ABSTRACT
The theme of ‘culture and the Cold War’ on the Bulgarian political and cultural landscape of the 1970s is seen in the existence of specific intellectual resistance whose typology results both from the characteristics of the domestic context and from the policy of ‘preventive repression’ led by President Todor Zhivkov, who was omnipresent on the cultural stage. The phrase ‘Sofia Spring’ symbolizes the whole movement of cultural and political opening, at a time when successes were achieved mostly through indirect efforts by Bulgarian artists attempting to reform the system of realistic socialism from the inside.
