2024 Recipient

Victor Petrov

Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain

The Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, established in 1995 and sponsored by the Jelavich estate, is awarded annually for a distinguished monograph published on any aspect of Southeast European or Habsburg Studies since 1600, or nineteenth and twentieth century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history in the previous calendar year. 

Winner: Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (MIT Press, 2023) 

In Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain, Victor Petrov masterfully tells the story of communist Bulgaria’s computer industry from its inception in the 1950s through the end of the communist period in 1989. Through rigorous analysis of an impressive array of scientific reports, Communist Party intelligence documents, oral histories, and magazines, comics, and science fiction, Petrov illuminates the inner workings of the state socialist project of modernity and the complex ways that the utopian promise of cybernetics shaped Bulgarian economics, science, culture, and society. Balkan Cyberia makes transformative interventions into several fields of scholarship. As a study in science and society, it shows how international technology and scientific knowledge shaped the production of knowledge and ideas behind the Iron Curtain. Computers, Petrov reveals, were not politically or ideologically neutral: their political purposes shaped their design, while the ideologies of states and scientists shaped their form and function. As a history of the state socialist project, Balkan Cyberia illuminates the possibilities and successes of utopian thinking in science, technology and economics. In the state socialist project, the computer—as mass object—was imagined to be a means of improving the human condition. Far from the dull, gray world of Cold War propaganda, Petrov uncovers a world filled with vibrant ideas about how technological inventions could create a more just, egalitarian world, and how a small state in Eastern Europe could become a global leader in this effort. Relatedly, the book sheds new light on the history of the international Cold War by revealing how scientific and technological exchange motivated Eastern bloc relations, notably through the work of the Comecon, as well as through a network of global computing entanglements that stretched from Bulgaria to India and the United States. To this end, Petrov rejects the idea of a Cold War binary, and instead argues for analyzing the complex web of global politics in which socialist states worked closely with decolonizing states and western capitalist states in the creation of new economic markets and new intellectual spaces for scientific exchange. Balkan Cyberia is as creative as it is rigorous, opening up many new avenues for scholarly exploration into the study of the socialist and post-socialist worlds, and of Eastern Europe’s place in the history of science and technology.   

Prize Committee: Emily Greble (chair), Theodora Dragostinova, and Vladimir Kulic