Дневникът на Георги Димитров и местата на паметта
The Georgi Dimitrov’s diary and the places of memory

Summary/Abstract: This diary, ‘one of the most secret documents’ in the Party archives, is here discussed in the context of two great battles for memory and correspondingly two great crises of the testimonies of the past. The article describes how the memory about Dimitrov reveals a deep national traumatism, a ‘syndrome’ obstructing the objective historical narrative (one of the hypotheses is that there is a similarity between the way in which, consciously or not, the history after 1944 and 1989 is instrumentalized). It demonstrates why, although the diary has been controlled, censored and self-censored, it is an authentic testimony important to a historical sociology of socialism that wants to understand the demiurgic nature of the power and the ideologically produced reality, the Partyization of the society and the specific nature of the socialist public space, the ‘great decoration’. Different possible readings of the document are analyzed (interest in the personality of the leader, in the everyday life of the Komintern, in the ‘important details’ and the consideration, very important to the sociologist, of history as not only the realized but also of the non-realized chances). Of central interest are the views of Georgi Dimitrov on history – in the double sense of the word, as both science and a process – and the mechanisms in which the Communist Party controls the common places of memory and imposes the new symbolic language of ‘the great Slav family’.

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