„Акушер на културната революция”: лекарят, биовластта и мюсюлманките в комунистическа България през 1960-те години
“An Obstetrician of the Cultural Revolution”: The Physician, Biopower, and Muslim Women in Communist Bulgaria during the 1960s

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the case of Dr. Gani Ganev, a rural physician in the village of Bezvodno (Kardzhali region), whose activities in the 1960s were elevated into a propaganda model of the so-called “cultural revolution” directed at Bulgaria’s Muslim population. Drawing on Ganev’s unpublished “diary-novella” (1961–1965) preserved in the Kardzhali State Archive, the study analyses how biomedical authority, socialist modernisation, and national-communist biopolitics intersect in everyday practices of surveillance, disciplining, and assimilation. The diary reveals an unusually explicit articulation of what Foucault terms biopower: systematic monitoring of women’s bodies, aggressive interventions in reproductive practices, the creation of a female “sanitary intelligence” network, and the pathologisation of religious and cultural norms. The text also exposes how Soviet minority-management models ‒ especially the Soviet (Azerbaijani) “Geokchay experiment” ‒ were imported and adapted to the Bulgarian context. Dr. Ganev’s self-fashioning as a “doctor-hero” illustrates the fusion between medical, ideological, and administrative functions within the communist project of ideological homogenisation. By reading this diary both as a self-serving political performance and as a rare documentary trace of localised state power, the article offers a more nuanced account of the 1960s ‒ a period often overshadowed by later assimilation campaigns ‒ and highlights the centrality of women’s bodies in the national-communist reordering of muslim minority communities.

• Details
• Contents