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Notes From the Field: Bulgaria’s Tolstoyan Vegetarians

by Mary Neuburger It seemed like a bad idea at the time, but I did it anyway. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope that the little museum in the Bulgarian mountain village of Yasna Polyana would be open. Established in 1998, the museum contained the intellectual remnants of the Bulgarian Tolstoyan community, who had created […]

Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive

By Ian Goodale In an unpublished letter to the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestiia, Liudmila Chukovskaya wrote that “muteness has always been the support of despotism.” This quote is cited in the booklet, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Public, compiled by the Radio Liberty Committee in New York in August 1968 to analyze the coverage of the Soviet invasion of […]

The Prague Spring Archive Project

By Mary Neuburger and Ian Goodale The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents […]

Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests

By Aleksej Demjanski The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled […]

The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt

by Mary Neuburger One evening this summer, I found myself careening down a country road at breakneck speed to the town of Studen Izvor on the Bulgarian border with Serbia.  Stunning scenery enveloped a string of thinly populated towns, some peppered with socialist-era industrial ruins that somehow added to the charm. Edit, the wife of my […]

Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

This summer I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years.

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