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assigned to one room and at one point Adbul Malik, the distinguished
Egyptian sociologist currently in exile in Paris, had to convene his group
on the floor of a corridor. Large groups were given small rooms and
small groups found themselves in large ones.
There were other episodes. The Prime Minister had invited some
300 of the participants (chosen from among session chairmen, rap–
porteurs, and so on) to a closed reception, but the Organizing Com–
mittee had printed the time and place of the event on the program.
Bulgarian police and plainclothesmen took the invitations at the foot
of a hotel staircase (some were promptly handed over the bannister be–
hind their backs to uninvited sociologists) and pushed back hundreds of
others. A British university lecturer was thrown down the staircase and
a German teaching assistant wh.o remonstrated with the police was
rather thoroughly roughed up. No apologies were tendered, but the Bul–
garian sociologists did plead with their foreign colleagues to treat the
incident as a "provocation." By this time, however, the irritation and
disgust of many of the participants with the course of the Congress
were quite audible, and even the least perceptive of our hosts began to
wish us gone. The International Hotel, where the recepti.on was held,
returned to its daily routine before the sociologists had left. An earlier
set of guests had been thrown out of their rooms and transferred to
other hotels upon our arrival (scheduled, after all, only two years in
advance). Now a curious mixture of German tourists and stocky native
big shots filled its lobby. The latter were well protected: the detectives
I'd first seen around the Prime Minister were very visible. Their com–
portment was such as to suggest that the "defense of socialism" was
consonant with Turkish manners: they made themselves conspicuous
by shoving aside women at the elevators. The Bulgarian elite enjoyed
ostentatious privileges and showed hopelessly provincial and petit-bour–
geois taste. The big shots drove about with motorcycle police escorts
who compelled all traffic on broad and empty roads t.o stop while they
passed. Their limousines had white chintz curtains. Pathetic Bulgaria?
Like many nations once ruled by the Turks, its people seemed broken
in culture and spirit. And to Orientalism was added Stalinism.
Was there any scholarly value at all to the conference? A con–
siderable number of sociologists had doubted it ahead of time, and
stayed away. Aron, Bell, Bendix, Bottomore, Casanova, Dahrendorf,
Etzioni, Gellner, Gouldner, Lefebvre, Habermas, Pizzorno, Supek and
Worsley were among the absentees. Adam Schaff, apparently swept
aside by the recent Polish campaign against "revisionists" (and Jews),
was missing. His Warsaw colleague Zygmunt Bauman had chosen the
road of exile - or return - to Tel Aviv and did not travel to Bulgaria.
