Dr. Jan Zofka will present his research proposal on the topic: "A Transnational History of Socialist Industrialisation – the Bulgarian "Economic Leap (1956/58-1960)" on 16 June 2016 (Thursday) at 16:30h at CAS Conference Hall.

Abstract:

In autumn 1958 the Bulgarian party leadership called for an „economic leap" and for a fulfilment of the Third Five-Year-Plan in „three to four years". This campaign aimed for a fast development of Bulgaria from an agricultural to an industrialised country. While not resulting in a humanitarian disaster, as the Chinese "Great Leap", by which it was partly inspired, the Bulgarian experiment led to a huge pile of debts at international banks. The transnational dimension and the cross-border interactions in state socialist industrialisation drives in the 1950s in the socialist periphery, namely in Bulgaria, are in the focus of my research. The project is aimed to map the actors involved in these interactions, and it asks for their rationales, lines of conflict and for the power relations behind. I will argue that industrialisation was a multi-central process, that was nor organised exclusively on a national level, nor steered from Moscow. A variety of actors and forces were impacting on the development of industrial growth and even on its campaign-style form, which it took with the Bulgarian leadership's call for an "Economic Leap". The cross-border interactions involved did not (only) consist of a top-down flow in a monolithic Moscow-controlled socialist bloc configuration. Instead, they also reflected global power relations – with world markets and western technology always present – and there was a certain room to manoeuvre for actors on the ground vis-à-vis national party leaderships, governments and "Moscow".
These hypotheses and this focus/approach I want to present and discuss on Thursday. As the project is still rather in an early phase and the bulk of the work remains to be done, the presentation is thought to put my approach up to discussion, much more than I will be able to present results already.

Research debate and aim

The important role of the state in 20th century socialism has led many observers (in the West) to conceive of the Soviet Union, the COMECON or other socialist states as being autarchic and the classic Cold War narratives created the image of an impermeable Iron Curtain and an omnipotent Moscow inside the Soviet bloc. This study draws inspiration from more recent research that has argued that socialist economies were highly dependent on global developments and that the Soviet leadership displayed a political will to deepen integration into the world economy. Recent studies on "socialist globalisation" and relations between "Second World" and "Third World" ask for the rationales of the actors, as economic efficiency is not evident in all transactions. By focusing on actors below government level, and searching for networks and a "room to manoeuvre" on the ground, these studies enrich the discussion about the rationale behind socialist trade and technical assistance by overcoming the dichotomy of either political/ideological or economic motives, the image of the socialist state as a united actor. My project is aimed to contribute to efforts of making the variety of actors in state socialist foreign economic relations visible and I will try to map differing rationales of institutions involved in the transnational interactions in the Bulgarian industrialisation drive of the late 1950s.

Actors and Sources

Thus, the project will not concentrate on international diplomatic relations or a quantification of integration into world markets but rather on the actors organising the cross-border interactions. It will put the focus on engineers and trainees who were sent on business trips abroad to realise technology transfers, economists who engaged in international debates, foreign trade ministry officials who sought foreign markets, and industrial corporations that cooperated with external partners. The focus on the protagonists is supposed to clarify which interactions across borders (beyond Soviet assistance) were crucial for the campaign, how important transfers of development concepts and technologies from China were, what the dependency on Western technology and capital meant for the Bulgarian industrialisation effort, and which power relations these interactions implied.
More specifically, I will examine the documents of several institutions, next to minutes of Politbureau and Council of ministers meetings, the Ministry of foreign trade, the foreign trade organisation Metalimport, the department for international relations of the Ministry for Heavy Industry and its Administration for "Raw materials and metallurgy", the department for international affairs at the State Plan commission, the State bank valuta administration, the Bureau for Economic Cooperation and the Committee for technological progress at the Council of Ministers, and the Bulgarian delegations to the COMECON-Commissions for Metallurgy and "Economic Questions".

Structure of the presentation

1) Transnational Perspective on Socialist Industrialisation? Periodisation and Concepts
2) The Bulgarian Leap-Campaign 1958/60 – Basics
3) Transfer of a Model? The debate about Chinese influences
4) Actors and cleavages of socialist industrialisation
5) Conclusion