The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe

"Yes, exactly like Romania," [Elena Lagadinova] says, raising her voice. "But what kind of country are we to make women have children that they do not want? These children will be unloved because women have no time for them. They will become a problem to society. Or wives will avoid being intimate with their husbands to prevent pregnancy, and we will have more broken families! What kind of solution is that?"

The above quotation is from an interview the author has with a woman who was a teenage partisan during WWII Bulgaria and later had a long term leadership role in politics under the communist regime there. The book is a well written one with many nice photographs that provides a balance to those who see communism during the Cold War in black/white terms.  Me personally, I know basically nothing about Bulgaria, so it was interesting on that level too and will read another one of the author's books on the area.

The book is a two part story.  The first part, the story of which inspired the author to write it, involves a young British specials operations officer, Frank Thompson, who is part of a doomed effort to help partisans fight the German allied government during WWII.  We also get a look at family of partisans, including Elena Lagadinova herself, who allows us to blend into modern day. After Thompson is killed by the fascists, communists soon after took over the country.  The people here saw communism as the great hope for the future and Lagadinova and others (including the author) feels the people significantly benefited from the social welfare state that grew those years.  The problems are not just papered over -- the Stalinist purges of the early years are cited and censorship, shortages and so forth later.

But, this book sees things through those who supported communism, and the regime that ran from the mid-1950s into the 1980s is portrayed positively.  This is important -- things rarely are black/white and this is the case during communism as well.  A similar approach would be appropriate let's say to handle the Cuban experience.  I'm sure the appropriate sources can be cited to show the problems during those decades too. And, many felt things were far from all that positive once a new age came in the 1990s.  The book begins and ends with recent political troubles, aided by economic problems (as continue in Greece etc.) as well as sorry from a few old timers, who saw the past as better than post-communist society.

I'm sure there is a lot of complexities here and someone else might write a book on how the post-communist era has positive aspects for them and the country.  Also, change takes time to develop, and this includes finding a proper mixture of post-communism life along with the social welfare policies of old.  After all, Scandinavian countries had some of that sort of thing without the darker aspects of communism, including censorship and other absences of democratic values.  The book is not here to deny this; the author's specialty is ethnographic work, giving a window to the people involved.  That is the biggest charm of the book.

The book is meant to provide a window into some stories from the "left side," those who rightly or wrongly thought they were fighting the good fight. For instance, Bulgaria was not an occupied territory during WWII and partisans against the government for many only in hindsight were heroes.  The two ways of looking at things is brought to the fore late in the book when the author looks at list of victims of communism compiled recently that turned out to have various unsavory characters from the WWII regime.  The battle for history there surely continues. Good book.

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* A tidbit from the book confused me and I emailed the author. Received an automatic reply that she was on vacation but later received an answer. It is great that the Internet provides such a direct means of interaction and that multiple times people who are quite busy actually take the time to answer my questions.  Also, to be a bit shallow, she's pretty cute!