In 1946, our fathers and grandfathers were harnessed by the communist government to keep a number of important infrastructure sites in the country free. With the enthusiasm to build their home and their children’s – Bulgaria, they managed to push our country forward at the cost of voluntary and exhausting work. Those who refused to participate were threatened and punished.
The builders are so many that they are nameless, because practically all young people – the uneducated, minors, officials, soldiers and students – are involved in this volunteering. Former partisans and political prisoners also set an example in construction. The work of each group lasts for several months, after which some builders are replaced by new ones.
On August 5, 1946, 2,075 foremen began digging a first-class road through Hainboaz Pass, named Republic Pass. This is the same pass used during the War of Liberation, when part of the Russian troops came out behind the army of Veysel Pasha, who was guarding the Shipchen pass. In the battle near the village of Sheinovo, the Turkish troops were defeated. Then the pass was abandoned until 1946, when the first assembled youth labor brigade was sent to maintain the road.
The length of the pass is 57.5 km, and the altitude of the saddle is 698 meters. For almost two years, with a lot of manual labor and dynamite to blow up the rocks along the way, the Pass of the Republic was built between the Eleno-Tverdishka and the Trevnenska mountains.
The brigadier movement built today’s Dimitrovgrad with many of its residential buildings and street network, as well as the cement and asbestos factory “Vulkan” near the city, initially for free, and later with minimal pay.
Brigadiers built the railway lines (Lovech – Troyan, Pernik – Voluyak, Samuil – Silistra), the dams “Alexander Stamboliyski” (in the municipalities of Suhindol and Sevlievo), “Georgi Dimitrov” (today’s “Koprinka” in Starozagorsk region), the dam on the river Maritsa and others.
In 1971, the second stage of the foreman training began, in which schoolchildren and students were involved in the harvesting of agricultural produce and its processing in concern enterprises.
When today it is nostalgically said how much was built during the time of socialism and how difficult it is to build today (“What built socialism, you cannot paint” – one of the usual lines on the occasion) it is good to answer the question: Is it possible today to make anyone work for the country for free? The answer is clear.
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