The Bulgarian Computer's Global Reach: On Victor Petrov's "Balkan Cyberia"
lareviewofbooks.org
lareviewofbooks.org
Then one day it wasn't anymore.
Actually all that, let's call it borrowing, laid a perfect ground for all future versions of those products/companies - with plenty of educated and demanding users thereof.
(btw rev.engineering was good fun.. but that's a forgotten land now)
We are now a fast shrinking country, poor and even today the political scene is a joke.
IMHO the ideological markets are very dangerous, gives you the wrong feedback on your output and makes you completely reliant.
USSR pumps oil, digs minerals and uses the income from that to purchase stuff from Bulgaria not because Bulgaria is the best(it might have been the best or very good at one point) but because politics. Then Bulgaria doesn't have proper feedback and instead of investing to advance its computer business keeps doing the same when the west with their real markets leaps ahead. Then one day the only customer who bought Bulgarian stuff for ideological reasons is gone and Bulgaria finds out that they don't have any customers anymore because they didn't invest in advancing their tech because they didn't need to.
Unfortunately, the west today has a similar problem of ideology based markets but its nowhere nearly as bad as the situation in Communist Bulgaria.
One argument might be, if the system worked why wouldn't keep doing it? Because its again very dangerous. If the USSR survived and Bulgaria was kept being the tech powerhouse of USSR with a few nodes behind the state of the art, Bulgaria might have been compelled to send the troops for the invasions USSR might have started because that's how empires work(Bulgarian economy collapsing the moment Russia decides not buying from Bulgaria since it disobeys). Notice that the Russian soldiers in Ukraine come from far eastern regions of the Russian federation, that would have been the fate of Bulgaria today.
List of countries which happily participated in USA's invasion of Iraq wants to say hello!
The American way works the other way around, they usually are for free market until you sell its enemies weapons or help finance the war.
They also do questionable things but IMHO it's a much better deal overall.
And not without its own drawbacks, as discussed elsewhere.
The Soviet one that you have drawn in your head is predatory. In real life, USSR went into Afghanistan alone as far as I know. Bulgaria meanwhile could dedicate efforts towards making PCs.
In the USA-satellite open market situation, Bulgaria gets to send cheap workers to fill positions in the EU as well as offers for its brightest minds, treated as a flyover country. No PCs.
The voting situation WRT Warsaw pact and Comecon was likely the same. Bulgaria can't vote anything useful in either ones.
There's no an governmental institution in Bulgaria that collects Bulgarians from the streets and sending them to other countries to work work cheap, like they do with doctors in Cuba or workers in DPRK.
You find a job, get a plane ticket, go there and work, get paid like everyone else. That doesn't make you a cheap Bulgarian labor. They like to call it like that because the talent pool increases and they want to imagine that employers are hiring Bulgarian butchers that can't cut meat or Bulgarian developers that can't code just because its cheap. That's not the case, it's a free market.
Which is almost always, as almost all EU countries have better conditions than Bulgaria. So in general you can assume a position with significantly worse social status than you had in Bulgaria, but if that position is in Germany, that is a net social benefit for you. So that's what you often do.
Bulgarian butchers in Germany, obviously, do not have native German to communicate with customers, and their butcher skills may be tailored to a different meat culture, so they are hired because Germany have more butcher positions than Germans want to occupy, and that German butchers will usually take the ones which pay more. Same for Bulgarian software developer in France: They have decent coding skills and English, but their French is no good, so they will be kept in more back-office roles, whereas French developers from France will be more customer-facing and paid somewhat more for this skill. That's pretty basic migration economy 101.
In Comecon, Bulgaria was one of more developed regions, which then got to host more prestigious industries.
If that was a valid way to reduce a discussion, I'd had it wrapped up five comments ago.
However I can also say that because of climate change, certain regions are now experiencing drought, I can specifically mention the far South-East near the border to Turkey. Rural villages are dying, but also lacking water, there is almost no water underground and it rains less and less, and the winters are no longer even winters. Wells fill up only once during winter and are emptied out within a few weeks before the crops even grow and produce fruit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26107924
And a small historical bit of snark that's probably in the book (which I haven't had a chance to read yet):
https://axle.events/events/prezentaciya-na-balkan-cyberia-c7...
I have loved everything I've learned about it since, even thinking of learning Bulgarian!
What a cool place, your country.
This post for me is an instance of that weird effect when once you start looking into something you see it everywhere..
Every other treatment I've ever seen for describing the Soviet computing and internet development has always just been a lazy "well it wasn't innovative like silicon valley" which, while not necessarily wrong, sounds more like awkward and insecure attempt at justifying our own processes, and also isn't all that descriptive or useful.
This isn't surprising because we still have a very heavy Cold War stink on history to do with the USSR and just continue to discover we were wrong about certain aspects of that experiment or didnt quite fully understand it without heavy ideological bias.
I think the wrongness of popular perception tends to go in the other direction. People often misunderstand just how badly the Soviet bloc lagged in high technology, precision manufacturing at scale, etc. This makes sense because they remember and have read about the military parity, the brief period of (very roughly) comparable middle class standard of living, etc. But Moore's law (among other things) dramatically exacerbated the technology gap - you can have, say, a steel or oil industry that's a couple of decades behind the state of the art. An IC industry that far behind is barely a meaningful IC industry at all.
It depends on the decade and if we're are talking about the Soviet Union, keeping in mind that Warsaw Pact countries also had their own trajectories and specifics, like the article mentions. By the 1970s the Soviets themselves realized they were lagging behind, and decided to mostly "borrow" Western designs. So it isn't just us judging them from an orange forum years later, it was a judgement they came to on their own at that time. In the end they were cloning the computer systems of the West, not vice-versa. And, if we know anything about the Soviets, is they did not like to lose face. Everything from space to sports was always them showing off their superiority, so the decision to concede and start copying computer systems designed by the "evil capitalists" likely wasn't done lightly.
It's not really how the Soviet Union operated, this sort of "technology transfer" was fundamental to Soviet development from the start. It was so ingrained in Soviet leadership that it was sometimes counterproductive - one famous example is Beria's insistence on strictly following the atomic bomb designs lifted from the Manhattan project which probably didn't make the bomb makers' jobs any easier. A down-to-the-last-rivet replica of the B-29 was also not what Tupolev would have done without orders from the top.
That's because because they had realized they were behind already. And it's not like the Americans and the Soviets were going to open their nuclear bomb blueprints so they world got to laugh at the copy-cat design.
> It's not really how the Soviet Union operated, this sort of "technology transfer" was fundamental to Soviet development from the start.
As far as computers went in the 1950s and 1960s the Soviets initially did pretty well. Their BESM-1 machine was the fastest in Europe for some years. They even had revolutionary designs like the Setun with its famous ternary logic. So they had the brains and the capability do build them. But due to planning and political hubris they lost their lead.
But once they were behind it was considered better to copy than not have the technology at all, but yes, those were made by political appointees and people who did not listen or take the scientists' or engineers' opinions seriously.
It was obvious they were copied.
Obvious to whom counts. It's not like every Lada came with a 'licensed from Fiat' sticker on the bumper. "Half the cars on the street" tells you a great deal about how much the Soviets cared about the visibility and appearance of copying things to the world at large.
Bashir Rameev and Victor Glushkov disagreed from https://www.sigcis.org/files/SIGCISMC2010_001.pdf
They wrote that:
> Copying foreign work excludes the possibility of utilizing our own collective experience of computer research, and in the immediate future, will hinder our ability to employ new principles. This will bring the development of computer technology in our nation to an end
They wanted to co-develop a new system with ICL. But you're right, the political and military leaders where the ones wanting to quickly copy the IBM-360 to catch up.
> Obvious to whom counts. It's not like every Lada came with a 'licensed from Fiat' sticker on the bumper.
They did a better one, and renamed a whole city where the cars were built after the Palmiro Togliatti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolyatti
Romania also had significant semiconductor industry and DDR too, such as Kombinat Mikroelektronik "Karl Marx" Erfurt.
I'm disappointed the article is so eager to tag late communist Bulgaria "repressive". The same myopic vision where Bulgaria can be of no significance, but also where socialist regime can manifest with nothing but repression.
And I'm absolutely no fan of communism.
The hole in question that absolute majority of Bulgarians' experience was shaped by what the economy can let them do and what it can't - talking about both pre-1990 and post-1990.
Late communism was more like an asylum which is run by inmates. It was as repressive as they personally were.
Edit about your edit:
Late communism was more like an asylum which is run by inmates. It was as repressive as they personally were.
I can't say I understand this but it sounds like a tautology you can apply to just about any human organization.
> sounds like a tautology you can apply to just about any human organization
Exactly! It wasn't much better or worse than your garden variety society. That you won't use all the repressive words against.
> The "Revival Process" was in turn followed by the forced expulsion of over 300,000 Muslims in 1989.
Isn't that exactly the action of post-Perestroika, now-democratic Bulgaria? Indeed, as I have heard most of ethnic cleansings happen in young democracies as opposed to autoritarian states. In young unstable democracy, it suddently seems like a good idea for 70% to get rid of a 30% minority (numbers may vary). After all, you can vote solidly in favor of that.
If Socialist Bulgaria wanted to get rid of muslims it would not wait until 1989. They had 40 years to do that if they wanted. They didn't. The new, emancipated one did.
Yes.
Isn't that exactly the action of post-Perestroika, now-democratic Bulgaria?
No. This was done under communist rule, as outlined in the Wikipedia page. Many Bulgarian ethnic Turks were able to return after the fall of communism as is mentioned there as well. A political party representing ethnic minority interests was one of the first formed after the end of communist rule. It remains significant part of the Bulgarian political landscape to this day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Rights_and_Freedo...
I can see a clear link between perestroikas and ethnic cleansings, but perhaps you can reason that away.
As for repressions, intellectuals getting censored, assasinated even [1].
Turkic and Roma populations getting forcibly assimilated [2].
Numerous personal accounts of asset seizure and blatant corruption among party members.
Is that repression to call it out or just enough to fall below the threshold?
With regards to forcible assimilations, I believe France, Denmark and Turkey did more or less the same stuff in the time frame. These are all democratic, capitalist NATO-member countries which are not always in the same sentence with "repressive". Again, that is tragic, but I wonder if most countries in the world aren't having worse contemporary skeletons in their closets.
I'm not challenging the actual grinding of people between state gears, just the myopic outlook where it is customary to use it against certain regimes' life experience but not others. People are conditioned to assume it was a torment to live in Bulgaria in 1980. The same people don't assume it was a torment to live in contemporary Turkey. In practice, both had their highs and lows.
With regards to asset seizure, I don't believe you were supposed to have any under socialism.
Oh, yes, kind of:
> “The [US] capitalists behaved like socialists while the [Soviet] socialists behaved like capitalists.” In other words, the United States’ internet precursor ARPANET was achieved through strong government support and subsidies, whereas the Soviet attempts were torpedoed by the “self-interest” of its bureaucrats and experts. The Bulgarian case is different because it did succeed—partly due to the fact that Petrov’s protagonists were able to outplay the capitalists at their own game. They copied the code and then rewrote it.
It is the end of history predicted by Karl Marx, but it had played in a different way that he thought. It played in a way Fukuyama described in retrospect. Capitalism is no longer "pure" capitalism, and communism is no longer "pure" communism. The thesis and the antithesis mated and gave rise to something in between. Or rather they morphed both, but the transformation of capitalism was more successful. Though China probably wouldn't agree with this last statement.
But looking at USA it use a lot of government funds spent on different projects with a goal to spur up progress. ARPANET is just one example, the other one is Apollo project or commercialization of space which is going on right now. And we can see in China a free market or at least market that is much more free than in USSR.
It seems it is not the end of history, it is more like an end of history. But I agree with Erik Hoel[1] it is no good in trying to apply Hegel to history, but his models are good to talk about politics.
[1] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-end-of-online-...