Communism and the Remorse of an Innocent Victimizer FROM THE PUBLISHER
"For decades Americans imagined life under Communist regimes to be grim, frightening, and oppressive. Not so, Bulgarian-born Zlatko Anguelov reveals in this memoir. For the most part, life was just normal. People adjust; bread must be earned; families enjoy each other's company. If Communist governments were oppressive, that oppression became the norm for most people's lives; totalitarianism was mundane and even banal." Yet in the morally ambivalent world of the communism in which Anguelov grew up, everyone was both victim and victimizer. Few dissented; few intended evil. More typical were tales of compliance, complicity, and informing on friends and neighbors just as part of getting by. Whether discussing his schooldays, his marriages, or his career, Anguelov inexorably returns to his theme of compliance. In moving but understated prose, he describes his own coming to terms with the harm done by compliance and his gradual shift into a more politically active stance.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Life under the Communist Party, in a political coming-of-age memoir by a Bulgaria native. Born of loyal party members smack in the middle of the Cold War era, journalist Anguelov had the pedigree and education of a model communist. And for much of his life, he was, indeed, a compliant citizen, remaining untainted by capitalist or democratic ideas despite attending an elite lycee staffed by a number of Western European instructors. He attended medical school, fathered six children by three wives, and gradually awakened to the insidious effect of the political regime. By the time he emigrated to Canada with his third wife and youngest children, he had come to see how every aspect of his life-his career, his marital relations, his lack of connection with his father, even his luxuriant facial hair-was stained by Bulgaria's political system. Even the fact that Anguelov never joined the party was tainted; he was able to lead a decent life outside of its confines (eventually becoming a political protestor) only because he was protected by the model communist status of his parents. "While by current standards, I ought to be regarded as a dissident, a close inspection of my own and my peers' behavior reveals that we complied with the system, no matter what." Anguelov went along to get along; he regularly delivered handwritten reports on the state of journalism to a local government agent, joining the rest of the citizenry in busily keeping tabs on itself. His argument for the insidious, ubiquitous effect of communism is convincing; jargon and politics is mostly eschewed in favor of demonstrating how the system affected the author and his family personally. That most valuable of commodities: aneyewitness report from behind the Iron Curtain.
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