Introduction

This chapter is concerned with the short life of the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov (Fig 6.1), built in Sofia in 1949 by the Communist government and theatrically demolished by the democratic authorities in 1999. Born in 1882, in the village of Kovachevtzi in southern Bulgaria, Dimitrov was co-founder of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1919. After leading a Communist uprising in 1923 against the Bulgarian pro-fascist government of Alexander Tzankov, he lived in exile in Vienna and Berlin. In 1933 he was accused of setting fire to the Reichstag during a politically loaded trial which provided the occasion for the exercise of anti-Communist rhetoric and propaganda. After a successful self-defence, in which he famously cross-examined Hermann Göring and transformed the trial into an acknowledged critique of Nazi manipulations, Dimitrov was acquitted. He then moved to Moscow, where he was quickly accepted as a Soviet citizen. Elected General Secretary of the Comintern in 1935, he returned to Soviet-occupied Bulgaria in 1945, where he was leader of the Communist party and of the country from 1946 until his death on 2 July 1949. In the 1990s Dimitrov was thoroughly criticised for the introduction of many of the techniques of Stalinist repression in Bulgaria after 1946, and for his role in the Stalinist purges.

The focus of this chapter is not, however, Dimitrov’s actions in life; instead it studies the one, among the hundreds of monuments erected in his honour, that exposed his dead body in the most direct manner possible. Far from the revolutionary pathos of its demolition and away from the nostalgia for what has been irreversibly lost (memory, the past, history), the Mausoleum presents an important case study for examining attitudes towards heritage on a number of different levels: ideological, political, cultural, historical and social.