Socialist Orchestration of Youth: The 1968 Sofia Youth Festival and Encounters on the Fringe
Socialist Orchestration of Youth: The 1968 Sofia Youth Festival and Encounters on the Fringe

Summary/Abstract: The global message of the 1968 World Festival of Youth and Students rang out over a divided Europe. While speaking of peace, the conceptual organisation of the Sofia Festival pitted the East bloc against the West, reinforcing the iron curtain that kept young people from communicating freely across the continent. As a highlight of socialist theatre, the Festival offers the opportunity to investigate the over-determination of youth by the Bulgarian Communist Party in a year in which young people in Central and Western Europe were challenging post-war political systems and the existing social order. In the summer of 1968, young Bulgarians were scarcely informed about the Prague Spring reforms or student demonstrations in the West. However, the fact of the iron curtain heightened the attraction of Western popular culture that permeated the dividing wall despite the Party’s efforts to stifle this threat to its hegemony. In this article I intend to trace the open and the hidden messages of the Festival, and how young people performed their socialist identity for the state. Turning then to biographical narrative, I will explore young people’s experiences on the fringe, where the Festival flowed into the lives of onlookers. As suggested by Stephen Kotkin in his book “Stalinism as Civilization”, socialist regimes and Party programmes did not only prevent action but also made things possible, sometimes with unintentional or unexpected results (Kotkin 1995: 22).

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