PARTISAN REVIEW
87
with simple matters, our Bulgarian hosts may indeed have acted largely
in
good faith. The result was as good as purposeful sabotage.
Even a great satirist could barely do justice to the scene. The
participants from Eastern Europe were lodged mostly in hotels ten kilo–
meters distant from the resort town of Gold Strand, where the rest of
us were housed. There was no list of participants with their local ad–
dresses, although there was under the counter of a Balkantourist desk
a preliminary list of bookings arranged by hotels - an inaccurate one.
Only one hotel had telephones in its rooms, and in any event reception–
ists and clerks at the other hotels were usually unable to find the names
of their guests on their registers. A bus service did shuttle back and
forth between Gold Strand and the Congress meeting sites at the
Palace of Culture and Sport and the University in Varna. The Eastern
Europeans, however, had buses only at the beginning of sessions and
mealtimes. It was not easy for them to get to Gold Strand for those
extracurricular talks which frequently constitute the life of a scholarly
conference.
The participants had been instructed, in the strictest terms, to ship
their papers in advance to the Bulgarian organizing committee. Many
who did never saw their papers again. Some never arrived, others were
given out at random, so that none were left for the sessions for which
they were intended, and still others were strewn in such disorder that
hours of their authors' searching were required to extricate them from
the pile. Four out of every five summaries in the printed volume of
abstracts were by authors from Eastern Europe. The daily Congress Bul–
letin, issued in Bulgarian, French and English, invariably stressed the con–
tributions from Eastern Europe. The Bulletin outdid itself, however, on
the second day. There was no space, its anonymous editors explained,
for conveying changes of room, modifications of programs and other
notices - these were too numerous. We were favored, instead, with the
full text of the address of greeting delivered the day before by His
Excellency, the Prime Minister of the Bulgarian People's Republic.
To these difficulties of communication were added others. The
Italians who constituted the secretariat of the International Sociological
Association negotiated for several days during the Congress to ob–
tain a bulletin board in the Palace of Culture. Their request had been
agreed to by the Bulgarian organizers, but the Palace personnel simply
removed it. The gallery was stacked during the opening address by the
Prime Minister with persons who wore Party membership buttons, but
local students and the local populace could not attend the discussions:
entrance to the buildings was by congress badge only. Meanwhile, room
allocations were constantly shifted about, two groups were sometimes
