Soviet rather
than Bulgarian initiatives.

The failure of the ninth congress to rejuvenate the party hierarchy and
to chart a reform course for the future had repercussions throughout
Bulgarian society. Initiatives in foreign affairs that had been taken in
1965 and 1966 foundered in the retrenchment into party orthodoxy.
Negotiations that had begun with Western European countries as well as
with Balkan neighbors bore no fruit as the Zhivkov government failed to
follow up earlier moves toward better relations. Even more detrimental
to Balkan relations was Bulgarian participation in the Soviet-led
invasion of Czechoslovakia, which Yugoslavia and Romania strongly
opposed. In the cultural area the party tightened its controls over
creative artists and reorganized the Committee on Art and Culture to
better serve the needs of the government. The First Congress of Culture,
held in 1967, emphasized the constructive role of culture in society and
called for an intensification of anti-Western propaganda in order to
counter the dangerous influence of so-called bourgeois culture.

There was also great concern among party leaders about the so-called
nihilistic attitude of the country's young people. In December 1967
Zhivkov published his "Youth Theses" in an attempt to counter what the
party considered to be dangerous apathy on the part of Bulgarian youth.
Zhivkov's theses initiated some institutional reforms that dealt heavily
with patriotic education in an attempt to instill some national pride in
the young people, but about a year later patriotic education was
deemphasized. Evidently the program had aroused strong feelings of
nationalism that interfered with the pro-Soviet attitudes that have been
characteristic of Zhivkov's government. After publication of the "Youth
Theses," all youth activities came under the aegis of the Dimitrov
Communist Youth Union (Dimitrovski Komunisticheski Mladezhki Suyuz),
referred to as Komsomol, which is the junior auxiliary of the BKP. The
moves to politicize young people failed to arouse any widespread
interest, and in the early 1970s Bulgarian youth remained essentially
apolitical and apathetic.

In the economic sector the BKP blueprint for reform commonly referred to
as the New Economic Model offered innovations in decentralized
decisionmaking that delegated more responsibilities to public and state
organizations on the lower level as well as to individual enterprises.
The attention given to