Dancing Bears
Page 1
ACCLAIM FOR
DANCING BEARS
“Should be required reading for anyone hoping to understand the growing appeal of authoritarian leaders in Eastern Europe today . . . Combining black humor with lyrical prose, Szabłowski brilliantly captures the tragic disorientation of men and women whose lives were bifurcated by the sudden collapse of Communism and ruthless onslaught of neoliberal capitalism. . . . A poignant allegory about the human costs of regime change.”
—Kristen Ghodsee, author of Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism
“A fascinating and wide-ranging book that shows how, across different and diverse species, old habits die slowly, if at all. Humans, like other animals, often don’t know when they’ve gained freedom because conditions of oppression have become the norm and they’re unable to adjust to a newfound lack of restraint. Szabłowski’s clever and metaphorical use of dancing bears to make this point is beautifully done.”
—Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado; coauthor of The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Age of Humans
“What a gem of a book. . . . So eloquent and original about the psychological transition from regimes.”
—Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University
“A brisk narrative [and] a surprising look at societies grappling with profound change.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Heartrending . . . A sharply drawn account.”
—Publishers Weekly
PENGUIN BOOKS
DANCING BEARS
Witold Szabłowski is an award-winning Polish journalist. At age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza’s weekly supplement, Duży Format, where he covered international stories in countries including Cuba, South Africa, and Iceland. His features on the problem of illegal immigrants flocking to the EU won the European Parliament Journalism Prize; his reportage on the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine won the Polish Press Agency’s Ryszard Kapuściński Award; and his book about Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City, won the Beata Pawlak Award and an English PEN award, and was nominated for the Nike Award, Poland’s most prestigious literary prize. Szabłowski lives in Warsaw.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2014 by Witold Szabłowski
Copyright © 2014 by Agora SA
Translation copyright © 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. All rights reserved.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Originally published in Polish by Agora SA, Warsaw
Photos by Albin Biblom
Maps by Wawrzyniec Święcicki
All images courtesy of Agora SA
This publication has been supported by the © POLAND Translation Program.
Ebook ISBN 9781101993385
Cover design: Tom Brown
Cover image: Bruce Dale, National Geographic Creative
Version_1
CONTENTS
Acclaim for Dancing Bears
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Author's Note
Maps
Introduction
PART ONE
I. Love
II. Freedom
III. Negotiations
IV. History
V. Instincts
VI. Hibernation
VII. Lions to Africa
VIII. Castration
IX. Dancing Bears
X. The End
PART TWO
I. Love
Cuba: The McRevolution Is Coming
II. Freedom
Poland / United Kingdom: Lady Peron
III. Negotiations
Ukraine: Nothing Bleeps for the Smugglers
IV. History
Albania: The End of the Concrete Toadstools
V. Instincts
Estonia: Tea with the Invader
VI. Hibernation
Poland: Hobbits at the State Farm
VII. Lions to Africa
Serbia: Pop Art Radovan
Serbia: Chickens for the Serbs
VIII. Castration
Georgia: Stalin’s Vestal Virgins
IX. Dancing Bears
Greece: We’ll Sweep Capitalism Away
Photographs
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some of the names in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
Athens: Every day thousands of Greeks here dream that one day their country will finally be run by the best and happiest system: Communism.
Belgrade: For many years war criminal Radovan Karadžić was here in hiding, disguised as a doctor of alternative medicine.
Berat: Here a construction worker, Djoni, smashes up the bunkers built by Enver Hoxha.
Gori: Here, in the house where Stalin was born, the generalissimo’s death mask is guarded by his vestal virgins.
Havana: Thousands of Cubans tremble as they hear reports about the declining health of Fidel Castro, some in horror, others in hope that the winds of change will finally start to blow on their island too.
London: Lady Peron’s five acres are located here, between the Victoria railway and coach stations.
Kosovska Mitrovica: Good friends Florent and Dušan set off from here to distribute chickens to the Serbs who come home to Kosovo.
Medyka: Day in and day out, thousands of “ants” walk across the Ukraine border here, bringing vodka and cigarettes into Poland.
Narva: The capital of the Estonian Russians, where not even the police can speak Estonian.
Sierakowo Sławieńskie: In the fight against poverty, the former residents of a state farm that was located here have founded the Hobbits’ Village. They dress up as figures out of Tolkien and invite kids to take part in field games.
Tirana: Enver Hoxha ruled Albania from here, where there’s still a pyramid designed in his memory by his daughter and son-in-law.
Belitsa: This town is the site of the thirty-acre Dancing Bears Park, where the bears are taught to live in freedom.
Dryanovets: This is the home of brothers Gyorgy and Stefan Marinov. Gyorgy used to travel the Black Sea coast and the local fairs with his female bear, Vela. Stefan was an expert in the extremely difficult art of wrestling with a bear.
Getsovo: Here, in 2007, the last three dancing bears in Bulgaria—Misho, Svetla, and Mima—were taken away from the Stanev family.
Yagoda: A town whose bear keepers were famous, though poorer than their colleagues in the north of the country. The Bulgarians used to say with a sneer that every resident of Yagoda had a bear at home.
Loznitsa: This village was the birthplace of Pencho Kubadinski, who hid with Gypsy bear keepers during the Second World War and later became one of the best known Bulgarian Communists—a close friend and colleague of Todor Zhivkov.
Sofia: Here in the capital city, only a few years ago, you could still see bear keepers in trams, at housing developments, and even outside stores or lottery-ticket sales outlets. They played the gadul
ka—a traditional string instrument—and begged for handouts.
Varna, Golden Sands: Not many years ago, before Bulgaria joined the European Union, the most popular Bulgarian resorts were still full of bear keepers and their animals.
INTRODUCTION
The guy with the wacky hair and the crazed look in his eyes did not appear out of nowhere. He was already known to them. Sometimes he said how great they were, and told them to go back to their roots; if need be, he threw in some highly unlikely but madly alluring conspiracy theory. Just to get them to listen. And to give them a fright. Because he’d noticed that if he scared them, they paid him more attention.
They’d gotten used to him being there, and to the fact that now and then, with a totally straight face, he said something unintentionally hilarious. Sometimes he hovered on the fringes of political life, sometimes closer to the mainstream, but he was generally regarded as a mild eccentric.
Until one fine day they rubbed their eyes in amazement. Because the guy with the wacky hair had entered the race for one of the highest offices in the land. And just as before, here he was, trying to scare them again—with talk of refugees, war, and unprecedented disaster. With anything at all. He was also trying to pump up the national ego. In the process—in the eyes of the so-called elite—he was making a bit of a fool of himself. But he was also making big promises. Above all, he promised to turn back time, and make things the way they used to be. In other words, better.
And he won.
You know where this happened? Yes, you’re right. In our part of the world. In post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. In Regime-Change Land.
* * *
• • •
Regime-Change Land is the lava that began to pour from the volcano known as the “Soviet Union and its satellites” shortly before it erupted and ceased to exist. Our part of the world did of course have an earlier existence—the Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, and Czechs, for example, have long histories. But since World War II we had been living in the Soviet sphere of influence, put on ice by the agreements concluded at Yalta by Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, which had left us on the dark side of the balance of power.
The lava began to flow in Poland on June 4, 1989, when the first (almost) free elections were held.
Then the Berlin Wall came down. And the lava really began to flow.
Soon after that, the Soviet Union came apart, and so did the whole post-Yalta order.
We became free. Not just the Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, and Czechs, but also the Estonians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Kirghiz, Tajiks, Kazakhs, and others. A large part of the world gained freedom, for which it was not prepared. In the most extreme cases it wasn’t expecting or even wanting it.
* * *
• • •
The story of the dancing bears was first told to me by Krasimir Krumov, a Bulgarian journalist I met in Warsaw.
For years on end, he said, these bears had been trained to dance, and had been treated very cruelly. Their owners kept them at home. They taught them to dance by beating them when they were small. They knocked out their teeth, to make sure the bears would never suddenly remember they were stronger than their keepers. They broke the animals’ spirits. They got them drunk on alcohol—many of the bears were hooked on strong drink forever after. And then they made them perform tricks for tourists—dancing, imitating various celebrities, and giving massages.
Then, in 2007, when Bulgaria joined the European Union, the keeping of bears was outlawed. An Austrian organization called Four Paws opened a special park in a place called Belitsa, not far from Sofia, and the bears were taken from their keepers and relocated there. Gone was the whip, the brutality, the nose ring that—according to the people from Four Paws—symbolized the bears’ captivity. A unique project began: to teach freedom to animals that had never been free. Step by step. Little by little. Cautiously.
The animals were taught how a free bear is supposed to move about. How to hibernate. How to copulate. How to obtain food. The park at Belitsa became an unusual “freedom research lab.”
As I listened to Krumov, it occurred to me that I was living in a similar research lab. Ever since the transition from socialism to democracy began in Poland in 1989, our lives have been a kind of freedom research project—a never-ending course in what freedom is, how to make use of it, and what sort of price is paid for it. We have had to learn how free people take care of themselves, of their families, of their futures. How they eat, sleep, make love—because under socialism the state was always poking its nose into its citizens’ plates, beds, and private lives.
And, just like the bears of Belitsa, sometimes we cope better with our newfound freedom, sometimes worse. Sometimes it gives us satisfaction, but sometimes it provokes our resistance. Sometimes our aggression too.
* * *
• • •
A few years after I first met Krumov, I went to the Dancing Bears Park in Belitsa. I wanted to know what a freedom lab was like. I learned that:
the bears are given their freedom gradually, in small doses. It can’t be given to them all at once, or they’d choke on it.
freedom has its limits; for the bears, the limit is an electrified wire fence.
for those who have never experienced it before, freedom is extremely complicated. It is very difficult for bears to get used to a life in which they have to care for themselves. Sometimes it simply can’t be done.
And I learned that for every retired dancing bear, the moment comes when freedom starts to cause it pain. What does it do then? It gets up on its hind legs and starts to dance. It repeats the very thing the park employees are trying their best to get it to unlearn: the behavior of the captive. As if it would prefer its keeper to come back and take responsibility for its life again. “Let him beat me, let him treat me badly, but let him relieve me of this goddamned need to deal with my own life,” the bear seems to be saying.
* * *
• • •
Guys with wacky hair who promise a great deal have been springing up in our part of the world like mushrooms after rain. And people go running after them, like bears after their keepers. Because freedom has brought not just new opportunities and new horizons—it has also brought new challenges. Unemployment, which under socialism they never knew. Homelessness. Capitalism, often in a very wild form. And like the bears, people would sometimes prefer their keepers to come back and relieve them of at least some of the challenges. To take at least some of the weight off their backs.
While I was gathering the material for this book, I thought it was going to be about Central and Eastern Europe, and the difficulties of our emergence from Communism. But in the meantime, guys with wacky hair and a crazed look in their eyes have started to appear in countries that have never experienced Communism. It turns out that fear of a changing world, and longing for someone who will relieve us of some of the responsibility for our own lives, who promise that life will be the same as it was in the past, are not confined to Regime-Change Land. In half the West empty promises are made, wrapped in shiny paper like candy.
And for this candy, people are happy to get up on their hind legs and dance.
Part One
I. Love
1.
Gyorgy Marinov hides his face in his right hand, and with his left taps the ash from his cigarette onto the ground, which in the village of Dryanovets is a deep-brown color that passes here and there into black. We’re sitting outside his house, which is coated in gray plaster. Marinov is a little over seventy, but he’s not bent double yet, although in Dryanovets, a village in northern Bulgaria inhabited mainly by Gypsies, very few men live to his age.
It’s not much better for the women either. There’s a death notice pinned to the door frame of Marinov’s house with a picture of a woman only a little younger than he is. It’s his wife—she died last year.
If you go through th
at door, passing a cart, a mule, and a heap of junk along the way, you come to a dirt floor. In the middle of the room there’s a metal pole stuck into the ground. A female bear called Vela spent almost twenty years tied to it.
“I loved her as if she were my own daughter,” says Marinov, as he casts his mind back to those mornings on the Black Sea when he and Vela, dependent on each other, pointed their noses in the direction of the water, had a quick bite of bread, and then set off to work along the road as the asphalt rapidly heated up. And those memories make him melt, just as the sunshine would melt the asphalt in those days, and he forgets about his cigarette until the lighted tip starts to burn his fingers; then he tosses the butt onto the brown-and-black earth, and he’s back in Dryanovets, outside his gray house with the death notice pinned to the door frame.
“As God is my witness, I loved her as if she were human,” he says, shaking his head. “I loved her like one of my immediate family. She always had more than enough bread. The best alcohol. Strawberries. Chocolate. Candy bars. I’d have carried her on my back if I only could. So if you say I beat her, or that she had a bad time with me, you’re lying.”
2.
Vela first appeared at the Marinovs’ house at the beginning of the gloomy 1990s, when Communism collapsed, and in its wake the collective farms, known in Bulgaria as TKZS—trudovo kooperativno zemedelsko stopanstvo, or “labor cooperative farms”—began to go under. “I was a tractor driver at the TKZS in Dryanovets. I drove a Belarus tractor and I loved my job,” says Marinov. “If I could have, I’d have worked at the collective farm to the end of my days. Nice people. The work was tough sometimes, but it was in the open air. We never lacked a thing.”
But in 1991 the TKZS began to slow down. The manager called Marinov in and told him that under capitalism a tractor driver must not only drive a tractor but also help with the cows, and the sowing, and the harvest. Marinov had helped people to do other jobs on very many occasions anyway, so he couldn’t see any problem. The manager replied that he understood all that, but that even if his tractor drivers were multifunctional, he couldn’t keep twelve of them on under capitalism—because until then there had been twelve at the TKZS in Dryanovets. At most, he could keep three. Marinov was made redundant.