Photo: Гаро Кешишян (RFE/RL)
Amid talk in Bulgaria of reintroducing compulsory military service, a new photo exhibition exposes the “labor battalions” used by the communist authorities, in part, to control the country’s dissidents and ethnic minorities.
It looks like an image of war: A crying, veiled woman hugs her uniformed son ahead of his departure as another man looks on. In fact, the young man is leaving to serve Bulgaria’s communist government with a shovel, not a gun.
The below photo is one of 92 on display at Sofia’s Gallery Synthesis until February 15 that offer a rare insight into Bulgaria’s Construction Corps.
The organization that would become known as the Construction Corps was formed in the wake of World War I. It replaced military service with mandatory labor, largely for construction projects. The organization enabled Bulgaria to organize tens of thousands of young people into an army-like structure without violating a treaty Bulgaria signed after the war that restricted Sofia’s military to just 20,000 soldiers.
In the mid-1930s, the military nature of the corps became official as the structure was handed from Bulgaria’s construction ministry to its military.
The Construction Corps built much of Bulgaria’s 20th-century infrastructure but was also used during the communist era to punish opponents of the regime and maintain control over ethnic minorities. The organization was disbanded in 2000.
Photographer Garo Keshishyan began photographing the labor battalions in the early 1980s after a chance encounter with a contingent of workers who were assigned a project in his hometown of Varna. “They started eating in front of the block of flats where I lived so I ran out to take some pictures,” Keshishian told RFE/RL.
Debate over the legacy of the Construction Corps has recently reignited in Bulgaria, where populist parties have called for the return of mandatory military service. Little of the current discussion has ventured into the details of how some formations of the corps were used to repress opponents of the regime and control the male population of entire ethnic groups.
Several of the labor groups during Bulgaria’s communist period were known as “black” battalions, filled with the politically “unreliable.” Other groupings were from Bulgaria’s Romany and Turkish ethnic minorities who could be closely monitored by communist informers within their ranks.
“The entire system shows the blatant ethnic discrimination of the communist and post-communist construction troops in Bulgaria,” Keshishian says. “The thing that kept me returning with my camera was my compassion for these boys whose only fault was where and when they were born.”
Keshishian’s remarkable access to the Construction Corps was largely due to luck. After his initial interest in the work battalions was piqued by his encounter in Varna in the early 1980s, Keshishian was assigned a communist apparatchik tasked with keeping an eye on the photographer when he requested permission to photograph them.
“When he saw the pictures [of the labor battalions] he was completely shocked,” the photographer recalls. But the officer confided to Keshishian, “I’ve been writing denunciations all my life, I’m going to let you shoot whatever you want.”
Georgi Lozanov, a lecturer in photojournalism at Sofia University, first met Keshishian in the 1980s. He describes Keshishian’s images of the Construction Corps as “one of the greatest examples of resistance against the regime,” adding, “He shows two things at the same time: the powerful machine of repression of the authorities, as well as the individual people caught up in it.”
“Even when he reaches for the truth, a photographer is always being subjective,” Keshishian says. “I spent 12 years going to the soldiers. They were all different, but I felt sympathy for every one.”