My Father - The Enemy of the People: A Bulgarian Family’s Cold War Story (465)

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1:05Oggy Boytchev:Life was tough. Life was very tough. I had to remember the basic food we ate. In the winter, there were hardly any vegetables or any fruit. It was basically milk, bread, and a little bit of meat. but my brother and I didn't know any better. Oggy Boydsheft is a former BBC journalist with more than three decades of experience reporting from conflict zones across the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Born in 1955, Oggy grew up under the shadow of a family secret. His father had been branded an enemy of the people and interned without trial in a remote Bulgarian town where he spent years under police supervision and forced labour.

1:52Even after his release, the family lived under a constant fear of surveillance, informers and political persecution. From secretly listening to the BBC World Service to navigating a school system steeped in communist ideology, he shares what it was really like to come of age in one of the Soviet bloc's most tightly controlled societies. It's a remarkable story of resilience, caution and quiet resistance, offering a deeply personal perspective on everyday life in Cold War Bulgaria. I'm delighted to welcome Ogi to our Cold War conversation. Before we start, I just want to let you know that Ogi has written several books, the latest of which is the Istanbul Connection, a gripping, morally complex thriller that explores the blurred lines between ideology and manipulation.

2:41It's available via a link in our episode notes, and any purchases will help support the podcast. I was born in 1955, at the height of the Cold War,

2:52Oggy Boytchev:in a small town in northern Bulgaria called Chermenbryak, or Red River Bank, it translates in English. And who was in your immediate family? mother father and a sibling a brother who is 18 months younger than me that was the core family in this small town also lived my maternal grandparents grandfather and grandmother and maternal uncle what was your parents employment my father was interned in that little town in 1948, branded as enemy of the people, although never convicted in a court of law. And he was made to break stones in the local quarry, which was just outside the town. He was getting paid a little bit, but he couldn't leave the town.

3:57Oggy Boytchev:He had to sign at the police station twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening, to make sure that he never leaves the town. And what was the crime that he was interned for? He said to me many times that he never knew because they never told him. After the fall of communism, my mother went to the interior ministry to request his file. They gave her a file, which was heavily reducted. and a summary of his offenses. They claimed that he was a member of the internal Macedonian revolutionary organization, which was in present-day terms could be classified as a terrorist organization before the advancement of communism in Bulgaria.

5:00Oggy Boytchev:This was during the 20s, 30s and during the Second World War. And this is an organization which claimed to represent the ideology of Greater Bulgaria, i.e. they wanted territories in Greece and Yugoslavia, which was populated by a Bulgarian-speaking minority to become part of Bulgaria. Now, that was a very sore subject at the time, because this organization was considered to be a nationalist monarchist organization. And obviously, after 1944, when the Red Army set foot on Bulgarian soil, this organization was prescribed. The second element in the document, in the summary that was given to my mother, was that he had been photographed meeting representatives of the British and American legations, as they were called at the time.

6:03They were not full embassies after 1944.

6:08Oggy Boytchev:he was photographed meeting these people at his office because after the coup d 'etat on the 9th of September 1944 when the Red Army entered Bulgaria and there was a coup against the monarchy and the Fadal and Front came to power which was a broad anti-fascist coalition there was a brief period between 1944 and 1947 when Bulgaria was a seeming democracy. And because Bulgaria was an ally of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, all the economic ties with Germany were severed. There was a gap in the market, and my father tried to exploit it and started trading with the United Kingdom, mainly importing fabrics and materials from Manchester.

7:06Oggy Boytchev:Now, whether members of the British legation came to his office to talk about business or talk about politics, I don't know. But the fact is he was shown photographs of these people meeting him at the office, and that was considered to be an act against the people. These were the reasons set out in this summary Given to my mother Why he was interned in Cervembriac, Red River Bank From 1948 to 1965 And that must have had a huge impact on your family How did your family manage to support itself? I think you said that he was getting a small wage of some sort He was getting a small wage to be able to pay the rent and food for us.

8:04Oggy Boytchev:But he was an incredibly entrepreneurial person and physically very strong. So he started building a house. So within a few years, he built a small bungalow, which was his own. and he got some help from my mother's family which were not wealthy but they were getting by mainly by providing child care for us so that both my parents could go to work life was tough life was very tough to remember the basic food we ate in the winter there were hardly any vegetables or any fruit it was basically milk, bread and a little bit of meat but we didn't know any better my brother and I didn't know any better for my father that was a big shock because he came from a relatively wealthy family he lived in the capital Sofia he had travelled abroad he was an active sportsman I was a very proficient skier and mountain climber So for him, that was a big decline Both mentally and physically But through sheer physical health, he survived Incredible, that period of time doing hard labour as well Would be tough, tough in itself And you mentioned there your grandparents What was their history and how did they fare during World War II?

9:46Oggy Boytchev:During World War II, my maternal grandfather was a small trader. He had a market stall in Red River Bank, as I call it, Czerwembrach. They had a very small house, basically two rooms, one bedroom where I managed to cram everybody in, like my grandparents, my mother and her brother. and a small kitchen. So by no means were there anywhere near the average standard of a Bulgarian family at that time. But my grandfather managed to save some money by doing his market trading. After the 9th of September coup in 1944, for he became a trader in the market, but trading not his own goods, but government goods.

10:48Oggy Boytchev:He sold basically government goods. This is what they were. I have to say here that my grandfather was an instinctive socialist, and I don't mean that communist. He was a member of the Social Democrat Party during the war, which was a semi-legal party. It was officially allowed to exist but their activities were heavily restricted. So after the 9th of September coup the Social Democrat Party was subsumed by the Communist Party. So my grandfather was considered to be a reliable person as they used to call it at the time. He was not an enemy of the people. So that gave a little bit of impetus to his financial strength as a market trader.

11:48And that's why he was able to help my father build a house. What about the family on your father's side? Well, the family on my father's side, it's something which I would describe as a Balkan saga. My father was born in the Ottoman Empire

12:08Oggy Boytchev:He was born in what is today northern Greece In an area called Epirus Between the border between Greece and Albania He comes from a Bulgarian-speaking family His father was a trader and a shopkeeper in Istanbul where he made a reasonable amount of money. And when he was in his early 40s, he moved back to his homeland and bought a big estate of land and became a farmer. And as an older man, he married a young woman and had 10 children. My father was the youngest of the 10. Now, my father was born in 1913 That was the Ottoman Empire By the time he went to school He was living in Greece He went to a Greek school His first language actually was Greek I remember when I was a teenager And we used to get visitors from Greece He was a fluent Greek speaker He could write Greek He had basic Turkish and he taught himself English and a bit of German in the years before the war and during the war So during the Great Depression, when he was 15, he was sent from Greece to Bulgaria by his parents Because he had two very successful brothers in Bulgaria and Sofia who had successful businesses So they thought, if we send the young boy to Bulgaria, he'll get looked after.

14:04So he came to Bulgaria, I can't remember exactly, maybe 1928, 1929, and started to learn Bulgarian at that sort of late stage in his teenage years.

14:20Oggy Boytchev:He joined the army, it was a sort of compulsory conscription at the time. and when the war broke out, he was working for one of my uncles who had a business in Sofia. He had a nightclub and a casino. The war years for my father were very interesting. He was a natural Anglophile. He never warmed up to Germany. He was against the Nazis. He was against Bulgarian affiliation with the Nazis. So all his friends were boys and girls from the Jewish community in Sofia, and they used to lock themselves up in one of his friend's cinemas to watch American and English films. That was what he did during the war.

15:17It may sound trivial at the moment, but what they were doing was taking incredible risks by doing that.

15:27Oggy Boytchev:After the communist takeover in 1944, he was not able to go back to Greece. His parents died in Greece in the early 60s. He was not allowed to go back. We were not allowed to go to Greece for their funerals. And yes, it was tough. It's hard to imagine those times, but I appreciate you describing those. Did you have many relatives abroad? I guess if you did, you had difficulty maintaining contact with them. Yes, we had family in Greece. We still have family in Greece. Now, by twist of fate, the family who remained in Greece after my father's departure in the late 20s during the war all became part of the anti-Nazi resistance.

16:26Oggy Boytchev:Some of them voluntarily, some of them were coerced in joining the communist partisans in northern Greece After the civil war in Greece in 1945, when the communist resistance lost Some of them came to Bulgaria, which was going to be a communist country And some of them were taken to Russia to study So that is the sort of dichotomy in the family. On the one hand, my father was branded enemy of the people because of his affiliation to a group fighting for greater Bulgaria and because of his business activities. On the other hand, I had cousins who had studied in Russia and came back to Bulgaria and became communist apparatchiks.

17:19So I suspect that this is part of why my father's life was spared. That definitely is a Balkan saga there. Really appreciate that. It's really interesting. How much interaction was there with the Bulgarian security services because of your father's history? When I was growing up, I wasn't aware of any interaction with the security services, apart from the fact that my father had to go to the police station twice a day to sign to demonstrate his presence there.

17:59Oggy Boytchev:And I was told at home not to talk about politics to anybody, not to talk about politics at school, not to talk about my father's background. Just do your studies, because the better you do at school, the greater the chances that you would escape this godforsaken place. now in that summary I mentioned before that the interior ministry gave my mother it transpired that my father had been under surveillance as late as 1979 when the surveillance was terminated this is what the document says this is just one sentence which is rather shocking looking back I was not aware of anything. I went through school.

18:57Oggy Boytchev:I did well at school. Nothing impeded me in my school endeavours. I was not stopped from doing anything I wanted at school. But the family had been under surveillance until 1979, which is truly shocking. and no detail apart from that one one sentence no absolutely no detail of what and how this surveillance had manifested itself now because my father had family abroad family in greece family in yugoslavia because of this cross-border anti-nazi resistance some of the the family i have first cousin in Yugoslavia at the moment, who is a successful businessman. They were part of the Titu communist system there because they were communist partisans.

19:56But I was not allowed to go and see them. They were allowed. They used to come to Bulgaria and bring presents and Western LPs and music and cassettes and all that, which were lacking in Bulgaria. But we were not allowed to go even to Yugoslavia.

20:19You're very isolated where you are. Did you have access to TV or were you able to listen to the outside world via radio? We didn't have a TV simply because it was too expensive. When TV was introduced in Bulgaria, I would imagine must have been in the very early 60s because some of our neighbours bought TV sets in Red River Bank and we used to go and watch sort of the 7.30 programmes in the evening on a black and white, a very small black and white TV set, which was a big experience. And I'm talking, this must have been 1962, 1963. There was no cinema There was one cinema which was open on a Sunday only And most of the films were Soviet and Bulgarian films So there was no access to Western culture But we had a radio And that was my and my father's window to the world Because my father being an anglophile he listened to the BBC World Service in Bulgarian.

21:38Now, these transmissions were jammed some of the time, but most of the time the BBC, from what I remember in the 60s and the early 70s, were not jammed because the economy was struggling and they wanted to save energy from jamming the broadcasts of the BBC. They concentrate on jamming Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle in Bulgarian.

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23:31Go to shopify.com slash realm. That's shopify.com slash realm. Did you know Sam's Club isn't a store? It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community. It's a club. Of course, Jason. It's in the name. Sam's Club. Oh, yeah. Come join us. Sam's Club. Now, I'm not saying that we were able to listen to the BBC every night because it was touch and go. It was very precarious whether you'd be able to hear a transmission or not. But we got to know the frequencies and it was a window to the world. It was something that none of my peers, none of my friends at school or in the playground were able to access, or at least I didn't know whether they were able to access because you couldn't talk to anybody.

24:32And my father had explicitly forbidden us to talk about it because we knew what might happen. And he always used to give me one example to imbue the fear in our mind, not just me, but my brothers too. that in 1956, he said, when the Hungarian Revolution happened,

24:58Oggy Boytchev:they were listening to the BBC about what's going on, and one of his friends shared his thoughts within a very limited group of people, like-minded people who were exiled from Sofia, and said, this is the start. Now the Americans will come in and help the Hungarian resistance, and the Russians are finished. The following day, that person was taken away to one of the strictest labor camps on the River Danube. And when he came back to Red River Bank a few years later, he was not the same person. He was physically and mentally broken. So every time my father... wanted to instill the fear of God in us, not to tell anybody, he would give this example and say, you must not trust even your closest friends.

26:00Because he shared these thoughts within a group of maybe six or seven people while they were having a drink at somebody's house. And one of those people informed on him to the police. I can imagine the impact that had on you With your schooling, did you just keep your head down and parrot the communist propaganda? Yes, and this is what my parents told me You have to excel at school And if that means you have to parrot the propaganda You have to learn versus extolling the virtues of Khrushchev because when I was seven, we had a textbook in Russian at school. We were Duolingo studies. We were studying Bulgarian, learning to read and write Bulgarian, but they tried to teach us to read and write Russian.

27:00And most of my classmates resisted, but my father said, no, don't resist, learn, because learning any foreign language which will be of benefit to you. Unfortunately, they stopped doing that within a few years. I said that by the time I was 10, these Russian language lessons at school had stopped. But I remember having to learn poems in Russian, extolling how great Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was. And I was very good at it. Although my dad used to say, you do that, you excel at school, but don't forget, the most important thing you learn at school is mathematics. Be good at maths and that will open a whole new window to the world for you.

27:54And he was right. You must have had friends at school. What were they like? The sad thing is that I could never become very close to anybody. I mean close that I can share my secrets. And my big secret was that I was listening to the BBC. And I was dying to say to people what I've learned from the BBC, not only about politics, because I didn't understand politics very well. I was shocked when President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. I didn't understand why and what were the driving forces, whereas the communist propaganda was saying, oh, he got what he deserved, whereas the BBC was telling us a completely different story.

28:47so it was a bit confusing at the age of seven but i enjoyed the cultural programs i enjoyed programs about books and films and television television programs and music which we were never allowed to or listen to so my circle of friends was very limited i had two or three friends maybe neighbors but even with them i couldn't share everything that i wanted to share must have been immense psychological pressure on you at such a young age there that you're having to with every word you say outside of the house be so careful as to what you reveal it it has made an indelible mark on me even to present day i am very careful what i say not because i'm afraid but that's a second nature that has been imbued in me that you have to be very careful when you choose your willows now in 1965 your father's hard labor interment finishes and you're able and move back to Sophia, what effect does that have?

30:11Oh, I was elated when I was told that we're going back to the big city. I'd only been there visiting with my father. The advantage of my father being a hard worker was that by 1965, the little two-room bungalow that he built and the wonderful garden he created around it, became a very desirable property. So he was able to sell that by a two-bedroom apartment in the center of Sofia, in the old part of Sofia, where properties were cheaper. But nonetheless, I moved from this godforsaken provincial town with unpaved streets to the big city. Our apartment was on the third floor. from my balcony, I could see the star of the Communist Party headquarters, which was a stone's throw away from us.

31:16And I embraced it. I just walked the streets. School was very welcoming, although at the beginning I got mocked because I spoke with a provincial accent having been brought up in this northern Bulgarian town, which I managed to eradicate within a year after I arrived at school. And because I was good at school, the teachers were very welcoming. The advantages of being in a big city, and this is what my father used to tell me, that you always have to strive to live in a big city because you can preserve a degree of anonymity there. is that very few people knew about my father's background. And only if somebody needed to investigate or if I had to apply for a different school or when I applied to university, I knew that there were background checks and all that.

32:21But the big city provided anonymity and allowed me to thrive. There were lots of cinemas. There were a certain limited number of Western films, mainly French and Italian. There were art exhibitions, and I just embraced it. So you were aged about 10 or 11 when you moved to Sofia, I'm guessing. Yes, I was 10. What are you planning or what are your parents planning for you for further education and a career? Do they have any ideas? Yes, I did. But my father's idea was that I should become a doctor. I should study medicine and I should become a doctor, which I resisted right from the beginning because I knew it was not for me.

33:12I was more into arts and the humanities and books. But I played along. I played along until the age of 17 when I had to make a decision in my final year at school. And when I declared that I was not going to study medicine and I would do anything else but medicine. And so eventually we settled on, which was partly because I did well at school at maths. and partly my father saw that this was the future. Business and economics will always give me a way of making a living. This is what happened. I enrolled. I had to sit an entrance exam. I enrolled at the Economics Institute in Sofia, aptly named Karl Marx at the time.