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WHAT WE FORGOT ABOUT SOCIALISM: LESSONS FROM THE RED RIVIERA  
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Kristen R. Ghodsee
November 19, 2025
Socialist Project
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_ When an economy is guided by social purpose instead of profit, it
can serve the common good and lay a foundation for long-term progress,
a lesson that we should all remember as we face the existential threat
of the climate crisis. _

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Twenty years ago in November of 2005, Duke University Press published
my first book: The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on
the Black Sea [[link removed]]. Produced
in the wake of socialism’s global collapse and the riot of Western
triumphalism that ensued, I deployed both qualitative and quantitative
methods to advance a simple, but unpopular, argument: for most people
in the former Soviet bloc, capitalism sucked.

By writing the “small histories” of men and women labouring in
Bulgaria’s vibrant tourism industry in the decade following their
country’s mad dash to embrace democracy and free markets, I explored
how and why this small southeastern European country transformed from
a relatively predictable, orderly, egalitarian society into a chaotic,
lawless, world of astonishing inequality and injustice. I wrapped my
critiques of the rampant neoliberalism of the “Wild, Wild, East”
in thickly descriptive accounts of the lives of chambermaids,
bartenders, tour guides, cooks, waitresses, and receptionists. I
wanted to show, not tell.

Through a close examination of the shattered careers and broken
families of ordinary men and women forced to live through the
cataclysmic decade of the 1990s, I asked readers to empathize with the
sheer scale of the upheavals of banking collapses, hyperinflation,
unemployment, violence, suicide, and the mass emigration of youth.
Capitalism promised prosperity and freedom, but for many it delivered
little more than poverty and despair. The dislocations of the
transition period, as I’ve documented in my subsequent books, still
reverberate today. One can easily draw a straight line from the trauma
of the 1990s to the rise of right-wing parties and authoritarian
leaders in the region.

Some Positive Aspects of Actually Existing Socialism

Perhaps more controversial, especially back in 2005, was my claim
that, despite some serious shortcomings, there were some positive
aspects of socialism that should not be forgotten. In those heady days
of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history
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of liberal democracy and free markets, to suggest that there was a
baby in the bathwater was political heresy. In this contemporary
moment when a Democratic Socialist is likely to be the next mayor of
New York City, it may be hard to remember how passé socialism was in
the first decade of the 21st century. Jacobin Magazine did not yet
exist; Bernie Sanders had not yet run for president; Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez had not yet entered Congress. In an academic climate
dominated by poststructuralist critiques of power, even mild
sympathies for socialism drew fire from both the anti-communist right
and the postmodern left.

As a young academic, I was perhaps too naïve to anticipate the sort
of vitriolic criticism I would receive by listening carefully to my
older informants, researching socialist-era legal codes, and
conducting two large anonymous surveys of tourism workers. Although I
dutifully corroborated my various findings, and wrote an honest
description of what life in socialist Bulgaria had been like for
ordinary people, some reviewers accused me of having been duped by
communist disinformation. For example, one 2007 review in the journal
Aspasia suggested
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that: “Ghodsee’s analysis is problematic because sometimes
interpretations fall into the trap of sociological legends fabricated
by communist propaganda.” As an apparent example of these
“sociological legends”, the reviewer quotes me: “Bulgarian women
once benefited from generous maternity leaves, free education, free
healthcare, free or subsidized child care, communal kitchens and
canteens, communal laundries, subsidized food and transport,
subsidized holidays on the Black Sea, etc. (p. 165).” All of this
was true, and the reviewer did not present any evidence to the
contrary.

The Aspasia reviewer acknowledged that “many, especially among the
less educated (near) pension-age women in Bulgaria” did believe that
the coming of capitalism had deprived them of these universal basic
services, but she maintained that this was only because they had been
brainwashed by the socialist system. My Bulgarian informants in the
late 1990s were apparently incapable of understanding that capitalism
would bring higher salaries with which one could purchase supposedly
better-quality housing, education, healthcare, and childcare, and that
this would be far preferable to having lower wages but receiving these
things for free. The reviewer then asked: “The question is, why
would a researcher ‘from outside’ buy into this propaganda in a
similar way?”

Capitalism and Poverty

Part of the “propaganda” that I apparently bought into was that
the radical dismantling of social safety nets following the
introduction of free market economies would push millions of
Bulgarians into poverty, and that the process would be distinctly
gendered to most women’s disadvantage. This turned out simply to be
true, as I and others have documented (see Milanovic 2014
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Ghodsee 2018
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and Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021 [[link removed]],
for example). You didn’t need to be a Marxist to understand the
black humor behind common jokes being told in the late 1990s:

Q: What did Bulgarians light their homes with before they used
candles?A: Electricity.Q: What was the worst thing about communism?A:
The thing that came after it.

This is not to deny that there were some appalling things about the
communist regimes, including its lack of genuinely representative
government, its attacks on political speech the government didn’t
like, and its use of repressive and secretive police outside the rule
of law. One should condemn such infringements of basic human rights,
both as they occurred under communism and as they are happening now in
the United States.

However, constantly preaching about the negative aspects of 20th
century state socialism can make it harder for us to see the things
that socialism got right. It may even be a deliberate strategy. Those
with the most to gain from capitalism want us to forget the good
things that happened under socialism, lest we try to do anything to
change a system in which wealth flows up into the hands of the rich
and powerful.

Doing the research necessary to write The Red Riviera
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are indeed many things we can learn from the experiences of those who
lived through a real and relatively long-lasting alternative to
capitalism. The experiences of socialist countries in Eastern Europe
remind us that societies can achieve a great deal when they treat
people’s basic needs as a shared responsibility. Education,
healthcare, childcare, housing, and a reasonable minimal standard of
living were seen not as privileges but as something we should
collectively guarantee for all.

My subjects did complain about having to wake up early for
neighborhood work on a “Lenin Saturday” but also noted that
socialism promoted a belief in the power of community and the dignity
of every person’s contribution. Women entered schools and workplaces
in greater numbers, finding new confidence and independence. Cultural
life – music, theater, literature – was made accessible to
everyone, helping people feel connected to something larger than
themselves. Planned microdistricts (an early version of what are now
called “15-minute cities”), and socialist workplaces often became
centers of shared activity and mutual support.

Even though these societies faced serious political and economic
challenges, their social ideals of equality, solidarity, and
collective care remain relevant to us in 2025. They remind us that
success isn’t only about material wealth or technology but about how
we choose to care for one another. When an economy is guided by social
purpose instead of profit, it can serve the common good and lay a
foundation for long-term progress, a lesson that we should all
remember as we face the existential threat of the climate crisis.

I’m not as naïve as I was in 2005. These days, I expect that my
critics will see me as the hapless victim of red “propaganda” and
will accuse me of underplaying the repression that occurred in the
Soviet bloc countries.

But I’ve also come to conclude that there is a place for naïveté.
Naïvely listening to how ordinary people remember their lives (even
the “less educated (near) pension-age women”!) can be far better
than going into a project with preconceived ideas about how your
subjects have been brainwashed by propaganda from an evil system and
without fear about how you will be criticized for taking those
subjects seriously.

I’ve learned that good scholarship, like good politics, depends on
empathy as much as on evidence. Listening carefully to how ordinary
people remember their lives under socialism isn’t an endorsement;
it’s an effort to understand what they valued and why. Those
memories, often complex and sometimes contradictory, reveal the
texture of daily life that grand theories tend to miss. They remind us
that the past is never as simple as our ideologies make it out to be.
If we can take those lessons seriously, if we can listen with
curiosity rather than judgment, we might find inspiration for new
forms of solidarity and care in the uncertain world we inhabit today.
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This article first published on the Duke University Press
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website.

_Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and
Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania. She blogs at __kristenghodsee.com_
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_The Bullet is an online publishing venue for the socialist Left in
Canada and around the world. It solicits, publishes and republishes
articles that advance socialist ideas and analysis of important
events, topics and issues. It publishes articles by socialist thinkers
and activists, movement builders and organizers, workers and trade
unionists, and all those seeking to go beyond capitalism._

 

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