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OCR
444 Anelia Kassabova runaways from school; the “Comrades court”; the battle between the school director 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 Delinquency’) 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 measures. As a formal reason for the “Hooligan action”, a murder committed in a metropolitan 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 Western 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-educational hostels” (trudovo-vazpitatelno obshtezhitie), where forced labor was considered 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.
