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426 Anton Angelov festing on a workers’ parade down the street. In fact, they dont recognize the new holidays, such as Labour Day, 1 May Day and Women’s Day, March 8. Zozas are often in the company of their fat mother or father under whose influence they live. One of the most popular suggestions in the pictures is also zozas’ and swings incapability of doing manual work. In August 1946, the great construction project began for building the national industrial and transport infrastructure using youth brigades. In this context, the stereotype of the not-working children of the former elite is confronted to the “enthusiasm” of the young construction brigade members (Fig. 2). Starshel satirizes zozas, depicting them working in the brigades with high-heel shoes and heavy makeup or keeping livestock in their bourgeois outfits (Fig. 3). This gloating “revenge” can be associated with the repression and marginalizing of many representatives and whole families of the former elite in rural regions in the country or sending them not just in brigades but to labour camps, which was a reality for some people at that time. Thus, the pictures are not only for fun for the mass public but also a kind of psychological threat and warning for the former high classes. Though the majority of the caricatures from the second half of the 1940s were concentrated on the zozas, the figure of the swings can be also found—usually as young men in smart suits with tight trousers, a hat, small moustaches, sunglasses, a cigarette in mouth. One of the few such pictures presents two swings with their suitcases, entering the army. The picture suggests the contrast between their outfit and behaviour with the reality and purpose of the people’s army barracks and, again, their inability to move the body for efforts, for labour, or for defence. In the drawings from this first period it is hard to find any pictures of what was promoted as “normal” and tolerated by the official discourse entertainment. In the first years after the war, entertainment, the satisfaction of any individual wishes and delivering pleasure seemed to be “inappropriate” as it was opposed to the pathos of the deep social changes, the construction of the new material and moral world, which needed the total mobilization of the masses and the participation of the individual only as a part of the collective. The only possible joy should have been the labour given for the national community, represented by the state. In 1952-1953 new protagonists stir the renewal of the leisure and entertainment discourse. By the early 1950s in the atmosphere of the great political and social dynamics the relicts of the old world have been already marginalized. But the urbanization, the mass migration from village to the city, gives birth to a new problem for the regime, related to the behaviour and tastes of some of the new, young city dwellers. In contrast to the zozas and swings, that category of youngsters is not regarded as relicts from the former urban high classes, though they have some of their features. They are young people in the city, mainly boys in small groups, who can be found in the parks, in the streets, having fun singing loud, playing the guitar, speaking in their own slang, drinking spirits, and smoking cigarettes. The official discourse, which accuses them of disturbing the social order, calls them /uli
