and individual housing construction as additional ways to deal with their housing problems. Participation in the construction of the cooperative buildings was a practice that had its roots in the prewar period. It is interesting to mention that private contractors were allowed to organize housing building activities until 1956 when a deinitive prohibition concerning their work was came into force.17 Cooperative housing associations were usually created by several families and they had to meet a very important requirement: to be customers of the Bulgarian Investment Bank, the only one to inance the construction of housing. Apart from this, the cooperative associations relied on ixed prices of building materials, planned well in advance by the local administration. These associations were facing a lot of problems: for example, when some of the building materials re­ mained unused during the planned period their prices were not ixed anymore and increased, thus becoming inaccessible for cooperators who usually were ordinary state oficials with low incomes. Owners of building plots often caused problems too (they were supposed to receive dwellings as compensation, according to the Law for Housing Construction and Usage of the Available Housing, art. 16).18 Another obstacle that diminished the opportunities for cooper­ ative housing construction came from a ruling of the Supreme Court of 1958, which implied that corporate bodies were not allowed to participate in cooperative housing associations.19 Yet enterprises could provide some housing too. According to the government Decree of January 23, 1949, as already mentioned, some large-scale plants were permitted to develop housing construction activities in order to supply their employees with dwellings. There were some rules to follow: irst, a special committee consisting of members of the administrative, party, and trade-union leadership had to decide who would be granted a lat and the prepared list had to be approved by the head manager (director); second, the employees who had already been approved needed to pay an initial fee and to sign an agreement that they would inalize all payments required in ive or ten years time. The latter condition was not easy to fulill but many workers and employees still managed to cope with it, thanks to the existence of the so-called “Mutual Aid Fund,” which offered interest-free loans.20 It was in the system of this enterprise’s housing stock that members of the HOME CULTURES HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA nomenclature most often broke the rules while distributing dwellings, a topic that deserves a separate investigation and requires a more thorough analysis. SPEEDING UP HOUSING PRODUCTION By the end of the 1960s, results achieved in Bulgaria were quite impressive in comparison with the situation in other socialist countries: 6.3 dwellings per 1,000 people.21 The proportion of the housing constructed by private investors made the Bulgarian case rather exceptional. COMECON data make it clear that 91.3% of all constructed housing units in Bulgaria were built with non-state investments (that is private, or belonging to factories) while the state’s ratio was only 8.7% in 1960. Table 1 represents data from several socialist countries for 1960 and conirms the opinion that what was at stake in Bulgaria up to 1960 was in fact not so much state care but rather state control. Table 1 State and non-state investments in the housing construction in the socialist countries in 1960. Source: Yaremenko (1981: 186). Country 208 HOME CULTURES Bulgaria Hungary GDR Poland USSR Czechoslovakia Dwellings built with state investments Dwellings built with other type of investments 8.7% 26.8% 32.5% 39.5% 50.6% 60.0% 91.3% 73.2% 67.5% 60.5% 49.4% 40.0% During the 1960s in Bulgaria, simultaneously with the developments in the USSR, the so-called “20-Year Program for Accelerated Development” was approved, which gave industrialization and urbanization a real push. In the mid­1960s the urban population surpassed the rural population: in 1966 the urban birth rate was already higher than the rural, for the period 1966–70 53.6% of all migrations were from village to city and these trends resulted in 51.7% urban population in 1969, which for the irst time in Bulgarian history overtook the rural population (Marcheva 1997: 128). The state continued its policy of dealing with the housing problem by speeding up sales of dwellings that had belonged to the former bourgeoisie on the one hand, while on the other it supported new con­ structions of housing units. In 1966, a decision was made to increase the volume of the state and cooperative housing construction by a factor of 2.3 during the period 1966–70 in comparison to 1961–5. Support for the cooperative and enterprise housing construction 209 was conirmed and in addition the opportunities of the Agrarian Cooperatives to produce building materials were stimulated too.22 Several other Decrees came into force between 1966 and1968: state authorities aiming to improve coordination between ministries and local authorities; they stimulated the sale of the existing and newly built state dwellings and simpliied all legal and inancial formalities.23 At the same time, this support was accompanied by further limitations of the migration from rural areas to the cities, with new addenda to the residence permit regulations.24 Not everything was going smoothly: a great number of citizens’ complaints were submitted to the Ministry of Architecture and Con­ struction concerning incorrect or false assessments, illegal sales of particular dwellings, etc. Hence the Ministry’s decision to transfer the decision­making process related to the state housing stock’s sales to the municipalities, and to their mayors in particular.25 This partial decentralization in the ield of housing supply did not help much, but the state was trying to solve the problem with the housing shortage caused by the system of building and distribution. After the irst experimental stage of the early 1960s, mass industrialization of housing construction was launched in Bulgaria as a priority in housing policy (see Zarecor, this issue). The large-panel industrial methods followed the practice of West and East Germany, France, and the USSR and at the beginning the production was meant to supply state and municipality housing for rent only. This was a way to secure housing for all new citizens—in 1967 every fourth employee in Bulgaria was a irst-generation citizen (Marcheva 1997: 127)—and at the same time a means to attract and retain the industrial labor force. The state involvement in the construction of housing gradually increased and in the second half of the 1970s 49% of all investment in housing in Bulgaria (and Romania) came from state resources—only the USSR was ahead with 73%; in the other socialist countries the state share was around 30–40% of the total housing budget (Yaremenko 1981: 186). While in Western Europe the use of industrialized methods of low­income dwelling construction peaked in the late 1960s and declined rapidly after that, in Eastern Europe it was still common in the 1970s and 1980s. By the use of industrialized methods 120 panelka complexes were built in Bulgaria, all subsidized by the state inancial fund for housing construction. From 1978 onwards, according to the Regulation for distribution and sale of dwellings, young families were treated with priority.26 Dwellings were sold to young families with the help of thirty­year low­interest loans. Yet urban populations were increasing constantly and it turned out to be impossible for the state to meet all housing needs. In addition, from the beginning of the 1980s socialism in Bulgaria showed signs of a system crisis, which led to its fall by the end of the 1980s. It is at this point that the state turned once again to tradition as a way of escape (Marcheva 2004). Along with the HOME CULTURES HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA administrative methods of restricted citizenship the widest possible participation of working collectives and citizens in the building of housing was allowed. In the mid-1980s, the authorities tried also to transfer private resources from the second house building to the irst dwelling in order to solve the problem of housing shortages (Po nyakoi vaprosi 1985: 71). The result, once again, was not very impressive. 210 HOME CULTURES CONCLUSIONS During the time when the most consistent and strong Soviet inluence in modernization could be expected, in the ield of housing the socialist (communist) regime in Bulgaria was in fact using tradition in order to cope with modernity, counterintuitive as it might seem. Bulgarian tradition has been different from the one the USSR inher­ ited: smallholders had already existed before the socialist time in the country, as was the case in other East European countries too. Russian peasants were liberated without any land in 1861 and the tradition of private smallholding was very weak in Russia and in the Soviet Union afterwards. This difference is, in our view, one of the main reasons that all attempts to impose Soviet model(s) in Bulgaria had to accommodate the traditional way of life. The fact that according to the Soviet-type social framework the state took care of supplying people with housing came as no surprise—the situation was almost the same in the rest of the postwar Europe (see Bervoets for the Netherlands, Hård for Sweden in this issue). What was different was the state control that accompanied or rather resulted from the state care: both care and control were substantially limiting the real housing market. Housing policy in Bulgaria played a very important role for overcoming the consequences of the socialist modernization and particularly the rapid urbanization and portrayed the state as a mediating actor making good use of tradition in the ield of housing and housing supply in particular. Bulgarian authorities relied very much on the essential wish of the people for their own home as one of the most salient features of Bulgarian traditional value system. This wish was exploited not only in the late 1940s and 1950s, when cooperative and enterprises’ housing construction was stimulated along with the expropriation of the former bourgeoisie. The state made use of it also when the boom of the industrial housing building took place (from the 1960s to 1980s). If during the irst period tradition was to be expressed more in the way of organization of construction as well as in the types of housing provided, in the time of socialist largepanel housing building tradition “moved” to favorable conditions of loans for housing, and in the irst place to the favorable opportunities of building the second dwelling (villa). Apart from this, whenever the state lacked inances for subsidized construction it always accorded initiative to the people by extending the rights to build homes or by allowing them to purchase dwellings ready for use. The existence of a HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION regulated housing market instead of a real one resulted, on the one hand, in a constant shortage of housing. On the other hand, however, the regulation of housing supply by the use of tradition explains the phenomenon of the very high percentage of private housing in Bulgaria after the fall of socialism. The Bulgarian peculiarities in the appropriation of tradition in the ield of housing presented briely in this article corroborate the already existing opinions that tradition is an important factor in the development of the socialist countries. They conirm, too, that continuity in Eastern Europe after the Second World War certainly deserves more scholarly attention. Perhaps with the gradual overcoming of Cold War clichés, new vistas for the analysis of the former socialist block as an integral part of Europe will open up. 211 1. When we use the term state in this text we always imply the meaning of “totalitarian party-state.” 2. The literature on civil society is abundant. For a general discussion of the topic and approaches to it, the newest discussion by John Keane may be helpful (Keane 2009). 3. Law for expropriation of the large-scale urban property—State Gazette, No. 87, April 15, 1948, changes in April 1948, and in August 1948. Abolished on June 29, 1962—see State Gazette, No. 52, June 29, 1962. 4. See http://www.mrrb.government.bg/docs/doc_425.doc (accessed February 20, 2009); these standards depended very much on the geological conditions in each country. See Ioan and Marcu­Lapadat (1999: 14), where the authors mention thirty­ eight typiied projects in use in the USSR which were questioned by Khrushchev in his speech of December 7,1954 (Khrushchev 1955). 5. Direction State Archives Soia, F. 65—Municipality of Soia, op. 1, а. u. 366, p. 8. 6. Direction State Archives Soia, F. 65—Municipality of Soia, оp. 1, а. u. 383, p. 24 and p. 67, respectively. 7. Property Law, State Gazette, No. 92, November 16, 1951. It was claimed that the Constitution of 1971 that replaced individual (private) with personal, quite widespread among sociologists (Marcuse 1996: 166; Dandolova 2002: 241, among others), does not consider this much earlier law as a source pointing to the change. 8. Investigation of the housing stock in Soia built by the large-panel methods, see http://home.arcor.de/ringo667/Vortraege/12_ Stavrev.pdf (accessed August 27, 2009). 9. Direction State Archives Soia, F. 65—Municipality of Soia, оp. 1, а. u. 331, describing the relationship between the Fatherland’s Front and municipality. HOME CULTURES NOTES 212 HOME CULTURES DOBRINKA PARUSHEVA AND ILIYANA MARCHEVA 10. Central State Archive, F. 28—National Committee of the Fatherland’s Front, оp. 1, а. u. 631. 11. Direction State Archives Soia, F. 65—Municipality of Soia, оp. 1, а. u. 383, p. 11. 12. http://www.soia.bg/history.asp?lines=862&nxt=1&update=all (accessed August 27,.2009. 13. See Law for Housing Construction, State Gazette, No. 64, March 21, 1949. 14. Instruction for the sale of dwellings of the housing stock, State Gazette, No. 39, May 14, 1957; see also Dandolova (2002). 15. Direction State Archives Soia, F. 65—Municipality of Soia, оp. 1, а. u. 297, pp. 216–18 and pp. 297–302. 16. Journal of the Presidium of the National Assembly, No. 28, June 6, 1954; with several changes and additions introduced—No. 55, 1954; No. 31, 1957, and No. 46, 1957. 17. Yolova and Kiskinova (1988: 73); Arhitekturata (1975: 105); Gaytandzhiev (1957: 26). 18. State Gazette, No. 24, May 21, 1949. 19. Central State Archives, F. 117—National Assembly, оp. 30, а. u. 214, p. 110. 20. One example of such a procedure is presented by Yadkov (2003: 407). For more examples, see Central State Archives, F. 375— Committee of State and People’s Control, оp. 23, а. u. 25, pp. 16–17. 21. At the same time in the GDR the number was 4.7, in Poland 4.8, in Hungary 5.8, and in Czechoslovakia 5.4; only in Romania and in the USSR were numbers higher, 7.3 and 12.1, respectively (Mikulski 1978: 279). 22. Council of Ministers’ Decree No. 39 about the speeding up of the solution of the housing problems in the country, art. 1, State Gazette, No. 61, August 5, 1966. 23. Like establishment of a real assessment of the price, postponement of the deadlines for payment, diminishing the amount of the initial fee to pay and eventually abolishing it in some cases, depending on the family situation and income. See Central State Archives, F. 215—Ministry of Architecture and Construction, оp. 2, а. u. 294, p. 7. 24. Instruction for temporary limitations of admittance of new citizens in the big cities and some other settlements, State Gazette, No. 61, August 5, 1966. 25. Order of the minister N. Matev, July 24, 1968. See Direction State Archives Soia, F. 65, оp. 4, а. u. 13. 26. That priority was conirmed with the Decree No. 1340 for supplying new families with housing, see State Gazette, No. 67, August 24, 1979, as well as with the Instruction No. 1 about the creation and use of the housing stock for young families, see State Gazette, No. 56, July 17, 1979. HOUSING IN SOCIALIST BULGARIA: APPROPRIATING TRADITION 213 Alexandriyski, S. and St. Handzhieva. 1959. 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