...what is certain is that the camel’s back has been broken in Bulgaria. Bulgarians have joined larger processes that shook the region - Romania last winter, Slovenia, Hungary, Macedonia and Kosovo this season. Slogans of the Occupy, Indignados, and Greek anti-austerity movements now fill the streets. People are less willing to trust traditional representative democracy, and they are starting to organize themselves in working groups to discuss organizational alternatives and propose new legislative measures. They speak of new mechanisms and forms of political, economic, and social participation.I've seen not a whisper of mainstream reporting of the dramatic collapse of the Bulgarian government due to widespread protests of citizens. The latter have recently been objecting to the symptoms of privatization that Bulgaria and the rest of what was the Soviet bloc are now experiencing due to the collapse of the Soviet version of communism which collapsed in 1989.
The apparatchiks who ran the government and industry in these countries reached a dead-end under their class leadership, and looked enviously at their Western capitalist counterparts who enjoyed so much power and wealth. Thus, 1989 they decided to accelerate the benefits of class rule by adopting capitalist methods.
If you want to learn more about this remarkable transition, I especially recommend reading Sale of the Century by Chrystia Freeland who while in the Soviet Union during the transition years witnessed the conversion of state properties into private hands, which were mostly the former apparatchiks and well-connected, for incredibly low prices that really constituted wholesale theft. And voila! A new class of wealthy oligarchs were instantly created! Freeland, a Canadian, is no radical, but a Western journalist who, while sometimes offering excuses, mostly reports on what happened.
