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Anelia Kassabova
runaways from school; the “Comrades court”; the battle between the school direc¬
tor and educators regarding the pedagogical methods used in the school, were all
based on actual conditions and systems in the LES “Violeta Yakova” in the village
of Vranya stena.
The girls’ LES “Violeta Yakova”" in the village of Vranya stena, Pernik region,
West Bulgaria—the model for the school in the film— was founded in 1961 after
Zakon za borba sreshtu detskata prestapnost (‘Law for Combating Juvenile Delin¬
quency’) was passed (Darzhaven Vestnik [“The State Gazette’], February 14, 1958).
The enactment of the law followed mass arrests in the winter of 1957-1958 known
as “Hooligan action’—code name “Thunderbolt event”. During the late 1940s to
1950s, the leaders of the Communist Party and the Bulgarian state, following the
Soviet policy, used repression as a tool for securing the functioning of the socialist
system for defeating the opposition (Skochev 2012; Gruev 2015). These policies
became relatively liberalized during the de-Stalinization in the so-called Thaw of
Khrushchev rule, but the uprising in Hungary 1956 reinforced repressive meas¬
ures. As a formal reason for the “Hooligan action”, a murder committed in a met¬
ropolitan tram at the end of December 1957 was given. On January 21, 1958, the
Politburo of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party decided
that the Ministry of Interior would isolate in forced labor camps “the hooligans,
blatant and harmful for the public order and tranquility; thieves-recidivists and
other decomposed element””’ (Skochev 2012). Hooliganism was a concept widely
used in the propaganda of the Soviet Union during Khrushchev’s rule in the second
half of the 1950s. The meaning of the term expanded and replaced “class enemy”
(Gruev 2015). Former “contra revolutionists” and intellectuals who opposed the
regime were labeled hooligans, as were criminals and all youth oriented to West¬
ern values—dressing in Western styles, listening to or performing Western music,
wearing trendy hairstyles, listening to Western radio stations and so forth. None
of the detainees was interned as political prisoners; all were declared hooligans.
Intentionally, very different categories of people were put together in the forced
labor camps. One of the ways to stigmatize people opposing the regime and to try
to force them into obedience was applying to them the fabricated, undifferentiated
image of Other, as hooligans, and for girls and women, as the image of immorality,
of hussies and prostitutes.'° Of the 1,328 detainees of the January—February 1958
Hooligan action, 1,145 were sent to forced labor camps, the so called “labor-edu¬
cational hostels” (trudovo-vazpitatelno obshtezhitie), where forced labor was consid¬
ered the leading “method of reeducation”. Of these, 167 were minors; the youngest
inmate was 12 years old and 34 were girls (Skochev 2012).
‘4 Violeta Bohor Jacob was a partisan and a member of a battle group of the Workers’ Party during World
War II.
The operation was led by the Deputy Minister of Interior Mircho Spasov; mobilized was the whole
staff of the Ministry.
16 On the politics of the Bulgarian socialist state towards prostitution see Gruev 2015.