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Immediately after 1989, newly emerging polities in Eastern Europe had to contend with an overbearing and dominant legacy: the Soviet model of the state. At that time, the strength of the state looked like a massive obstacle to change; less than a decade later, the state's dominant characteristic was no longer its overweening powerfulness, but rather its utter decrepitude. Consequently, the role of the central state in managing economies, providing social services, and maintaining infrastructure came into question. Focusing on his native Bulgaria, Venelin I. Ganev explores in fine-grained detail the weakening of the central state in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

Ganev starts with the structural characteristics of the Soviet satellites, and in particular the forms of elite agency favored in the socialist party-state. As state socialism collapsed, Ganev demonstrates, its institutional legacy presented functionaries who had become accustomed to power with a matrix of opportunities and constraints.In order to maximize their advantage under such conditions, these elites did not need a robust state apparatus--in fact, all of the incentives under postsocialism pushed them to subvert the infrastructure of governance.

Throughout Preying on the State, Ganev argues that the causes of state malfunctioning go much deeper than the policy preferences of "free marketeers" who deliberately dismantled the state. He systematically analyzes the multiple dimensions, implications, and significance of the institutional and social processes that transformed the organizational basis of effective governance. ... Read more

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Bulgaria is a Slavic nation, Orthodox in faith but with a sizable Muslim minority. That minority is divided into various ethnic groups, including the most numerically significant Turks and the so-called Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking men and women who have converted to Islam. Mary Neuburger explores how Muslim minorities were integral to Bulgaria’s struggle to extricate itself from its Ottoman past and develop a national identity, a process complicated by its geographic and historical positioning between evolving and imagined parameters of East and West.

The Orient Within examines the Slavic majority’s efforts to conceptualize and manage Turkish and Pomak identities and bodies through gendered dress practices, re-naming of people and places, and land reclamation projects. Neuburger shows that the relationship between Muslims and the Bulgarian majority has run the gamut from accommodation to forced removal to total assimilation from 1878, when Bulgaria acquired autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, to 1989 when Bulgaria’s Communist dictatorship collapsed. Neuburger subjects the concept of Orientalism to an important critique, showing its relevance and complexity in the Bulgarian context, where national identity and modernity were brokered in the shadow of Western Europe, Russia/USSR, and Turkey. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A well written and lucid study of the subject
Prof. Neuburger examines the role that Bulgaria's Muslim minorities played in the emergence of a Bulgarian national identity.Her work does draw on Edward Said, but is hardly "another Orientalist book" as one reviewer would have it.Neither is her book "jargony," but instead is well written and eminently readable.I can only agree with the review posted in "The American Historical Review" v. 109, n. 5, p. 1674 - I hope that she will turn her keen intellect towards the treatment of Turkish and/or Muslim minorities in the wider Balkan region.

Simplistic
I read this book two years ago hoping that it will give me an insight and an interesting frame of reference for my thesis. I was disappointed. The only aspect I found useful was the information on the different policies of assimilation of the Turkish minority during Communism.

Jargony
Disappointing. Bought this book hoping for a multi-facted picture of Bulgarian/Turkish relations and instead got a very jargony tome -- yet another to ride on the coat tails of Professor Said's "Orientalism." As Neuberger does state, Bulgaria is a complex case, but she then goes on to depict Bulgarian Turks/Pomaks/Muslims as the oppressed -- very rarely (only once -- and very briefly) making refernce to the shockingly recent centuries of Turkish rule and how that might affect the interplay of "native" vs "foreigner", muslim vs christian, monied vs dependant, a historical quagmire that is omnipresent in Bulgaria today. Bulgaria is a fascinating case study -- one that, sadly, Professor's Neuberger's book reduced to a simplistic, jargony thesis ... Read more

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Chapters: Sava Mutkurov,. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 12. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Sava Atanasov Mutkurov (Bulgarian: ) (16 December 1852-15 March 1891) was a Bulgarian officer (Major General) and politician. One of only three recipients of the Order of Bravery 1st grade, he was among the chief architects of the Bulgarian unification (1885) and, as an officer in the young Bulgarian Army, one of its defendants in the Serbo-Bulgarian War (1885). He also served as one of the regents of the Principality of Bulgaria after Prince Alexander of Battenberg's abdication (1886-1887) and was Minister of War in Stefan Stambolov's government (1887-1891). Sava Mutkurov was born in the city of Tarnovo in the central Danubian Plain (then part of the Ottoman Empire, today in north central Bulgaria) in 1852. He studied for two years at the Military Medical Academy in the imperial capital Constantinople (Istanbul), but graduated instead from the Cadet Infantry School in the Russian city of Odessa in 1872. As a soldier in the Imperial Russian Army, Mutkurov participated in the Serbo-Turkish War of 1876 along with other Bulgarian volunteers. He was also involved in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 which brought about the Liberation of Bulgaria. During that war, he was the commander of a company in the 54th Minsk Infantry Regiment of the Russian Army. After the Liberation of Bulgaria and the establishment of the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia in 1878, Mutkurov settled in Eastern Rumelia, where he joined the provincial police or militia. He served first with the 1st Plovdiv Battalion and thereafter with the general staff. As an eminent man of arms in Eastern Rumelia, Mutkurov was one of the main leaders of the Bulgarian unification on 6 September 1885, the bloodless revolution tha...http://booksllc.net/?id=26314153 ... Read more

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Gerald W. Creed analyzes contemporary mumming rituals in rural Bulgaria for what they reveal about life after socialismoand the current state of post-socialist studies. Mumming rituals have flourished in the post-Soviet era. Elaborately costumed dancers go from house to house demanding sustenance and bestowing blessings. Through the analysis of these rites, Creed critiques key themes in post-socialist studies, including understandings of civil society and democracy, gender and sexuality, autonomy and community, and ethnicity and nationalism. He argues that these events reveal indigenous cultural resources that could have been used both practically and intellectually to ease the post-socialist reconstruction of Bulgarian society, but were not. ... Read more

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Since May, 1876. Chiefly From The Papers Presented By Command. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Communication World, published by Thomson Gale on November 1, 2006. The length of the article is 1977 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Paying taxes: a question of honor: charged with increasing revenues, Bulgaria's new tax agency seeks to change the public's mind-set.(National Revenue Agency )
Author: Juliana Toncheva
Publication: Communication World (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 23Issue: 6Page: 24(3)

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Over the last decade privatization, decentralization and public procurement processes have provided opportunities for unscrupulous civil servants to benefit in central and eastern Europe: the case of Bulgaria, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia are considered. Conflict of interest is the power of public officials to promote their private interest, the private interests of their relatives or the commercial enterprises in which they participate. ... Read more

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This book assesses the post-communist period in Bulgaria and examines how the Democratization process has developed so far. It contains valuable historical and comparative features and provides the reader with a comprehensive and detailed account of the ongoing political, social, and economic transformation in this heavily understudied Balkan country.
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