Grant Work | Visual Story Editing | Project Management: Democracy + Communism: 1. Bulgaria: 25 Years After Democracy

The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — the event which allowed my family to emigrate from Eastern Europe's closed borders to the Western world 25 years before — prompted me to examine how the idealized theories of both democracy and communism had impacted my country, Bulgaria, and places of kindred circumstances, with Cuba as one of many.  

(This project is being updated in both scope and publication before and during the pandemic, with more historical material via imagery and reporting alike.) 

I proposed the original idea for this project to gain its sponsorship through the Pulitzer Center, created text and visuals for it while overseeing its on-the-ground execution and final-product packaging, to later publish it in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and TIME magazine. 

- Bulgaria: 25 Years After Democracy 

Each block that crumbled from the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9th, 1989 foreshadowed the coming of forbidden freedoms to Soviet satellite nations sprinkled throughout the Eastern Bloc. Twenty five years later, the promise of democracy is but an ironic whisper in the minds of many in Bulgaria, my homeland until the age of 12.  

The story of democratic Bulgaria at age 25 is a cautionary tale about transplanting one-size-fits-all Western values to a nation still undergoing social and economic upheaval. And there's a clear divide in the way people remember their Communist past.  

That's because Communism didn't die in 1989: it lives in people's minds, surviving political factions and visual remnants across the nation — still-standing Soviet monuments, nostalgic graffiti, decaying factories. The country’s dark political past reanimates when visiting forced labor camps, also in ruins, where political prisoners once languished. 

Most shudder at the memory of the regime’s brutal ideologies and closed borders; yet just as many, turned sour from post-1989 political corruption, brutal job market and crimes of desperation, equate democracy to disaster.  

This is because Bulgaria is still one of the poorest, most corrupt nations in the European Union, its hopes of change wilted by this chronic political instability, high crime rates and skyrocketing inflation. While Bulgarians can now freely vote and protest without much threat to their freedom, corruption has became the new oppressor to prosperity. It is at a 15 year high, across political and civil sectors, according to a finding by the Sofia-based think tank Study for Democracy.  

The country also has the most extreme population decline in the world — much of it due to post-1989 emigration, high death rates and low birth rates. There are so few people of child-bearing age in the nation that population statistics project a 30-percent decrease by 2060, from 7.2 million to just over 5 million. In other words, Bulgaria’s population declines by 164 people a day, or 60,000 people a year — 60 percent of them aged over 65. As depopulation further saps the nation of its men and women, visions of severe structural and industrial decay become increasingly common – and so, with each visit, I witness more and more of my country’s disturbing vanishing.  

What gripped me just as much is the ennui, so casually etched on the passerby's face that it becomes routine — against this startling backdrop of rotting architecture, joblessness, and waning population. It seems that despite what democracy has changed in Bulgaria, the daily struggles of its populace have largely stayed untouched, trapped in a post-communist time capsule. But I believe hope for the country remains with those who are willing to believe in and fight for its still-nascent freedoms.