‘I studied capitalist economics to destroy it from the inside’

Albena Dimitrova is a Bulgarian-born author who relocated to France in 1989. She worked in economics, studying the privatization processes in former Eastern Bloc countries and the associated corruption. Her novel Nous dînerons en français (‘We will dine in French’) portrays the decline of a totalitarian regime through the eyes of a young woman. She was Secretary General of the France-Bulgaria Alliance under the presidency of Pierre Consigny.

Margaux Cassan (MC) To start with, where were you back in the autumn of 1989?

Albena Dimitrova (AD) Yes, it was a very political time. I was extremely politicized without knowing it. I'm the very fruit of perestroika. Gorbachev arrived in Bulgaria after Chernobyl. He said that we needed to make our economic management and production system more flexible, and that we were going to open up to joint ventures with companies in [Western] Europe. That was beginning to gain industrial legitimacy in the eyes of the leaders in Moscow, and also in the countries of Eastern Europe, particularly in Bulgaria, where we were historically known as the 16th Soviet Republic. We’d had a president, Todor Khristov Zhivkov, for 33 years. At that time, in my life, I’d known no other political figure. Gorbachev gave the founding speech of Balkan perestroika.

Our president's dream was to do as well as Tito, in other words to have a car industry. It was still a romantic era: if the car industry goes well, the economy does well, everything does. So the dream of Zhivkov and his entourage was to be able to attract car manufacturers, if only to produce spare parts. Obviously, many European carmakers liked the fact that they could find a technically qualified engineering workforce in close proximity, with highly competitive wages. So, we had Volkswagen, Rover and Citroën as manufacturers. I came to France in 1989 as a Citroën stockbroker. It was completely surreal. What was frightening for me, to get back to the question about politicization, was that in my mind at the time, if I have to be honest, was: I'm going to go and study capitalist economics to destroy capitalism from the inside.

Luuk van Middelaar (LvM) Like infiltrating a foreign army.

AD Exactly. Without going as far as that, but it was, ‘We're going to understand how they work and by knowing more about how they work, we're going to improve.’ So, I was really politicized, without knowing it. But what struck me was that my first semester in economics was going to be a disaster. I was still mastering 2,000 words of French, so following lectures was a bit of a problem. Nevertheless, I passed. I realized that you could study economics as long as you knew how to do a few maths equations. This meant that you could study capitalist economics without understanding it. It was a real sign that something was wrong. It had completely abandoned the philosophical content of economics. And I came from a country where words were mega-powerful.

I said to myself, on the other side of the [Berlin] Wall, which supposedly no longer exists, they’ve gone too far in their scientific confidence that observation, that science and mathematical analysis would be totally capable of anticipating the right decisions. Ideology has been left behind.

MC So, there are these two rather binary doctrines: capitalism and communism. What would be the third way? And who would be in charge of it at the time?

AD China was observing everything that was happening in the Eastern bloc. It had never completely cut itself off from the Western bloc, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese very cautiously, but with a lot of foresight and 20 years of planning, made room for both private enterprise and the political control of private enterprise. That was a form of third way that they experimented with and that they are now continuing to modify. For us, the third way was essentially linked to the idea of democracy. SMEs were seen as a reliable fabric, but what was needed for all the big industries, which were nationalized, was an ideological counterweight. In other words, a kind of critical independence in relation to the party doctrines. Those who questioned the ideology mysteriously disappeared; they had heart attacks, a bit like the way oligarchs who don't obey Putin are now disappearing very strangely.

LvM So we're talking about the end of Perestroika.

AD That was really up to ’91, ’92. Then all that disappeared and was followed by a sort of unbridled capitalism, with mass privatizations. In other words, after the fall of the Wall, we never had time to weigh up the pros and cons of the economic regime we wanted. Immediately a horde of Western companies saw a very interesting opportunity. There was the truly neo-liberal school, which went full speed ahead with the concept of mass privatization and shock transition. There was never enough time in those societies.

LvM It was done in a hurry.

AD But strangely enough, the emergency was not an emergency for Eastern European societies. It was a market emergency. Society was all right. What I remember is that just before I left for Paris, at the beginning of 1989, there was some sort of leak – it was common – of chemical waste into the Danube. It was a truly apocalyptic sight to see this immense river covered in carpet of dead fish. We totally overlooked the ecological dimension, and that helped precipitate the fall of the Wall.

LvM You've already mentioned Chernobyl too.

AD Gorbachev addressed one of the problems; that's why he was asking more questions about NATO, about economic reforms, which started in 1986. But he had more questions about the democratization of the regimes. Nobody was prepared. Those who were prepared, in fact, were people who were part of a very specific network, who travelled, who shuttled between East and West: the diplomatic corps, intelligence corps, and possibly some academics or industrialists. And in the midst of all this questioning, the keys were handed over to oligarchs who had been structurally created.

‘I found out that the wall had fallen … with a 5-franc coin.’

The way I found out that the wall had fallen was with a 5-franc coin. There were still phone boxes. And I called my mother. I was supposed to go home for Christmas and New Year and then come back. She said to me, ‘You're not moving; they're going to send in the tanks.’ This idea of overthrowing the regime, of breaking down the Wall – my parents' generation didn't believe in it. I was watching the events in Bucharest on TF1 [in France]. I thought to myself, the Westerners are exaggerating with their lies. I thought it was an ideological set-up against us. A fiction.

LvM Propaganda. So there was a temporal collision?

AD Maybe that's why we had to wait almost 30 years before we could look at it again and not blame the West. I don't like this tendency at all today when we talk, for example, about geopolitics or Putin's power, to say that the West provoked Russia and is responsible for it. I don't think the West was prepared for it to collapse like that either. I had professors at the Sorbonne who had just published books in 1987 and 1988 saying that the communist regimes were never going to collapse.

LvM And what about Bulgaria?

AD Bulgaria, as an experiment, was really colonized by Moscow more than other countries. In Bulgaria, pro-Putinism has exploded. When we had just joined the European Union, everyone was very enthusiastic. But in 2014, when he took Crimea, people were happy in Bulgaria, although they didn't say so. They thought that the great Soviet Union was going to be reborn. There was an enthusiasm for pestering people in the West. The idea that Putin is the only one who can stand up to them.

It's really wrong to analyse Putin's success solely in terms of his repressive regime. In Bulgaria, where there is no repression, where we benefit from the infrastructure and other advantages of Europe, even economically, and where certain rights are guaranteed, where even militarily we don't have to be afraid that Putin's tanks are going to arrive on our doorstep, like our Ukrainian neighbours, because we are part of NATO, 2022 has opened up the possibility of defending Putin in a no-holds-barred way. And for the first time, the Bulgarian Parliament has extreme right-wing, ultra-nationalist members. There have never been any extreme right-wing groupings in Bulgaria. Since 2020, there has been a growing sympathy for dictatorship.

LvM So this raises the question of Bulgaria's place as being somewhere between Europe, the European Union and Russia. You were involved in the negotiations to bring Bulgaria into NATO and the European Union.

AD At that time, in 2004, there was such a consensus of desire for Europe. I'd say that almost my happiest period was between 2002 and 2004, in terms of ‘Ah, that's it!’ By then, the hyper-violent economic crisis had already died down a bit, and there was a sort of beginning of construction. Bulgarians were unanimously enthusiastic about being part of the European Union. The desire for Europe – but it was a fantasy. Europe, but Europe. Economy, Europe, democracy, Europe. Civilization, values... An imaginary Europe, which doesn't actually exist. Then it took three to four years to start taking shape. And this materialization was a total, extremely brutal disenchantment.

LvM That's how you explain the 2004–07 transition from a kind of jubilation vis-a-vis the European Union to the opening of a Putin discourse today?

AD At the time, there was an alliance, a very sincere collective joy. We were very happy with NATO.

LvM And another distinction: is there a difference in the imagination of the North, Europe or the West? Between Europe and the United States, or is it more or less the same thing?

AD Bulgarians still believe that Europe is America's vassal. I don't agree. I believe that Europe has its own way of thinking and its own battles, which have nothing to do with America. In fact, that's why the EU exists, to help Europe become independent and think for itself.