What Socialism Got Right

Twenty years ago, in November of 2005, Duke University Press published my first book: “The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea.” Produced in the wake of socialism’s global collapse and the riot of Western triumphalism that ensued, I deployed both qualitative and quantitative methods to advance a simple, but unpopular, argument: For most people in the former Soviet bloc, capitalism sucked.

By writing the “small histories” of men and women laboring in Bulgaria’s vibrant tourism industry in the decade following their country’s mad dash to embrace democracy and free markets, I explored how and why this small southeastern European country transformed from a relatively predictable, orderly, egalitarian society into a chaotic, lawless world of astonishing inequality and injustice. I wrapped my critiques of the rampant neoliberalism of the “Wild, Wild, East” in thickly descriptive accounts of the lives of chambermaids, bartenders, tour guides, cooks, waitresses, and receptionists. I wanted to show, not tell.

Through a close examination of the shattered careers and broken families of ordinary men and women forced to live through the cataclysmic decade of the 1990s, I asked readers to empathize with the sheer scale of the upheavals of banking collapses, hyperinflation, unemployment, violence, suicide, and the mass emigration of youth. Capitalism promised prosperity and freedom, but for many it delivered little more than poverty and despair. The dislocations of the transition period, as I’ve documented in my subsequent books, still reverberate today. One can easily draw a straight line from the trauma of the 1990s to the rise of right-wing parties and authoritarian leaders in the region.

Perhaps more controversial, especially back in 2005, was my claim that, despite some serious shortcomings, there were some positive aspects of socialism that should not be forgotten. In those heady days of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” narrative about the primacy of liberal democracy and free markets, to suggest that there was a baby in the bathwater was political heresy. In this contemporary moment, with a Democratic Socialist set to take office as mayor of New York City, it may be hard to remember how passé socialism seemed in the first decade of the 21st century. Jacobin Magazine did not yet exist; Bernie Sanders had not yet run for president; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not yet entered Congress. In an academic climate dominated by poststructuralist critiques of power, even mild sympathies for socialism drew fire from both the anti-communist right and the postmodern left.

As a young academic, I was perhaps too naïve to anticipate the sort of vitriolic criticism I would receive by listening carefully to my older informants, researching socialist-era legal codes, and conducting two large anonymous surveys of tourism workers. Although I dutifully corroborated my various findings and wrote an honest description of what life in socialist Bulgaria had been like for ordinary people, some reviewers accused me of having been duped by communist disinformation. For example, one 2007 review in the journal Aspasia suggested that: “Ghodsee’s analysis is problematic because sometimes interpretations fall into the trap of sociological legends fabricated by communist propaganda.” As an apparent example of these “sociological legends,” the reviewer quotes me: “Bulgarian women once benefited from generous maternity leaves, free education, free healthcare, free or subsidized child care, communal kitchens and canteens, communal laundries, subsidized food and transport, subsidized holidays on the Black Sea, etc. (p. 165).” All of this was true, and the reviewer did not present any evidence to the contrary.

The Aspasia reviewer acknowledged that “many, especially among the less educated (near) pension-age women in Bulgaria” did believe that the coming of capitalism had deprived them of these universal basic services, but she maintained that this was only because they had been brainwashed by the socialist system. My Bulgarian informants in the late 1990s were apparently incapable of understanding that capitalism would bring higher salaries with which one could purchase supposedly better-quality housing, education, healthcare, and childcare, and that this would be far preferable to having lower wages but receiving these things for free. The reviewer then asked: “The question is, why would a researcher ‘from outside’ buy into this propaganda in a similar way?”

Part of the “propaganda” that I apparently bought into was that the radical dismantling of social safety nets following the introduction of free market economies would push millions of Bulgarians into poverty, and that the process would be distinctly gendered to most women’s disadvantage. This turned out simply to be true, as I and others have documented (see Milanovic 2014, Ghodsee 2018, and Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021, for example). You didn’t need to be a Marxist to understand the black humor behind common jokes being told in the late 1990s:

Q: What did Bulgarians light their homes with before they used candles?

A: Electricity.

Q: What was the worst thing about communism?

A: The thing that came after it.

This is not to deny that there were some appalling things about the communist regimes, including its lack of genuinely representative government, its attacks on political speech the government didn’t like, and its use of repressive and secretive police outside the rule of law. One should condemn such infringements of basic human rights, both as they occurred under communism and as they are happening now in the United States.

However, constantly preaching about the negative aspects of 20^th-century state socialism can make it harder for us to see the things that socialism got right. It may even be a deliberate strategy. Those with the most to gain from capitalism want us to forget the good things that happened under socialism, lest we try to do anything to change a system in which wealth flows up into the hands of the rich and powerful.

Doing the research necessary to write “The Red Riviera”convinced me that there are indeed many things we can learn from the experiences of those who lived through a real and relatively long-lasting alternative to capitalism. The experiences of socialist countries in Eastern Europe remind us that societies can achieve a great deal when they treat people’s basic needs as a shared responsibility. Education, healthcare, childcare, housing, and a reasonable, minimal standard of living were seen not as privileges, but as something we should collectively guarantee for all.

My subjects did complain about having to wake up early for neighborhood work on a “Lenin Saturday,” but also noted that socialism promoted a belief in the power of community and the dignity of every person’s contribution. Women entered schools and workplaces in greater numbers, finding new confidence and independence. Cultural life — music, theater, literature — was made accessible to everyone, helping people feel connected to something larger than themselves. Planned microdistricts (an early version of what are now called “15-minute cities”) and socialist workplaces often became centers of shared activity and mutual support.

Even though these societies faced serious political and economic challenges, their social ideals of equality, solidarity, and collective care remain relevant to us in 2025. They remind us that success isn’t only about material wealth or technology, but about how we choose to care for one another. When an economy is guided by social purpose instead of profit, it can serve the common good and lay a foundation for long-term progress, a lesson that we should all remember as we face the existential threat of the climate crisis.

I’m not as naïve as I was in 2005. These days, I expect that my critics will see me as the hapless victim of red “propaganda” and will accuse me of underplaying the repression that occurred in the Soviet bloc countries.

But I’ve also come to conclude that there is a place for naïveté. Naïvely listening to how ordinary people remember their lives (even the “less educated (near) pension-age women”!) can be far better than going into a project with preconceived ideas about how your subjects have been brainwashed by propaganda from an evil system and without fear about how you will be criticized for taking those subjects seriously.

I’ve learned that good scholarship, like good politics, depends on empathy as much as on evidence. Listening carefully to how ordinary people remember their lives under socialism isn’t an endorsement; it’s an effort to understand what they valued and why. Those memories, often complex and sometimes contradictory, reveal the texture of daily life that grand theories tend to miss. They remind us that the past is never as simple as our ideologies make it out to be. If we can take those lessons seriously, if we can listen with curiosity rather than judgment, we might find inspiration for new forms of solidarity and care in the uncertain world we inhabit today.

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and an award-winning author of several books, including “The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea,” published by Duke University Press. She is also the host of the podcast A.K. 47 – Forty-seven Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai.

This article was first published on Duke University Press’s blog and appears here with permission.