Cybersecurity and control over technology were global political concerns long before online Russian intereference in the 2016 presidential election.
Victor Petrov, an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, delivered a guest lecture on Friday focused on Bulgaria’s role as tech giant and an electronics producer during the Cold War.
The lecture, titled “Welcome to Cyberia: Bulgarian Modernisation, Computers, and the World 1967-1989,” discussed the various ways that the former Soviet Union utilized Bulgaria in their economic system and how that changed Bulgarian politics, economics and culture.
“When the communists took over less than 40 years before, Bulgaria was 85% agricultural, extremely rural; it was one of the perennial cases of underdevelopment,” said Petrov. “In less than one generation’s time, these people were sending satellites into space.”
Part of the Eastern Bloc, Bulgaria was one of many so-called “satellite states” allied with the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) during the Cold War. Petrov went so far as to call Bulgaria the USSR’s most loyal ally during that time, citing the rapid modernization of the country as a possible cause.
According to Petrov, Bulgaria was chosen by the USSR to specialize in the building of computers, listening devices and even robots.
“‘If we’re going to overtake you guys, the Americans, and we’re going to defeat you, obviously we have to use our limited resources in the best possible way. It’s not good for the Poles and the Bulgarians to create ships. We should divide up the tasks so each economy can specialize in something in particular in order for us to overtake the rotten capitalists,’” Petrov said lightheartedly of Russia.
One consequence of this division of economies that Petrov pointed out was that the Soviet Union had to buy and use Bulgarian equipment “no matter how bad they were.” Additionally, Bulgarian engineers were forced to rip off American technologies to keep up, which Petrov said had the unexpected consequence of making espionage and mimicry a large part of the Bulgarian economy and culture during the Cold War.
For example, Petrov referenced a now-rare Bulgarian knockoff of a James Bond book titled “07” rather than “007” to illustrate how the two practices had become so integral to the operation of Bulgarian culture under the Soviet Union.
“Actually the main way that Bulgarians produced computers and procured knowledge was spying and stealing,” said Petrov. “The Bulgarian intelligence services can almost be seen as any intelligence services in an authoritarian state; it’s obviously a tool of oppression ‒ which they were ‒ or as a tool of political control, which they were. But if you actually look at a lot of the jobs they were doing and the control that was placed on them … they’re also just industrial espionage.”
While Bulgaria may have once been the world’s top producer of robots, Petrov said, those days are long behind them. After the collapse of communist governments in 1989 to 1990, Bulgaria transitioned quickly to a much more capitalist state. Petrov argues that they were able to do so in large part because of their espionage work in western markets.
As soon as the early ‘90s, prominent former Soviet party members were dressing in western-style business attire while meeting onboard yachts in Monte Carlo. Petrov cautions against referring to 1989 as the “end of communism,” saying that former Soviet states have not so much fallen as have simply transitioned to oligarchies in which the oligarchs are the same leaders as before.
Petrov’s lecture is the final one of the year for the history department. Guest lectures are set to begin again in the fall as regular classes resume for the 2019 to 2020 school year.
