Did you know that Bulgaria became an electronics powerhouse during the Cold War? In an illuminating lecture for CHM Live on September 18, 2025, historian Victor Petrov shared insights from his new book, Balkan Cyberia, a CHM Book Prize winner.
Petrov joked that few people can find Bulgaria on a map. But, in 1981, the small country in Southeastern Europe launched itself into the world of computing with a satellite. Commemorating the 1,300th anniversary of the Bulgarian state, the satellite sent a nationalist message that the country was one of the oldest in Europe and that its Communist leadership was controlling a highly technical society.
In 1944, when the Communists took over, Bulgaria was an agricultural country with few cities and almost no heavy industry. But, by the 1970s and ‘80s, 47% of electronics exports from the Eastern Bloc were Bulgarian, and the industry employed about 13% of the country's workforce—215,000 people out of a population of under 9 million.
By the late 1950s, Bulgaria’s fast-paced industrialization triggered a debt crisis, and the ruling Communist Party realized it needed a cash cow. For a country without many natural resources, an industry that needed only capital and labor was ideal. Electrical engineer Ivan Popov, who was pursuing a PhD in East Germany, convinced the Party leadership that mass producing computers was the answer.
The first Bulgarian computer was the Vitosha. Built in 1962 with vacuum tubes and lamps, development of the machine was rushed in order to present it in an exhibit in Moscow. It apparently needed so much power that a Russian engineer had to be bribed with brandy to steal power from the Indian delegation’s pavilion. In any case, the Vitosha was a key step forward.
Victor Petrov explains early mass production of electronics in Bulgaria.
The success of ELKA calculators wasn’t enough for the ruling party, who wanted billions in profits. Through his connections with the head of Fujitsu in Japan, Ivan Popov secured the first license to mass produce computers in the Eastern Bloc—a functional copy of the Fujitsu FACOM, called the ZIT in Bulgaria. From 1965 to 1969, hundreds of of engineers trained in Japan to produce 20 of the machines. When they returned home, they brought with them ideas about the Japanese style of management and work that differed sharply from socialism.
By the 1970s, the computing industry was bringing in billions. Bloc countries cooperated to build IBM 360 compatible computers, and Bulgaria produced the processors. The conglomerate also reverse-engineered minicomputers when they came on the scene and then the personal computer, all with components from Eastern Bloc countries. Bulgaria’s Pravetz PC was introduced in 1979 and mass produced and exported. At a cost of more than a year's salary, it wasn't accessible to the average Bulgarian.
Unique machines were made in addition to IBM copies, like the MIK-16 that operated on the Russian Mir space station. For Bulgaria, the most lucrative products were memory devices, bought in large quantities and at high prices by the Soviet military, among other customers. Electronic secrets became the focus of spy games during the Cold War.
Victor Petrov shares stories of tech espionage.
Exploring the computing industry outside of the Cold War framework, Petrov found that Bulgaria exported to 54 countries and that its biggest market in Asia was India. That relationship, he believes, became a conduit for capitalist thinking.
Victor Petrov explains how Indian customers required new thinking.
Petrov also examined how computerization impacted Bulgarian society through the prism of socialism. He found that everything bad that happened on factories and farms was blamed on workers rather than the automated machines that had been introduced by the 1980s. Workers at the time experienced anxiety and physical strain similar to that of people in the industry today. There is evidence that they sabotaged machines.
Engineering and computing also became embedded with creative pursuits and had cultural and gender dimensions. For example, the vast majority of factory workers were women, who, far from receiving the promised benefits of socialism, like three years off to care for a child, instead were expected to breastfeed while programming.
Bulgarian children had a chance to take computer classes, with the home-grown Pravetz computers provided to schools and computer clubs. The last socialist generation, steeped in sci-fi as well as computing, made a memorable contribution to tech history—in the early ‘90s, the vast majority of the world's computer viruses came from Bulgaria.
But today, the computing industry that Petrov studied no longer exists.
Cold War Computing | CHM Live, September 18, 2025
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