Комунистическата държавна сигурност и младежта – език и идеологии
Communist State Security and Youth – Language and Ideologies
Author(s): Petar Vodenicharov, Nurie MuratovaSubject(s): History, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Cultural history, Media studies, Communication studies, Special Historiographies:, Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Culture and social structure , History of Communism, Cold-War History
Published by: БАЛКАНИСТИЧЕН ФОРУМ - МЕЖДУНАРОДЕН УНИВЕРСИТЕТСКИ СЕМИНАР ЗА ПРОУЧВАНИЯ И СПЕЦИАЛИЗАЦИИ
Keywords: youth; communism; newspeak; state security
Summary/Abstract: Our research is based on published archival documents of the State Security (DS) related to youth (the age range is from children of 15 years old to adolescents of 19 years old), with students and young ‘scientific-technical’ and ‘artistic-creative’ intelligentsia also being subjects of operational interest. Despite privileges and total surveillance, propaganda, and repression, the youth do not comply and ex-hibit active and passive resistance, rejecting the identity prescribed by the com-munist Newspeak as the 'cheerful Dimitrov’s coming generation.' Underground youth communities create their own alternative jargon and subculture, crossing the Iron Curtain in harmony with youth movements in the West. The analysis of under-ground youth discourses reveals alternative meanings and identities, social sobrie-ty and protest, artistic and real escapes beyond the fences of the socialist camp. In the disenchanting world of real socialism, young people also respond with protest through what the Party cannot take from them – the body and its pleasures, even going as far as prostitution and violence. The young intelligentsia, toward which the State Security is particularly suspicious, increasingly provokes the dogmas of the artistic method of socialist realism and scientific communism. Under conditions of total propaganda and censorship, free thought can divert the meaning of ideo-logical messages, ironize them, and find alternative, albeit risky, ways to express itself.
Journal: Balkanistic Worlds
- Issue Year: 2/2026
- Issue No: 2
- Page Range: 51-95
- Page Count: 45
- Language: English, Bulgarian
