Страницата също така е преведина на български език. Линка се намира най-отдоло.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Bulgaria was still a fairly agrarian nation with low levels of industrialization. That began to change in the 1960s, when more students began to be trained in technical professions, and manufacturing equipment and machinery began to be shipped into the country from the Soviet Union. Bulgaria began to rapidly industrialize, coinciding with the growth and expansion of the Vazov Machine Works.

To meet the demand for workers in these specialized professions, there was emphasis that students study at technical high schools where they would develop the theoretical and practical knowledge to immediately join the workforce post-graduation. Many students attended technical high schools in the region, including the Vocational School, and the Vladimir Zaimov Technical School in Sopot.

One interviewee described how technical high schools served as a direct “pipeline” for training workers to staff the VMZ plant. Since employment was mandatory during the communist government, most people directly began work at VMZ after graduating. One interviewee recounted how work was always abundant at VMZ and they were always looking for workers.

For those students who needed more advanced technical knowledge, they would continue studying at technical institutes or universities. The VMZ created scholarships to fund students for a five-year university degree from the Leningrad University in the Soviet Union. Selection for the scholarship was competitive, but students who returned from abroad were qualified to enter into managerial positions heading up the manufacturing departments.

One interviewee describes how his education abroad as a VMZ scholarship student enriched him in ways beyond just his technical education:

I didn’t ponder the decision too much, since a lot of people would go--they would go, study, and come back to work in the plant. Here in the region, around five or ten people would go abroad during those years. These are some of the best specialists here at the plant and even in the region. Because it wasn’t only the education in the technical school, nor did we only study in one city, not only in St. Petersburg--in Moscow, in Harkov, and other bigger cities, too, in Kiev--I know that they’ve even gone to Tashkent to study. It wasn’t only studying, the student life...we also got to know the culture, we attended the theater, the movie theater, sightseeing, which all came together into a very good cultural experience. And I think that this region here became enriched in the spiritual sense, not only with technical and material knowledges. I think so.

….

I visited mansions, theater, opera, ballet--for a boy coming from a city of 10,000 people, that is quite a lot. And I think it helped me, these visits that weren’t rare at all. We would go very often. We had our own cultural program, but nobody forced us to go. In the first years we have an organized visit to the Hermitage. Two and a half years I visited the Hermitage every other week.