| Petar Vodenicharov South-West University “Neofit Rilski” (Bulgaria) [peter_acad@yahoo.com], ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9637-4490 Nurie Muratova South-West University “Neofit Rilski” (Bulgaria) [nuriemuratova@yahoo.com], ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1083-4722 | Download https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20963114 |
COMMUNIST STATE SECURITY AND YOUTH – LANGUAGE AND IDEOLOGIES
Abstract:Our research is based on published archival documents of the State Security (DS) related to youth (the age range is from children of 15 years old to adolescents of 19 years old), with students and young ‘scientific-technical’ and ‘artistic-creative’ intelligentsia also being subjects of operational interest. Despite privileges and total surveillance, propaganda, and repression, the youth do not comply and exhibit active and passive resistance, rejecting the identity prescribed by the communist Newspeak as the ‘cheerful Dimitrov’s coming generation.’ Underground youth communities create their own alternative jargon and subculture, crossing the Iron Curtain in harmony with youth movements in the West. The analysis of underground youth discourses reveals alternative meanings and identities, social sobriety and protest, artistic and real escapes beyond the fences of the socialist camp. In the disenchanting world of real socialism, young people also respond with protest through what the Party cannot take from them – the body and its pleasures, even going as far as prostitution and violence. The young intelligentsia, toward which the State Security is particularly suspicious, increasingly provokes the dogmas of the artistic method of socialist realism and scientific communism. Under conditions of total propaganda and censorship, free thought can divert the meaning of ideological messages, ironize them, and find alternative, albeit risky, ways to express itself.
Keywords: youth; communism; newspeak; state security.
- Declaration by Authors
- Ethical Approval: Approved
- Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.