Recently a saw a review of the 2015 Romanian documentary Chuck Norris vs Communism about 'how Romanians managed to consume Western culture during a period marked by extreme censorship and the nationalist ideology of protocronism. While the Ceaușescu regime imposed strict propaganda directives and cut scenes of food abundance from films, a clandestine phenomenon flourished on the black market: video cassettes.' One of the main figures in this was Irina Margareta Nistor, Romania's 'unmistakable voice of foreign cinema', who secretly translated and dubbed thousands of films brought from the west in the 1980s.
.jpg)
The same phenomenon with videotapes of western films being smuggled in also happened south of the border in Bulgaria in the 1980s.
The appearance in 1980s communist Bulgaria of ‘videosalons’, usually in a room of a flat of someone who had purchased a VCR and had the videos smuggled into the country by people who’d regularly go abroad (sailors and lorry drivers, in particular), was of such concern for the Bulgarian authorities that even the magazine Obshtestvo i pravo (Society and Law) offered a rather frank report about the phenomenon in 1984.
Talking with a friend of mine, a psychotherapist, about her childhood in 1980s Bulgaria, she once recounted how watching her first western film in one of these videosalons was a major revelation for her and many fellow Bulgarians. The wealth and opulence on display were beyond her dreams. Despite word going around that things were better in the west, up to then all she and most Bulgarians had seen of the decadent west was the propaganda imagery shown on Bulgarian TV depicting the west as a crisis-filled disaster zone. She said that having those visuals to show proof of how rich the west was, albeit with an extremely skewed view (Dynasty and Dallas are hardly documentaries on the everyday lives of people in the USA), did cause Bulgarians to question their system more than anything else.
The otherwise banned western films shown at these impromptu videosalons, ranging from childrens films to action blockbusters to porn, would all have a dull voiceover in Bulgarian done by the one man – Vasil Kozhuharov. He went on to become a folk hero, and has his own FB fan site with almost 5000 followers. Kozhuharov passed away last year.
The first time I encountered a Vasil Kozhuharov-narrated film was in 1997. Riding on a well-worn Bulgarian Chavdar bus from Stara Zagora to Burgas, at a time when it was still permitted to smoke inside buses in Bulgaria (or at least people just lit up anyway – I did), we passengers were treated to a film being projected on the ramshackle TV set up at the front of the bus aisle. That film was the 1973 turkey of a horror movie The Crazies. I had heard of this thing for "lectors" in ex-USSR and Poland, but I didn't know Bulgaria also did it too... but I wasn't at all surprised. Having all the dialogue, including the love scenes, all done in this male monotone made what otherwise is at times a gory, if goofy, film into a comedy for me. What also helped for me was that I hardly had any sleep the night before, so I was in a bit of daze while watching it.
James Bond films were particularly popular at the time. But I was intrigued when one time when working for a subtitling company in the mid-2000s, we were assigned to do the DVD subtitles for From Russia with Love into Bulgarian (and Romanian). One of the cameo characters in the film is a Bulgarian assassin who’s described as ‘worse than the Russians’. I asked my Bulgarian colleague won’t Bulgarians be offended? She laughed and said ‘do you remember what this Bulgarian’s surname is? It’s Kirilencu. It’s shows how little the west knows of Bulgarians or eastern Europeans. So Bulgarians treat James Bond films as comedies’. We laughed.
Come time when the Bulgarians did what seemed the impossible and turned out in the tens of thousands in November 1989 calling for an end to Communist Party rule, my grandfather, who had fled communist Bulgaria in 1947, was, surprisingly at the time, rather dismissive of the protestors. His words: 'They think that the VCRs now will be raining from the skies and they're going to be like Krystle and Alexis. No, it's doesn't come that easy. Now they're going to learn how to work. They're going to regret it.'
.%20A%20day%20of%20campaigning%20%E2%99%80%20%E2%80%A6%20or%20a%20day%20to%20buy%20flowers%20%F0%9F%92%90.jpg)
