Bulgarians are divided on whether the years of the Liberation until 9 September 1944 were good or bad years for Bulgaria. The same is the percentage of people who want to live after 10 November 1989 and people preferring the years before 10 November 1989.

These are just some of the main findings of the first part of a nationally representative study of Trend Research Center, commissioned by Andrei Kovachev, MEP from the EPP Group. The survey was conducted between 18 and 26 October 2017 among 1005 adult Bulgarian citizens through the face-to-face method.

Positive and negative associations for the period from the Liberation to 9 September 1944 are relatively evenly divided. On the one hand, accumulations around the rise and development (15%), historical events such as Independence (5%), Liberation (4%), Unification (3%), but the memory of national catastrophes (8%), world wars (6%) are also part of our national memory of the period. It is noteworthy that 44% of all respondents can not make any association with this period. This is due to somewhat lesser knowledge of the respondents over the period, as well as its historical distance.

The public is split of the assessment for the period of post-liberation Bulgaria clearly revealed the question whether these were good or bad years for Bulgaria, with 31% believing that these were good years, while 30% are in the opposite opinion. Still, 41% believe that in the period from the Liberation until 1944 Bulgaria has gone in the right direction. However, there is high share of people who do not know or can not judge (43%).

Due to the historical closeness to the communist period, a higher percentage of respondents managed to associate the years from 1944 to 1989. Here the positive assessments mostly related to the social achievements of communism - work for everyone (16%), tranquility (11%), free healthcare and education (8% / 7%). Then come negative associations such as censorship and limitation of personal freedoms (5%), repression (4%), exclusion and travel ban (2%). Here we can express the hypothesis that the majority of the youngest age groups are abstaining to respond to what the communist regime most commonly relates to because they did not live in that period. The units of refusal to answer the question among the eldest are minimal, which to a large extent forms the public picture on this issue.

The majority of respondents (52%) are of the opinion that the Communist regime has committed crimes against people, while only 17% do not share that opinion.

During the interviews, respondents were put in a position to choose at what time they would prefer to live - in the current one, after 10 November 1989 or before the regime change. The community is totally divided in answering this question, with each option collecting 41% of the responses. The breakdown by age shows serious dynamics. Only a fifth of people between 18 and 39 want to live in the period before November 10, while more than two-thirds of people over 60 would prefer socialism.

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