Baby it’s cold outside. And the New York Times is finally writing about Bulgaria. We’ve been without gas since last Tuesday. That’s January 6th for anyone counting and so it’s official we’ve been without gas for seven days. Early on Bulgaria had a small gas reserve and we may still but the huge problem is that our country is 100% dependent on Russia for natural gas.
This morning the New York Times (NYT) finally decided to write about what it means for Bulgarians not to have natural gas in the article Memo from Sofia: Without gas, Bulgaria turns icy to old ally. (The article made the front page of the online edition with a photo and everything and when I saw it I thought, it’s about time.)
The story tells about one old woman who huddles near her electric stove for warmth and a young mother with a brand new baby. It also mentions that major industries in Bulgaria have closed because they can’t keep up with production without natural gas–these industries include glass, steel and beer. Then there’s the alliance with Russia that has been strengthened over the past few years by pro-Russian Bulgarian politicians. The country is 100% dependent on Russian natural gas and the article explains why every-day Bulgarians are angry about this. It’s a good article don’t get me wrong but it seems to have missed something.
The complacency.
While people express some anger about the situation, in day to day life mostly they treat it as a minor annoyance–no heat, no hot water. Nonetheless, people still go about their lives–they go to work, eat out in restaurants and drink, drink, drink. Maybe it’s because there’s not a lot else that they can do about it or in the relative scheme of things given life in Bulgaria for the last fifty years it’s no big deal. Still as an American it strikes me as strange.
In Washington DC, if the weather forecast suggests that a snow storm is on the way people get crazy about it. You go to grocery store and the lines are into the food isles and people have their shopping carts full of milk, toilet paper and canned food as if the end of the world is coming rather than a few inches of snow. Here in Sofia we’ve got inches of snow, no end in sight to the cold weather and to top it off no gas and people are just sort of humph about the whole thing.
What stands out to me, today, is the fact that the Bulgarians I’ve talked to are more angry at Russia than their own government. Even though, their own government is in part responsible for an energy policy that depends fully on natural gas from Russia. The NYT piece ends suggesting that this natural gas crisis will change the shape of politics in Bulgaria and that the socialist government which was pro-Russia will be voted out and the new party will reorient Bulgaria to the politics of Europe and Washington. But given the relative complacency of the people I’ve been talking to I wonder if this will actually materialize.
Thus, it’s an interesting question: will this crisis be enough to shake up Bulgarian politics? I think that right now it will all rest on how cold it gets here, how long we are without gas and what the final solution is.
The opposition will try to use the situation as a trump card, but people will forget the crisis by the end of this month…
The Bulgarians are good at surviving, and every generation has experiencies like this, which shapes the national character. This is a puny crisis compared to the stuff that people have seen.
It’s an eastern bloc mentality – one secretly feels good for surviving against the odds… you actually feel like a winner.
And we’ve also been surviving for 500 years under the turks. It’s in the genes of the Bulgarians to avoid the state, to hate it passionately and to try to cheat it… The complacency is just the genetic wisdom that it’s useless to waste your energy on things which don’t depend on you.
[...] help but think about an observation I’d written about recently on my blog–the complacency of Bulgarians given the natural gas [...]