Romanian highschool students are now able to study the communist past of their country, news agencies reported this week. Naturally, this raises the issue about when Bulgarian students will have the chance to read in textbooks approved by the Education Ministry about who did what in Bulgaria during the 45 years that the country spent under communism.

Not that this question has not been previously raised, but it has always been dismissed by historians and other intellectuals with the argument that it was still too soon for children to be taught what had happened in Bulgaria just 19 years ago. Most prominent historians will say that there should be at least 30 to 40 years distance before certain periods can be taught objectively in schools.

So far, this argument has worked well because students are taught about how Bulgaria joined the Nazi Germany in the Second World War, how it later drop this alliance and tried to join the allied forces against Germany in a desperate effort to avoid being treated as a hostile country after the end of the war which it failed. The other thing students are taught is that a 1947 referendum was held in Bulgaria that overthrown the monarchy and Bulgaria was declared a republic.

Anything more than that can be found in the university textbooks, but not in highschool ones. Of course, some might also say that teaching children about Bulgaria's communist period, especially the repressions in the 1950s, is not exactly a lesson in patriotism but whoever said that official history should only be the good history of won battles and wars.

Others might claim that because millions of Bulgarians who have lived though those times are still alive, writing about Bulgaria's communist times would not only be difficult but probably an impossible mission for the quarrels that might result from historians' take on the issue.

While these debates are still going on, children in Bulgaria get told about communism by their parents and grandparents and by the media. The latest media story on who was what in communist Bulgaria came this last week when the body appointed by Parliament to open the archives of former communist security police disclosed the names of 37 former and current TV journalists from Bulgarian National Television.

The commission described them as agents, some even as high-ranked intelligence officers, who have organised entire intelligence units within the TV station and abroad. All these people made their reputation as prominent and respectable journalists on BNT in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, when there was only one television in the country. It would not be untrue to say that these were probably the best-known and respected journalists back then and even today. And now children are told that these prominent journalists were actually working for the communist system.

The body in question is soon to check the communist past of other public officials, such as those who have worked or still work at universities. According to a long-accepted tradition in Bulgaria, textbooks - history books in particular - are usually written by teams of university professors.