If Bulgarians have learned one thing from the 10 years since the Fall of the Wall, it is that democracy can deliver poverty just as well as communism.
Governments have see-sawed between communist and capitalist, and neither has lifted Bulgaria out of its economic rut. Workers, peasants, students and dissidents had all hoped to gain from the new order.
"This is not what we had dreamed of," says former dissident Mihail Nedelchev. "A small group of very, very, rich people has been created."
For 23 years, Nedelchev ploughed his lonely furrow, a dissident trying to stay out of jail, yet without sacrificing his demands for democracy. Today, as then, he works as an academic. And he finds his former tormentors from Department Six, the internal security service, are now enjoying the good life.
"These guys had good connections. Now they have become bankers and businessmen. There is one man, Dimitar Ivanov, he was in charge of Department Six, the most secret group. Now he owns his own company. He doesn't hide his past - in fact he's written a book about it!"
Bulgaria's change was more a spasm than a revolt: it happened unexpectedly on November 10th 1989 when, a day after the Berlin Wall came down, Todor Zhivkov, the Iron Curtain's longest-serving dictator, stepped down after 30 years of power. There was no upheaval, and no catharsis, and many of the old communists kept their jobs.
"I was doing the second shift, the afternoon shift, that day, and a colleague who had a radio in her office came in and said Zhivkov's gone. Well, we thought it was a nasty joke," says Stefan Parvanov (46), a worker at one of Sofia's two state-owned concrete makers. "I had mixed feelings. I had thought that up until then we were living a normal kind of life. We had plenty of work."
That soon began to dry up. Stefan's plant had been producing concrete for the mammoth Palace of Culture, a conference centre that now dominates central Sofia. A construction boom took its place, but orders fell, as Stefan fell victim to a massive fraud.
What happens is this: the director of a state-owned firm sells equipment and assets at fire-sale prices to a new private firm, which just happens to be owned by a friend of his. When the sale is complete, the state firm gutted, the director resigns and joins his friend. As a result, state-owned firms are ruined and, once shorn of government subsidies, many collapse.
Stefan's firm saw orders plummet, the workforce cut from 20 to seven, even as a clutch of private concrete firms sprang up around Sofia. And while he lost his fear of the communist-era police, he gained a new, unexpected fear. Anxiety.
"Before, you knew you had a job. Now, you don't want to go away on holiday because you might come back and find you have no more work," he said. In fact, with his wages now one third less than under communism, he can no longer afford holidays. His money is taken up in supporting his wife and student daughter in their Sofia apartment.
"We became very disillusioned, very disappointed," he says. "We were expecting for these 10 years there would be even a small change in a positive direction. People lost faith basically, people think now - whoever we vote for, it is going to be the same."
On this tenth anniversary, Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov seems finally to have grasped the nettle. "Bulgarians have been disappointed," he said as he saw his government lose ground to the former communists in last month's local elections, "not by the reform or our choice of European values, but by us, those who have been carrying out the reform and the way we have been carrying it out."