The Retro Museum, tucked away on the second floor of a shopping mall in the Black Sea city of Varna, is a testament to the material culture of everyday Bulgarian life between 1944 and 1989. From the Chaika vacuum cleaners and Maritsa manual typewriters to simple household items like tea towels, ashtrays, wine glasses, and portable record or cassette players, the collection highlights the importance of private spaces to those raised under authoritarian regimes, evoking memories of spontaneous dinner parties and family gatherings. Although I’d seen many of these same goods in the home of my Bulgarian in-laws in the 1990s, encountering them beneath glass in 2024 reminded me that behind the bleakness of the Iron Curtain, there was life. Crushed by a government they had no part in choosing, ordinary Bulgarians turned inward, but they curated their private spaces as small sanctuaries of domestic coziness.
“Internal emigration” is the name given to this withdrawal into the personal sphere across Eastern Europe in response to Communist authoritarianism. “If I were to design a monument to the Soviet Union it would be a kitchen table. Around it would be seated a group of friends, cigarettes and vodka glasses in hand, a loaf of bread and some pickled gherkins on the table,” explained Angus Roxburgh, a foreign correspondent who lived in Moscow in the 1970s.
Back in July, I wrote at TNR about the dangers of withdrawing from the public sphere. Yes, escapism through art, culture, and nature helped East Europeans persevere despite the many hardships of life in a command economy. But it also left them uniquely unprepared to deal with the sudden changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because people had cultivated the habit of apathy, they stood helpless as the lofty promises of free markets and democracy descended into kleptocratic chaos.
And yet now that the soaring cost of Wonder Bread, strategic fearmongering about Haitian dog-eaters, and a........