Lilia Topouzova Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag Cornell University Press 318 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN: 978-1501782022
Lilia Topouzova
On Unsilencing: The History and Legacy of the Bulgarian Gulag
Interview of
January 7, 2026
In a nutshell
Unsilencing is the first comprehensive study of the Bulgarian gulag— a network of forced-labor camps and prisons that operated throughout the communist era from 1945 to 1989. Referred to as “Little Siberia,” these camps interned thousands without trial, subjected them to inhumane conditions, and silenced them for decades. Drawing on two decades of archival research, oral history interviews with survivors and perpetrators, and an array of declassified state documents, I reconstruct the harrowing reality of life behind barbed wire. The book explores how the communist regime systematically used these camps to suppress dissent, target minority groups, and instill fear across the population.
Unsilencing also examines the post-1989 period showing how Bulgaria has grappled with its recent past: the brief life of its truth commission, the aborted trials of former officials and guards, and the ongoing struggle over collective memory. Telling the little-known story of the Bulgarian gulag and its aftermath makes possible a close study that asks difficult questions about the origins of state violence and how we come to terms with it. How do we address the trauma of the camps, which still lingers in everyday life? Who do we hold accountable for crimes committed in the camps? What does it mean to survive a camp? To remember it? Who decides which memories matter? How are families and communities impacted by the legacy of violence?
To anchor these complex questions, multiple individual human threads run through the book, the life stories of ordinary people caught in the maelstrom of political ideologies and sweeping historical transformation. Some of these ordinary people rose to power, while others were destroyed by it. The storytelling texture makes the book readable and resonant beyond its immediate geography and historical period.
Having worked for over twenty years on this topic and in multiple capacities––as a scholar, writer, filmmaker, and artist—I wanted to take readers with me on the circuitous yet meaningful path of uncovering a history meant to vanish.
It is why I begin the history of the gulag with its attempted erasure. In 1990, shortly after the fall of the communist regime, the Minister of the Interior ordered the destruction of the secret-police archives. To reconstruct this history, one must begin from absence—from what was purged, burned, or buried. At first, I treated silence as an obstacle to be overcome, but with time I learned to work with it, to weave it into the narrative itself. I began to look for evidence where it was least expected: in discarded papers, in abandoned camp sites, and in the pauses and hesitations of survivors whose words faltered under the weight of unspeakable experiences.
The book invites the reader with me as I piece together purged archives, fragmented testimonies, and the lived aftermath of fear. It argues that silence is not merely the absence of speech or memory but a historical agent in its own right—one that shapes what can be known, said, and imagined.
The author collecting files and folder in front of a dumpster in Sofia. June 2022. Photo courtesy of Krasimira Butseva.
The wide angle
Unsilencing belongs to the global conversation about how societies remember—or refuse to remember—state violence. It speaks to the legacy of the gulag but also to the aftermath of authoritarianism everywhere, from past dictatorships to the lives of today’s refugees and political prisoners. The book is also a meditation on silence itself—how it becomes a political technology that extends beyond repression into everyday life, persisting long after the collapse of authoritarian regimes.
During my research, I encountered a tangible sense of despair and fragility. Few were left unscarred by the system of political detention and the impunity with which the secret police operated. Pain, fear, guilt, and anguish endure in victims, in perpetrators, and in society at large. I thought often about how to make members of this society care—people who had not been directly affected by violence but who nonetheless lived with its consequences, often without realizing it. This is, of course, a broader philosophical question: why should any of us care about past violence that no longer intrudes upon our daily lives? There is no single or absolute answer, yet when people are invited to reflect on their personal histories, a connection to this difficult past frequently emerges. The same holds true for me.
I was born in Communist Bulgaria, and I was a proud member of the Communist Youth League when the regime collapsed in 1989. One moment I was wearing a red scarf and saluting Soviet revolutionary heroes; the next I watched the hammer and sickle removed from Party headquarters and joined crowds celebrating the demise of the regime, eager for a democratic future that seemed just around the corner. I left Bulgaria in the early 1990s and grew up in Montreal.
As a graduate student, I came across a photograph of a female camp guard on trial for crimes committed in the gulag. Her expression was at once ordinary and unfathomable. That image drew me back to Bulgaria—to the archives, to the barren camp landscapes, and to the closed world of survivors. For the next two decades, I navigated between scholarship and creative practice, each offering a distinct way of understanding the recent past.
I co-created the documentary The Mosquito Problem & Other Stories (2007) and the multimedia installation The Neighbours (2022–2024). Unlike the solitude of archival research and writing, both were collective projects, born of an impulse to translate silence into form. In collaborating with Julian Chehirian and Krasimira Butseva—and bringing The Neighbours to the 2024 Venice Biennale—we sought to reckon with collective trauma and to affirm that remembering is an intergenerational endeavor.
My book weaves these experiences into a written practice that treats history as encounter—between researcher and witness, document and silence. Each interview and each archival fragment became a point of entry into larger questions: how does one listen to lives lived under fear, and how might those lives alter our understanding of what history is?
A close-up
I would begin with the preface where I describe my first meeting with Krum Horozov, one of the most candid survivors I interviewed. In the late spring of 2006, I stood at the door of his apartment not yet knowing that this encounter would define the years to come. Horozov, an eighty-one-year-old former political prisoner, had spent eleven years in camps and prisons, many of them in Belene, the most infamous of Bulgaria’s forced-labor camps.
Over the course of several hours, this soft-spoken but determined man narrated his story: his imprisonment as a member of the agrarian left, his survival of Belene’s brutal regime, and his relentless efforts after 1989 to make the memory of the gulag public. Although he had served in the Grand National Assembly, helping draft Bulgaria’s new democratic constitution, his later work met indifference. His memoirs and an extraordinary album of camp drawings and architectural blueprints lay stacked in his living room—self-published, unsold, unseen. For every story he told, he produced a document from his declassified file or pointed to a sketch in the album. “So that you don’t doubt me,” he whispered, leaning toward the recorder. Perhaps he mistook my disbelief for doubt; or perhaps he was simply used to being doubted.
When our interview ended, Horozov walked me to the door. Dressed neatly in an old brown suit, he handed me copies of his memoir and album but refused to take any payment. We lingered across the threshold in silence, the door half-open between us. Then, quietly, he said, “Our voices will not suffice—there need to be others.” He closed the door, and I stood listening to the faint click of the lock.
That sentence has stayed with me ever since. It captures the essence of Unsilencing: remembrance as an intergenerational relay, testimony as a collective endeavor. Horozov’s words transformed my understanding of what it means to write history. They suggested that bearing witness is never finished—that it depends on others to continue it.
Lastly
The book traces not only the history of Bulgaria’s forced-labor camps but also the culture of silence that outlived them—how fear, denial, and forgetting seeped into everyday life and shaped the country’s post-socialist transition. Silence, I suggest, is not merely the absence of speech but a political force, one that determines what can be known and what remains hidden.
The implications extend far beyond Bulgaria. Across the world, state violence is minimized, archives are manipulated, and citizens are urged to forget in the name of unity. Unsilencing speaks to these broader patterns: the fragility of truth in the aftermath of repression and the unfinished nature of justice. It reveals that transitional justice cannot succeed without an active culture of remembrance. Remembering becomes a civic responsibility, a collective act of care that resists indifference. In that sense, the book is not only about the Bulgarian gulag—it is about us, and about how we choose to confront, or to look away from, the violence that still shapes our world.
At its core, Unsilencing asks what it means to live after violence—how trauma persists across generations and how memory, if neglected, curdles into cynicism. The survivors I met taught me that remembrance is a form of resistance. Their testimonies reveal that silence can never fully contain what it seeks to erase; it lingers in families, in the landscape, and in the archives that were meant to destroy it.
This is also where art and collaboration enter the conversation. My work with the artist-scholars Krasimira Butseva and Julian Chehirian on The Neighbours grew directly out of the oral histories at the heart of the book. Over a decade, we transformed research into a multimedia installation that reimagined the homes of survivors of the Bulgarian gulag.
Presented as Bulgaria’s national pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), The Neighbours recreated a darkened apartment from the early post-socialist years. Three rooms—living room, bedroom, and kitchen—evoked different modes of remembering through video projections, ambient sound, and artefacts from former camp sites. Visitors never saw the survivors; they heard only their voices.
Critics named The Neighbours one of the Biennale’s “must-see” installations. It drew nearly 60,000 visitors and received international media coverage. Its impact lay not only in visibility but in intimacy: audiences described feeling “inside memory,” compelled to listen differently. We collected four notebooks filled with comments. Hundreds of pages in languages we could and could not read from people around the world who said that the stories, sighs, and whispers could have been those of their own grandparents or neighbours. Something so distant felt suddenly close.
In Venice, research became a public act of collective remembrance, realized through collaboration between survivors, artists, and scholars. When scholarship enters conversation with art, it creates spaces of empathy that bridge disciplines, generations, and nations. Unsilencing, then, is not a single act or scholarly method but an ongoing practice—a way of insisting that even the most troubling histories remain audible.
