The communist Committee for State Security made every effort to bend music, as all other forms of art, to its propaganda objectives. Its main aim was to turn it into a “militant art in the ideological struggle and a powerful ideological tool for communication with other nations”, reads the collection “State Security and Bulgarian music art” by the Dossier Commission.

“In 1967, the 6th directorate of State Security was set up with the aim of fighting dissenters, following the model of the 5th chief directorate of the KGB,” says Ekaterina Boncheva, member of the Dossier Commission. “These documents testify to the efforts of State Security, naturally under the leadership of the communist regime, to destroy the tradition of bourgeois Bulgaria and to create a new socialist art – just as they tried to create a new socialist science. But neither science, nor art can be created with slogans or under party dictate. That is the reason why the art of music survived, notwithstanding. There was resistance, for example a refusal to stage operas by Bulgarian composers, because the works did not develop vocal potential. There were attempts by pop singers to perform songs by composers from the west – in other words, free music from the free world.”

There are no stories from concentration camps or torture in the book, the focus is on the mechanism of surveillance and submission, applied in the sphere of culture.

“Even if there was no repression, there were prohibitions in place which affected the individuals and their professional career,” Ekaterina Boncheva says. “One example is from the Sofia Opera. Its company, numbering 280 was supposed to take part in an international festival in Belgium. At the State Security’s bidding, 16 people were excluded – they were described as “hostile elements to be secured”. And to keep an eye on how the rest were behaving while they were in a foreign country, 4 active, 13 former agents and 30 operatives were attached to the company. To have any kind of career worth mentioning and be able to tour abroad, you had to meet the most important criterion of all – and it was political, not artistic. No concert tour could take place without there being people who watched what the musicians were doing and reported on them. And not just outside people, members of the companies were recruited too. They reported back on things like how many songs Bogdana Karadocheva sang at a world exposition in Montreal or how much Nicola Ghiuzelev was being paid, information that was absolutely worthless and had nothing whatsoever to do with national security. The system was using inhuman methods to wield its power and to benefit its own self. Because all of these agents, all of the people who were on State Security’s payroll, whether they were musicians from the companies or not, got to travel the world for free, were paid well and lived a good and prosperous life spying on the musicians. And they are still living a good life on their good pensions.”

Though many of the documents have been destroyed, the State Security archives reveal there were 80 agents among the musicians – household names, though the law forbids that their names be made public. Still, not all of them succumbed to the system and in this sense, talent survived individually, in the words of Ekaterina Boncheva, “not with the support of the state or State Security but in spite of them.” The documents reveal a host of instances of primitivism and brutality by the communist leadership and their repressive apparatus towards people of talent. One of them was the “disco scourge” which hiked the percentage of “westernization” in.

“As to the question whether the public is interested in this information, what matters is people’s right to make an informed choice and read history, through these documents,” says Ekaterina Boncheva, explaining what the point of declassifying the State Security archives is. “Unfortunately, political parties did not formulate a clear political will to set the process of lustration in motion, so that now, 27 years later there would be no need to talk about this sinister system of State Security, nor was there a sufficient amount of public pressure for this to be done. Still, the Dossier Commission has been doing its job for ten years, at least that’s something.”

English version: Milena Daynova