‘Modernization’ in terms of state-organized urbanization, industrialization and emancipation was one of the important goals of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. It became an important measure for the achievements of socialism, epitomizing the degree at which society was approaching the final stage of communism. In every socialist country this process worked out differently, each having its own specific local agendas and dynamics. Yet there was enough common ground to be able to speak of shared patterns and characteristics of socialist ‘modernization’. In the immediate postwar decades, for instance, the emphasis was put on fast-track industrialization and urbanization. Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, most socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe abandoned this ideologically driven programme of rapid industrial development, reaching a social and political compromise which Creed (1998) has called the ‘domesticated revolution’ in Bulgaria's case. It is often argued that this compromise between the regime and the population heralded the transformation of socialist society into a consumerist society, by inserting the practice of consumption into the experience of socialist modernity (Brunnbauer and Taylor 2004; Taylor 2006).

Yet in Bulgaria the situation was in many respects specific. In some parts of the country, for instance in the Rhodope Mountains, on which I will be concentrating in this chapter, Bulgarian socialist modernization, even during the 1970s, closely resembled the 1920s Soviet experiment of fast-track modernization, of rapid and forced industrialization and urbanization (Kotkin 1995).