Communism And my part in its downfall
How one man fostered a vibrant youth scene out of the rubble of a fallen state.
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1989 was a definitive year in the late 20th Century. A social order inspired by the architects of the Bolshevik Revolution ran aground on rocks of protest, as the people of the communist states of Eastern and Central Europe took a stand for personal freedom. For a then eighteen-year-old Bulgarian skateboarder called Alex Kyourkiev, the events that took hold of the streets that year sent his life, and the youth culture of this vital part of the Eastern Bloc, into a wholly new and unforeseen direction. In the decades that followed he would go from poster-child for the Communist Youth Union to counter-cultural icon. His is a story doubtless repeated throughout the former Soviet Bloc: by skateboarders Martin Karas in Czechoslovakia and Kuba Prezyna in Poland. A story repeated anywhere that time and place have synchronised the anger of youth with a wider feeling on the wind. Where the underground cultures attracting all the disparate disaffected - the punks, skaters, drop-outs, hippies, student activists, musicians - have shown that by bucking the system you unveil its vulnerability and somehow, amongst the rubble, bring about change.
When skateboarding first came to Alex in 1987, it appeared as a rare and coveted portal to a Western way of life. “My dad used to work for the national telephone company so he always had a room reserved in the local post office accommodation,” says Alex, delving into a back story for the benefit of Western heads. “It was a tenet of communism that individual tradesmen holidayed together en masse. A few resorts had foreign tourists and I remember seeing a skateboard there for the first time - it seemed amazing fun. So when I was working on the Sunday market stall, selling imported “original” heavy metal badges and patches at the age of sixteen, I was offered a proper skateboard in exchange for three heavy metal badges. Under the communists it was impossible to get hold of a skateboard or anything that symbolised the Western way of life. I took his arm off for it.”
Ironically, the years preceding the 1989 revolutions took a weird twist for the skate punks of the Eastern Bloc as the communist youth leagues, in their various forms, began to take an interest in sanctioning and federating the movement. “The DKMS [Dimitrov Communist Youth Union] decided to support skateboarding and they started organising events and building ramps,” explains Alex. “I was picked to be a part of the national sponsored team. We were flown by plane to comps around the country and stayed in hotels. We went to Czechoslovakia, to a communist skate camp - which was amazing, by the way. Even now this seems like a mirage - we were sponsored by the state! We bored of the slalom and freestyle quickly and got into vert when a ramp appeared in the Black Sea resort of Varna, and later in Sofia, too. There were a maximum of four ramp skaters, and maybe three roller skaters. Once in winter, at minus-twenty, we paid five Leva [about one pound fifty at the time] for a snow truck to push the snow off the ramp. We ended up mangling the flat bottom doing that!”
Clouds were gathering as the eighties drew to a close, however, and fidelity to the regime was total. National service was mandatory, at the time, and the worst thing that could happen if you were a male turning eighteen. As a country versed in Soviet ways, the Bulgarian army was primarily in the business of breaking and indoctrinating wayward youth. Drinking dye, breaking limbs, heroin addiction and disappearing were the options for an objector.
“From age eighteen, dodging the army was all anybody thought about,” explains Alex. “I saw ten friends fail to break a mate’s arm in order to get out of trouble. I took a gamble. Acceptance to one of Bulgaria’s elite academic institutions could get you a deferment. I’m not an intellectual but I had a skater mate who was. I had him sit the exam for me and with the time that bought me, we fled the country.”
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Communism (text) by Niall Neeson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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