Red Hangover

1. Fires

• Context and scope: A sequence of self-immolations in Bulgaria during 2013–2014 as a protest against economic hardship, rising utility costs, and political stagnation after the post-communist transition. The author frames self-immolation as a long historical act of political protest, accelerated by the use of accelerants like gasoline and the ensuing extreme, often fatal, pain.
• Economic backdrop in 2013 Bulgaria:
  • Average monthly wage: about 400\,€ (roughly 520\,USD) per month.
  • Caritas study (2013): 43\% of Bulgarians faced “severe material deprivation” across nine items (rent/water/electricity; heat for winter; medical costs; ability to eat meat/protein at least every two days; a week’s vacation; a car; a washing machine; a color TV; a telephone/mobile).
  • EU comparison: the EU average for severe material deprivation was 9.6\%; Bulgaria ranked last among EU member states.
  • Poverty risk: 21\% of Bulgarians were at risk for poverty and social exclusion (living on about 60% of the median income, i.e., around 240\,€ or 312\,USD a month in 2013).
• Spark and escalation of protests:
  • February 2013: mass demonstrations in Sofia against steep winter power bills after electricity distributors (foreign-owned monopolies) raised prices.
  • The protests broadened into calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and a reconfiguration of Bulgarian politics; some observers dubbed this moment the “Bulgarian Spring,” a surge of civil society activity.
• Individual self-immolations and timeline:
  • February 18, 2013: Traian Marechkov, 26, unemployed environmentalist from Veliko Tarnovo, doused himself with gasoline at a crossroads and lit himself on fire. He died in hospital two days later. Marechkov’s last words reportedly: “I give my life for the people, my family, and Bulgaria, hoping that politics and the government will improve the standard of living for the people.”
  • February 20, 2013: Plamen Goranov, 36, photographer and protest leader in Varna, prepared a self-immolation on the steps of City Hall, using five liters of gasoline. He died eleven days later on Bulgaria’s national independence holiday. His act drew comparisons to Jan Palach (Czechoslovakia, 1968).
  • Within 72 hours, the Varna mayor resigned; the media framed these acts as catalysts for political accountability.
  • The Guardian and the New York Times covered the events, emphasizing the sacrifices as calls for reform; the events were tied to Bulgaria’s lack of political tradition of self-immolation.
  • February 26, 2013: Ventsislav Vasilev, 53, unemployed, entered a municipal office in Stara Zagora and set himself on fire—his family’s debt and a water bill were cited as drivers; Vasilev died on March 10, 2013.
• Later 2013 developments and broader consequences:
  • March 6, 2013: Bulgaria declared a national day of mourning for Goranov; the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s Patriarch Neofit officiated Goranov’s funeral and issued a theological caveat against suicides, suggesting that suicide was incompatible with dogma.
  • The Patriarch framed the act as a symptom of social distress rather than political solution; he urged Bulgarians not to self-immolate.
  • March 10, 2013: Ventislav Vasilev died; media coverage noted a surge in suicides in Bulgaria in the wake of these events.
  • March 13, 2013: Dimitar Dimitrov (age 52) self-immolated in Sofia outside the presidential palace; his account—shared in later interviews—revealed a desire to be the voice of ordinary Bulgarians and to spur international attention to Bulgaria’s situation. Figure 1.1 (described in the text) shows guards in front of the presidential building.
  • Dimitrov’s narrative: he believed democracy had failed to deliver economic security; his testimony to the BBC and other outlets framed his act as a plea to be seen and heard rather than merely to die.
• 2013–2014 continuing pattern and broader context:
  • Five more Bulgarians died from self-immolation in 2013 after Dimitrov’s act; 2014 saw additional cases, including Lidia Petrova (mother of one), who self-immolated near the presidency six days before the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall; Desislava Koleva (Pernik, 2014) self-immolated in a garage to avoid harming others’ property; Dimitrov’s example inspired further acts, including Kotov in Dimitrovgrad in June 2013.
  • The 2014 incidents seeded renewed attention to poverty, unemployment, and the legitimacy of political reforms; the international media highlighted Bulgaria’s ongoing struggles with oligarchy and energy prices.
• Medical and ethical notes on self-immolation:
  • Self-immolators often use accelerants to maximize instant tissue destruction, typically causing first moments of severe, excruciating pain as the epidermis and dermis are burned; many victims sustain third-degree burns requiring extensive grafts.
  • The text notes examples from Tibet (monks drinking kerosene to destroy internal organs) as another extreme instance of self-immolation.
• Global and historical references and implications:
  • Palach (Czechoslovakia, 1968) and Bouazizi (Tunisia, 2010) are cited to situate Bulgaria’s acts within a global history of self-immolations as political protest and symbolical political call for change.
  • The Bulgarian case is linked to an argument about civil society’s fragility and the potential for protest to influence political outcomes (e.g., leadership resignations, elections), as well as the risk that such acts may be co-opted by media and political elites in different ways.
• Endnotes and context:
  • The text notes that as of November 2016, Boyko Borissov remained prime minister; Bulgaria remained the poorest EU member, with electricity distribution monopolies continuing to raise prices.
  • A concluding line underscores a paradox: while social and economic conditions persisted, gasoline remained relatively inexpensive compared to other costs.

2. Cucumbers

• The narrator’s framing: A former CIA officer (the author narrates in the first person) who operated under nonofficial cover (NOC) and later adopted a cover as a professor at a small liberal arts college in New England. The narrative explores espionage ethics, archival ethics, and the entanglement of personal memory with historical documentation.
• Key distinction in espionage: official cover (OC) vs nonofficial cover (NOC)
  • OCs work in embassies/consulates, enjoy diplomatic immunity, and may be expelled without severe repercussions if outed.
  • NOCs lack immunities and face severe penalties if uncovered, including potential death. A plausible cover identity is essential for their operational safety.
  • Some governments create fake corporations or NGOs to insert NOCs into fieldwork; sometimes individuals integrate into existing structures.
• The narrator’s Bulgarian assignment and cover realization:
  • The narrator spent over a decade in Bulgaria post–Cold War, initially uncertain about her cover; by 2009, her cover matured: a professor at a rural New England college; this background shift coincided with a stable-sounding academic life that served as cover for intelligence work.
  • The narrator describes the pre-1989 era as sociopolitically complex, with a mix of state control and new post-communist vulnerabilities.
• The trash-bin discovery in Sofia:
  • In Sofia, while living in the eastern part near Sofia University, the narrator found a trash can overflowing with old archives and journals, including personal dossiers.
  • The park encounter with a narcoman (drug addict) who attempted to seize the discovery underscores the social vulnerability and the value of historical documents in the post–communist period.
  • The narrator pretended to be on “official business” to deter interference, using a feigned insider vantage to claim the documents as part of archival work.
• The central finding: Andrei Andreev’s personal dossier
  • In a green folder labeled “personal dossier” dated 1976, the narrator discovers a dossier for Andrei Andreev, born 1924, a specialist in the greenhouse sector for the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Production.
  • Andreev’s Autobiography (dated August 10, 1976) lists:
  • Born November 7, 1924, in Cherkovna, Silistra Municipality; education details incl. secondary school in Silistra (1946) and university in Sofia (1954).
  • Spouse: Ekaterina Andreeva (born January 11, 1938); she is a non-Party agricultural specialist who works as a planner for Balkanstroi.
  • Son: Ivan Andreev (born 1974).
  • Career: district agronomist in Gurmazovo (early career); then roles in various vegetable production cooperatives; chief agronomist in Kostinbrod; six-month English-language study in 1964; Division Head of First Category in 1967; awarded a Victory Passport and a Gold Badge (later another Gold Badge of Excellence) by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Production.
  • Political involvement: active in politics as an agricultural specialist for 23 years (13 years with Polish vegetable production; 10 years with greenhouse vegetables).
  • Noted contributions: importation of patented Dutch cucumber seeds and successful vegetable greenhouse production.
  • Andreev’s references: two letters of support—Stoyan Nedelchev (WWII-era antifascist resistance participant; “honest, principled and tenacious”) and Vasil Spahahiski (worked with Andreev on a major greenhouse complex; credited with importation of Dutch seeds and described as an “excellent” and “diligent” worker).
  • Administrative records: approvals for foreign travel (e.g., 1974 for Polish greenhouses; 1973 for Mongolia; regular four-week annual vacations; two weeks around Christmas); property deed for a 1974 apartment; extensive notes on how to grow Dutch cucumbers in Bulgarian greenhouses; the ledgers documenting inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides) and outputs (tomatoes, cucumbers, corn). Andreev’s meticulous record-keeping reveals a life organized around the quotas and schedules of a centrally planned economy.
• The significance of Andreev’s papers in the post-1989 era:
  • The central Bulgarian economy (1944–1989): collectivization, state ownership of agriculture, and central planning to meet domestic demand with fixed prices. Greenhouses were built to stabilize vegetable supply; cucumbers were a staple; seeds were often imported from capitalist countries (e.g., Dutch seeds).
  • After 1989: privatization of state greenhouses, sale of land beneath them, collapse of state-driven production, and a shift to imported cucumbers from countries like Turkey and Israel. The narrator muses about Andreev’s fate: did he retire in 1984 at age 60? Did he live to see privatization erode the system he helped sustain? The text suggests Andreev’s world ended with the transition to democracy and market forces, even as his work helped Bulgaria’s citizens eat cucumbers year-round.
• The narrator’s personal reflections and ethical questions about field notes and archives:
  • The narrator notes the American Anthropological Association’s code of ethics that requires ethnographers to keep field notes for future scholarly use; these notes become part of a collective historical memory.
  • The tension between preserving field notes and protecting private memories: the narrator puzzles over whether Andreev’s papers should be preserved in an archive or discarded; she worries about becoming a conduit for espionage myths or conspiracy theories about a real-life figure.
  • The mundane yet intimate details in Andreev’s life—crossword puzzles, road maps, airline timetables, a Polish-Russian-English multilingual pamphlet listing Bulgarian gas stations in 1968, and a Yugoslav-era timetable for Jugoslovenski Aerotransport—illustrate how a bureaucrat’s life can illuminate broader historical changes more deeply than grand political events.
• The park scene and the narrator’s ongoing covert role:
  • The encounter with the narcoman, the smoking man on a balcony, and the narrator’s bluff demonstrate the precarious nature of fieldwork in a society transitioning from state secrecy to open archives.
  • The narrator’s research process includes a blend of archival sleuthing, everyday life, and the instinct to protect sources and avoid sensationalizing private lives of ordinary people.
• The long arc of Andreev’s life as a lens on history:
  • Andreev’s life spanned pre-1989 Bulgaria through the post-communist era, a period of dramatic economic and political upheaval. He represents a generation of agronomists who maximized production under central planning, modernized farming methods, and connected Bulgaria to Western technology (Dutch cucumber seeds), before seeing central planning dismantled and their hard-won expertise devalued by privatization and marketization.
• The narrator’s later life and meta-narrative about memory and scholarship:
  • In 2014, the narrator receives a two-year research leave and becomes a full professor; a replacement professor needs storage space, pushing the narrator to consider what to do with the paper flood in her office.
  • She contemplates moving papers to a university archive, but worries whether archivists would care about a single cucumber agronomist; she maybe imagines a future PhD student who uncovers Andreev’s papers and misinterprets them as a clandestine intelligence dossier.
  • The essay closes with a meta-fictional flourish: the narrator imagines a future niece or grandchild unearthing these documents and turning them into a fictional spy narrative; she jokes about the ethics and consequences of such readings.
• The final scene and present-day tension:
  • The narrator imagines the day when she must move out of her current office and confront the enormous mass of paper accumulated over decades; she wonders who might read her own field notes and whether they will be used to construct a narrative about Americans in Bulgaria as undercover agents.
  • The closing moment returns to the classroom: a student interrupts with a deadline, and the narrator realizes she is running late for class—an ordinary, urgent moment in the life of a scholar who also lives with extraordinary memories and ambiguous loyalties.
• Figure reference:
  • Figure 1.1. The guards in front of the office of the Bulgarian presidency is noted in the text as part of the visual memory of self-immolations and political protest, illustrating the security and symbolic power surrounding Bulgarian sites of political action.
• Connections and implications:
  • The juxtaposition of self-immolations as a method of political protest with the painstaking archival work of a Western academic in Bulgaria highlights the ethical and practical tensions of studying totalitarian and post-totalitarian histories.
  • The narrative foregrounds questions about memory, memory-work, and the ethics of handling personal papers: whether to archive or erase, to preserve or to publish, to reveal or to protect, and how a scholar’s own life may be read by future generations.
• Summary takeaway:
  • The Bulgarian self-immolations of 2013–2014 illuminate a country in crisis, where poverty, debt, energy costs, and political disillusionment produced tragic acts of protest. The cucumber dossier narrative uses the micro-histories of a single agronomist—Andreev—to reveal how centralized planning, international exchange, and political change intertwined to shape everyday life. Together, these sections probe the ethics of memory, the fragility of civil society, and the ways in which individual lives both reflect and resist historical forces.