Glasnost--A Bulgarian View.

• Author: Rickert, Jonathan
• Position: Communist-era cartoon in Bulgaria

Hanging on the living room wall in our summer house in Sweden is a framed pen-and-ink cartoon from our time late in communist-era Bulgaria. As with most memorabilia, there is a story behind it.

One Saturday in September 1987, our family went for a drive in the mountains outside of Sofia, as we often did on weekends. On the way home, we passed through Bankya, a famed mineral springs spa town that now is officially part of the capital city. We noticed a small outdoor craft fair in progress, so we stopped to look around. At one of the stands, we met a gentleman named Iovio Terziev, a cartoonist/caricaturist, who was hawking several of his pen-and-ink drawings.

Some were humorous, some mildly "political." In the former category, I recall one depicting a physician seated at a desk and peering down at a file. Before him stood a man bandaged from head to toe with only his eyes visible. Without looking up at the patient, the doctor is saying to him "please remove your clothes." That, I guess, is what passes for Bulgarian humor. However, the drawing that particularly caught my eye was one entitled "Glasnost."

That drawing showed a large man shouting angrily into the bell end of what I took to be an oversized bugle-like musical instrument. It showed strong, heavy lines emanating from his mouth, while thin, weak lines were emerging from the opposite end of the contraption. I understood immediately what Terziev was conveying, but, feigning ignorance, asked him what the cartoon meant. He responded jovially that where glasnost was concerned, there was much more noise at the source than further away. In other words, he was quite cynical about the concept, apparently believing that it was little more than a slogan or game of words.

Since glasnost and perestroika, as promoted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, were popular buzzwords just then, and Bulgaria was considered the most slavishly faithful of the USSR's Warsaw Pact allies, I found Terziev's mildly heretical rendering to be unusual and asked him how much he wanted for it. He replied that his drawings usually sold for around 100 leva each, a significant sum (at the inflated official exchange rate) in those days. Knowing that I had only 20 leva with me, I opened my wallet and, pretending disappointment, told him that unfortunately I could not buy his work, since that was all the money I had...