There are plans for a museum of totalitarian art in Bulgaria’s capital Sofia, even as a political scuffle has broken out after two centre-right parties alleged that Prime Minister Boiko Borissov and his allies are seeking to rehabilitate the memory of long-time communist dictator Todor Zhivkov.
 
Borissov, a former bodyguard of Zhivkov, was reported to have said recently that it would be an enormous success for any government – including the current one – to achieve even a hundredth of what Zhivkov achieved.
 
Zhivkov was in power from 1954 to 1989, when he was swept away in an internal communist party coup as the then-Soviet bloc headed for disintegration. Under Zhivkov, Bulgaria had been a devotedly loyal ally of the Soviet Union.
 
Ivan Kostov, formerly one of Bulgaria’s post-communist prime ministers and now the leader of minority right-wing party Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB), said on November 13 2010 that his party would complain to the European People’s Party, of which ruling party GERB is a member, about what Kostov called the attempt to rehabilitate the dictator in what he said was an "insult to all Bulgarians".
 
Two days later, the DSB’s ally in the centre-right Blue Coalition, the Union of Democratic Forces also complained about the latter-day apparent attitude to Zhivkov.
 
GERB and ultra-nationalists Ataka were seeking to rehabilitate Zhivkov, something that no political force and no prime minister of Bulgaria in the past 20 years had tried, UDF leader Martin Dimitrov said.
 
"The communist regime and Todor Zhivkov killed and tortured tens of thousands of people, leaving behind devastation and multi-billion debt," Dimitrov said, adding that Bulgaria could not forget communist-era detention camps such as Belene, Skravena and Lovetch.
 
Dimitrov said that Borissov had rejected a UDF proposal that no state honours be given to former agents of the communist-era State Security (Държавна сигурност).
 
The UDF leader also hit out at Borissov over the Prime Minister’s reported comments on the "Revival Process" (an episode during communism that involved serious human rights violations amid a campaign to forcibly rename Bulgarians of ethnic Turkish descent).

Borissov, said to have played a minor role in the campaign in his days as a firefighter, is reported to have said that the main mistake of the campaign was not the goal but the way in which it was carried out.
 
Bulgaria’s communist regime had been described by the Council of Europe as "criminal", Dimitrov said, and said that his party proposed that a memorial museum be built on the island of Persin near Belene so that nostalgia "cannot be compared with the suffering of millions of Bulgarians".
 
Ataka, which generally has been supportive of Borissov’s Government since GERB won Bulgaria’s July 2009 national parliamentary elections, entered the controversy on November 16 when Ataka leader, Volen Siderov, was quoted as describing Zhivkov as a "gifted statesman and someone who had done a lot for Bulgaria".
 
However, Siderov said, as quoted by Bulgarian-language mass-circulation daily 24 Chassa, civil liberties were indeed suppressed during the communist era.
 
Meanwhile, on November 18, further details emerged of the idea of a museum of totalitarian art in Sofia.
 
The location that has been earmarked is a Ministry of Culture building in Luchezar Stanchev Street in Izgrev.
 
Several other Culture Ministry bodies are to be moved there, including the National Institute for the Immovable Cultural Heritage, Unesco regional office, Philip Koutev Ensemble.
 
According to Bulgarian-language news agency reports, the building includes a concrete bunker and there is an idea to adapt it to resemble the mausoleum of Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov – whose central Sofia tomb was the subject of a series of attempts to destroy it, eventually successfully, after the end of the Bulgarian Communist Party era.
 
Draft plans are to include works by great Bulgarian artists who lived and worked in the post-World War 2 "People’s Republic of Bulgaria".
 
The Bulgarian-language reports said that similar museums had been set up elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, notably the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary.
 
Writing on November 19 2010 in daily 24 Chassa, Georgi Lozanov, head of the Council for Electronic Media, said that he was happy that the idea of a museum of totalitarian art was beginning to be implemented.
 
Lozanov said that he had taken part in an action group that had suggested that Bulgaria had a Museum of Communism.
 
"We are the last country of the former socialist countries which has no such museum," Lozanov said.