National Agenda : Skilled Workers Suffer as Bulgaria Steps Back in Time : * Unemployment climbs as the country turns away from Communist-era industrialization and returns to its agrarian roots.

As she hops from foot to foot to stamp the winter cold from her thin-soled boots, it’s hard for Zdravka Milanova to see herself as part of the vanguard of a revolution.

A jobless economist forced to make ends meet by selling beer and trinkets at Sofia’s outdoor central market, the mother of three describes her forced career change as “a cruel fate.”

Milanova is one of thousands of college-educated specialists in the Bulgarian capital whose skills are in low demand as the country abandons its Communist-era priority of industrialization.

Engineers, scientific research specialists and legions of planners and comptrollers are among the first to become unemployed as Bulgaria takes a collective step backward to get reacquainted with a simpler economy and its agrarian roots.

Some of the foot soldiers in the industrial counterrevolution, like Milanova, complain that they must bear the painful brunt of the transition. But they concede that their sacrifice will be worth it if they can contribute to a more secure future for the next generation.

“Our generation has been the most victimized by the Communist system,” says Milanova, in her mid-40s. “All we can hope is that our children will benefit from our suffering.”

In Bulgaria’s first-ever State of the Nation speech last week, reformist Prime Minister Filip Dimitrov confirmed that the country is reorienting its economy away from heavy industry as it disengages from socialism’s central planning and state ownership.

Dimitrov said the new priorities for Bulgaria, a country of fewer than 9 million, will be rapid privatization of small businesses and farmland to emphasize tourism, light manufacturing and agriculture over the mass-development schemes of the former regime.

Huge, antiquated factories that produced weapons, machinery and chemicals are gradually shutting down, unable to compete against more sophisticated producers in the West and under pressure from environmental organizations to staunch the flood of contaminants ruining Bulgaria’s once-pristine forests, seashores and rivers.

The transition has already made half a million Bulgarians jobless, from an estimated work force of 4.5 million, according to Evelina Zhelcheva of the National Labor Exchange. With another 200,000 or so “hidden unemployed”--those indefinitely laid off from doomed factories that have not yet officially closed their doors--Bulgaria now endures about 15% unemployment, and the figures are expected to rise as 1992 progresses.

Government statistics suggest that as many as 1 million Bulgarians live below the poverty line of 1,300 leva per month for a family of four, or about $65. The Confederation of Independent Trade Unions contends that 70% of workers earn less than that amount, forcing both parents to work.

While many families are genuinely suffering and some pensioners are forced to beg outside churches and tourist sites, tradition and Bulgarians’ unshakable optimism are cushioning the blow for the majority.

Sofia and Spass Skarlev live with two of their three daughters in Gorni Lozen, a village just south of the capital where residents tend small gardens and livestock between commutes to the city to work.

Sofia lost her job as a cleaning woman at a computer-manufacturing plant when the enterprise shut down at the first of the year. Spass is also officially unemployed because his construction brigade has not received any new government contracts for months.

Despite what would seem an economic catastrophe for Western families, the Skarlevs insist they’ll muddle through somehow.

“I have two hands and a brain, don’t I?” Skarlev insists to a table full of visitors as his wife laughs and rolls her eyes as if in doubt. “There will always be work for painters and builders, and if not I’ll raise pigs.”

Sofia, likewise, is unperturbed by her loss of income. She says she has already inquired about a job with a private bakery that opened in the village recently and is sure she’ll find enough odd jobs to raise the little money they need to get by.

“All we need to buy is bread,” says the plump 43-year-old who spent much of the fall curing sausages and putting up jars of pickles, eggplant and cherries.

“People will get back to the land and farming, but this will happen slowly,” Skarlev predicts. “The only way Bulgarians will survive is if they go back to what they did before the Communists took over.”

The nationwide shift in economic direction has caught many of Bulgaria’s young in mid-stride, forcing them to consider career changes before their working lives have even begun.

Mariana Uzunova is a 20-year-old chemistry student who has decided that the chemical industry’s future is too bleak to pursue her studies.

“Even if the economic prospects were better, I don’t want to go into a field that is responsible for polluting our country,” Uzunova says. “I’ve started taking education courses so I can become a teacher, although what I’d really like to do is design fashion.”

Nowhere is the case for reeling Bulgaria back to a simpler past more persuasive than at the six-reactor nuclear power station at Kozluduy. Even those charged with managing the facility concede it is the most troubling evidence that Bulgaria, under Communist rule, grew too big for its britches.

“Bulgaria was never meant to be an industrial power,” says Jordan Jordanov, spokesman for the Kozluduy station as well as its nuclear safety chief. “For Bulgaria, it is not necessary to have nuclear reactors. But this is post facto . We have a nuclear power station and we have to decide what to do about it.”

When Bulgaria’s borders opened after the anti-Communist revolution of November, 1989, scores of its best nuclear experts emigrated to more lucrative jobs in the West. That endangered plant safety and maintenance to such a point that the two oldest Kozluduy units, built in the 1970s, had to be shut down last fall.

The European Community has offered to finance programs to improve maintenance and train personnel to run the Kozluduy reactors. But Bulgarians, mindful of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, are increasingly arguing that the country should just get out of the nuclear power business.

“The big consumers of energy were Russian-built factories like our tank factories and metal works, many of which have shut down over the past year,” says Jordanov. “We also increased the price of energy, which has cut (household) consumption by 40%. People now think about it before they turn on each light bulb.”

If the trend continues and Bulgaria’s huge munitions and machine-building industries successively close their doors, Jordanov believes the country will be able to survive without the older Kozluduy units, once they reach retirement age in about five years.

“I agree with the government that what we need is a less complex economic profile--more tourism, more farming and some light manufacturing,” Jordanov says, echoing many of his countrymen.

Some grumbling has been heard as Bulgarians have been forced to swiftly adjust to the crude capitalism of private markets and the unfamiliar hardships of rural life. As one Sofia gardener commented on the prospect of being forced back to the family farm in Svilengrad, “One gets used to having carpets and central heating after a career in the city.”

But most Bulgarians seem to feel that if any nation of the defunct Communist Bloc can beat its swords into plowshares, it will be theirs.