Visual Project Management | Grant Work: 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 versions of both democracy and communism had impacted my country, Bulgaria, and places of kindred circumstances (with Cuba as one of many.) 

I proposed the original idea for this project to the Pulitzer Center, reported its text and crafted its visuals to publish in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and TIME magazine. 

- Bulgaria: 25 Years After Democracy 

Each block tumbling down the Berlin Wall in 1989 foreshadowed thus-far forbidden freedoms to Soviet satellite nations across the Eastern Bloc. Twenty five years later, the promise of democracy is but a bitter whisper in the minds of many in Bulgaria, my homeland until age 12.  

The reality of Democracy in Bulgaria at age 25 offers a worrisome warning against pro-forma Westernization to any nation still managing social and economic unrest. For one, there's a clear divide in the way people remember their Communist past.  

This is because totalitarian Communism didn't simply die in 1989: it survives in the mindset of many, via political factions and visual remnants strewn 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, a brutal job market and crimes of desperation, equate democracy to disaster.  

It remains that Bulgaria is one of the European Union's poorest, most corrupt nations, 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 as much threat to their freedom, corruption has became the new oppressor to prosperity—at a fifteen-year high across political and civil sectors, according to recent findings by the Sofia-based think tank Study for Democracy.  

The country also suffers the most severe 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 people, visions of severe structural and industrial decay become increasingly common. And so, with each visit, I witness more and more of my country’s disappearance.  

What's gripped me just as much is the ennui, so casually etched on passersby's faces that it becomes routine—against the startling backdrop of rotting architecture, joblessness, and waning population. It seems that despite what democracy has gifted Bulgaria, the daily struggles of its populace have largely stayed untouched, as if trapped in a post-Communist time capsule. Nonetheless, I hope for brighter days for my country, if those who want to build true freedom and equality continue to fight for it.