Slavic Review 77, no. 1 (Spring 2018) © 2018 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.14 Against the Double Erasure: Georgi Markov’s Contribution to the Communist Hypothesis Nikolay Karkov To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it lashes up at a moment of danger. Walter Benjamin There is a lot of energy in the dirt. Georgi Markov The Double Erasure of Eastern European State Socialism Part of the motivation behind this text is a sense of ongoing impasse that we (that is, those of us with letist leanings and political commitments to the region) experience as we confront the still relatively recent socialist past in eastern Europe. While the monopoly of interpreting that past may no longer lie solely in the hands of right-wing think-tanks, the parameters they set in the 1990s for public debate over socialism continue to haunt us. The domi- nant theme of that early interpretation stipulated that state socialism in east- ern Europe was a “lost time” and a “waste of experience,” setting the clock back for half-a-century and necessitating an accelerated catching up with the west. A typical example of this attitude was a 2004 declaration passed by the Parliament of my home country, Bulgaria, on the 60 th anniversary of the “communist takeover” in the country. The declaration claimed that in 1944 the “European road” chosen in the nineteenth century by those who were building contemporary Bulgaria was interrupted by a “utopian experiment” that retarded social and economic development for several decades. 1 While increasing numbers of social scientists and, in fact, the majority of the popula- tion may have embraced by now a vision of socialism as an “accelerated mod- ernization,” a top-down conception of the socialist past continues to inform both apolitical forms of “socialist nostalgia” and easy slips into nationalism and xenophobia. 2 Perhaps somewhat less predictably yet no less importantly, state social- ism has also been under severe attack from the western (North Atlantic) let, including its more militant wings. Oten launched under the banners of a 1. Iskra Baeva and Evgenia Kalinova, “Bulgarian Transition and the Memory of the Socialist Past,” in Maria N. Todorova, ed., Remembering Communism: Genres of Represen- tation (New York, 2010), 84–85. 2. Petya Kabakchieva, “Rethinking Communism: Social Approaches to Compre- hending ‘That Society’ in Postcommunist Bulgaria,” in Todorova, ed., Remembering Communism, 46; Maria Todorova, “Introduction: The Process of Remembering Commu- nism,” in Todorova, ed., Remembering Communism, 18.