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Remembering Communist Violence: The Bulgarian Gulag and the Conscience of the West

University of Colorado at Boulder

This article problematizes the rhetorical appropriations of memories of violence by focusing on a collection of narratives of former labor camp inmates in communist Bulgaria. The collection, published in the United States in 1999 under the title Voices From the GULAG: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria, was edited and introduced by Tzvetan Todorov and represents an effort to interpret the meaning of communist political violence. By examining Todorov's strategies of interpretation, the article discusses how the personal narratives of camp survivors are appropriated in a rhetoric of conscience, directed at Western public opinion, whereby their historical and political significance is transformed. The analysis demonstrates how the painful accounts of victims are discursively subsumed into an ideological discourse about a morally superior, democratic West and a corrupt, totalitarian East.

Key Words: political violence • communism • totalitarianism • collective memory • rhetorics of conscience

Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 31, No. 1, 44-61 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0196859906294703


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