Just outside Sofia’s city centre sits a high-rise concrete hotel, visible from many directions silhouetted against Mount Vitosha, the hulking mountain on the outskirts of the Bulgarian capital. There are plenty of Brutalist hotels in this part of the world, but this one is a little different – sleeker, but also visibly prefabricated. It bears a faint resemblance to a Japanese ‘capsule’ hotel, which is not accidental. This was originally the Vitosha New Otani, designed in 1974 by the celebrity architect Kisho Kurokawa, co-founder of the Metabolist Movement and one-time supporter of the Japanese Communist Party, at the time best known for the recently demolished Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. The Vitosha hotel was built in collaboration with Mitsubishi and partly funded by the Japanese government. What on earth is it doing in Sofia? There are, on the face of it, few places so incongruous, so unlikely to be linked, as Bulgaria and Japan, and few economies so dissimilar as that of the eastern Balkans – now dedicated to tourism, agriculture and low-value services – and East Asia, with its cutting-edge high-tech industries and futuristic public infrastructure.

Victor Petrov’s new book Balkan Cyberia shows, however, that between the sixties and the eighties, state socialist Bulgaria was bent on becoming the Japan of the Warsaw Pact, and almost succeeded. In this revelatory revisionist account, Petrov, a historian of modern Europe at the University of Tennessee, evokes a mostly forgotten past in which Bulgaria became one of the world’s leading manufacturers, designers and exporters of computers, establishing trade links with East and South Asia in order to do so. At its height Buglaria’s computing firms significantly outpaced some of their American competitors – partly through forming close ties with Japan, a country that Bulgaria’s post-Stalinist dictator Todor Zhivkov thought could serve as a national model. Notwithstanding its sober tone, Balkan Cyberia is a wild book, completely rewriting the early history of mass personal computing through placing Bulgaria at its centre. Drawing on dense archival research as well as interviews with Bulgarian computer programmers, engineers and boosters, the book traces the rise – and fall – of the country’s Cold War tech industry, and considers its effects on everything from local science fiction to the utopian speculations of Bulgarian Communists.

After 1989, some, such as the American historian of Germany Charles Maier, claimed that among the reasons for the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’ was the inadequacy of the computing industries in the Eastern bloc which prevented it from participating in the third industrial revolution and the ‘information society’. Most socialist countries had important state-owned electronics manufacturers: among the largest was Electronika in the USSR, and Robotron in the DDR (Yugoslavia, typically, did something a little different, with the self-assembly Galaksija computer – still a minor cult). But they tended to be derivative and inefficient. Petrov concedes this in the Soviet and East German cases, but shows that Maier and others were looking in the wrong places. By 1989, hardware and software in Eastern Europe and in the Comecon system attached to it were not dominated by the DDR or the USSR, but by Bulgaria, which had conquered the low-cost computing market (‘much to East German chagrin’).

Balkan Cyberia situates itself among the recent books about the hopes socialist governments once placed in computing – Slava Gerovitch’s From Newspeak to Cyberspeak (2004), on Soviet cybernetics; Benjamin Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation (2017), on the USSR’s failed efforts to develop its own internet; and Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2014), on the computer-aided planning system Project Cybersyn, developed by the Popular Unity government in Chile in the early 70s. These are, however, tales of failure, in the Soviet cases, or of dreams crushed by neoliberalism and dictatorship, as in Medina’s book on Chile. Balkan Cyberia, by contrast, is a tale of spectacular success, within certain limits.

In the early 1960s, Bulgaria – and in a different way, the more loudly non-cooperative Romania – used the Comecon economic bloc to challenge Soviet plans that would have kept them as underdeveloped agricultural reserves, with high-tech industry favoured in more affluent countries such as Czechoslovakia or the DDR. The Balkan countries managed to win this internal argument, and Bulgaria under Zhivkov moved with surprising speed from heavy to light industry, especially in sectors – such as computing – that their richer neighbours hadn’t yet fully developed. From 1959 onwards, Bulgaria entered into trade deals with the electronics industry of Japan, which crowbarred the Balkan country into the international market; the Japanese were able to share American technologies that the Bulgarians would otherwise have been unable to access. Though committed to the American alliance at the political level, Japan, in Petrov’s telling, was eager to expand its own trading empire, helping the Bulgarians open an increasingly large tear in the Iron Curtain.

Bulgarian engineers, programmers, politicians and writers were all infatuated with Japan. Books were published in Bulgaria on Japan’s post-1950 ‘economic miracle’, and Zhivkov in particular became, as Petrov puts it, ‘a weeaboo’, frequently visiting and engaging with the country – a process which led to Kisho Kurokawa and Mitsubishi designing and building a luxury hotel in Sofia with a view of Mount Vitosha. What fascinated them most of all was the apparent reality, below the futuristic gloss, of a culture where planning seemed to be effective and dynamic rather than a semi-dysfunctional economic straitjacket. As Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation showed, Soviet computing in particular was – ironically – severely undermined by a lack of cohesive, collectivist planning, with competing ministries and bureaucracies in Moscow and Kyiv embroiled in petty scrambles for resources and favour, whereas the development of electronics in Massachusetts and California during the same period was lavishly state-funded, leisurely and cooperative. The Bulgarians were fully aware of this, and managed, for a time, to escape the trap of anarchic competition.

By the 1980s, Bulgaria was one of the world’s leading exporters of hardware, not only to Eastern Europe (where it had cornered nearly half of the market), but also to India – where Bulgarian electronics were decisive in the development of what is now one of the world’s major tech industries – as well as to the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, in both the latter cases using the trade links of the non-aligned movement and Comecon to its advantage. Bulgaria, like Japan, South Korea, Singapore or Taiwan – the East Asian countries it was consciously emulating – had acquired its technological lead through creating cheaper, faster, more compact (though not necessarily better-made) versions of American systems. Most of its computers were copies: its best-selling personal computer, the Pravetz, named after the small town where it was manufactured, was an imitation of the Apple II. This was a significant regression from the utopian, experimental era of socialist computing in the sixties, when the USSR and Poland in particular tried to develop their own systems independent of those of the capitalist world; by the seventies it was generally deemed cheaper and more efficient to simply copy IBM, Apple, and, lest we forget, the British state-funded ZX Spectrum, which was cloned as the Didaktik in Czechoslovakia and the Elwro 800 in Poland.

Petrov’s is thus not a utopian story. To be sure, Bulgarian Communist intellectuals and a few politicians had imagined a cybernetic socialism in which computing could solve the inefficiencies of the command economy and robotics would free workers to fish in the morning and critcize in the evening. What materialized instead was unromantic: developmentalism. The infatuation with East Asia on the part of Zhivkov and his comrades reveals a seldom discussed elective affinity. In both regions, overwhelmingly rural countries whose economies were based around agriculture and extraction were transformed into urban, industrial, educated societies with lightning speed. Between the forties and eighties, all were one-party regimes, equipped with highly active secret police forces, oscillating between incorporating the working class and ruthlessly disciplining it – computer manufacturers complained about the sweaty fingers of Bulgarian proletarians ruining their components – while favouring economies in which careful planning would efficiently produce innovative, cheap commodities which could be sold on the world market. That the Soviet sphere did in fact have its own version of a world market is one of the most important contentions of much of this recent research – at no point were these economies ‘closed’. As one of Petrov’s sources, Łukasz Stanek’s Architecture in Global Socialism (2020), outlines, in the sixties and seventies Asia (and Africa) became regions where Eastern Europeans were able to encounter and then adapt western technologies.

By 1989, Bulgaria had achieved things that would have seemed improbable in 1959, but the gains were unevenly distributed. As Petrov describes it, villages where roads were still unpaved coexisted with highly advanced science and industry. In Bulgaria and East Asia, as in the USA, the people at the forefront of high-tech industrialisation tended to regard themselves as free marketeers – Bulgarian computing professionals were, as Petrov notes, early admirers of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs; some of them even met these two influential privatisers of computing. Yet they acted in practice as developmentalist state capitalists, working within a deliberately distorted market, and benefiting from immense state subsidy and sponsorship. Fatally, however, Bulgarian liberals seem to have believed that the free market rhetoric of California corresponded with reality, and Palo Alto replaced Tokyo as Sofia’s imaginary twin. From the collapse of Communism onwards, the Bulgarian computer industry was privatised and then swiftly dismantled – a process which Petrov does not describe or explain in as much detail as he might have, though it seems the withdrawal of state support was decisive. The Bulgarian computer industry’s higher-ranking cadres, including Petrov’s father, moved to the US; those lower down the chain opened call centres; and its thousands of skilled factory workers were simply dumped on the scrapheap. Capitalist Bulgaria’s unusual preponderance of trained programmers made it a good place for computer outsourcing, and it still has a significant tech sector, but the project of development-through-electronics was over.

The developmentalist dictatorships of East Asia were overthrown in the 1980s and early 1990s, just as they were in Eastern Europe. This raises a question: why was it that South Korea or Taiwan continued to dominate electronics manufacturing and research globally, while Bulgaria became just another node for American and Western European outsourcing? The answer surely has something to do with continued state support for industry in East Asia, and with the ingrained belief shared by post-1989 Eastern European liberals and conservatives that everything produced in the old system must have been worthless; but Petrov, keen not to show his hand politically, does not speculate. He does not explicitly criticise Bulgarian capitalism any more than he does Bulgarian ‘actually existing socialism’, but it is clear that the neoliberal cargo cult implemented so comprehensively in Eastern Europe after 1989 was a far less suitable model for building on the previous system’s advantages than the state capitalism of East Asia; one of the computing professionals Petrov interviews remarks wistfully that Bulgaria could have become Singapore if it hadn’t destroyed its own developmental state.

Bored and underemployed, Bulgaria’s engineers and coders entered the new free market system in their own way. After 1989, a rash of viruses – many with names derived from the British metal band Iron Maiden, such as ‘Eddie’ and ‘Number of the Beast’ – infected computers around the world. By the end of 1990, the New York Times estimated that 90% of all computer viruses were made in Bulgaria; the most dreadful of all, the Dark Avenger, comprised 10% of all calls to antivirus specialists McAfee during the first half of the 1990s. These nihilistic programmers are perhaps the ancestors of today’s Russian cyberattackers, like those who destroyed the British Library’s computer systems at the end of last year. Programmers under ‘real socialism’ never did create cybernetic communism, but the foreclosure of their utopian dreams might have made some small contribution to today’s tech dystopia.

Read On: Timothy Erik Ström, ‘Capital and Cybernetics’, NLR 135.