Join us for Dr. Victor Petrov’s Slavic Colloquium talk titled, “Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain”.
How did a small country in the Balkans become a hotbed of technological production and innovation in the Cold War? Centred on the Bulgarian computer industry during socialism, Balkan Cyberia reveals the extension of economic and political networks of influence far past the reputed fall of communism, along with the pivotal role small countries played in geopolitical games at the time. Through the prism of the Bulgarian computer industry, the true nature of the socialist international economy, and indeed the links between capitalism and communism, emerge. Granted tremendous freedom by the Politburo and backed by a concerted state secret intelligence effort, a new, privileged class of technical intellectuals and managers rose to prominence in Bulgaria in the 1960s. Plugged in to transnational business and professional networks, they strove to realize the party’s radical dreams of utopian automation, and Bulgaria would come to manufacture up to half of the Eastern Bloc’s electronics. Yet, the export-oriented nature of the industry also led to the disruption of party rule. Technicians, now thinking with and through computers, began to recast the dominant intellectual discourse within a framework of reform, while technocratic managers translated their newfound political clout into economic power that served them well before and after the revolutions of 1989.
Dr. Victor Petrov is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Historian of the modern Balkans and Europe more broadly, his research is driven by a variety of overlapping questions - the local ramifications of larger global trends and the two-way interaction between supposedly small states or societies, and geopolitical ‘forcefields’ such as the Cold War, or the information age, or the transition to democracy; questions of technology and its intersection with politics and culture; and utopian thinking, often displaced into ‘non-earth’ spaces, both internal and external. His first book, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain, came out in 2023 with MIT Press.
