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In the Communist Playground

Neda Neynska

In one of the oldest playgrounds in Sofia, where I grew up, there are some new toddler attractions among the old rusting ones, but the potholes in the tarmac haven’t been repaired. For the last six years, flowers have been appearing in them, as part of an ongoing project devised by the artist Veronika Tzekova. She calls it WUMAMPAROI (‘When you make a mistake put a rose on it’). We are a long way from the Soviet cult of childhood, in which the playground played a key role, shifting children’s emotional focus away from home and setting them on the road to the Party.

When Mikhail Gorbachev took power, Komsomol, the Soviet youth organisation, had more than 42 million members. At the age of 14, children across the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc became komsomoltsi. Many Bulgarian children had been Septemberists since the age of six, and Pioneers at ten. As Lenin understood, the sooner you start, the better.

The vast, ideologically charged infrastructure that supported the youth organisations was where socialism in Bulgaria came to life: the communal youth homes (mladejki dom), the pioneer camps and cultural and labour brigades, the sports halls and playgrounds, all financed by the state and free for children.

Most playgrounds like the ones I was taken to in Sofia as a child now look like archaeological sites, the remains of a civilisation that came to an abrupt end. We were catapulted out of the structured environment of the ‘advanced socialist society’ into a world of ‘choice’, where there seemed to be very few choices. We were left with the relics of a grand idea: wide boulevards, monolithic architectural projects, empty palaces of culture, space-themed jungle gyms. But even before 1989 it had all begun to look dated, and defeated. Gagarin and Tereshkova were ancient and drab; we had seen Lego and Barbie.

In the spirit of egalitarianism, all playgrounds were designed to look the same: celebrations of Soviet ironmongery and ideology. Spacecraft were intermingled with boats and tractors. There were animals, too, and here was a difference I spotted early on: the nearer you were to an affluent part of town, the more exotic the species were likely to be. I never understood what the elephant was doing there; space seemed a more realistic destination than the African savannah.

After the fall of communism, the youth centres closed down as the organisations they represented became defunct. But no one thought of playgrounds as politicised spaces: they survived into the post-communist era, with minimal upkeep, and remained important for local communities. Parents and minders had always been able to talk freely there, sitting on benches under awning-like structures without any actual awnings. They suggested shelter, but did not provide it.

Playground benches were used by the former Pioneers and komsomoltsi to barricade the streets when Bulgaria’s last socialist government was brought down.

communism bulgaria playgrounds

Comments

  • 3 May 2016 at 4:19pm
    Timothy Rogers says:
    This piece and the photographs remind me of a similar “derlict” playground my wife and I encountered while in Slovakia in 2007. We went to Kosice, Slovakia’s second largest city, in the east of the country (known to its former Hungarian residents as Kassa and its Germans as Kaschau). We stayed in a hotel on a mountainside about 5 or 6 miles outside the city. You could reach the top of the mountain (Horny Bankov) by a straight pathway that ran through the woods behind the hotel (the longer route was to walk the hairpin-turn road that took a city bus to a loop at the top, where there was a park). The park itself consisted mostly of untrammeled woods, but there were clearings (with wildflowers) that allowed a good view of the city and valley below, and there were numerous multilingual signs pointing along various mountain walking trails. Tired from our walk uphill we went to the clearing where we found a scattered collection of benches and wooden chairs adjacent to the old communist playground – similar ironwork and climbing structures to those shown in this article. Farther along a service road was a five or six-storey building. I walked its perimeter and bumped into a local resident who spoke English and explained the site. Flat-roofed and with alternating concrete and stained-wood panels and iron balconies, the place had been built as a working-man’s resort. But, once it lost its subsidies after 1989 it had fallen into disrepair. However, the building was in use at the time to house a few city programs, including one which was a sort of adolescent reformatory – my companion pointed out the teenagers in khaki uniforms who were grooming the grounds; rehabilitation through work was the idea. I liked the whole setting, as frowsy as it was, because the view was nice and you got a great mountain breeze (not high mountains, which are farther to the north of Kosice, along the border with Poland), and of course, nobody cared if you lit up a cigarette. A lot of families from the city were taking the bus up, so there were plenty of signs of life. But the architecture of the lodge and the playground were certainly “dated” to an era when “socialist leisure” was a motivating ideal. I have no idea how much the place has been gussied up in the last eight years. Maybe some eager developer has renovated the building or knocked it down and replaced it. In 2007 it was a frozen slice of the recent past, a reminder of the grim decades of “normalization” managed by the dim old men installed to keep a lid on things after the Soviet (and Warsaw Pact) invasion ended the experiments of the Prague Spring of 1968. Yet it had its own charm.
    • 6 May 2016 at 5:00pm
      Timothy Rogers says: @ Timothy Rogers
      This piece and the photographs remind me of a similar “derlict” playground my wife and I encountered while in Slovakia in 2007. We went to Kosice, Slovakia’s second largest city, in the east of the country (known to its former Hungarian residents as Kassa and its Germans as Kaschau). We stayed in a hotel on a mountainside about 5 or 6 miles outside the city. You could reach the top of the mountain (Horny Bankov) by a straight pathway that ran through the woods behind the hotel (the longer route was to walk the hairpin-turn road that took a city bus to a loop at the top, where there was a park). The park itself consisted mostly of untrammeled woods, but there were clearings (with wildflowers) that allowed a good view of the city and valley below, and there were numerous multilingual signs pointing along various mountain walking trails. Tired from our walk uphill we went to the clearing where we found a scattered collection of benches and wooden chairs adjacent to the old communist playground – similar ironwork and climbing structures to those shown in this article. Farther along a service road was a five or six-storey building. I walked its perimeter and bumped into a local resident who spoke English and explained the site. Flat-roofed and with alternating concrete and stained-wood panels and iron balconies, the place had been built as a working-man’s resort. But, once it lost its subsidies after 1989 it had fallen into disrepair. However, the building was in use at the time to house a few city programs, including one which was a sort of adolescent reformatory – my companion pointed out the teenagers in khaki uniforms who were grooming the grounds; rehabilitation through work was the idea. I liked the whole setting, as frowsy as it was, because the view was nice and you got a great mountain breeze (not high mountains, which are farther to the north of Kosice, along the border with Poland), and of course, nobody cared if you lit up a cigarette. A lot of families from the city were taking the bus up, so there were plenty of signs of life. But the architecture of the lodge and the playground were certainly “dated” to an era when “socialist leisure” was a motivating ideal. I have no idea how much the place has been gussied up in the last eight years. Maybe some eager developer has renovated the building or knocked it down and replaced it. In 2007 it was a frozen slice of the recent past, a reminder of the grim decades of “normalization” managed by the dim old men installed to keep a lid on things after the Soviet (and Warsaw Pact) invasion ended the experiments of the Prague Spring of 1968. Yet it had its own charm.