Daniel Vatchkov, Le mythe de la protection du travail à l’époque communiste comme source de la nostalgie dans la société bulgare contemporaine

Daniel Vatchkov - Institut d’études historiques – Académie bulgare des sciences, Sofia
TOME IV 1966 1-2
pp. 331-336
Online publication date: 
11/27/2023
Keywords: 
Myth; Labor Protection; Nostalgia; Communist Era; Bulgaria
Abstract: 

Thirty years after the fall of communist rule in Europe, it is still widely believed in Bulgarian society that the regime had its good points. Nearly half of the population cites public security as a major positive, most notably in the area of crime and labor protection. In fact, the secret statistics of that time show a very different picture. For example, the number of homicides varies between 180 and 260 per year, which is 2–2.5 more than today, and the deaths from work-related accidents were between 500–550 or 6–7 times more than the current ones. Declassified documents show that, in order to carry out the production plan, gross violations of labor law and labor safety regulations happened all the time, which were often at the root of many industrial accidents and serious occupational accidents. But due to the fact, that this information was deeply covered by the population, it was unaware of the scale of the problem and, as a result of continued propaganda, a large part of it shares the understanding that communist rule was a time of public security.