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I have been coming to Bulgaria fairly frequently for nearly a decade and am in close and regular contact by email. I have felt honored to be asked to come here and then asked again. I am particularly pleased to be honored by you today. Thank you.
I am far from being an expert on your country, much less on the other countries in the former Soviet bloc, but I have always been interested in them. I used to listen secretly to Radio Moscow on short wave as a boy in Texas, fearing that I would one day be arrested for doing so, such was the paranoid atmosphere of that time. It was a time when we suffered virulent McCarthyist anti-Communist witch hunts, especially in Texas. When I eventually visited Russia in the early 1970s, I was assured that there was every reason to feel worried about human rights there. We were followed, spied on, and reported on, and women sought me out in order to compromise me.
I was told in no uncertain terms by Russian scholars that things had been and still were awful for academics as well as everyone else. For example, in biology and the history of biology it was fatal to question the pseudo-science of Lysenkoism. (Lest we be too complacent about this blatant undermining of science, I remind you that obscurantism never dies: in the American state of Kansas the teaching of evolution in the schools has in recent weeks been made very difficult by the Board of Education, and creationists are making similar inroads on Darwinian science in other American states.) When I was later close to the daughter of the former head of the Soviet Writers' Union, who became a colleague of mine at Cambridge, she told me dreadful things, so dreadful that her father had killed himself in the wake of Kruschev's revelations at the Twentieth Party Conference. She was very graphic in her descriptions of the hardships people experienced in the Soviet Union. I am sorry to say that she was herself so damaged by events in her childhood that she killed herself in London some yea