Tom Junes1; 1 Polish Academy of Sciences (ISP PAN), Poland
Discussion
This paper will discuss the Ninth World Festival of Youth and Students in Sofia through the double prism of multinational youth rebellion and the emerging crisis of Soviet-style state socialism. It will do so by placing it within intersecting political developments of the European and Global 1968 on the one hand and the socialist bloc on the other hand while underlining that the Festival was in fact the largest single event involving the young generation of the sixties in an international setting. Therefore, the paper will demonstrate that the Festival became an explosive microcosm in which these political developments reverberated from a youthful perspective – from the student rebellions in North America and Western Europe to the student revolts in Poland and Yugoslavia, from decolonisation and liberation struggles in the Global South to the Cultural Revolution in China and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. The paper will then proceed to analyse the problems the socialist regimes were facing when dealing with youth in the run-up to the Festival. Subsequently, the paper will elaborate on several pitfalls that the Bulgarian Communist regime and its youth organisation, the Dimitrov Komsomol, faced in organising a mass event to promote Soviet internationalist hegemony at a time when it was contested and undermined in a variegated and multipolar way. These pitfalls were constituted by problems of legitimacy of the organisational bodies, problems of representation, problems of discrimination, and problems of ideological divergence. Finally, the paper will reflect on the impact and legacy of the Festival, both domestically and internationally, in an attempt to answer why this mass event has been forgotten or perhaps even ignored in the ever-growing amount of literature on the Global 1968.
