M. Todorova: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins

Titel
The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins. Imagining Utopia, 1870s – 1920s


Autor(en)
Todorova, Maria
Erschienen
London 2020: Bloomsbury
Anzahl Seiten
384 S.
Preis
€ 124,70
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von
Alexandra Oberländer, Freie Universität Berlin

This book revisits the trodden path of socialist history by telling it from “Europe’s margins”—here, Bulgaria—and suddenly this well-travelled route becomes pebbly and bumpy again. Although not necessarily a history of “what if”, this books nevertheless presents a plethora of alternatives when it comes to socialist utopias. What Todorova excavates is the many histories of socialism, which ended, depending on one’s political stance, in 1917, 1937, 1956 or 1991. While all those years are inherently linked to episodes in Soviet history (which became the “utopia on earth” [p. 251] and thus the embodiment of all socialist history after 1917), Todorova aims to tell a history of socialism in which many other outcomes would have been possible. As such her book is utopian in itself—in the best possible sense.

In scrutinizing and revising socialist history, Todorova effectively de-centres socialism. By explicitly ignoring the impact of the Russian Revolutions of 1917, she aims to leave the behind Cold War paradigms and to consider socialist history from scratch. She demonstrates that writing a history of socialism by highlighting the supposedly dominant social democratic parties (the “Western” and the Russian) is tantamount to ignoring the utopian potential and attraction socialism held for people on the peripheries in the period between roughly 1870 and the 1920s. She builds her case by diving into individual life stories of known, lesser known and entirely unknown left-wing activists from Bulgaria born in the second half of the 19th century.

One of Todorova’s many achievements in this book is to historicize the influence of the Russian Social Democrats on socialist history up until the fateful year of 1917. By digging deep into the endless debates of the Second International about reform, parliamentarism and nationalism, Todorova demonstrates the relatively minor influence Russian socialists had on Bulgarian discussions. For Bulgarian social democrats, the German SPD (especially Karl Kautsky) was a much more influential figure than the Russian Georgy Plekhanov (chapter 1). Just before Todorova might run into the danger of simply exchanging one hitherto dominant paradigm (the Russian influence on Bulgarian social democracy) with the next (the German influence), she annihilates any notion of one socialism, let alone one commonly agreed upon utopia.

The multitude of dreams and ideas, disputes and splits among the Bulgarian protagonists of her book alone is mind-boggling to say the least—and as such typical for social democracies and their heirs all around the globe. The Bulgarians’ many different perspectives and developments did not only occur in interactions between the various factions, but also reveal themselves in events within individual biographies, of which Todorova collected a staggering 3.500. Some Bulgarian comrades started out as religious believers, moved on to briefly identify as narodniki, and ended up as fervent anarchists, while others started out as socialists and remained socialists, yet changed the actual meaning of their socialism with every season. If there was a common influence among Bulgarian socialists, Leo Tolstoy was most likely that figure, as his ideas loomed large in many biographies. The internationalism of Bulgarian socialists is yet another impressive characteristic. Despite the fact that many of these socialists were first-generation teachers or lawyers and often of peasant origins, many spoke up to eight or even more languages, travelled broadly, and studied or lived all around the “social democratic world”—preferably in Geneva, it seems (Chapter 3).

Todorova is most interested in the life worlds, experiences, mindsets and emotions of “her” 3.500 socialists. Todorova painstakingly analyses her sampled biographies in classic social history fashion in order to shed light on influences, common readings, professions and social backgrounds. In her fifth chapter she introduces us to many diverging life stories of women whose influence on socialism might not have sufficed for entries in encyclopaedias, which Todorova manages to balance by using photographs as source. She also sets out to correct yet another stereotype about socialist women, that they were supposedly overwhelmingly turned into socialists by their husbands, though this overdue correction does not detain her from introducing exactly such a socialist wife in a later chapter. The variety of biographies Todorova presents is key for writing a non-linear history.

For fans of microhistory and the history of emotions, the last three chapters will certainly be the highlight of Todorova’s book. Todorova introduces Angelina Boneva, a schoolteacher in northwestern Bulgaria. The glimpses into her life story are as impressive as the sources Todorova compiled and presents to us in the best fashion of microhistory. We learn about the everyday of being a village teacher, which meant providing everything oneself: maps, abacus, blackboard through to the furniture of the classroom and eventually the school building itself, which Boneva bought and renovated with money from her income as a schoolteacher. We learn about the many male enemies this left-leaning single woman seemed to collect simply by existing and about the massive impact this woman had on generations of pupils. The most intriguing aspect, however, is that her being a socialist does not explicitly come up in the very few ego-documents she left: “That she gravitated to socialism was so natural that she did not have to explain that to herself” (p. 199). The way Todorova reads Boneva’s ego-documents as explorations of her inner self is incisive, careful and funny. Todorova amuses us with little interpolations about (cultural) history writing as such, which tends to throw in occasional vignettes (which Todorova luckily manages to avoid) or small jokes about “good historians” who would not “let their imagination go wild without any evidence” (p. 198) and thus stops herself from speculating about Boneva’s sex life.

The next life story is that of Todor Tsekov. The complete opposite of Boneva, his “memoirs-diary” contains more than 1000 pages, which cover only the first third of his life. Tsekov wrote several long letters a day, which he scrupulously and consecutively numbered. In his writing, he proudly and repeatedly identified himself as a socialist and did not spare pathos when he wrote that “socialism [...] has become the flesh and blood of my body” (p. 206). As a graphomaniac to an extent Todorova has “only encountered in novelists and few politicians” (p. 205), he leaves the historian no room for speculation and gives us more than just glimpses into his love and sex life. A dandy, he was yet picky when it came to women. Like Boneva, Tsekov was a teacher and a member of the social democratic teacher’s organization—but this is as far as the commonalities go. Todorova reconstructs his life story from the “memoirs-diary”, which is above all a testament to the Sturm und Drang-phase of a young man blessed with a heavy dose of what one would today call mansplaining. This chapter is a delight, partly because Tsekov’s writing is hilarious but more importantly because Todorova manages to take us to the United States (Tsekov emigrated twice), roam through émigré socialist history, muse about genre questions of autobiography vs. memoir vs. diary and shed light onto the intimacies of a socialist marriage.

The confidence with which Todorova masters her 3.500 biographies, how she invites us along on her own archival journey and how she presents her sources is a constant reminder that this is not a first nor a second book, but a book one writes after decades of research. It is bold and careful, focused and far-reaching, soaked in theory while remaining down-to-earth and accessible. Most importantly, Todorova is full of empathy for her subjects. If one wants to understand the contingency of history in both its unfolding as in its writing, this is the book to go for.

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