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Women and Minorities: Ways of Archiving. The Bulgarian Case

Marijana Piskova, Kristina Popova

1. The Archives: the Centralized System

The problem of how documents of women and minorities have been archived could be understood only in the context of the system of the Bulgarian state archives which were the only officially accepted archives in Bulgaria. The archive system has been introduced after the Second World War following the Soviet model of full centralization of both government and acceptance of documents in the state archives.
According to the Founding decree of the Bulgarian archives in the structure of the Central state archive should be included the archives of the central and local authorities, religious institutions, civic societies, cultural organizations, economy enterprises. The other source of filling up the archives were the personal collections of “state and social figures, figures of art and literature, science, technique, distinguished representatives of social labor for the periods after 1944 (clause 2 A -zh); members of the monarch-fascist families, people of their circle, representatives of the reaction and contra-revolution, political and social figures and persons engaged in the state government (cause 2 B-k, ); representatives of science, technique, art and literature for the period before 09.09.1944 (Cause 2 B-l)”. 1

The present model of the archive system includes the Central state archive (Sofia), the State archive of military history (Veliko Tarnovo) and the 27 territorial state archives of the administrative districts. The new legislation changes (1993, 2007) allow for parallel existence of personal and other kind of archives and archive collections, included in the National archive fond.
The acquisition of state archives with documents of institutions and with personal documents was following a preliminary approved yearly plans for each unit of the archive system. The methodology proscriptions required certain periodicity and regularity in the acceptance of documents in the state archives. According to the law regulations valid to 2007 documents of national importance should enter the archives 10 years after they have been created, those of local importance – 5 years after been created. In the new law valid from July 2007 the period of conservation of documents in the institutions is prolonged to 20 years.
The composition of the documents accepted in the state archives is defined in the process of appraisal. The methodology rules from the 1980-es followed 3 basic principles for the appraisal: historicity, complete elaboration and class-party ideological approach. The selection of valuable records depended on their content, the importance of the institution where they were created, their informative value and authorship.
A categorization of the institutions offering documents to the state archives was introduced. From the 1960-es 3 categories of institutions were described in 3 “guiding lists” of the first methodology instruction for acquisition of documents in the state archives.
The first category list referred to institutions, organization and enterprises which were to be considered with priority in the acquisition of documents.
The second referred to mass institutions, organizations and enterprises. It was on the decision of archives which documents to be considered important for the district life and to be related to the trans¬ferring agency of the first category.
The third refered to institutions, organizations and enterprises of secondary character. Documents from this institutions were not accepted in the archives.
In the past decades there were several centrally organized campaigns for collecting and archiving memories and personal fonds: “1300 years of founding Bulgarian state, “People’s memory is relating” (celebrating 40 years of Socialist revolution in Bulgaria). Documents concerning the life of common people were exception in the archives since the legislation was recommending “distinguished figures”.

2. Women and minorities archive fonds

In the archive system there is a considerable number of women personal archives: 700 form total of 6 000 personal archive fonds, 99 of them are family fonds. The geographic distribution shows that most of these documents belong to the Central state archive in Sofia -247. Some regional archives have been very active in collecting personal fonds including family and women fonds – the archive of the towns of Stara Zagora and Gabrovo.
A considerable number of institutional fonds reflecting the life and the activities of women organizations – schools for girls, female monasteries, charity and educational organizations - have been also preserved (around 300).
Considering the minorities only fonds of cultural – religious and educational organization were preserved. Most of them were minority schools mainly Turkish ones because of the special policy to Turkish and Muslim minority. There is a considerable number of fonds concerning the life of Jews. There is also a small number of fonds concerning the life of Armenian and Rumanian and only 2 fonds about Gypsy minorities.
For the rest of the fonds the existence of women and minorities depends on the way the archives were described and catalogued.

3. The access - inventories, guides, thematic catalogues

Inventories, descriptions, catalogues and archive guides assist users in their access to the documents. The principles of the elaboration of those descriptions and catalogues, their thematic features and content are the key to the corpus of documents. To research the existing documents about women and minorities one should analyze the guides and the inventories. All archive documents had been described in the inventories and using them one could approach archive units containing documents about women and minorities. The catalogues (except for systematic ones) had been elaborated for celebrating different anniversaries and jubilees and reflect the official communist party priorities. The fonds in the catalogues had been distributed in tree main categories according to the variety of information they contain. The published catalogues of documents had also a personal name index. To elaborate the indexes information about the life and activities of distinguished persons: figures of politics, revolutionary movement, science, technique, art – had to be gathered. Other catalogues were required by different institutions, by the Government of the Archives or on the archive own initiative. Archive policy of cataloguing women and minority documents could be research by analyzing the published thematic catalogues devoted to women and minorities.

Women movement catalogues.

A catalogue for the Women movement Bulgaria from 1878 to 1981 had been issued. 1402 descriptions of documents from all over the country had been included in it. Four catalogues of local archive documents about the women movement (198-1982) were also published.2 One catalogue about the famous Bulgarian poetess Dora Gabe had been issued . Ten thematic reviews of women fonds have been published – 1 for the nun sisterhood and the rest for the women societies and women communist movement. The earliest publication was from 1969, most of the publications were elaborated after 1989.

Minority catalogues

There were not any thematic catalogues concerning minorities. 6 thematic and fond reviews were published - 2 of them for Turkish, Tatar and other Muslim organizations, 1 for the process of Islamization, and 1 about the Jew documentation collection of the Institute of Balkan Studies.

Publishing of documents

Getting published the documents became part of scientific and public life. In each issue of “The Announcement of the state archives” the new publications were announced. There were 15 such publications about documents concerning women for the period of 1968 – 2003. Most of them concerned wives and mothers of communist figures.3
Nevertheless of the considerable number of archive fonds concerning women and minorities there were very few catalogues and publications about them. Even more invisible were women and minorities in the name indexes which made difficult their research.
Generally speaking the communist policy of archiving, cataloguing and publishing of documents was promoting one and the same circle of “distinguished figures” their relatives and collaborators. This policy had limited the chance of new thematic fields, concerning not so popular or forgotten persons. The problem is that the Bulgarian archive system lacks flexibility which impoverishes the social memory being a dialogue between memory and forgetfulness. But still there is a considerable deal of archive documents concerning unprivileged groups – women and minorities – and assisting the access to them is one of the tasks of our project.

 

 

1. The archive infrastructure reflects also some tendencies of decentralization allowing separate archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affair, Ministry of Internal Affair, The Military Ministry, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, National Library Historical Archive. The basic structures of the archive system were the central and the state archives, the documents being distributed according to the principle of national or local significance and according to chronology principle.

2. Including documents about women societies and socialist women movement

3. Parashkeva Dimitrova (the mother of the communist leader Georgi Dimitrov,, ElenaVaptsarova (the mother of the communist poet Nikola Vapzatov, Mila Geo Mileva (wife of the poet Geo Milev) etc.