a) In-depth interviews with the "inhabitants" of the communist regime and
b) Call for life narratives and authentic diaries from the communist times.

Period: 2010 - 2012

Our general goal is by introducing to the interested audience the private, intimate experience of the people under communism to enrich and broaden the critical historical knowledge and social capacity for moral evaluation of our common recent past.

The project team tries to achieve these through the development of a rich database of people's testimonies from the times of the communist regime in Bulgaria. As it is noted in the proposed project title it will consist of two types of resources: (1) interviews and (2) written life narratives gathered through an open call for recollections and authentic diaries from 1944–1989. These two forms of witnesses have things in common but also presuppose a different level of self-awareness and varying proportion of spontaneity and auto-censorship. Viewed from this perspective they are complementary and provide an additional validation for each other. It is hard to foresee who and how many will answer the call for written life stories. However, in respect to the anthropological survey and according to the financial and human resources the project team can conduct from 150 to 200 in-depth interviews.

The proposed project will rely on the methods of the oral history combined with audio and video documentation of the interviewees.

"Knowledge and Memory Policies: Public (Mis)Use of the Recent Bulgarian Past" is three year research project. Its basic premiss is the lack of critical and profound mass of knowledge about the communist period which hinders the independent evaluation of the past.

The project aim is to involve people from the countryside (village, small town, medium-sized town), ordinary people in reflecting on their past (life under communism 1944-1989) and put their own stories in the public debate, looking for reasons of silence, non-participation, alienation and melancholy.

The voices from below are voices of people from the periphery of the system, performers of prescribed roles who were trampled or privileged by the system, people who have failed to conceptualise their life experience and are therefore still helpless in the changing times.

The institute for studies of the recent past started a common research project with Open Society Institute in Sofia on the communist years in Bulgaria. Researchers are writing on 16 actual topics from the recent past. Outcomes to be announced and published in the following years.