Post-Stalinism – the last three decades of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – gave birth to new political ideas and social struggles, which reshaped socialist societies and forged new global imaginaries. With a focus on socialist Bulgaria, Restless History traces the dynamic polemical and social shifts that took place during this period.
With anti-Stalinist and humanist visions, socialist societies rebuilt their material and social worlds around social-reproductive needs such as care, housing, education, leisure, rest, and access to culture and the arts. In the sphere of global politics, they created anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist solidarities that challenged Western hegemony and reordered the global geographies of power. Yet the changes of the period also took some troubling directions: humanist imaginaries of socialist progress, modernity, and nationhood welcomed ideas of national and social homogeneity, opening the doors to ethnonationalism. Following the promising as well as troubling moments in the history of Bulgarian post-Stalinism, Zhivka Valiavicharska brings to life the complexities of real lived socialism.
Restless History re-examines the post-Stalinist period in Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, and beyond – in all its tensions and contradictions – to offer the socialist past as an unfinished history, one that cannot be easily put to rest.

Zhivka Valiavicharska is assistant professor of political and social theory at the Pratt Institute in New York.

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"Restless History boldly reconsiders state socialism in Eastern Europe in this admirable and stimulating work of scholarship." Maria N. Todorova, University of Illinois

"Valiavicharska develops a nuanced and careful analysis that lays bare some of the ideological foundations of the neo-nationalist and even neo-fascist politics that have gripped much of the region, as seen most dramatically in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars of the 1990s." Kevin B. Anderson, University of California, Santa Barbara