Социалистическите семейства в България: между идеология и практика. Един изследователски проект
Socialist Families in Bulgaria: Between Ideology and Practice. A Research Project

Summary/Abstract: The article studies the problems, as well as the continuity in the way of thinking on the part of the communist ideologists about the family and women in politics, to which women and families were subjected in the period of the so-called “real socialism” in Bulgaria. These changes, however, can only be elucidated when social practice is also included in the analysis. Besides wanting to change that social practice, the theoreticians and politicans of the family react for their part to the changes, processes and coersions brought about by that social practice. Therefore the discourse of the socialist family policy also encompasses families which had been given the role of an object in it. The finding that the family does not sufficiently perform the functions of demographic reproduction and moral education assigned to it, serves as justification for the interference of the party and the state in family life, even in the intimate sphere of marital relations. The socio-political and legal measures taken to channel family relations in the direction desired by the party were not successful. Modernisation resulted in family relations, incompatible with the communist ideology, while the attempts of the authorities to infiltrate the family were diverted by various ways. The party responded to that social practice by new reforms, as well as by adaptation of the ideology to reality, wherever it could not be changed. The examples adduced show that the system of Bulgarian socialism was hybrid, and internally contradictory, and that it earned its adaptability to the social processes both by ideological and by practical incompatibility.

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