ACAT Speaker Lilia Slavova on the Luxury of Thinking for Yourself After Growing Up in a System Where Telling a Joke Could Land You in Prison
by Michael V. Clinton
June 2025
Lilia Slavova is an actress, director, playwright, and producer with extensive international experience. She is the founder and owner of Stars Studio, where she has been teaching acting for over 30 years. She was born in Sofia but grew up among the beautiful hills of Plovdiv in Bulgaria.
At ACAT, we are delighted to interview her as a long-time and valued member of our Speakers Bureau. We had the privilege of conversing with her at length regarding her experience in communist Bulgaria and with the U.S. public education system. It is a pleasure to share her responses and the wisdom she imparted during our discussion.
ACAT: You mentioned that you originally believed in the communist system. What led you to eventually be disillusioned with communism?
Lilia: [I felt disillusioned] when I took the entrance exams for the Bulgarian National Institute for Theater Arts. I passed all the exams, and I had first place on the list of applicants. I had finished high school with a gold medal and the highest score.
When I went to register for the National Theater Institute, I had been removed from the list because my father had been unjustly imprisoned by the communist regime. I had been placed on the waiting list. The truth is, I had been certain that I would be admitted, but all of my professors told me, “Lilia, next year you’re going to be in. This year they needed to accept the children of so-and-so (meaning the communist nomenklatura and others with important personal connections).” I felt this as the first significant slap on the face by the system, proving that what we were hearing and fearing was true.
We had to work for eight months before we could apply to other universities. I thought of becoming a journalist, perhaps a sports journalist, as I was deeply involved in sports. However, my father advised me not to go into journalism, as I could not speak against the Prime Minister and the party leadership. He said I could be imprisoned for speaking the truth. He showed me the photos of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Members, and I thought they were all so repulsive. So, when my father asked me if I could write a puff piece about any of them as a journalist, I started crossing out their photos one by one and could not picture myself writing about them. Moreover, I truly wanted to be an actress. The arts were a way to escape the politicization of society.
My sister, who had been a musician since early childhood, belonged to a prestigious children’s symphony orchestra, which travelled all over the world. Every time she came back from abroad, she would lock herself in her room and refuse to go out for some time. As a teenager, she had already been to Italy twenty times. She was allowed to travel to the West, since the communist government wanted to boast about these children’s talent. All of a sudden, after she shared her experiences abroad, I realized that there was a whole world out there from which I was being kept.
She was the first one to have emigrated, and I was allowed to visit her a few times as a “first-blood relative” (meaning the closest blood relative). Then I could see the other world beyond the Iron Curtain. I had been an honest believer in the system. As an actress, I would recite these very emotional poems about the U.S.S.R. and the revolution. However, I knew people who were telling jokes against the system, such as one of my father’s best friends, who went to prison for telling a joke. I also noticed that privileged party people were riding in different cars, wearing different clothes, and going to the West for vacations. I thought, “What’s wrong with the rest of us? Why can’t we live like that?”
ACAT: You mentioned that the communist education system was “teaching by phrasing.” Could you elaborate on what that means?
Lilia: You’ve probably heard that Bulgaria has excellent education. We had incredible teachers. They would teach us values and discipline. But of course, I am speaking of central Sofia. Education in smaller towns and villages was worse. For example, high-school students had to return and remain at home before the curfew, at 7:30 p.m.! Boys needed to have very short hair, and girls needed to have their hair braided. They all had to wear uniforms in those small towns. While we in the city did not need to wear uniforms, they could not go outside wearing civilian clothes. Could you imagine not being able to go out in civilian clothes?
ACAT: What would happen if somebody did?
Lilia: Oh, they would get punished: you know, suspended, given low behavioral grades, etc. There was such a thing as a grade for behavior. If you had a grade lower than expected, you could not enter the university.
There was a slogan in Eastern Europe, not only in Bulgaria: “Study hard so you won’t have to work hard.”
Pupils in the countryside even had to wear berets or some school badge. If someone didn’t have the beret or the school badge, even if it hadn’t been his fault, he would face a strict punishment. To avoid that, a friend would sneak into the basement of the school and hand his beret to anyone
who needed it. It was quite humiliating but funny at the same time. The teachers would wait at the door and check if one’s collar was clean. If one did not have a clean collar, one would be sent home and subsequently punished. They would also check if the boys were properly shaven, and the girls could not have long or painted nails.
They established their system and governed it through fear.
Teaching by phrasing means that communist education recycled the same politically charged phrases that the students were supposed to repeat without expressing their truthful opinion. For example, they had to praise children like Pavlik Morozov, a boy who informed on his family members and got them killed.
For comparison, I had taught in Virginia at the Fairfax, Alexandria, and Arlington County public school systems. The public school system was horrible. I talked to principals and the Secretary of Education. They used various phrases that were repeated as certain ideological clichés. Some party leaders nowadays use such rhetoric. These are political phrases. They make the students study Maya Angelou’s poetry, and they are supposed to write, for example, “Maya Angelou is the most wonderful, open-minded, and talented author.” This is a U.S. example of using key phrases to cement a political point. Had someone written, for instance, “I don’t like her poetry very much,” they would not accept that. You had to write somebody else’s opinion, but there are exceptions both here and during my childhood. [Editor’s Note – many have observed that political correctness is the beginning of communist indoctrination.]
Thankfully, in the ninth grade, in Bulgaria, I had a teacher who encouraged independent thinking as much as possible. She said, “No, I want you to write exactly what you think.” However, we were still careful and did not do that entirely. She did not allow us to repeat clichés that were expected of us, but encouraged us to use our own words. She was truly remarkable and had the title of “National Teacher,” which was a rare honor. She could get away with not following the permanent clichés. For example, she had us sing a beautiful, apolitical song about Bulgaria, and we had to express our thoughts and feelings about it. There were incredibly educated people in Bulgaria because they were educated before communism. They went to the Sorbonne in France. They went to Switzerland to study, and my mother studied in the French lycée in Sofia. She was a lawyer, and my father was an electrical engineer. They were both superbly educated before communism.
Most other people were afraid to use their own words. We were afraid, all of us, and had to live in fear. My intuition often protected me.
ACAT: In Communist Bulgaria, as has been here in the public school system, there was a lack of parents’ involvement in the education of their children. Were there any ways that the parents could make an imprint on their children, despite the continuous indoctrination? How would this happen?
Lilia: We had a little bit more control because those PTA (Parent Teacher Association) meetings were very much mandatory for the parents. Our teachers also had to, from the first to the fourth grade, go to each student’s home to see how the students live and understand their level of poverty, malnutrition, and other factors. I remember that we lived right in the center of Sofia, in the attic, in extremely poor conditions. My teachers were in shock. They were not expecting that because my father was an engineer. The roof was leaking, and often it would rain on my bed, and we would use dishes to collect the water.
The teachers were trying to understand the family backgrounds of the students, and that helped to a certain degree. Some parents came from family backgrounds similar to mine and rebelled against the system.
When I taught in the United States public school system, some parents were not involved and were not aware of what their children were learning. Sometimes they didn’t speak English. In private schools, however, parents are naturally involved and want to make sure their money goes to good use. Today, we have many private schools also in Bulgaria, and they work rather well.
When I was talking about how good education was during my childhood, I created perhaps a bit of a misconception. It wasn’t that education per se was that good, but we did have some excellent teachers who were educated before the communists took power, and the discipline that was imposed on us, largely out of fear, created a positive result. What discipline teaches you is that you ought to behave even if you do not want to. You had no choice but to listen. There were no phones; you could not talk back to the teacher; even if you didn’t want to study, you were still there and passively learning.
In America, children simply walk out of the classroom if they do not want to be there. We however, had a genuine fear that we could be kicked out if we misbehaved.
There were special schools where children would go if they did not behave, and unfortunately, now I recognize those behavior problems could just have been medical issues, for example, hyperactivity. Such children would be placed in these schools, which were “correctional facilities” for those who did not follow the rules. They would beat them up there. They would physically punish them. It was horrible. There were movies made about these “correctional facilities.” Fearing to end up there, many children stayed in school and somehow learned more than they wanted.
When I taught in Virginia, a lot of my students in my acting class came from Thomas Jefferson, which was one of the top high schools in the nation. The involvement of the parents there was incredible. They had a very good theater department. The boys I taught became engineers. I had three girls who became producers. It was an incredible school, and an important factor was the involvement of the parents.
The same was true for my high school. Do you remember the teacher that I told you about earlier? Thanks to her, half of the class entered colleges with performing arts as musicians, writers, actors, and dramatists. There’s a Bulgarian proverb: “One bird does not make a spring.” But in this case, it did.
ACAT: If you could give any words of advice to young people in the West, what would you say?
Lilia: The world is a very confusing place right now. Because of all the mass media, fake news, and misinformation, I think the best thing for young people to do is to inform themselves properly. Make sure the information you receive is correct. Do not immediately believe what you hear.
Another piece of advice I can give young people has to do with the fact that we had real friends. We had a childhood. We socialized. It’s incredibly important because right now, people are glued to their devices and their computers. It alienates you from the real world. It affects the brains of young people. Socialize. Get into interest groups. Don’t get your information from fake news. If you wish to be involved in politics, consider a variety of sources.
Another thing lacking here is discipline and respect.
I’m going to brag a little bit about my teaching. Almost 20 years ago, at Drew Model Elementary School, the students were failing their SOLs (Standard of Learning exams) for more than two years in a row, and the school was about to close down. The principal was very close to the theater in Shirlington, and she asked for our help. She told us that they were not passing the Social Studies test. They were turning to us because they thought we would have some idea about how to help them. After all, we are actors and are skilled in memorization.
So, she asked if I could develop some sort of program based on my theatre experience in learning and sustaining information. I was not especially skilled in American history. Nevertheless, I said that I would do it. I created the program, and after a year, the school’s test scores increased by 700 percent. Our Congressman, James P. Moran, went to Congress and asked, “How were these Russians able to teach so well?” I was a bit annoyed to be called Russian, but appreciated the compliment. And so, the Department of Education gave us a grant of $500,000 directly for this program. When we matched this with two financial programs afterwards, we received $1.5 million to spend for five years.
When they asked us what the solution to this crisis was, I told them that it was discipline— simply discipline and nothing else. I helped them focus and retain information through games and reading exercises. Initially, these children couldn’t focus for five minutes. I couldn’t believe they couldn’t do the simplest theater exercises for five minutes! The main culprit for this was all these distractions, external and technological. I helped them focus and learn. By 2015, we had spent twenty years using different grant money simply because of the successful theater exercises that improved the school discipline and scores. One of the reasons we had success back in my day was because there was discipline, even though it was out of fear.
Thankfully, for private and Catholic schools, discipline is a very high priority. Back in Bulgaria, they would smack our hands and pull our ears. Some boys had one ear bigger than the other due to frequent punishments.
Another one of the disadvantages of today’s life is that people are so lonely. It’s especially sad and strange that young people are lonely. The elderly are lonely for different reasons, but the loneliness of young people is abnormal. People have called me a social butterfly because I’m always happy and smiling. I’ll tell you another thing that surprised me when I came here: nobody talks to anybody! I thought, “What am I going to do here?” I talked to one of my friends, and we decided to start a social committee. We planned projects and decided on many things to do every month. People love each other; people help each other. It’s created a blossoming effect.
I’m wishing you good luck with this! I hope I was helpful.
ACAT: You were very helpful! Thank you!
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