Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, 2 (Spring 2014): 303–34. Article How the Concept of Totalitarianism Appeared in Late Socialist Bulgaria The Birth and Life of Zheliu Zhelev’s Book Fascism ZHIVKA VALIAVICHARSKA Few would dispute the claim that the most signiicant political text—and political event—in the history of late socialism in Bulgaria was Zheliu Zhelev’s Fascism. Completed around 1967 and published in 1981, the book was censored immediately after its publication for making implicit analogies between the fascist regimes and the political organization of the socialist states. Yet despite the state’s attempts to limit its circulation, the book captured the political imagination of the generation of the 1980s, reordering political coordinates, eroding the legitimacy of state power, and triggering a political crisis of enormous proportions. Its author, Zheliu Zhelev, trained as a philosopher of Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s but during his graduate studies developed a liberal political perspective and became a harsh critic of the regime. Known as one of the most prominent dissident voices in the country, Zhelev took a trajectory similar to that of Václav Havel, becoming the irst democratically elected president of Bulgaria after 1989. his article traces the trajectory and political life of Zhelev’s book, the only explicitly liberal political critique of state power written and published under Bulgarian socialism. he book presents Europe’s fascist states as totalitarian regimes, reproducing Western Cold War right-wing and liberal frameworks that dominated the analysis of fascist and communist societies and their political institutions for most of the second half of the 20th century. In the socialist context, however, these arguments played out in a unique way, I thank Momchil Khristov, Georgi Medarov, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and the Russian Studies work- shop at the University of Chicago, as well as the editorial team and two anonymous reviewers at Kritika, for their feedback and editing suggestions. he research was carried out in collabo- ration with the project “Historical Sociology of Socialism” at the Institute for Critical Social Research, Soia.