The Left Side of History - Kristen Ghodsee

One of the few books on Bulgaria at the TPL.  It is the account of the lives of two partisans during WW II, a British officer and member of the British Communist party, and a young Bulgarian girl who ends up joining the communist partisans with her brothers and father.
It is a bit jumbled, with historical elements and also personal elements as Ghodsee relates the people she meets and interviews she conducts as part of her research.  It creates both an historical document (of narrow scope) and a human document of lives lived and remembered.
The books brings up some interesting points:

1) The history of Communism in Eastern Europe is now being written by the winners  ie. Americans and western Europeans, and when the winners write history there is always a strong danger of bias contamination.  She brings up the idea that everything about Communism as a form of governments was not all negative and that it accomplished some positive or important things in many countries.  These are now totally ignored.  It is an area of historical research that needs to be explored.

2) Through her interviews with Elena Lagadinova you also get a sense of how pirate capitalism managed to grab so many State assets when the Communist government fell.

3)  Through personal interviews you gain an understanding of why some people are nostalgic for the old days - most of the public had a more secure, stable life under Communism.  It is the corrupt that have benefited most from regime change.

4)  Through Lagadinova you also get a sense of how states rewrite history to create mythologies that both justify the new regime and also work to discredit the  old regime.  The story in the book is about the monument to the innocent victims of Communism that is erected in Sophia (and in many other formerly Communist countries - as well as Ottawa???)  Some of the names on the monument include former government officials who were allies of the Nazis, former army officers that committed barbaric war crimes against civilians and partisans.  This type of "history" is dangerous, unethical and undemocratic.

5)  In the account of Bulgarian Communist leadership over the decades, you also see how the greedy and the power hungry corrupt a system to protect their power, wealth and privileges.  This is true regardless of the system.  The same could be said of current American "democracy" and, to a degree, of the European government bureaucracy.

A lot of threads to follow from this book.