Corruption in Bulgaria is not just a deviation from the rules, but a mechanism through which the system often functions in practice. This is what Kostadin Gramatikov claims, who after many years of living in the USA makes a comparison between the American and Bulgarian models of social organization. According to him, the historical layers inherited from the Ottoman Empire and the communist regime continue to influence the way institutions work, and the lack of trust turns informal relationships into a parallel system for solving problems. What else did he share… Kostadin Gramatikov, who was an emigrant in the USA for nearly 30 years, spoke to FACT.
- Mr. Gramatikov, corruption – is that a “nice” word both in the USA and in Bulgaria. You lived in the States for many years, but you claim that corruption in Bulgaria is not just a defect in the system, but a mechanism by which it functions. How did you come to this conclusion?
- Corruption is a legal way of governing Bulgaria. Unwritten rules, unspoken, but it works flawlessly. When corruption in Bulgaria is discussed, the conversation almost invariably takes place in a legal register: weak prosecutors, insufficient control, low salaries, immoral politicians. This framework is not wrong. It simply does not go deep enough. After decades in California and returning to Bulgaria, I discovered something more difficult to name. Corruption here is not primarily a failure in the system. In many cases, it is the mechanism by which the system actually functions.
The difference is structural, not moral.
In the United States, corruption is largely institutionalized and abstract: lobbying, regulatory capture, financial influence over politics. Systemic, but remote. The ordinary citizen rarely encounters it directly. In Bulgaria, corruption is procedural and personal. It lives in bureaucracy, in meaningless forms, contradictory requirements, discretionary decisions, invisible gatekeepers. The citizen gradually understands that official rules function less as neutral frameworks than as obstacles that must be maneuvered around through informal mediation. You don't just read about corruption in the media. You feel its gravity in every interaction with the state.
- Why does corruption persist despite political changes and numerous anti-corruption campaigns?
- You ask a question that the legal framework cannot answer: why does it persist? Why do governments change, while the lived structure remains fundamentally unchanged? Why do anti-corruption campaigns produce so much rhetoric and so little transformation? The answer is not individual immorality. It is a historical accumulation.
- What are the main layers that, according to you, maintain the corruption model in Bulgaria?
- Corruption in Bulgaria operates through several sedimentary layers, each of which reinforces the others. The deepest is the persistence of clan and patronage logic beneath the surface of the modern state.
Helping relatives, friends and one's network was not just acceptable in conditions of historical uncertainty, it was survival.
Modern bureaucratic states require something psychologically unusual: equal treatment of strangers according to abstract rules. Citizens must trust procedures more than people. This change took centuries even in Western Europe. In Bulgaria, it remains unfinished.
- What is the historical role, is it inherent to be a “human to man“ in order to survive?
- We have to go back to the Ottoman Empire, and then go through the communist period, to answer for the formation of this system – corruption. As a basic layer, we can point to the Ottoman administrative tradition. Under Ottoman rule, the state was hierarchical, personalized and discretionary. People survived not through the law, but through mediation. The intelligent person was not the one who followed the procedure strictly, but the one who knew someone, found the informal channel, negotiated the exception. The Ottoman Empire has disappeared. The administrative psychology that it produced - no. Communism is also a strong layer - not only as an ideology, but as a technology of double consciousness. The official rhetoric proclaimed equality and solidarity. Real life functioned through hidden privileges, party access, and silent exchange. Citizens learned to inhabit two realities simultaneously: the official narrative and the operational truth. When 1989 came, the formal system changed. The civic psychology, already deeply damaged, remained largely unchanged.
- What impact did emigration have on the quality of institutions in Bulgaria?
- To everything already said, one more serious thing must be added - the emigration of precisely those people most capable of building institutions with a high degree of trust. Thus, institutions began to reproduce individuals best adapted to survive within them - the rest. Not a conspiracy. A selection effect. The consequences are visible in almost every administrative body, in most universities, in a large part of the judicial system.
– You say that corruption also provides a certain stability in the public environment. Isn't that a paradox?
– What makes everything more difficult to see and more difficult to dismantle is that corruption here provides real stability. In an environment with low trust, formal institutions are perceived as arbitrary or inaccessible. Informal networks compensate. Connections solve problems. Services speed up processes. Citizens can condemn corruption morally while practically depending on it and practicing it. The same person who speaks against the system at dinner calls the next morning to ask for a favor. This is not exactly hypocrisy, but rationality within a broken structure.
This is the paradox that anti-corruption discourse rarely acknowledges: corruption survives in part because it replaces institutional weakness. Eliminating it without building social trust can produce instability rather than immediate improvement. That is why real reform threatens much more than politicians – it threatens the informal security systems that ordinary people rely on to get their jobs done.
– Why has European integration failed to change these mechanisms?
– European integration has made all this stranger, not simpler. Bulgaria has introduced extensive legal frameworks, oversight mechanisms, and procedural standards. The number of signatures required has increased, but trust has not. Bureaucratic complexity multiplied, while citizens continued to rely on informal mediation to navigate it.
The result is a hybrid: modern legal forms coexisting with pre-modern social operating systems. The architecture is that of a European state, but the operational logic is that of something much older.
And here universities deserve special attention, because they reveal the mechanism most honestly. Universities are supposed to be sanctuaries of merit, independent thought, and institutional courage. In practice, they do not exist outside civilization; they reflect it. Academic freedom requires economic independence, transparent evaluation, and protection from repression.
In low-trust societies, universities quietly transform into patronage ecosystems, where loyalty, strategic positioning, and internal networks matter more than intellectual honesty. Young academics are learning this lesson quickly. Independent thinking carries professional risk, while conformity and strategic relationships provide security. The institution internalizes the same hidden constitution that operates throughout society, and then trains the next generation in it.
– Where do most anti-corruption programs go wrong? What follows from all this?
– Most anti-corruption programs focus on penalties, monitoring, ethics committees, declarations, additional agencies, and more regulations. This is not only insufficient, but can be counterproductive. Every unnecessary approval creates leverage. Every opaque requirement creates dependency. Every discretionary authorization creates a market for an informal solution. Procedural complexity is not a solution to corruption. In conditions of low trust, it is the very stuff that corruption is made of.
– What specific reforms can actually curb corruption?
– The first real reform would require radical simplification. Fewer intermediaries, fewer layers, fewer points of human discretion. Simplicity is harder to corrupt than complexity. The second is deep digitalization – not symbolic modernization, but functional automation.
Human discretion is the oxygen of petty corruption.
Estonia demonstrates that post-Soviet societies are capable of profound institutional transformation when digital governance becomes structurally central, not decorative.
The third, and least discussed, is about prestige. In corrupt societies, the most respected figure is usually not the most competent or the most honorable, but the best connected. Society changes only when prestige comes to be associated with trustworthiness, procedural honesty, and institutional trust. This change cannot be legislated. It is slow, cultural, and requires visible examples - what might be called islands of integrity: courts, municipalities, media institutions, university departments that have become truly trustworthy and are perceived as such.
– You say that the deepest problem is psychological because...
– The deepest problem is not structural, but psychological, because generations have grown up perceiving corruption as realism and integrity - as naivety. The person who navigates the informal system is pragmatic. The refuser is naive or, worse, a kind of social burden. This inversion of prestige is what maintains the balance most permanently – more than any separate law or political regulation.
– Where can real anti-corruption change begin in Bulgaria?
– The anti-corruption revolution in Bulgaria, if it happens, will not begin with a parliamentary vote or a prosecutorial arrest. It will begin the moment when institutional honesty begins to seem not only abstractly commendable, but also practically better than informal navigation. When young people in universities, administration and courts discover that transparent competence is not a drawback. This is a civilizational reorientation, not another reform cycle.
– Is it possible to change this balance in the end?
– The tragedy is not that corruption exists. It exists everywhere, in different forms and with different densities. The tragedy is that so many Bulgarians have learned to view it as a fixed feature of reality – natural as geography, permanent as history. It is neither one nor the other. It is a learned equilibrium. And equilibria can change. The question is what would make people want that.